26

 

Years ago, when I began writing my first novel, The Blue Mountain, I met with some of the last pioneers of the Second Aliyah. They were all over the age of ninety, and the eldest was ninety-six years old. His name was Eliezar Slotzkin, a member of Ein Harod Ihud Kibbutz. The years had not blunted his sense of humor, and he enjoyed mocking himself and his friends.

“I heard you’re meeting all the old-timers in the valley,” he greeted me at our first meeting in his room on the kibbutz. “What for? They’ve no idea what they’re saying anymore.”

“What are you talking about, Slotzkin?” I answered him. “You’re the oldest of the whole lot.”

“That’s true,” he said, “but they were already stupid at the age of twenty.”

Eliezar Slotzkin was a technical person. “I was just the plumber of Ein Harod,” he told me, “and I used to get jealous when I saw the golden boys of the kibbutz coming back from the fields.” But he made a point of telling me that he was the one who designed and installed all the plumbing when the kibbutz was founded.

“And what do you do today?” I asked.

“Today I repair faucets and valves in the kibbutz workshop,” he said, adding apologetically, “but only for a few hours a day. Part-time.”

“And how do they treat you?”

“They treat me very well,” he answered, wearing a look of innocence, “but it’s not because they love me that much but because I won’t give them the map of the underground pipe system,” and Slotzkin burst out laughing. “They can’t dig anywhere without first asking me where they can safely use the backhoe loader.”

Slotzkin died a few years later at the age of one hundred years and three days. A few of his lines and insights appear in The Blue Mountain, and I have not forgotten him. This is not just because of his humor and wisdom, but for another reason: every time I dig the soil in my garden in order to plant or sow, repair a leak, or expose a mole rat’s tunnel under mounds of earth—I hit a pipe. I don’t understand why or how, but as soon as I thrust a pitchfork or shovel into the ground, or pound it with a rake or pickax—a fountain shoots up into the air. I like to think that God endowed me with a sixth sense for finding underground sources of water. It might not be groundwater, but it’s not bad for starters.

Damaging a pipeline is not the only danger inherent in gardening. There are also scorpion burrows, and I have already come across viper and wasp nests, which I will discuss later. But the truth is that I am perfectly capable of damaging myself without any assistance from these fearsome creatures. Almost every time I go out to work in the garden there is a branch that scratches my forehead badly enough for it to bleed, a flowerpot that trips me up, a raffia string that winds itself around my ankles, and I further excel in getting very muddy.

Aware of this talent, I always make sure to wear old, worn work clothing kept precisely for this purpose before setting out for the garden. But it often happens that I return home from one place or another in ordinary clothes, and while walking along the fifty feet of path from road to house I cast a glance to the left to see what has sprouted, or bloomed, or withered, and I always see weeds that need to be uprooted immediately, and as I stoop over them I notice a lupine seedling that ought to be elsewhere, but because I am lazy, and the ground is damp and soft, I poke my fingers in and remove it together with a small clump of soil around its roots. Then I pace across the mud to where I might plant it, and, once there, I go down on my knees absentmindedly, planting the little lupine, and then get up and wipe my hands distractedly on my pants.

A similar thing occurs on summer mornings when I detect bite marks of thirsty jackals on the irrigation pipes. In such a case the pipe should be cut and the offending section removed, and then the pipe should be reattached to a hollow plastic connector. For this reason, the main gate valve must remain closed for a few minutes. I, however, under the influence of neural synapses which determine my level of intelligence but are beyond my understanding, quickly cut the pipe without closing the gate valve.

What happens next has happened before and will happen again: the water bursts out, drenching my eyeglasses, and in this way, half blind, I attempt to assemble the snipped ends of each side of the connector. My wet hands slip on the pipe, the connector flies off, and I get a shower of water mixed with mud on my face and clothes, just like last time.

These are all well-documented and familiar incidents that frequently happen, but they all concern physical dangers and injuries, while the biggest danger lurking at the door of every gardener of the wild is mental: collector’s disease. I am describing this as a disease, since it is difficult to recover from yet easy to catch. Usually people catch it because they are particularly interested in a certain subject, and perhaps even wish to learn about it, but after a period of incubation unbeknownst to the person who is infected, and who might even feel healthier than usual, the disease can be incurable. I speak from personal experience because once, out of the love I have for children’s storybooks, I fell ill with this disease, and I well remember the infection, deterioration, addiction, and—to my joy—also the recovery, which happened at the very last moment.

I began writing relatively late, but was already reading at a very young age. I quickly became immersed in it, and then my father told me that in the wooden crate where linens were stored in his mother’s house there was treasure to be found: tens of old books, most of them bound in red, from a publishing house known as Omanut Publishers. These books had been read by my father in his own childhood: A Tale of Two Cities, Huckleberry Finn, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, The Talisman, The Voyages of Dr. Dolittle, Three Men in a Boat, In Desert and Wilderness, Montezuma’s Daughter, Moon Mountains, The Last Days of Pompeii, The Adventures of Captain Hatteras, and a host of others.

Whenever we visited my grandmother, she always agreed to let me read one of those books—but when I asked to borrow the book so that I could continue reading it at home, she refused. Perhaps she was worried I wouldn’t give the book back or that I would stop visiting her if all the books were handed over to me. But my father, who sensed my disappointment and who wanted me to read copiously, devised a scheme: he would keep her busy with a thing or two that would hold her attention, I would take a book while she wasn’t looking, and the next time we visited, I would return that book and take another. This is exactly what we did, and those books, with their plots and heroes and their flowery, outdated translations, were much loved by me and became part of my world. Today I still recall pictures and characters and lines from them: “SIRE, a fresh dispatch,” from the opening of Michael Strogoff, and “Oh, come and see the skulls; come back and see the skulls!” from the visit to the graveyard in Three Men in a Boat. And “Let’s have it out with swords, gentlemen, not pins!” from Tartarin of Tarascon, and “Captain Hatteras always went northward,” and of course “Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!,” and the names of all Dr. Dolittle’s animals, and so on and so forth.

Some years after my grandmother’s death, her apartment was rented out to students, and I also lived there for a few years. I quickly released all the books from their penitentiary and took them for myself, and then I was overcome with a desire to find and purchase more books from Art Publishers in order to complete the entire collection. My desire turned into passion, my passion into an irrepressible urge, and the disease swiftly spread, “dealt with in its most virulent form”—also a quotation from one of the above books, and to demonstrate to you the depth of my addiction—I began to bring home all sorts of other old books, too.

At a certain stage I discovered that I was not interested in the content of the books I procured but rather in their uniqueness: their age and rarity and, even worse, the number of books I owned and the very fact that I owned them. I cultivated relationships with bookdealers and exchanged books with other addicts until one day, while working for the Israel Broadcasting Authority, I found myself fabricating some fiction in order to escape a day of editing and travel from Jerusalem to Haifa because a bookstore owner told me that “a few promising crates” had arrived, adding that if I could get there that same day he would wait for me before displaying the books on his shelves.

I left Jerusalem feeling excited and happy, but this time something happened that had never happened before. While driving, I began wondering what had come over me and what exactly I was doing. At Sha’ar Hagai, this brooding became a weighty conversation with myself; at Latrun I turned the car around, and just as decisively as I quit smoking a few years later, I cured myself that very day of collector’s disease. I stopped buying books I did not need and even sold or gave away some of the books in my collection. I still own a large library today, but all the books are either ones I enjoy rereading or require for work.

There are also certain features of collecting in the growing of wildflowers, but of a completely different sort: a person who collects books, stamps, old work utensils, corsets of Spanish queens, Victorian coal irons, hoods and valves of Duesenberg automobiles, Belgian wall clocks from the eighteenth century, and train schedules from the Austro-Hungarian Empire knows that none of these items has the ability to reproduce. Even if we do not know exactly how many there are, the number is finite, and the collector strives to discover as many as possible and to procure them, to derive pleasure not only because he owns them but because other collectors do not.

Wildflowers, on the other hand, are living organisms and can be grown and made to multiply rather than merely collected. I have met growers on several occasions who endeavor to amass in their gardens every single type of plant growing in Israel, or at least every type of sage and every variation of clover. However, people like myself who are simply lovers of nature, who are not collectors or professional botanic gardeners and who do not want to be inscribed in the Guinness Book of World Records, simply grow flowers they love and enjoy the beauty therein.

I certainly enjoy detailing the list of wild plants that grow in my garden, but this is not the main point or purpose. It is their beauty that is important, greater in my eyes than that of ornamental flowers, the engagement with and knowledge that can be gleaned from them, the thoughts and love these flowers arouse within me, their very existence as a collection that lives, breathes, eats, drinks, and reproduces, rather than a collection of dead items imprisoned in boxes and drawers. Most of all, I revel in the knowledge that there will always be a collection that is larger and richer than mine, larger and richer in fact than any collection belonging to gardeners who are better and more devoted than I—nature itself, where all these plants evolved and where they can be found today.