The Blue Mountain-Chapter Forty-Six

As if they had planned it together, the old folk were dying off one by one. A great deal was said at their graves about ‘the vacuum left behind’, but although Pinness had taught us in school that Nature abhors a vacuum, nothing rushed in to fill this one.

One night I went to spy on Meshulam. Through his window I saw him bent over his documents, his face lined with contrition and framed with the new white fuzz of a mourner’s beard. His visitors heard him regret having shortened his father’s life with his shirking, denounce his own petty-mindedness, and list the principal differences between the anopheles and the house mosquito as smoothly as if humming a melody. Whereas the larva of the latter has a long breathing tube and lies in the water diagonally, the larva of the former has a short breathing tube and lies in the water horizontally. The house mosquito has short antennae and a drooping stomach, the anopheles has long antennae and an arched stomach. Asked why he should bother to recite basic facts that every schoolboy in the village knew by heart, Meshulam answered modestly that the memory of the Jews of Israel was going soft and some things needed to be saved from oblivion.

When the month of mourning was over, Meshulam looked in the mirror and decided to keep his beard. ‘It’s the first crop he ever managed to grow, so of course he can’t stand ploughing it under,’ wrote Uri, who kept asking me to send him news of the village.

As sometimes happens with beards, Meshulam’s flourished splendidly and gave him a sense of his own rectitude. Every day he came with new queries to his father’s grave, where his appearance caused a stir among the visitors. With Mandolin Tsirkin’s old work clothes and rope belt and his own great shock of salt-and-pepper hair, Meshulam was the spitting image of Hankin, Gordon, or the prophet Isaiah. American tourists and visiting schoolchildren looked at him admiringly and asked to have their pictures taken with him. Busquilla suggested paying him ‘a modest salary’ to hang around Pioneer Home all day ‘with a worker’s cap and a hoe’, and even wanted to sell picture postcards of him. As far as I was concerned, though, Meshulam was nothing but a pest. Since Avraham and Rivka had gone abroad, he had become more obnoxious than ever. He even insisted that ‘we must’ – we, no less! – put Hagit’s stuffed body by his father’s grave. Now that Grandfather and Avraham were gone and the farm was mine, I had no more patience for him.

‘I don’t need that mangy cow of yours in my cemetery,’ I told him. ‘If your father had wanted her next to him, he would have told Liberson.’

Busquilla was poised to recite our usual disclaimer about the candidate not meeting admission requirements, but Meshulam, his face limned by the golden aura of swamp drainers and desert blossomers that he had managed to acquire from a prolonged study of old photographs, chose not to argue.

For several weeks he tried to make a farmer of himself, getting some Rhode Island broilers for his yard and even attempting to plant vegetables. Bashfully approaching Rachel Levin, whose greens were famous throughout the village, he tendered her one of his prize exhibits, a book by a farmer named Lifshitz entitled Vegetable Growing in the Land of Israel. Rachel, however, looked doubtfully at the old paperbound volume, on the cover of which two fat children and a huge lettuce graphically symbolised the bounty of the land, and pointed out to Meshulam that the book was older than the village and badly out of date in its advice.

Nevertheless, Meshulam was smitten by Lifshitz’s prose style. ‘“Your aubergine delights in light and well-mannered soil”,’ he read aloud to me, his lips curling as though tasting the aubergine’s delightful nourishment. The two sentences he found most spellbinding were: ‘“The most suitable of radishes for the Land of Israel gardener is the Giant White of Stuttgart”,’ and ‘“The smaller the animal, the finer its manure: sheep droppings are finer than cattle droppings; songbird droppings are finer than pigeon droppings; but finest of all are the droppings of the silkworm”.’

‘He must dream of giant Nazi radishes getting fat on protozoa shit,’ wrote Uri, adding that Meshulam would go down in history as ‘the first farmer in the Valley to manure his crops with a tweezers and a magnifying glass’.

Meshulam got hold of some silkworms, and Rachel, patient and good-natured as ever, showed him how to feed the little creatures fresh leaves from the mulberry tree in his yard. But not even their magic guano could do any good. The timidity of Meshulam’s touch made the earth go into spasms and vomit up his seed, while his starving chickens called him names behind his back.

Meshulam did not give up. Filled with the great deed for which he was preparing himself, he went around with a pregnant expression. The villagers knew that look well from their cows and their wives but failed to recognise it on a face with a beard, misinterpreting it as grief.

The product of his father’s obstinacy and his mother’s shamelessness, Meshulam was now abetted by these two qualities. He hired Uzi Rilov to give his land a good ploughing, borrowed the village’s chain mower and heavy harrow, and uprooted the rank carpet of wild carrot, mignonette, and yellowweed from his property.

The last carnivorous mice, snakes, centipedes, and ichneumons fled in panic from the land that had been their home ever since Mandolin Tsirkin’s last illness. The green John Deere tractor crushed the burrows of the voles, splattered the eggs of the lizards, and bared the angry mole crickets to the depredations of the sun. Uzi piled all the weeds in a big heap at the field’s far end, and Meshulam set them on fire and stared at them, mesmerised by the tidings of the great, all-purifying flames.

‘So Meshulam’s decided to be a farmer at last,’ said the farmers to each other at their evening meetings by the dairy. They would have been happy to give him advice, because he knew absolutely nothing about agricultural equipment except for the ancient Kirchner and Zirle mouldboards pictured in 1920s farming journals, but Meshulam was not looking for help. On his own initiative he had the district digger build a five-foot wall of earth around his land, the purpose of which, he explained to his startled neighbours, was to plant an experimental rice paddy.

‘Rice,’ he announced, ‘is an important and nourishing food whose cultivation had been neglected in this country.’

By now, however, no one believed a word he said. It was obvious to everyone that behind his white beard and show of ploughmanship and filial bereavement, Meshulam had swamps on the brain. It was decided to discuss the matter at the next general meeting, where it would share the agenda with new contracts for the fodder dealers, the acquisition of some old railway track for the construction of additional cowsheds, and also, I was extremely happy to hear, the request of my cousin Uri to visit the village.

He had now been in exile for several years, and tempers had cooled. Bearing a quiet halo of proud reconciliation and new ideas from the city, Ya’akovi’s wife had returned long ago, and when Uri wrote to ask the Committee’s permission to come home for the autumn holidays, I was sure his petition would be granted.

The general meeting was never held, however, because Meshulam struck sooner than expected. The night before it was to take place he set out for the fields, wearing his father’s work boots and carrying a new ten-pound pick he had bought in the village store. Never in his life, not even when he discovered letters to Liberson from Slutzkin and Berl Katznelson in a cardboard box in the Committee office, had his heart pounded so loudly as it was pounding now, as he walked along the main irrigation pipe smashing the large water taps one after another without stopping once to look back.

Fountains shot up and kept jetting. At first the water sank into the soil, but then, gluing the thin particles together, it turned the field into a huge basin of mud in which it slowly began to rise.

Meshulam did not go home. All night he sloshed around the field, climbing up to perch on the earthen wall when the water reached his boot tops. By the time worried cries rose from the cowsheds and poultry runs, waking those responsible for noticing a drop in water pressure, the Tsirkin farm was flooded and the village had lost three weeks of its national irrigation quota.

In the morning we all turned out to have a look, unable to believe our eyes. The silt had sunk to the bottom, and the new lagoon lay sparkling in the sunlight, the shimmering reflection of the blue mountain visible in its calm water from the angle at which I stood. Apart from an inexpressible fear, we all felt the hidden passion of the farmer for whatever is cool and clear, flows and bubbles, and mirrors the images of clouds. Pinness was the first to realise what had happened. After years of sowing and reaping, of tears, joy, and mockery, the floodgates of the earth had been sprung.

‘I stood there thinking of the day Avraham Mirkin recited his poem,’ he testified much later before the Movement commission of inquiry that investigated the events. ‘Then too not everyone sensed the approaching disaster.’ The commission members looked at him, looked at each other, thanked him politely, and told him he could go.

Even after the crowd had dispersed, I couldn’t bring myself to leave the Tsirkin farm. The longer I stood watching, the more stagnant the clear water grew, forming a green nightmare of slime before my eyes. Lured from their lairs by the odour of legend and doubt, sedge and loosestrife sprouted alongside great snails that had waited all their lives for such wet tidings.

From his place atop the earthworks, armed with his father’s gypsy bandanna and a curved papyrus sickle that he had removed from the walls of Founder’s Cabin, Meshulam proclaimed: ‘A swamp is born!’

‘There’ll be mosquitoes!’ shouted Ya’akovi the Committee head, who was close to collapse from the late summer busy season and the cost of the lost water.

Meshulam raised a hand. ‘So there will,’ he called out. ‘The Jews of this country have forgotten what a swamp is. The time has come to remind them.’

Ya’akovi did not wait to hear the rest. Shouting, ‘You’re out of your mind!’ he ran for the digger and started up the engine. With a thud the steel scoop rammed the earthen breastwork and battered a two-yard breach through which Meshulam’s lake began to flow, flooding the neighbouring fields.

‘Mend your ways!’ cried Meshulam, consciously adopting the hortatory tone in which Pinness declaimed the jeremiads of the prophets during Bible lessons. ‘Drainage ditches must be dug! Clay pipes must be laid! Our comrades from the press must be invited to see us plant eucalyptus, sing, catch malaria, and die!’

There were loud guffaws. And yet Pinness, Tonya, and Riva, I saw, were standing off to one side, apprehensively holding hands. I knew that in the old folk’s home Eliezer Liberson must have stopped chewing his breakfast as he caught his poignant first whiff of the forgotten old smell. ‘I don’t feel well,’ he said to Albert, and vomited up a glob of oozy green muck onto the tablecloth.

‘The thin crust has burst, the abyss has opened its jaws,’ said Pinness, thinking ‘circularly’ about the inundation of his own brain by the stroke that had swamped it in a cloud of forgetfulness. Only the top of the blue mountain remained, protruding like a lonely isle of memory. Ravenously hungry, the old teacher summoned up the last of his strength to go home and drown his worries in a pot of squash with rice and tomato sauce.

Tonya Rilov stuck two fingers in her mouth and resumed her vigil at Margulis’s grave. By now the skin around her fingernails was as white and porous as a wrinkled crust of boiled milk. Riva, whom the swamp had caught scrubbing windows, went back to work. Meshulam was in high spirits. His knowledge of Visionary Pioneering’s practical fine points was a sure guide to the future, and Ya’akovi’s assault on his earthworks had only strengthened his resolve.

From then on everything happened according to the ineluctable laws of cause and effect. Meshulam’s water flooded an adjacent patch of clover, decimating the shoots, and malignantly washed away a corn field, reducing it to spongy splotches of foam. Huge, gurgling, atavistic bubbles formed and burst, releasing a horrible stench. With a great squish, a cloud of high-bellied mosquitoes flew up from the bog and circled over it.

Only now did I understand that none of this was accidental, and that the secret, invisible skeins tying us to the earth ran far deeper than I had imagined, intertwined fathoms down with rootlets, corpses, and hoofprints. I thought of poor Levin wringing his blue fingers while insisting that ‘this land never gives the slightest strength to anyone who walks on it but simply suffuses the soles of your feet with its madness.’

Grandfather’s flight from Shulamit, Efrayim’s vanishing, Uri’s banishment, Avraham’s going abroad, Daniel Liberson’s undeciphered love furrows – all these were merely the fissures through which the never-clotting venom could circulate.

Pinness, I told myself, was wrong. He had plugged the wrong holes with his fingers. We were not the products of accident – not unless you considered Pesya Tsirkin’s breasts two random cornucopias whose effect on Mandolin Tsirkin brought their addlebrained son Meshulam into this world.

That afternoon a few unemployed men Meshulam had hired in the nearest town arrived on the scene. Smiling sheepishly in the old peasant’s blouses and Russian worker’s caps he had dressed them in, they looked pathetic and ridiculous. Meshulam gave them sickles and hoes and took them to his swamp, where to our astonishment they burst at once into the old swamp drainers’ song:

A friend of the frog,

Of the frog

Am I,

And just like the frog,

Like the frog

I cry:

Give me water,

Or I die.

Though at first they were embarrassed, little by little their voices gathered strength and their arms began to move in sweeping motions. Within an hour, however, several big tankers appeared on Ya’akovi’s orders, sucked up Meshulam’s swamp water, and drove off to dump it in the nearby wadi. On their heels came dumper trucks loaded with earth that they spread over the wet fields. Before the day was out the fresh soil was firmed down by angrily vibrating rollers and the entire bill for the water, labour, materials, and heavy equipment was presented to the Tsirkin farm with a strongly worded threat of seizure in case of non-payment. By the time I drove to the railway station that evening to pick Uri up, the morning’s events seemed simply one more story I had heard, a nightmarish figment of my imagination.

I drove the farm truck through the fields. I don’t have a licence and only drive on the tractor paths around the village.

Uri jumped down from the train, and we gave each other a big hug. As I embraced him I could feel how much stronger and older he had grown.

‘You’re crushing me, you big ox,’ he groaned, half laughing. ‘You don’t know your own strength.’

He looked good, as slim, sardonic, and handsome as always. As we drove back, he stared at the farmed fields. White beards of cotton were flowering all around, and the first pomegranates were turning red on the trees, taking over from the last Somerset peaches. Far in the distance a big red International was beginning the autumn ploughing. We turned into a path that ran along the wall of Pioneer Home. Uri kept silent as he looked in amazement at the gravestones, the greenery, the flowers, and the ornamentals.

‘What do you do with all the money you make?’ he asked as we entered the cabin. ‘Nothing has changed here.’

I still slept in my old bed and dried myself with Grandfather’s soft old sheet after showering. Grandmother Feyge’s glass plates and big tin spoons were still in use in the kitchen.

We drank tea and ate some good cake Uri brought me. I suggested that he sleep in Grandfather’s bed, since at the request of the Committee I had put his parents’ house at the disposal of the cantor who had come to the village to lead the High Holy Day services.

We stayed up talking all night.

‘Tomorrow,’ Uri said, ‘we’ll go and see Pinness. And maybe we can visit Eliezer Liberson in the old folk’s home.’

That surprised me, because when Grandfather was in the home Uri had rarely bothered to visit him.

‘Working on the bulldozers has given me a lot of time to think,’ he said. ‘Of all the old folk in this village, Liberson is my man. More than Pinness. More even than Grandfather.’

‘Everyone’s looking for a model,’ I answered him. ‘Busquilla still thinks that Pinness is a holy man, and Pinness wrote in the village newsletter how special you are.’