The Blue Mountain by Meir Shalev Page A

his unhierarchical, pigeonholing brain Eliezer Liberson’s walking on water had the same status as land acquisitions in the Jordan Valley. And yet with my own eyes I had seen old man Liberson floating at night in the village swimming pool, gasping and gurgling to show his wife Fanya that he was still as young as ever, while if Tsirkin grew the tallest, juiciest penicillaria in the village, it was only because he strolled through his green fields at night, his white head gleaming in the darkness, serenading the tender sprouts with his mandolin. I was sceptical only about Grandfather, because he had never stopped loving Shulamit, the Crimean whore who betrayed him, cheated on him, ‘went to bed with every officer in the Czar’s army’, and stayed behind in Russia all those years.
    ‘But he married Grandmother Feyge,’ said Uri, whose long, heifer-like eyelashes danced up and down whenever the subject was women or love.
    I already loved Uri then, when we were children. We were sitting in a big field of clover waiting for Avraham and Yosi, who were out cutting alfalfa for the cows on a creaky horse-drawn reaper. In the nearby orchard Grandfather and Zeitser were burning weeds.
    ‘That has nothing to do with it,’ I said. I knew he had only married her because a plenary session of the Workingman’s Circle had decided he should. ‘Grandfather has a girlfriend in Russia, and someday she’s going to come.’
    ‘No, she won’t,’ said Uri. ‘She’s too old and too busy sleeping with retired Red Army generals.’
    Grandmother Feyge had been dead a long time then, and I, who had lived with Grandfather since I was two, saw at night how he opened the box with the blue envelopes that came from afar, from the country of the wicked Michurin, the filthy muzhiks , and the infamous Shulamit, and sat slowly writing answers that were not always mailed, though he never crossed out a word of them. One morning when he went to the orchard, I found an unfinished letter on the floor among the night’s harvest of notes.
    I couldn’t understand a thing. Not only wasn’t it in Hebrew, itwasn’t even in the foreign letters that appeared on the green glass of our big radio. I carefully copied a few words out on a piece of paper and took it with me to school.
    During recess I went to see Pinness, who was having tea with the teachers.
    ‘Ya’akov,’ I asked him, ‘did you ever see writing like this?’
    Pinness looked at the paper, blanched, reddened, led me out of the teachers’ room by the hand and tore what I had given him into shreds. ‘You shouldn’t have done that, Baruch. Don’t ever go poking through your grandfather’s papers again.’
    I never cheated on Grandfather again. I never looked at his papers again either, until he was dead.

6
    I remember Grandmother Feyge’s brother walking down the streets of the village, his head and glasses glinting in the sun, his shoulders stooped, old crumbs of apricot leather yellowing between his teeth. Though public servants like Levin were not highly regarded by the farmers, he was the person they turned to whenever anyone was needed to do an audit or arbitrate a dispute, because he was as honest as the day was long and a great stickler for the facts.
    One afternoon as he sat with his Yemenite wife Rachel under the white mulberry tree in their yard, tearing off little pieces of pitta bread and cheese with his thin blue fingers and placing them in her mouth, I eavesdropped on their conversation, scrunching myself up in a bush as best I could.
    ‘Have some more,’ he said, preparing another morsel.
    ‘I don’t need to be hand-fed,’ protested Rachel, though she could not keep from laughing. ‘I’m an old woman, not a baby.’
    ‘My baby,’ I heard Shlomo Levin sigh. ‘My baby sister.’
    Sometimes when the old-timers reminisced about Grandmother, they would let drop a few words about her brother,so that little by little I put together a picture of him, as I did of others whom