Read Online The Blue Mountain by Meir Shalev - Free Book Online Page A

didn’t take her eyes off him for a second.
    They saw caravans of camels, ‘Turkish trains’, as Margulis called them. Levin tingled with pleasure. Hayyim Margulis was the first person in Palestine not to humiliate him, and Levin felt the beginnings of a great liking for this fragrant young man, whom he already dared affectionately call ‘Hayyim’ke’ in the privacy of his thoughts. Perhaps, he imagined happily, he would be asked to join Margulis for good. Together, he daydreamed, the two of them would possess land and Tonya, together ploughthe earth and build a home. For a fleeting moment the future seemed to beckon from beneath a warm canopy of hope. It was all so sudden that he could feel the back of his neck go limp from sheer bliss. But no sooner had they reached Jaffa than Margulis took Tonya by the arm and disappeared with her and their friend behind the Park Hotel, waving goodbye. Sadly, Levin watched them depart. For several hours, until he was chased off by a waiter, he sat on a bench in the garden of the hotel, looking at the spire of the Lutheran church and the flame trees glowing red all around him. When night came, he bedded down on the dunes north of Jaffa. Cold lizards crawled over his belly, and the snouts of jackals sniffed his legs. He didn’t sleep a wink, and when morning came he went to look for construction work in Tel Aviv.
    ‘The girls here,’ he wrote to his sister, who was then digging irrigation holes in orange groves near Hadera, ‘are callous and crass and pay no mind to a young man like me who cannot serenade them or sweeten their lives with honey. They want strong fellows who sing while they work, and I, weak and afflicted as I am, am not well liked by them. How I long for a soft, pure hand, for the fragrance of a muslin dress, for a cup of coffee with little cakes on a white table by a green riverbank.’
    Levin dug foundations and pushed wooden wheelbarrows through the sand until he felt his back would break.
    ‘My poor hands are all blistered, and every blister has burst. My skin is peeling and full of bloody cuts. And each day’s work is followed by a sleepless night. My back and sides ache, and each thought is more worrisome than the last. Will my powers hold out? Have I the mental and physical fortitude to pass the test? I would be happiest going back to Russia or away to America,’ he wrote to Feyge, who was then singing away as she crushed stones into gravel near Tiberias.
    Levin showed me Grandmother’s answer. ‘There are other women working here, and they indeed launder and cook for the men as you feared would be my lot. But how happy your little sister is! She is a real worker. Tsirkin, Mirkin, and Liberson – I call them by their last names, and they in turn call me Levin andsalute me like an officer – all lend a hand in keeping up our tent. Tsirkin, when the spirit moves him, is a most wonderful cook. Give him a cabbage, a lemon, some garlic, and some sugar, and he will make an unparalleled borscht. From a pumpkin, some flour, and two eggs he whipped up enough food for a week. Yesterday was Mirkin’s turn to do the laundry. Would you believe that a grown man washed your sister’s underthings?’
    Levin was so overcome with envy and abhorrence that he made a note of his feelings in his diary, thus condemning them to immortality.
    ‘Do you remember that song I used to sing back home? Yesterday I taught it to the boys. Tsirkin played it for us, and we sang all night long until the sun rose and a new day of work began.’
    Levin stuck his pencil behind one ear, rose, stepped out from behind the desk in his office, and began to dance slowly, describing a pained, graceful circle around his torment while singing in a high voice:
I shall plough, and I shall sow, and I shall rejoice––
Only when I am in Israel’s land.
You may dress me in plain cloth and call me ‘Jew’––
Only when I am in Israel’s land.
I shall eat dry bread and bow to no man––
Only