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

when I am in Israel’s land.
    He sank back into his chair. ‘Israel’s land,’ he said. ‘You can’t throw a stone in this country without hitting some holy place or madman.’
    All around him were the first houses of Tel Aviv, with their Jewish workers, Arab coachmen, and new inhabitants.
    ‘Suddenly I realised that no one was ever born in this country. Those who didn’t fall from the sky popped up from under the earth.’
    He began carefully peeling more letters from the rustling bundle in his drawer. Elegantly anxious, Grandmother’s large, round handwriting angled charmingly forward.
    ‘I rose from my sickbed,’ she wrote her brother, ‘and towardevening we went for a swim in the Sea of Galilee. The boys carried on like naked babies in the water, and I waded in wrapped in a sheet I threw back on shore once I was neck-deep. Then the three of them had a contest. Liberson said he would walk on water like Jesus and nearly drowned, Mirkin proved quite an artist at skimming stones over the waves, and Tsirkin played to the fish for our supper. In fact, though, I have eaten nothing but figs for the past three days.’
    Levin, who had never seen his sister in the nude, was stricken with anger and shame. His short lunch break was already over. Up and down the dusty street walked young men like himself in tattered work clothes, sweaty, faded young women with hunger and disease glittering in their eyes, and fine gentlemen in white jackets and fancy shoes that never sank into the sand. One of them gave Levin a rude look, and he rose from the limestone ledge he was seated on and went back to work.
    ‘All afternoon I dreamed of returning at night to the sycamore tree on the dune, where I could sit in the dark with my thoughts.’
    That evening, however, when he climbed the sand dune and came to the tree, beneath which he sought only to collapse until he regained his strength, he found a young couple ‘rutting like pigs’. One look from them was enough to send the despairing Levin running to the shore.
    The next day he went to a bank in Jaffa and asked for a job. He was in luck. Because he boasted a good hand, knew some book-keeping, and had a nice, trustworthy smile, he was given a trial as an assistant clerk, and a year later he was already a cashier with a white jacket and a straw hat on his head. The sores on his hands healed, his skin grew soft and smooth again, and at night he strolled along the beach in a pair of moccasins, listening to the whispers and songs of the pioneers on the dunes and smelling the spicy tea they brewed in tin cans. His heart leaped inside him.
    Just then, however, when Fortune, or so it seemed from his account, had begun to smile on him, a war broke out. Along witheveryone else in Tel Aviv, Grandmother’s brother was banished from the city.
       
    ‘During the war,’ said Grandfather, ‘we were given a forged vasika .’
    I wrote down the word vasika . I never asked what anything meant, because explanations would only have snarled the threads of the story. Vasika, kulaks, sukra, Ottomanisation – the only reason I remember such words to this day is that I still don’t know what they mean. Just like Levin and mesamsam .
    ‘We lived on olives and onions and almost starved to death,’ said Grandfather.
    Every autumn he picked and cured a barrel of olives. I sat next to him on the concrete path, watching him peel garlic, slice lemon, and rinse stems of dill, his hands giving off a good green-and-white-striped smell. Each time he tapped his knife handle against a clove of garlic, the pure white tooth slid out of its skin with one quick tug. He showed me how much water and salt to fill the barrel with.
    ‘Go and bring a fresh egg from the chicken coop, my child, and I’ll show you a nice trick.’
    He put the egg in the salt water, and when it was suspended halfway to the top, neither floating upward to the surface nor sinking down to the bottom but hanging by an invisible thread of