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

he asked. ‘That was Rachel Yana’it, the workers’ leader.’
    Ten years later, when Grandmother bought her first hen in the nearby Cherkessian village, she called her Rachel Yana’it and liked nothing better than to scold her for the tiny eggs she laid.
    Feyge’s hunger pangs flowed in her veins. She could feel them circulate through her heart, pumped all over her body. That day in Zichron Ya’akov, she and her brother were cleaning vats in the winery, and the fermentation vapours so tortured her empty belly that she felt she was going to faint. When the three young men working next to them stopped their singing and produced from their knapsacks pitta bread, olives, some slices of cheese, and a bottle of brandy stolen from the storeroom, her eyes clouded mistily over. They rubbed their hands and dug in. After a while Mandolin Tsirkin felt Feyge staring at the crumbs on his lips.
    Tsirkin could read the hunger in anyone’s eyes. With a tip of the neck of his mandolin, he invited her to partake.
    ‘She looked like a hunted bird. I smiled at her with my eyes the way you smile at a child.’
    Feyge let go of her brother’s sleeve and joined them.
    ‘She did eat of their own meat, and drank of their own cup,’ quoted Pinness over Grandmother’s grave.
    Shlomo Levin didn’t like the noisy threesome and was afraid of them. ‘They ate and drank like Arab coolies and sang like Russian hooligans,’ he told me in the office of the co-op. ‘At a time whenall of us were torn by a thousand loyalties and conflicts, nothing fazed them at all.’
    He didn’t look up at me. We sat by ourselves in his office, the sun glinting off the myriad particles of dust that danced outside the window. Levin was cutting carbon paper for the co-op’s receipt books with his thumbnail. Though I was too young to understand everything he said, I didn’t interrupt him with questions. Like the desert flowers in Pinness’s collection, Levin opened up once every few years, and it would have been a great mistake to stop him.
    ‘She fell for them at once,’ he whispered, his blue fingers trembling. ‘Like a dumb moth for the flame that kills it.’
    Levin was shocked to see them tear off pieces of bread and cheese with their dirty fingers and put them in his sister’s dry mouth. Though he tried to keep her away from them, that same night, when Liberson, Mirkin, and Mandolin Tsirkin were high from finishing their bottle of brandy, they founded the Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle ‘in order to cheer your grandmother up’. They even voted a budget, wrote a constitution, and composed a preamble to it.
    ‘The historians never took the Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle seriously,’ said Meshulam Tsirkin to me. ‘Perhaps it suffered from its name. What serious scholar would write a dissertation on an organisation with a name like that?’ he grinned. ‘Still, it was a living legend among the pioneers. It was the first true commune in this country, because it was the first to grant full equality to women. And though its by-laws were highly idiosyncratic, you’ll find several important breakthroughs in them.’
    Underneath Grandfather’s bed in the cabin was a large wooden trunk. I shut the curtains and opened it. The documents lay beneath a white embroidered blouse, a Russian worker’s cap, and a yellowing mosquito net. Her picture, too.
    Grandmother smiled at me. She had two black braids and little hands, and looked as though she were about to come skipping right out of the photograph. Wheeling around, I saw Grandfather behind me, his pale face looking stern. He knelt by my side, prisedmy fingers from the picture one by one, returned it to the trunk, and took out an envelope with different photographs.
    ‘This is Rilov, the famous Watchman,’ he said in a mocking tone I knew well. Grandfather had never liked the members of the Watchmen’s Society. ‘Underneath that Arab cloak he’s got two Mauser pistols and a French field cannon.