The Blue Mountain by Meir Shalev

coot ever said a word to him. Why, he’s never even had a girlfriend. And he won’t ever have one, either.’
    Her squat, heavy body turned to face me. ‘They should have sent you to an orphanage,’ she yelled.
       
    I was a sad and angry seventeen-year-old at the time. My loneliness, the stiffening flesh of my adolescent body, the deviousnessof my mind, which still followed every twist and turn of my childhood – all filled me with resentment, with a black, gritty, stinging bile. Shulamit had just arrived in Israel, and Grandfather had left me and gone off to live with her in an old folk’s home. Every other day I went on foot to visit him, bringing him a can of fresh milk.
    When I returned home with the empty can in my hand, I went as usual to see Pinness. My old teacher dragged a little table out to the garden. He was raising balloon spiders for observation in the bushes, where dozens of them hid in their leafy domiciles, ready to swoop down on the prey caught in their nets. Though Pinness was old, he could still trap a fly in flight with one hand and cast it into a web.
    ‘All those years your grandfather went on loving Shulamit, until she finally arrived, and all those years I thought of my dead Leah. We were made of different stuff from you. The patience of an entire people, two thousand years of it, had built up in our bodies until our blood ran hot.’
    He sighed. ‘I envy you. We had our romances too. We danced shirtless in the vineyards, young men and young maidens, and made love on the threshing floors. But who among us could shout in public, “I’m screwing so-and-so’s daughter, and so-and-so’s granddaughter, and so-and-so’s wife”? Who hath sent out the wild ass free, and who hath loosed his bands?”’
    ‘Is he still at it?’
    ‘Once every few months, the scum. Afterwards I can’t sleep for a week. The first time I wanted to climb up after him and throttle him. Now I just want to know who it is. To look him in the eyes and understand.’
    As I sipped my tea I put an olive in my mouth. Pinness patted me affectionately.
    ‘Just like your grandfather, eh? He’s a man worth modelling yourself on. Ya’akov Mirkin is one of a kind. Even here in the village there’s no one else like him. He never went to congresses or lobbied in Jerusalem or galloped off on a horse with a bandolier of bullets and a black Keffiyeh , Arabic scarf, on his head, but everyone looked up to him. When Mirkintouched a fruit tree, there was an idea behind the act that we all understood. You were privileged to be raised by such a man. How is he?’
    ‘He’s living with her there. He spends a lot of time standing on the terrace.’
    ‘Doing what?’
    ‘Looking. Waiting.’
    ‘Still waiting?’
    ‘For Efrayim, I suppose. And Jean Valjean. Maybe for Shifris too.’

9
    T o this day I haven’t managed to transfer Grandmother’s body from the village cemetery to mine. I offered the village a fortune for it. I thought of robbing her grave. Even Pinness, who was dead set against Pioneer Home, filed a request with the Committee on my behalf and wrote in the village newsletter about it.
    Fanya Liberson was furious. That evening she burst through the green gate that led to the teacher’s garden and stuck her lovely old head through the patch of light in his window.
    ‘Won’t you ever let her rest in peace?’ she shouted, returning home without waiting for an answer. I followed her as quietly as I could, skipping from shadow to shadow.
    ‘Mirkin killed her, and now that undertaker of a grandson of his is trampling on her memory. What does he want? To make his grandfather a happy man with his wife on one side of him and his Crimean whore on the other?’
    I huddled outside the Liberson house, trying to make my big body smaller. It was difficult to hear the rest of their conversation. A wind was blowing, and Fanya’s lips were pressed against her husband’s wrinkled neck.
    Avraham, who was five years old when his