Read The Blue Mountain for Free Online

Grandfather’s table drinking tea and eating bread with olives.
    ‘I’m sure you’ll want to tell your uncle Avraham and Pinness,’ he advised me. ‘Don’t do it just yet, though. Wait a little while.’
    The next day Busquilla quit his job at the post office and put himself at my disposal.
    ‘I’ll manage the business, and you can pay me what you think I’m worth,’ he said.
    That was the beginning of Grandfather’s vengeance, which was carried out with the prophetic exactitude of a good planter, filled my sacks with money, and wreaked havoc on the most sensitive nerve centres of the village.
    ‘They drove my son Efrayim from here,’ he repeated to me and Pinness one last time before his death. ‘But I’ll get them where it hurts the most: in the earth.’
    We didn’t know then what he was talking about.
    The Committee considered several candidates to fill Busquilla’s position at the post office and finally settled on Zis. The donkey already knew every house in the village, and now that it was riderless, could carry packages too. Zis was the grandson of Katchke, a charter member of the village who had hauled water from the spring every day until he was murdered by a snake.
    Zis, however, did not even last two years. ‘The old-timers discovered that he was licking the stamps off the envelopes,’ said my sardonic cousin Uri.
    The Committee appealed to Busquilla to return to his old job, but by then he had a business card that said ‘Manager, Pioneer Home’ in Hebrew and in English, plus ‘a herd of one hundred corpses’, as old Liberson sarcastically put it until the death of his wife Fanya, his first and only love, who became the hundred and first.

4
    T he Mirkin farm was one of the most successful in the village.
    So everyone said enthusiastically whenever Grandfather’s fruit trees broke into stormy bloom; so they said when my uncle Avraham’s cows gushed floods of milk; so they said, upset and envious, when the cowshed filled with dusty insect moults and bulging sacks of money while the orchard went to ruin and was sown with bones and graves.
    The graves ran in rows on either side of red and white gravel paths. Scattered among them were green benches, flowering shrubs, trees, and shady corners for meditation, and in the middle was Grandfather’s white gravestone. The whole village shook its head at the sad fate of earth that was meant to bring forth fruit and fodder but had become a great field of revenge.
    ‘It’s really quite simple,’ I told myself, wandering through the large rooms of my house. ‘Why keep picking at it, prying and looking for answers?’
    Wasn’t that why Grandfather had raised me to be what I was? He had made me as big and strong as an ox and as faithful and savage as a sheepdog, thick-skinned and thick-headed. And now he lies in his grave, surrounded by dead friends and tickled pink by the village’s conniptions.
    ‘Leave him alone. The child is nothing but a bag of yarns and tall tales,’ said Pinness when I announced that I had no intention of appearing before the Committee for a hearing.
    I was no longer a child. I was a rich young giant, burdened with my money and my bulk. Pinness, however, had a way of extending his pupils’ childhoods to all ages, continuing to pat them on heads that had long since grown bald or grey. ‘Who knows how many memories were crammed into the boy’s big body until it just burst and spilled its bile?’ he asked rhetorically.If Grandfather had been alive, he would have dismissed such a remark by saying that although Pinness knew many fine parables, ‘he sometimes forgets what they’re about’.
    When asked to abandon the mortuary business, I myself always replied, ‘I’m only doing what Grandfather wanted.’ I sent Busquilla and his hired lawyer to the Committee hearing because they were outsiders, as smooth as they were crude. The fallen leaves of stories had not covered them, and the soles of their shoes kept the Valley’s