Free The Blue Mountain by Meir Shalev Page B

which was several miles away. The entourage had hardly left the village, however, when it saw the train come around the blue bend of the mountain and roll into the station.
    The story of my uncle Avraham’s birth was one of the most famous in the Valley. On the village’s fiftieth anniversary it was even dramatised by a director from Tel Aviv, who astounded the locals with his purple pants and his loud efforts to bed every young girl in sight.
    Mandolin Tsirkin and Rilov the Watchman ‘jumped on their horses, galloped off like two Cossack lightning bolts’, and caught up with the train. Over the protests of the engineer, who brandished a coal shovel, Rilov leapt from his horse into the locomotive, subdued the man with an angry glare and a stiff prod to the chest, and yanked the brake handle.
    ‘We’re not just anyone, we’re Committee!’ he told the engineer and his sooty assistant, who lay shivering on a pile of coal, stunned by this pronouncement and the sudden stop of the train.

    ‘On your feet and shake a leg if you want to die in your own bed, you dead jackal, you!’ shouted Rilov. ‘Full steam ahead!’
    The train started out with a groan, leaving behind a great wake of sparks, columns of smoke, two saddled horses, and Grandmother Feyge and her forgotten entourage, which ran shouting toward the tracks. There was no choice but to give birth in the fields.
    My uncle Avraham was delivered an hour later, Grandmother and Grandfather’s firstborn son and the first child of the village. ‘He was born in our field, on our earth, beneath our sun, in the exact place where Margulis’s main irrigation tap now stands.’
    That day the cicadas kept up a steady roar in the fields. The pioneers sat up singing all night, and in the morning Rilov and Tsirkin reappeared, having run all the way back. Rilov did not even apologise. After sipping some water, he demanded a general meeting to decide what the child should be called. ‘He’s already been given a name by his mother,’ he was told. ‘It’s Avraham, after her father.’ Eliezer Liberson muttered something about ‘comrades taking impermissible liberties’ and even wrote in the village newsletter that ‘the child is as much ours as hers’, but there was nothing he could do about it.
    Knowing that the birth of a first child afflicts all men with a sense of their own mortality, Fanya Liberson, who had been shanghaied from her kibbutz several weeks previously, made Grandfather leave Grandmother’s tent.
    ‘Fanya and my poor wife Leah moved in with her. The two of them embroidered nappies for little Avraham and wove him a cradle of reeds they had cut by the spring.’
    A week later the circumciser arrived from the city beyond the blue mountain. The villagers dressed in white, cut their hair and nails, and sat in a semicircle in front of Mirkin’s tent. A great cheer went up as Grandfather stepped outside holding his son high in the air. ‘Your uncle Avraham was truly our first fruit, because he was born before the fruits of the trees had set.’ To this day, on the holiday of Shavuot, the feast of first fruits, all that year’s children are held high in front of everyone to commemorate the occasion.

    The whole village was dazzled by the beauty and fairness of the new baby, who ‘smiled with a mouth so bright that you could have sworn he had already cut his teeth. He was like a big jonquil swaddled in its calyx.’ Avraham was born without the two deep creases that now furrow his brow, and with a friendly expression on his face, which was as fresh and smooth as the peel of a large apple.
    ‘We formed a circle immediately,’ said Pinness. ‘Each arm found a shoulder or waist and the dance began.’ Everyone felt that it was a moment of grace for the village, which now had ‘someone to carry the torch forward in the great relay race of the generations’ and need not fear extinction with the death of its founders.
    Pinness smiled softly, the pleasure of the