A Pigeon and a Boy (10 page)

The Baby covered his head: a small darkness. The blanket swallowed the sounds. For a kibbutz child there are few moments like these that are solely his. “On a kibbutz, even time is shared collectively,” I was once told by my sister-in-law, Zohar, who grew up in a children’s house “exactly the same.” And lying in ambush behind those few short private moments is everything that is about to take place and cannot be prevented or postponed: the morning cry of “Good morning, children, everyone wake up!” and the parting of the curtains and the tumult of the awakening and the uproar of washing and dressing. And after the meal, the collective departure to the road to wait for the collective ride to the collective schools of the Jordan Valley kibbutzim.

“He was what we called ‘an external,’” I was told years later by an old man from that kibbutz, someone who would have been the Baby’s own age if he had not been killed in battle. “We didn’t pick on him like other
externals because he had an aunt and uncle here. But an external is an external. That’s just the way it is.”

“Just like you in your family” Zohar said, chuckling. “You’re kind of an external, too.”

The Baby had a mother and father, but the mother could not bear life in the Land of Israel—not the people, not the heat, not the poverty and not the demands. She left him in the hands of his father and returned to the country of her birth, where she was greeted by the theater and music she loved and had missed, by the language and climate, and by the death that claimed her early, her punishment several years later.

The father married another woman, who kept him apart from his friends and demanded that his son be sent away “You have an older brother on a kibbutz,” she said. “A little old, but a good man. He can take him in. The kibbutz is a good place and the people are good. It will be good for us and good for him.”

And so, surrounded by all that goodness, he was exiled to his new home. He was seven years old, and the backs of his hands — still dimpled like an infant’s —and his dark, chubby cheeks earned him the nickname “the Baby” I know nothing of his feelings at that time, and there is a limit to what I can guess or verify, particularly since everyone from the Baby’s early life is long dead: he himself in the War of Independence, his aunt and uncle in the same year from the same illness in the same old-age home. His father in his bed, next to his third wife, about whom, apart from the fact of her existence, I know absolutely nothing. His mother in a concentration camp, from hunger and cold, pondering both the child she had left behind and that unbearable sun and the possibility that the entire Second World War had broken out for the sole purpose of paying her back for what she had done to him. And his stepmother in a traffic accident on Gaza Street in Jerusalem: for her punishment, fate brought together rain, a bus, and a motorcycle with a sidecar full of flowers, which ended up scattered on the pavement.

But at that time, all these people were still alive, and the Baby’s aunt and uncle took him in and raised him with love. They were elderly, their only son already married and living on another kibbutz. The stepmother was right: they were good people and enjoyed a certain status on the kibbutz. The aunt was the first woman in the country to head an entire branch of production on a kibbutz—a cowshed of milking
cows —and the uncle ran hither and thither on kibbutz movement matters, always returning with a report for the general assembly and “a little something” for his wife and nephew

Visits by his father grew shorter and less frequent, and the Baby began to call his aunt and uncle “Mother” and “Father.” Every afternoon, when he came to visit them in the family apartment, they hugged him and kissed him and told him a story They asked him what he had learned that day at school, and they taught him to stick two cookies together with jam and dip them in tea and to play checkers at the same time. The uncle knew how to imitate the galloping of horses by rapid drumming of his fingertips on the tabletop, and the aunt taught him tongue twisters. When he tried repeating them, the words clogged in his throat and made him laugh.

After that he would ask to leaf through the Album, a French picture book they kept in the cabinet of their bookshelves. He did not understand the words —truth be told, neither did they—but there were beautiful photographs and pictures there of castles and mountains, of butterflies and reptiles, of flowers and crystals and winged creatures, and the uncle thought to himself that they should take care, that this album was just as likely to awaken in the heart of the young reader a welcome passion for learning as it was a dangerous passion for collecting.

Indeed, as he walked about the kibbutz, the Baby’s eyes were always cast downward, not from fear or embarrassment but because they were on the lookout for a shiny beetle or a glittering stone or the darting green lightning of a lizard. And sometimes he would notice a coin or a key that had fallen from someone’s pocket. Then he would rush to his aunt and hand over, quite officially, the new find, and she would pat him on his neck and say, “What a nice little
kelbeleh
you are.” Then she would give him a note to pin to the notice board in the dining hall: the lost item could be retrieved from her at the cowshed by providing identifying marks. The Baby had been certain that a
kelbeleh
was a puppy and it was only years later, after joining the Palmach, that he discovered it meant “calf,” and he did not know if he should be happy or irritated. One way or the other, this virtue of his became known around the kibbutz, and more than once he was called upon to find something important that had gone missing, because his eyes were quick at searching and scanning and finding that which was lost, just as in the future they would know how to identify each returning pigeon while it was still high in the sky and far off.

So it was one morning that he was standing with the other children who were waiting for their ride to the collective school when suddenly a strange truck appeared and stopped at the edge of the road. Everyone regarded it with curiosity Vehicles were not at that time a common sight, each and every car arousing the interest of children, and thus an unknown truck even more so.

A man in work clothes and boots — the kind of thin man whose age could be anywhere from thirty to sixty, the kind of man who seems both very familiar and completely unfamiliar at the same time— alighted from the truck. He shouted, “Thank you very much, driver-comrade!” and “Good morning, children-comrades!” as he began walking with long strides. He was very tall, in his hand a woven wicker basket with a handle and a lid, his nose slightly hooked, his freckles plentiful and densely scattered, his thick red hair parted precisely in the middle of his head.

The visitor made straight for the tent camp of the Palmach, presented himself to the platoon commander, and the two headed purposefully for the kibbutz carpentry shop. In the carpentry shop they were met by planks, nails, screens, a carping carpenter, and tools. In those days every kibbutz had a carpentry shop, and every carpentry shop had a carping carpenter, and every such carping carpenter, when asked to carpenter some thing, even if he was told that this thing was important for the nation soon to be born and the war drawing near, would grow even surlier. But this visitor was accustomed to carping carpenters, was familiar with their habits and manners, and even knew the best way to draw out their patience: he showed them “top secret” sketches. He whispered, “You may not reveal this!” He gestured with freckled hands that explained and requested, and, most important, he asked questions that gave his cohort the impression that he was not issuing orders but, rather, asking for advice.

The two began toiling over something that at first appeared to be a giant box or a tiny shed, the walls of which sported openings of various heights and sizes; a person could move about erect in this space, his arms spread. A short time later, internal compartments were added, and shelves on the outside, and screened windows covered with wooden slats, and double doors, the inner one with screens.

For two whole days the sounds of pounding and sawing and arguments and instructions in Yiddish, German, and Hebrew could be heard. On the third day the platoon commander sent several young
men from the Palmach tent camp around to the carpentry shop. They loaded the small screened-in shed onto a cart, pulled it to the petting farm of the kibbutz children, and set it up there, facing east. The visitor checked to make sure that no nail or splinter was sticking out, and when he was satisfied he said, several times, “That is good,” and “That is very good.” Then he opened the lid of the wicker basket he had brought with him and removed from it a pigeon. It was a pigeon like any other: bluish-gray similar to a thousand other pigeons, but broad-winged and short-tailed, a light-colored swelling where the beak met the head. The visitor placed the pigeon in the small shed, and while everyone understood that this was a pigeon loft, they had no idea for what purpose it had been built and why only one pigeon had taken up residence there.

The visitor served his pigeon a dish of water and some seeds, then went to the dining hall but did not eat a full meal there. At first he pecked at his plate, then began dunking an endless series of cookies into an endless series of cups of tea with lemon, an act observed by many eyes and interrupted only when the Baby’s aunt approached his table.

“Hello, Doctor,” she said, and added, “how are you?” Then she invited him to pay a visit to the cowshed to see a calf leaning toward death.

Thus everyone learned what only the dairy-farmer aunt knew: that this was not just any redhead who builds pigeon lofts and places in them a single pigeon, but a veterinarian. And not just any cattle curer from some nearby town or kibbutz but a real doctor, with a diploma! The visitor examined the calf, collected ingredients from various women—the dairy farmer, the medic, the supplies administrator—as well as from the kitchen of the children’s house, and concocted a tepid and putrid remedy, which he siphoned into the calf’s mouth from a bucket; after this he went to the room allotted him and, according to the night watchmen, did not extinguish the light in there until dawn.

First thing in the morning, the visitor left his room, hurried to the cowshed, administered more of the remedy he had mixed the day before, and said, “Patience, calf-comrade, soon you will heal and forget.” From there he proceeded, limbs flapping, to his pigeon loft, where he removed a small notepad from his shirt pocket, wrote something on a thin slip of paper, tore it out, rolled it up, and placed it inside a capsule he had taken from his trouser pocket. He took hold of the pigeon, attached the capsule to her leg, and let her fly

There was something pleasant and pleasing in the way his hands dispatched the pigeon, a gesture that contained the granting of freedom and the handing over of power and a wave of good-bye and hope and envy Everyone present at that moment was stupefied. Their gazes followed the pigeon until she disappeared in the distance. Even the veterinarian was stirred, despite having dispatched thousands of pigeons since he was a boy in the German city of Köln, where he had been born and raised, and where he had dispatched his first pigeon.

For a moment his hands remained outstretched, as if helping the pigeon in her ascent; then he pulled them in and tented them over his eyes. His gaze escorted her as she grew distant, his lips wishing her a safe and swift journey There is joy and newness in every dispatch, he thought to himself, and when she could no longer be seen he removed a second pad from a different pocket and scribbled something.

The next day a green pickup truck entered the kibbutz laden with metal boxes and wood-frame crates with screens; small, bulging burlap sacks; more woven wicker baskets; troughs; and tin vessels. At the wheel sat a silent young woman, the kind whose knee never stops jiggling when she is seated, and she, too, had brought with her a single bluish-gray pigeon. A certain type of know-it-all began to gabble about female drivers and those who give them licenses, while another type of know-it-all began to argue whether it was the same pigeon the visitor had dispatched the day before.

In the metal boxes there were tools and instruments, the burlap sacks were stuffed with seeds and grain, and from the wooden crates there arose soft noises, an impatient scratching and a dull cooing. It did not take a genius to connect the sounds to the sights and the guesses to the smells, and to understand that inside these crates there were more pigeons. The veterinarian and the silent young woman emptied the truck, put everything in the shade, and went to check that all was in order in the new pigeon loft. Afterward, they gave the carpenter “the trap door,” a set of thin metal bars rotating on a common axis that can be set to swing outward only, or inward only, or in both directions, or in neither.

The carpenter affixed the trap door to the opening of the pigeon loft, and the veterinarian brought the troughs and tin vessels inside and secured them. Spying the tip of a nail that was pointed inward and had managed to escape his notice, he said, “You thought we didn’t see you!” and pounded it with his hammer. Then the silent young woman smiled
a smile that no one had suspected her of harboring and she took out a handsome and colorful sign written in Hebrew lettering and adorned with childish flowers and blossoms and birds. The letters spelled out
PIGEON LOFT.
She hung the sign over the door of the loft, took two steps back, looked at it, straightened it, then smiled again, while among the onlookers a third type of know-it-all began to wonder whether, after smiling so much to herself, she might not smile at others.

Then she took a hoe and a pickax, moved away from the loft, and dug a large, square pit. She was strong and diligent, she neither stopped work nor straightened up until she had completed the task, and she answered with a shake of her head “all the fighters from the pioneer training program and all the tough guys from the fields and all the big bruisers from the locksmith’s workshop”—that is the way the story would be told in the future—who approached her one after another and offered their assistance.