A Pigeon and a Boy (11 page)

She returned to the pigeon loft, sprinkled seeds, ladled water into the vessels, and brought the screened crates inside. She straightened up and looked to the veterinarian as if waiting for instructions.

“Open them, Miriam, open them,” the veterinarian said. “These pigeons are yours.”

The young woman opened the crates. Some forty pigeon chicks, most of which were already fully feathered but some of which still sported remnants of down, burst out of them, filling up their new home and falling upon the food and water. She cleaned the empty crates and put them out in the sun to be sterilized; then she took the waste from inside the crates and dumped it in the pit she had dug earlier and covered it with a thin layer of dirt.

I
N THE EVENING
the two appeared in the dining hall, and after having dunked cookie after cookie into glass after glass of “lemon with tea”— that is what the kibbutz jokers were already calling it—the redheaded veterinarian stood up and tapped his glass with a fork. A stunned hush ensued: who was it that dared to make such a bourgeois salon sound in the dining hall of a kibbutz?

“Good evening, comrades,” he said. “Dr. Laufer here.” He presented them next with the silent young woman: “Her name is Miriam, and she
is an expert pigeon handler.” He asked if there were any strangers among them or if all present were members of the kibbutz or the Palmach, because “we are harboring a secret of sorts.”

“Only members here” came the answer from the crowd.

“We shall start with words of gratitude,” Dr. Laufer began. “We wish to thank you for agreeing to take in under your roof a pigeon loft for Haganah homing pigeons. The pigeons we have brought here are four weeks old. Soon they will begin their flight training, and at the age of six months they will be yoked to a life of family and work.”

People in the crowd began to murmur. Expressions like “yoked to a life of work” were not foreign to their ears, but speaking in the plural, as the doctor did, instigated a quarrel among the veteran kibbutz members: was this
the pluralis majestatis,
the “royal
we,
” primarily the aggrandizement of the speaker, as in the Book of Genesis—“Let us make mankind in our image, after our likeness”—and also the Koran, or was this the
pluralis modestiae,
the amplification of humility?

Dr. Laufer did not wait for this important matter to be clarified; he announced that this pigeon loft was “secret and important” and had been placed in the children’s petting farm so as not to arouse suspicion. “Should the English army come to make a search, one must say this is the children’s pigeon loft.” He explained: “Homing pigeons are very similar to regular pigeons, and only the discerning eye of an expert can tell the difference between them. Still, one must exercise caution. The English are certainly familiar with homing pigeons; they dispatched thousands of them at the front during the Great War. We are telling you all this so that you will know to maintain the secret and the loft and you will not reveal them to anyone.”

Now it became clear to the astonished crowd that
the pluralis
used by Dr. Laufer was a new and different kind of “royal
we,”
in fact a
plu-ralae,
a feminine plural. At once, additional arguments erupted: there were those who said this was nothing more than an erroneous use of Hebrew, just another in the list of errors made by
yekkes,
the German-speaking Jews; there were those who felt they were being presented with a certain sort of humor, the kind of joke of which
yekkes
are particularly fond; and there were those who said that Dr. Laufer spoke thus because he had grown accustomed to living among pigeons and the Hebrew language refers even to male pigeons in the feminine.

“It is impossible to overstate the importance of homing pigeons,” Dr. Laufer announced. “From the days of the pharaohs and the first
Olympic games in Athens, pigeons carried out their missions and delivered news on their wings. Many a time has a single pigeon saved an entire battalion of soldiers or a lost convoy, and on occasion has even sacrificed her own life for man. The Phoenicians brought the pigeon with them in their ships. The sultan Nur-ad-Din connected the entire Muslim empire through a network of pigeon lofts. Homing pigeons brought the news of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo to Nathan Rothschild three days before it reached the European capitals and their rulers, and there are those who claim,” said the veterinarian, suddenly whispering, “that he owes the beginnings of his fortune to them.

“And just last year,” he said, raising his voice again, “a homing pigeon brought along by fishermen saved three boats caught in a storm off the coast of New England, in the United States of America.”

Dr. Laufer recited a line from Ovid, declaimed a florid poem about pigeons written by a medieval Spanish Jewish poet, and added that the pigeon is the incarnation of the Holy Spirit in the New Testament, quoting fluently and precisely two of the four versions: “And straightway coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens opened, and the Spirit like a dove descending upon him,” as well as “I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it abode upon him.”

“Of course we do not need to remind you of pigeons in our own Bible,” he said. “From the Song of Songs we have ‘my dove who art in the clefts of rocks’ and
yonati tamati,
my undefiled dove of innocence. And then there is the dove dispatched by Noah from the ark that kept returning until it found rest for the sole of its foot.” Charmingly involuntarily, he waved his long arms as if dispatching a pigeon, raising a voluntary smile on the faces of the attentive crowd.

“Indeed,” he asked with emphasis, “who but the Jewish people returning to their homeland can better appreciate the tremendous yearning of the pigeon for her home and homeland …” He lowered his voice as he neared his conclusion. “For that reason we must plead with you once again to keep this matter a secret. Do not unwittingly reveal the existence of this pigeon loft to anyone, and certainly not wittingly either.”

He had one additional request: that comrades not loiter in the vicinity of the loft, nor open it, nor thrust a hand inside, nor make unnecessary noise, nor frighten the pigeons. “A homing pigeon must love her home; otherwise she will not wish to return to it,” he said. Then he thanked the comrades once again before taking his seat and dunking
more cookies into more glasses of tea. And when he had eaten and drunk to satiation and had amassed in front of him an impressive pile of squeezed half lemons, he took his leave of the carpenter and the district commander and the Palmach platoon commander and the calf that was now recuperated and the Baby’s aunt, the dairy farmer, and he went to the room that had been allotted to him and at long last sank into sleep.

Early the next morning he awoke, started the engine of the green pickup truck, and drove off to where he had come from. And all at once everything settled back to the way it had been. The aunt returned to the cowshed and the calf that skipped gaily toward her. The platoon commander returned to his command and his training exercises. The carping carpenter—who only now comprehended how pleasant the veterinarian’s company had been—returned to the tediousness of cabinets and beds. And Miriam the silent pigeon handler returned to the new pigeon loft, which was her responsibility She cleaned up, refilled water, put the wooden crates in the storeroom, reviewed each pigeon’s individual file card and the list of band numbers recorded in the flock’s log. As the sun set she seated herself on an empty crate and took pleasure in the jiggling of her knee and an evening cigarette.

T
HE SPEECH
Dr. Laufer made in the dining hall bore fruit. No one mentioned the pigeons, but they certainly did mention the pigeon handler, Miriam. They discussed the cigarette she smoked, wondered about her jiggling knee, pondered, too, the other knee and the distance between the two, the jiggling one and the quiet one, and they came to the conclusion that these were not agitated knees or lazy knees or knees that went out dancing, but rather knees of self-confidence and strength and stability The cigarette, too, they came to realize, was not something on which to pin their hopes, for Miriam smoked only after completing her daily chores. That is to say, it was a cigarette of unwinding from hard work and not a cigarette of recklessness.

For the first three days, Miriam kept her pigeons enclosed inside the new loft. She fed them at the appointed hours, quarantined two sick pigeons, and broke the neck of a third pigeon, whose throat had become inflamed with an infectious malady, after which she burned its body and buried its ashes in the pit.

She wrote lists in the loft log, shooed away cats that displayed more than the usual feline curiosity, caught with her pickax a tenacious black snake that had tried repeatedly to slip into the loft through gaping loops in the window screens. And, like all the other members of the Palmach training program, she worked at all kinds of jobs demanded of her by the kibbutz. At dusk she would sit down, smoke her lone daily cigarette, and jiggle her knee.

The children, who were not interested in Miriam’s knees but in the new pigeons and the new loft that stood in the yard of their very own house, were told that it was forbidden for them to enter the loft or feed its residents and that they might regard the pigeons but only from afar. This was enough to double their curiosity and triple their questions because the new pigeons were plain and simple-looking, but there were too many strangers flocking around them and it was clear to the children that the pigeons were steeped in mystery and secrets. In their petting farm there were already two pairs of pigeons: white ornamental pigeons, their heads pulled tautly backward and their tail feathers spread like those of a peacock. No one knew which were the males and which the females because their primping and preening habits were quite similar one to the other’s, and so self-absorbed were they that they failed to bring descendants to the world; thus it was impossible to discern which was being wooed and which was doing the wooing, which was not laying the eggs and which was not doing the mating.

Miriam went to the village of Menahamia and brought back a few more ornamental pigeons, whose job it was to blur the presence of the new homing pigeons. They were housed in an adjacent loft that appeared to be connected to the new loft but in fact was separated by an internal screen. There were dandified French pigeons that looked and acted like small chickens, with feathered necks and enlarged craws and an arrogant gait, and other pigeons that the children dubbed “slipper pigeons” because soft feathers covered their toes and slid across the floor.

The guys from the Palmach, too, tried to add a few pigeons to the new loft—large, meaty birds that one of the boys had brought back from his parents’ home in Magdiel—and they claimed it was not for their succulent taste that they had been enlisted but in order to serve as camouflage for the homing pigeons. But then Miriam proved that she was not silent at all, that she was capable of speaking if necessary and
even shouting: she did not want these pigeons anywhere near her loft! She knew what the boys were up to, and she was not willing for someone to go poking about, sticking his hands into the loft and pulling out some hapless pigeon for slaughter.

“It’s likely to frighten them. Let them fly away and find a home somewhere else!” she said, then repeated Dr. Laufer’s motto: “Apigeon has to love her home; otherwise she won’t want to return to it.” And the Baby, who was standing next to the loft just then and hoping that she would take him in and let him help with the work, recalled that day as the one on which she had smoked two cigarettes, one after the other, and even her quiet knee jiggled.

Even the woman in charge of the children’s house had an important issue she insisted be raised: she was not willing—so she announced— “for a sign to hang in the petting farm, so near the children’s house, with a mistake in the Hebrew!” When asked what all the commotion was about, she said that when vowels were added to the Hebrew letters signifying “loft”—
shin
and
vav
and
kaph
— they would make the word
shovakh
and never
shovekh,
as Dr. Laufer’s sign had it spelled. Miriam responded by telling her that anyone who knew Dr. Laufer knew that this was not the only mistake pigeon handlers made in Hebrew

For example, she explained, the trap door at the entrance to the loft is called a
loked,
and not a
lokhed,
as would be grammatically correct. Even she, Miriam, called it a
loked,
although she knew this to be a mistake, and she would not take down the sign with the word
shovekh
instead of
shovakh
because not only must the homing pigeon love her home, the pigeon handler must as well.

Lo and behold, not long ago I found such a
shovekh,
not in the petting farm of some out-of-the-way kibbutz but in a poem written by Natan Alterman his very selfness (I’ve adopted an error or two of Meshulam Fried’s):

I was really excited. Miriam the pigeon handler had been right. After all, no one can claim that Alterman—Alterman!—wrote in erroneous Hebrew Still, the poet made a mistake of a different nature: pigeons do
not fly at night. I wanted to tell this to my mother, and to ask if she knew which came first, the
shovekh
in the poem or the
shovekh
on a kibbutz in the Jordan Valley But my mother had already died, and Benjamin, whom I phoned to ask, told me that the time had come for me to stop this nonsense of mine, that my reliance on the riches of my wife and the memory of my dead mother were turning me into a bum and an idiot.

“Shovakh, shovekh,
it’s all the same. Poets will do anything to make their rhymes and meters fit!” he said before hanging up, adding that if I have trouble falling asleep at two in the morning that is no reason to wake up him too. That’s what God made woman for. Wake her up.