A Pigeon and a Boy (14 page)

T
HERE ARE A FEW
character traits that set me apart from my parents and brother and wife. Some I have already mentioned and others I will mention now They—she included—are well acquainted with the skies above their heads and the earth beneath their feet, while I am a kite whose string has severed. They—particularly she—take risks, while I hesitate. They—especially she—decide and do, while I settle for hopes and wishes, in the manner of the devout in prayer: like a hammer that pounds again and again on the same spot. Always the same words, always toward the same east. Sometimes—with my dark, closely spaced eyes, my desire for wandering and fear of travel, my uttering of prayers and my dread that they will be answered—I feel like the only Jew in my family

Yordad chose my major in high school—biology, the sciences track—just as he determined in which unit I would serve in the army On his strong advice I did the course for medics, and thanks to his good connections and my success I stayed on as an instructor. He saw this as a first step toward medical school and taking over his clinic, an idea that surprised me greatly I had never expressed an interest in becoming a doctor; nor would I have guessed that he had considered me, in particular, to be destined for that future.

“What about Benjamin?” I asked, amazed. “I thought he’d be the one to study medicine and take over your clinic.”

Yordad grew serious, his expression clouded. “Benjamin does not have the medical temperament.”

And when I asked what Benjamin would get if I received the clinic,
he said, “You needn’t worry about Benjamin, Yairi. He’ll find himself a rich wife.”

But Benjamin studied medicine and married a woman whose only goods were her joyful heart and her excellent brain, while I did a course for tour guides sponsored by the Ministry of Tourism. That is what my mother advised me to do. “Don’t work in an office,” she said. “It’s good to be outside, and it is nice to return home from all sorts of places. Anyway,” she joked, “maybe on one of those tour buses you’ll meet a rich woman. An American tourist. Perhaps it won’t be Benjamin who meets her, but you.”

“What right does she have? What right does she have to intervene? She leaves us and still tells us what to do!” Yordad rose from his chair, paced back and forth, then lowered his voice. “You could be an excellent doctor, Yairi. Why be a tour guide?” He tilted his head downward to mine. “To tell tales to people and bring them to souvenir shops that sell little camels made from olivewood, and crosses made from sea-shells? To expect tips? And what’s all this nonsense, Yairi, about a rich American tourist? Rich tourists sit in the back seats of chauffeur-driven Mercedes-Benzes, not in buses!”

“It’s just one of Mother’s jokes,” I said. “She didn’t mean it for real.”

“I don’t like those jokes of hers!” Yordad sputtered, fuming. “They don’t amuse me in the least.”

I did a
FOR
and
AGAINST,
became a tour guide, and met my rich wife in the exact manner you joked about: on a tourist bus. If I had the courage I would whine like a baby and say, “It was all your fault!” But instead I will describe things as they were, without pointing an accusatory finger at anyone. I was guiding groups at Christian holy places and Crusader sites and telling them tales and bringing them to souvenir shops, and I had already made a good name for myself and had amassed anecdotes and stories I collected first in my head, then in a small notepad purchased for me by Yordad, that fan of notepads, all of them small and black. And who knows? Maybe I would have continued thus, but one day a beautiful young American tourist climbed into my bus —I did not know then that she was rich as well—and sat in the back. She listened attentively to all my explanations. Sometimes I felt her gaze lingering on me, as though assessing me, weighing me. In the afternoon she approached and told me that her name was Liora Kirschenbaum and that she would like to meet with me after dinner.

Truth be told, that tourist had caught my attention even earlier. Her
height and her eyes reminded me of my mother and Yordad and my brother, but she was handsomer than they, albeit in a strange way Usually it is not only the contours of the face that make a person beautiful but also what one radiates. My mother’s features and her luminescence were one and the same. Tirzah’s features are not special, but she is radiant to the point of blinding. And this tourist radiated nothing, but she was exceptionally beautiful. When we sat that evening in the hotel lobby all those present stared at us in wonder, the way people stare in wonder at such a lady in the company of a dark young man, short and flustered.

The bus driver even made a vulgar crack about tourists who want to get something on with guides, but this tourist was headed in a very different direction. In the fall, she told me, she was supposed to return to Israel with several English friends of hers, young people who had money and time on their hands and were interested in birds. “And we would like you, Mr. Mendelsohn, to take us on a two-week nature tour in search of migrating birds.”

“I don’t know anything about nature,” I told her. “Especially about migrating birds.”

She touched my arm. “You won’t need to know any birds and you won’t need to explain anything to anyone. What you’ll have to do is locate and prepare observation points and places for us to eat and sleep, and to equip and drive a car. There will be six of us, including you and me.”

At that time Yordad had an acquaintance, an elderly gynecologist who was aggressive, short of temper and stature, and a knowledgeable amateur ornithologist: a
Vogelkundler,
he called it. I went to consult with him and he introduced me to his band of bird-watchers, all old German Jews like him, all far more strange and intriguing to me than the birds that caught their interest.

I told him about the offer I had received from the young American and he invited me to accompany his group on a bird-watching outing.

“She says I don’t need to be familiar with the birds,” I told him.

“You need to be familiar with the bird-watchers. They’ll be your clients, not the birds.”

The
old yekke
bird-watchers turned up armed with binoculars, cameras, and a telescope, wearing boots, and khaki trousers that reached their knees, and khaki socks that reached those same knees from the opposite direction. They all wore wide-brimmed straw hats, except for one; his hat was topped with a tuft of feathers, provoking the others to
serve him with a sharp, educational rebuke that such a hat was not seemly for someone who loves birds:
“Es gehört sich nicht!”

They sat on small folding chairs, and almost at once the announcements began: the distance, the direction, the type of bird. And then the arguments: Oriental honey buzzard or black kite? Steppe eagle or greater spotted eagle? The beginners tend to confuse the kestrel with the sparrow hawk, but the wingspan of the sparrow hawk is greater, they told me, and the hawk does not hover. Anyway, a small bird of prey that hovers could only be a kestrel, but a large bird of prey that does this must be a
schlangenadler,
a short-toed eagle.

After several hours, a vote was held and it was decided that we would eat. The men removed sandwiches, fruit, and thermoses of black coffee from their knapsacks. The scent of sausages and boiled eggs wafted through the air.

“We have two people on duty,” they told me. “One keeps his eye on the sky in order to alert the members of the group if something interesting appears overhead. As for the other, please meet Professor Freund, on cake duty today” Professor Freund, an expert on Greek history during the week, sliced and served with great ceremony a wonderful apple pastry made by his wife.

“She baked a strudel for us and she stayed at home,” he noted with pride. “Bird-watching is a very good hobby for us boys,” he said and laughed oddly, something akin to clearing his throat.

They spread before me a map of Israel, explaining which birds I was likely to meet in which locales. It was an important lesson to learn, because even though today I am no expert in identifying birds, I did become adept at knowing where to find them, and spot them, and show them to others. Some places, like the Hula Valley, are known by every bird-watcher, while in certain locations around Jerusalem you can find the resting places of eagles, and in one of the valleys of the Gilboan Hills, those of storks. I have a small ravine where they stay year-round, and a place in the Judean Desert where birds of prey gather to sleep on the ground. I had one eagle owl—the only bird that arouses true affection in me—whose nesting grounds I have visited a number of times; today I show my tourists his descendants. I have one small, isolated pool around which there are all manner of ducks, greenheads and coots, cormorants, egrets, gray herons, black storks, stilts, lapwings.
You
see, I remember the names even if I don’t always know to put them with the right birds.

S
EVERAL MONTHS PASSED.
On the appointed day I drove the minibus I had rented to the Haifa port to fetch the rich tourist from America and her English bird-watching friends. Overhead, seagulls and enormous flocks of pigeons circled, landing and alighting at the granaries nearby.

My clients disembarked from a ship arriving from Piraeus. Liora Kirschenbaum called me “darling,” tilted her head downward to kiss my cheek, and presented me to the others, a small and amiable group, slightly inebriated and emitting the scents of pleasant colognes, four sunburned noses protected—a little too late—by light-colored straw hats. Four pairs of binoculars hung on four concave chests; four leather-covered flasks were hidden in four back pockets.

We left the port in the direction of the Check Post, and already in the city they began to identify swifts and swallows. We traveled north. Although I was not asked to do so, perhaps out of awkwardness and habit I tried to tell them a few of my often-told tour-guide stories as we drove: Elijah on Mount Carmel, the Crusaders and Napoleon in Acre, the snail that produces the mauve color used by the ancient Phoenicians for dyeing, the invention of glass. Straightaway one of them, a squat and jaundiced fellow, his Adam’s apple jutting sharply from his neck, told me they did not want to hear any of the “holy garbage”— that’s what he called it—that tour guides pawn off on tourists in the Holy Land.

“We’ve come to watch the birds, Mr. Mendelsohn,” he said. “It’s best we make this perfectly clear now so this trip will be a success.”

And the trip was, indeed, a success. The organization, the food, the accommodations, the rented minibus—nothing failed. Even the birds did not disappoint. The stork knew the appointed hours, the swift observed the time of her coming, and large flocks of birds of prey passed by overhead as if on command. My new clients were satisfied. They were particularly excited by the sound of a soft crowing they could not locate. It was late in the afternoon and we were eating sandwiches at the edge of a large field in the Beit She’an Valley when suddenly all four raised their eyes skyward. Their gazes scoured the heavens, but the looks on their faces attested only to listening, not seeing.

“What are you looking for?” I asked.

The squat, jaundiced, irascible one signaled me impatiently with his hand to be quiet, and after cocking his head and listening for half a minute he raised his binoculars to his eyes and said, “One o’clock, thirty degrees.” His cohorts looked, too, and one said, “The scouts.”

“Those are cranes, Yair,” Liora whispered to me, her mouth—how pleasant—very close to my ear. “Listen. They make a very soft, quiet sound, but they can be heard at great distances.”

I listened to their amicable crowing like conversation and then I saw them, three large fowl with long legs and outstretched necks.

“I thought they flew in large flocks,” I said.

“The scouts,” said the squat, jaundiced guy, “fly ahead of the flock. They’ll find a nice spot to rest, they’ll land there, and then signal to the rest of the flock from the ground.”

“Pretty soon the sun will set,” I noted.

“Cranes fly at night, too.”

The stork, the pelican, the birds of prey—all these glide. That is what he explained to me later. The sun heats up the earth, the earth heats the air, and the hot air rises, enabling the birds to rise as well, and glide. That is why they fly exclusively during the day and over land. But the crane is the only large bird that both glides and beats its wings, so that while the stork takes several days of coasting to circumvent the Black Sea, the crane traverses it in one night of wing-flapping flight.

That night they slept at a kibbutz in the Beit She’an Valley Incidentally, years later it would turn out that this was the kibbutz where Zohar, my future sister-in-law, lived, and that the man who handled the room rental—a tall, stout young man, friendly and efficient—was one of her three brothers. Sometimes I ponder what would have happened if she herself had been working at the desk, or if I had not sat with my guests on the grass but had set out on a walk around the kibbutz and had met her on the sidewalk. I could have warned her against marrying Benjamin. But that evening I sat with my English bird-watchers on the grass until quite late, and my life took its present course.

A full moon was shining. The four of them drank a lot and told stories that amused one another and Liora immensely I envied them. Their behavior hinted at a certain insouciance and freedom from financial worry that had less to do with monies inherited or earned than with some mysterious heredity

The squat, jaundiced fellow with the jutting Adam’s apple coaxed me
to take part in their drinking. I declined. I told them I was not accustomed, that I had never drunk liquor, and that I abstained almost entirely even from drinking wine. But Mr. Jaundice would not give up. “It’s high time you tried. Drink it down in one go. This is good Irish whiskey”

Perhaps because of Liora’s presence there and perhaps because his words convinced me, I downed the glass he handed me. Was this what my mother felt as she sipped her daily glass of brandy? A snake of fire coiled around my throat. Ahorse kicked the inside of my brow I wished to distance myself from them, breathe some air, and get hold of myself, but my body was unable to stand. I crawled to the side on all fours. Everyone laughed and Liora drew near, compassion in her eyes but mirth on her lips.