A Pigeon and a Boy (16 page)

I said perhaps she should consult other doctors, but she cut me off “There’s nothing wrong with me,” she said.

I asked, “What are you trying to say? That the problem is with me? I mean, you did get pregnant.”

Liora grew angry “I don’t ever
try
to say anything, Yair. Whatever I have to say I say without trying.”

Later, I lay next to her, put my arms around her, tried to calm her with gentle words. She stood up and leaned over me from her full height. “Each one of us is absolutely fine. It’s the two of us together that’s the problem.” She wrapped herself in the large sheet that until that day had covered us both, took her pillow—Liora uses a particularly soft pillow; mine gives her a neckache—and moved to the bedroom that from that day forth became her own.

I did not protest, and in retrospect I think she was right. Even then she was always right. Once a month she would visit me in my room for her “treatment”—“To keep my complexion looking good,” she said— while I, I must admit, was grateful and even happy, then insulted and angry, because afterward she would get out of bed and return to her own room.

“It’s not polite,” I told her after her next “treatment.” “You act like those men that women complain about: you come and then you go.”

“I come? Don’t flatter yourself.”

“So why do you go? Why don’t you stay until the morning?”

“It’s too hot in bed with you.”

Who was this son, who was this daughter that were not born to us? And if they had been born, would they have looked alike? Taking into consideration that spluttering doctor’s diagnosis that one was a boy and his brother a girl, and taking into consideration the difference in their ages—exactly two years —I can only surmise and wonder. Even now, sitting on the wooden deck that Tiraleh, my luvey built for me in my new home, I imagine them as suddenly they take shape from molecules of air and view, becoming real in the transparent void as less transparent images. They do not float in it like fish, nor hover like winged creatures; although there is no solid ground for their feet, they walk as though there were.

About one thing I have no doubts: had they been born, they would have been good friends. It is a fact that they always visit me together, never separately He is two years older than she, and she— sharper-witted and more mercurial—is exactly those same two years younger than he. They always stand close to each other and are occupied with the same thing, like Siamese twins joined by a shared matter of interest. They argue, gaze at something in the distance, call each other’s attention to something with pointed fingers.

I do not give them names. It is enough foolishness that I conjure them before my eyes. Anyway, a name requires a familiar body upon which it can be hung, but these two—they are always changing. Sometimes they are like my parents and my wife and my brother—fair and thin and tall of stature—and sometimes like me, dark and short, though never one of each kind. They never have facial features. I sense all their movements, I hear their voices, but I do not see their faces.

“Why weren’t you born?” I ask them, and answer myself: perhaps this is simply happenstance, a case of being thwarted by the hand of
fate, or perhaps their mother was right, that any mixture of mine and hers—home, child, work, sleep—was doomed to fail.

L
IORA INHERITED
her beauty from her father and her charm from her mother. He is the president of Kirschenbaum Real Estate in New York, and she is the owner of Kirschenbaum Pastries in New Rochelle. Other than parents Liora has an older brother, Emmanuel, whom I have already mentioned, the father of six daughters and the director of business operations for Kirschenbaum Real Estate on the East Coast: Boston, Washington, Long Island, New York City A long time ago he was a wild young man, fond of sailing and food and drink and expensive clothing. Today he wears the simple black suit and white shirt of a Hasidic Jew, his eyes and shoulders downcast, his voice soft and his gait a hurried shuffle as befitting a repentant Jew Still, his badgering has remained constant: back then he wore me out with discussions of designer shoes and boat engines, while these days it’s contributions to settlers and hidden messages in the Scriptures.

Liora does not believe that a person can change. “It’s all a big act,” she says about her brother. “He’s just as much of a pain in the ass as he ever was, and these ugly new clothes of his are just another way of showing off” She sneered, “Emmanuel is the only Hasidic Jew in the world who wears a tallis made by Versace.” In my opinion she is wrong, though. Emmanuel may still be a boring pain in the ass, but his repentance is real.

Two or three times a year he makes an appearance in Israel on one of his business-Judaism-family trips, and whenever he or some other Kirschenbaum comes, Behemoth and I are dispatched to the airport to bring them to their hotel. That is my job, lest we forget that my salary comes from the Israeli branch of the firm.

The automatic door of the arrivals hall opens for me. I enter and wait. Sometimes I even hold up a sign with
KIRSCHENBAUM
in two languages. I do not have the cap and uniform of a driver but I am good at acting my role, and the sign infuriates Emmanuel to no end.

Here they are. Emmanuel and his father come out first, then the two wives, both dressed modestly but expensively, Emmanuel’s wife carrying a round hatbox. Sometimes the arriving group is even larger. I do
not know them all, but it is always easy to pick them out. Although they are quite different from one another, the Kirschenbaums—even those related to the family by marriage—radiate an ambience of unity and family identity “See how beautiful they are?” Liora scolded me when our wedding photos arrived from America. “Only you look different.”

“That’s the way I am,” I told her. “Even with my own family I’m the one who looks different.”

And after I am presented to the newest Emmanuel or Liora that has been born or has entered the family, I let them all hug and kiss and chatter while I load the luggage into the back of Behemoth or on the roof rack. I climb up, pull this way and that, load bags, tighten straps. Simple tasks imbue me with energy and diligence. I sit behind the wheel and await instructions.

Several days later, when the family and business meetings have ended, Behemoth and I are asked to take them on trips around the country Liora’s parents are easy tourists, happy everywhere I take them and with every explanation I make. Emmanuel, on the other hand, is interested in visiting only one kind of place: Rachel’s Tomb, the Cave of the Machpelah, illegal settlements and outposts in the West Bank. Lately he has also discovered the holy graves of the righteous in the north of the country, which means longer trips for me. I don’t mind driving, but it is hard for me to be in his company for so many hours. On those occasions, Behemoth, usually a roomy vehicle, suddenly becomes solitary confinement on wheels and I become a short-tempered and angry prisoner whose sentence carries no parole.

“I can’t stand these trips with him,” I told Liora.

“That’s the nature of the job. Every tour guide gets stuck with annoying tourists now and again. And don’t forget that this annoying tourist is the director of the company that pays your salary”

T
HE
I
SRAELI BRANCH
of the company that pays my salary is a spacious and elegant office, full of air and sunlight, on Chen Boulevard in Tel Aviv. Liora can make the short walk there from our home on Spinoza Street in her spiked heels. That is how she goes to work each morning: she walks southward on Spinoza, crosses Gordon Street, ignores her admirers on Frishman—the men who wait to watch her
firm calves and thighs pass swiftly by each day—then takes a shortcut, turns right, and minces her way up the moderate incline of the shaded boulevard, capping it off with a smooth, quick climb up the twenty-four steps that lead to her office.

Sigal, her stern, pudgy secretary, hands Liora her daily schedule of meetings along with a cup of lukewarm water with lemon juice, tea-hyssop, and honey Then it is straight to work. After all, someone has to earn a living, bring in the money to buy Yair travel clothes that will never travel and knapsacks that will never be carried and shock absorbers that will never be shocked to their fullest and skid plates for Behemoth’s undercarriage that will never get scraped on rocks.

Most of Liora’s clients are wealthy American Jews looking for an apartment in Israel, as well as foreign diplomats and, lately, rich Jews from France and Mexico, whom Emmanuel meets at religious conventions. She finds houses and apartments for them in the finest neighborhoods, in Talbieh and Rehavia in Jerusalem, in Caesarea, in Rishpon and Ashdod and Tel Aviv And since many of them neither live in these homes nor visit them regularly she handles their maintenance and subletting.

Sometimes Sigal sends me to make one of these houses ready for short-term rental or a visit by the owners. I check the water system, the electricity, the air-conditioning, the kitchen appliances; I hire technicians and cleaners; and on occasion I even buy a few food staples for the owners to find in their refrigerators. For all these services the Israeli branch of Kirschenbaum Real Estate pays me a monthly salary, a sum that enables me to entertain an illusion of independence and my wife to write off a few more expenses.

There are several advantages to being married to a woman of means, but there is a disadvantage, too: I am required to make reports, to be measured, to be itemized into the smallest parts of worthiness. If you wish, my life with the wealthy woman you prophesied for me is a long chain of handing in receipts and proof

“You’re wrong!” Liora protested when she heard me make this claim. “I have never asked you why you need something, and I have never said no. But money is something orderly, and those are Itzik’s instructions. You have to know how much is coming in from where and how much is going out to where.”

Itzik is her accountant, a Moroccan-born Prussian with a tiny skullcap in place of a spiked helmet.

“I am a subject, I am a serf, I am a hostage,” I told her. “You and Itzik have the barrel of a wallet pointed at my head.”

“So quit. You’ll get workers’ comp from me and you can be self-employed.”

“There’s not enough work for tour guides these days.”

And because Liora reacted by maintaining a scornful silence, I erupted. “You know why I don’t have work? Because of people like your brother and his settler friends.”

“Don’t make excuses. If there’s no work in tourism, then change professions. I can set you up with loans and guarantees to get started. Like you were given by that friend of your father’s, the contractor who’s built half of Israel. I remember how he looked at me when we met at the party back in Israel after our wedding, how he glared at me with snake eyes.”

She gave me her own venomous glare. “I’ve heard he has a very successful daughter who’s busy building the other half of Israel. Why don’t you go work for them instead of me? Maybe you’ll feel more comfortable with her.”

“I’ll be your driver. On that happy note you can even raise my salary”

“I am willing to raise your salary so that you
won’t
be my driver.”

That is what she said, but in the weeks following, Sigal began phoning me from time to time to chauffeur Liora around. Sometimes she would sit next to me and sometimes in the back of Behemoth, her wide-set blue-gray eyes perusing papers or the screen of her Mac in preparation for some meeting or deal, while my deep, close-set brown eyes — the eyes of a bull who has guessed his fate—shifted back and forth from the road to the mirror. If I tilted the mirror and my head at the proper angles, the wide space between her eyes and the small one between her knees would reflect back at me inside a single frame.

This new situation awakened new passion in me and, apparently once, in Liora as well. We were traveling from Jerusalem to Beit Shemesh at Emmanuel’s request, to look in on several properties in a development being built there for the ultra-Orthodox community I suggested we leave the main road and drive through Ein Kerem, Bar Giora, and the Valley of Elah.

So we had done when suddenly my wife ordered me to turn Behemoth onto some dirt side road that I myself was not familiar with, and there, under a large and secretive carob tree, we lay upon a blanket I extracted from the back of the vehicle, a blanket that I had bought and
that had already given up all hopes of ever being used. Afterward, happy with the unexpected pleasure my wife had granted me and mournful of its rarity, I fetched from Behemoth the alpine camping stove and a kettle and skillet, so that by the time Liora had awakened and stretched and smiled I had already prepared a field meal for the two of us, seasoned with leaves and herbs I had found between the rocks.

“I had no idea you and Behemoth were so well equipped,” she said. “What else have you got in there?”

“Everything you need.” And more: a set of tools and recovery equipment and cooking utensils, a large sleeping bag and a thin, self-inflating air mattress, jerricans for gas and water, a headlamp, batteries, a kerosene lamp, a coffee kit, cloves of garlic, instant soup, salty things — that is what my mother would say about Benjamin and me: “Benjamin likes sweets and Yair likes salties”—everything I would need for departure or banishment.

And a spare set of keys for Behemoth kept in a secret, sealed hiding place on the chassis. Thus, if one day Liora informs me that I must leave, I will be able to get up and depart immediately, without the complicated embarrassment of packing and loading, of how many and which clothes to take and of “Did you happen to see my keys anywhere?” I will leave just as banished women once left: bedecked with their gold and jewels. I will leave, I will go, and until some other rich woman takes me in, I will manage to survive for the first few days in the hills.

The next day Itzik informed me that my wife would no longer be in need of my services as a driver but that my salary would continue to be paid in full. Several days later I was summoned to the office, signed a few papers, and went from being a partly employed tour guide to “director of the transportation department” of the Israeli branch of the firm, a department established overnight so that I could head it. Behemoth and I, who once trailed around after migrating birds, now found ourselves ferrying lecturers, singers, and actors and—since we are both capable of departing from paved roads for dirt ones — senior engineers from the Israel Electric Company, foreign television crews, and special guests of the Office of the Prime Minister and the Foreign Ministry That is how I met the American Palmachnik and his friends, whom I took to the Harel observation point and the Palmach cemetery at Kiryat Anavim and the monastery from which the Baby’s final pigeon took flight.