A Pigeon and a Boy (20 page)

He wrote in round, childish letters, proud and very anxious.

“First, record the numbers and letters written on her band. Very nice. And where it says
PLACE
write
PUMP HOUSE,
and where it says
WEATHER
write
CLEAR, TEMP. 24
°
C, LIGHT EASTERLY WIND,
and where it says
TIME
write 13:45. That’s a quarter to two. Did you write it all down? Did you understand it all? Now watch carefully”

He watched her hands as she dispatched the pigeon forward and upward, her body taut, her breasts suddenly lifting under her gray work shirt, a smile rising on her lips without her thinking about it. The dispatch was so smooth that the pigeon looked like a smile that had detached itself from her body and ascended, and the sight was so
lovely and attractive that the Baby did not know why he was ashamed of his excitement.

In the same way, Miriam dispatched the pigeon with the yellow ribbon, and this caused the Baby to worry Would she let him have the third pigeon or would she dispatch her herself? He filled in the third form and lifted his eyes to her, and Miriam said, “It’s your turn.”

He took hold of the pigeon and, in spite of what he had learned, briefly stared straight into her eyes like a bird of prey

“Think about what you are doing,” Miriam told him. “This is your first pigeon; don’t forget that. Don’t just release her, and don’t throw her. Think that you’re handing her to the heavens. Gently”

Even before he had opened his hands as wide as they would go he felt that his movements were not as successful as hers. But the pigeon had already spread her wings, and his eyes escorted her as she lifted off and his body wished to rise along with her. Her wings were beating, first turning a bluish-gray then—in an immense, clear sky—blackening and shrinking. The Baby watched her, unaware that this would be the last scene he would witness nine years later as he lay bleeding on his back in the ruined gardener’s shed of a monastery, his body riddled with holes and broken and slit open, a pigeon lifting off above him carrying his final wish.

“You’re very good,” Miriam said. She patted his head with a cool hand, first in small, joyful circular motions, then with two fingers that slipped down to the sides of his neck and delighted his back.

S
EVERAL WEEKS LATER
Miriam asked the Baby to ask his aunt to ask the milk-truck driver if he would take a few pigeons for more distant dispatches. First from near the Sea of Galilee, then from Afula and Haifa. Then she told him she knew his uncle traveled to kibbutz movement meetings in Tel Aviv on occasion, and she wanted him to ask the uncle to take three pigeons with him for dispatch from there.

“How will I take them?” the uncle asked.

“There’s a special pigeon basket,” the Baby answered. “It’s made of wicker and it has a handle and a lid.”

“And what if they start quarreling on the way, or if they make a mess?”

Miriam did not give up. She went with the Baby to the uncle and said, “The pigeons will not fight. They will make a little mess but nothing terrible. The basket is lined with newspapers.”

And where would I release them?” the uncle grumbled. “Just anywhere? In the middle of the street? Would I just stand there and open the basket?”

“Do you remember Dr. Laufer, who saved your wife’s sick calf? I’m sure you’d be happy to do him a favor in return. Take the pigeons to him. You’ll find him at our central pigeon loft, in the zoo,” Miriam said. “He’ll dispatch them and he’ll fill in the forms and maybe he’ll even give you a few pigeons of his own for us to dispatch from here. That’s important. We don’t have so many opportunities to dispatch pigeons from great distances.”

The uncle looked agitated. His body broadcast his refusal. But then the Baby, to whom the words “central pigeon loft” seemed as magical and important as palaces and temples, called out to his uncle, “I’ll come with you. I’ll take care of the basket and I’ll watch over the pigeons. All you have to do is bring me to the central pigeon loft in the zoo.”

“That’s a good idea,” Miriam said, leaning over him. “I trust you.”

“What about afterward?” the uncle said, preoccupied with his own concerns. “Are you going to tag along after me the whole day and come with me to my meetings?”

“You can leave him at the zoo,” Miriam said. “Dr. Laufer will find things for him to do. The central loft is large, and there is always work to be done.”

At three o’clock in the morning the uncle woke the Baby and led him with his eyes shut and his hands clutching the pigeon basket to the milk truck. The trip deepened his sleep but here and there he snapped awake, and each time he opened his eyes he took in a different landscape, so that the journey came to seem like an interrupted series of dreams. In Haifa they proceeded to the central bus station. The uncle handed him a sandwich from his satchel and bought him a tart drink from an Arab vendor, and when the bus pulled away from the station and headed southward down the coast he told him that it was not enough to look out the window; he should breathe deeply and smell what he was looking at as well, since smells are what we remember best.

The bus stopped at many stations, taking in and discharging passengers. The sea, which was at first nearby and blue and salty-smelling, drew farther away and turned greener. Its scent changed, too: first it
weakened, then strengthened; then it took on the smell of an orchard. The pigeons were silent in their basket and the Baby fell asleep again, awakening only when the uncle nudged him and told him to open his eyes and look around. “We’re here. This is your first time in Tel Aviv Look, here’s the central bus station.”

The Baby was impressed. “There’s a central pigeon loft
and
a central bus station here?” he asked.

This made the uncle laugh. “There’s a Central Committee for Settlement of the Land of Israel and a Central Department Store for Agricultural Supplies here, too. That’s the way it is in Tel Aviv.”

From the central bus station the two walked down a scalding, humid street and caught another bus. Again the uncle poked him to look around, and he pointed out shops and cars and men wearing panama hats — things you see in the city but not on the kibbutz—but the Baby was preoccupied with only one thing, and when they were in the vicinity of the zoo and could hear the sounds of the animals and smell their smells, he told the uncle that now he must dispatch the pigeons.

“But Miriam said that Dr. Laufer would dispatch them,” the uncle said.

“She trusts me,” the Baby said. “And it’s the only reason I came all the way here. You’ll see, Father. The pigeons will return safely and Miriam will even say that I did a good job dispatching them.”

He gave a few seeds to the pigeons—a light meal, nothing to weigh them down but enough to satiate them a bit so that they would not stop to eat on the way—and then he ladled some water into a small bowl and handed the forms to be filled in to his uncle. “Here, write the date,” the Baby instructed, and he dictated: “Place of dispatch: gate of Tel Aviv zoo.” The uncle recorded the time of day and the weather as well: hot and humid and still and clear. Miriam had entered the numbers on the pigeons’ bands ahead of time.

The Baby copied the information onto a slip of paper he would keep with him, inserted the forms into the message capsules, and attached them to the pigeons’ legs. He lifted his hands in the air and dispatched them one after the other, first the light-colored one and then, several minutes later, the bluish-gray ones. The uncle watched him. While his lips smiled, his heart—this is the way he would remember it in the future—constricted. He was a kind and loving uncle and he would never forget this moment and would recount it tearfully to all who came to comfort him nine years later, at his nephew’s death. As for the Baby, he
was sorry that Miriam was not there to see how smooth and right his movements had been and he said, “Now let’s go into the zoo and find the central pigeon loft.”

However, Dr. Laufer beat them to it. He emerged from the entrance, tall and slightly stooped in his rubber boots, his nose long and his limbs flapping, his hair red and his freckles overflowing, and behind him was a very fat man wearing a cap with a visor.

“Here he is,” the Baby whispered. “That’s the Dr. Laufer who built the pigeon loft on our kibbutz.”

“Well, look who is here!” exclaimed the veterinarian. “The young man sent to us by Miriam, and his uncle. Only the pigeons are not with us.”

Crestfallen, the Baby said nothing.

“And there was no voice, nor any that answered,’” Dr. Laufer said, quoting Scriptures and Bialik, “ ‘and a pigeon with a boy, still knocking at the gate’! You dispatched the pigeons yourself, didn’t you? We saw them rising in the air two minutes ago.”

“I filled in all the details, too,” the Baby boasted, showing the veterinarian the copy he had retained.

Dr. Laufer perused the slip of paper. “Very nice. But we were hoping to add a little pigeongram of our own to Miriam, only now the pigeons have taken off and there is nothing we can do about it.”

“She didn’t tell me,” the Baby said, disconcerted.

“You, uncle-comrade,” the veterinarian said, “you are welcome to continue on your way now We will keep him gainfully employed until your return.”

The uncle left and Dr. Laufer said to the fat man, “You see this fine young fellow? He’s our guest. Anytime he shows up here, please let him in.” And to the Baby he said, “Come!”

The zoo spread out before the Baby’s eyes like some enchanted land of first sights. Near the entrance stood several huge turtles, the eye unable to believe they truly existed, in spite of—or perhaps because of—their enormous size. Past the turtle pens were the monkeys, which the Baby suddenly understood were the creatures that visited his nightmares and which he had been able to forget, until now, upon waking. There were a few cages containing smaller animals —cruel and cunning in appearance, the likes of which he had glimpsed more than once in the tangled reeds that grow by the Jordan River, not far from his kibbutz— and a pool for pelicans and all kinds of ducks, all of which were also familiar from the Jordan Valley Here, however, there was a black bear
and a lion and two lionesses, and I amuse myself by wondering whether these were the very same Tamar and Dolly and Hero that I saw years later, when my mother brought me to the very same zoo. There was a leopard, too—Teddy the Great Leopard—which had been hunted in the Galilee. “Would you believe it, Yair? A leopard right here in Israel! Found near the town of Safed …”

But the Baby wanted more than anything to reach the central pigeon loft, for it was the central pigeon loft about which he could not stop pondering and wondering. From so much pondering and wondering he imagined it to look like one of the large marble palaces from the fairy tales his uncle would tell him, and like the pictures in the French picture book, filled with hundreds of glittering blue pigeons and shiny white pigeons pecking at golden grains in alabaster troughs and drinking water from ivory basins and taking their naps on beds made of ebony embroidered pillows, with the finest linen beneath their heads.

However, when they reached the central pigeon loft he saw that it was a completely ordinary loft, with the windows and the screens and the pigeon dung and the landing shelves and the trap doors, just a lot larger than the kibbutz pigeon loft, and it had separate compartments for pigeons from other lofts and many laying compartments because here, Dr. Laufer told him, “At the central pigeon loft, we also lay eggs and we raise most of the chicks that are sent out to new lofts around the country”

On the wall of the central loft he saw the same two placards that hung in his own loft—the characteristics of a good pigeon handler and the work schedule in the pigeon loft—and then there appeared in the central loft a girl, a serious girl with fair and curly hair who was older than the Baby by half a year and taller than he by half a head.

Dr. Laufer introduced them to each other. “Just as you are the youngest boy working for us as a pigeon handler,” he told the Baby, “so is she the youngest girl. She is very familiar with our work in the loft, and she will tell you what to do.”

The Baby glanced at her and felt he would like to extend his stay by many days, so that on every one of those days the girl could tell him what to do, and he was already imagining himself leaving and returning to her, not just there and then but from every time and every place. Because he wished to make a good impression on her, he said, “I was sent all the way from the Jordan Valley specially to dispatch pigeons from here.”

“You shouldn’t talk about that—it’s a secret,” the Girl said.

The Baby was perplexed. “I thought I was allowed to tell you.”

“It’s a secret pigeon loft of the Haganah,” the Girl said. “You’re not allowed to tell anyone anything.”

“So why did you tell me just now?”

They both blushed. “There is no need to argue,” Dr. Laufer said. “Among ourselves we can talk freely It is only forbidden with strangers.”

The Baby waited a moment, then asked, “What time do you take them out for their first flight?”

The Girl said, “Just after sunrise. I have to get up really early to make it here in time; then I go straight to school from here.”

The Baby said, “I have to get up before sunrise to go to work, because our school is far from the kibbutz. How long do you keep them out for?”

“That depends,” said the Girl. “The older ones fly farther away, but the younger ones are frightened.”

“Do they let you catch the birds and hold them in your hand already?”

“Sure, for a long time. I even take baskets of pigeons for dispatch on my own. Two days ago from the horse paddock and sometimes from the Yarkon River, too.”

“I’m allowed to catch and dispatch, too,” the Baby boasted. “And today I dispatched from here all the way to the kibbutz. But sometimes I can’t help myself and I look them in the eyes.”

“What’s the name of the guy who handles the pigeons on your kibbutz?”

“She’s a girl, and I don’t know if I’m allowed to tell you that, because maybe that’s a secret, too.”