A Pigeon and a Boy (23 page)

“He is very strong,” says Benjamin, always quick to exploit an opportunity A slow, bright smile flitted between them suddenly, lifting off, arcing over my head, landing, like one of the winged documents on the screen of Yordad’s computer. I wondered: could it be that Benjamin and Liora are sleeping together? It is common knowledge that similarity between two people creates mutual desire; if the matter has occurred to me, it has certainly occurred to them.

My brother added, “By eight he was already lugging groceries for our mother, and tins of whitewash up the stairs.” He also has a good memory, but why are they my memories? She would skip ahead of me carrying only the paintbrushes or a bouquet of gladioluses or a carton of eggs “so they won’t break,” while I followed behind, eager to please, making great efforts and turning red in the face, lugging tins of whitewash, oil for the heater, baskets full of vegetables up to the second-floor entrance. “Without stopping, Yair. Let’s see you make it all the way to the top in one go …” And how you praised my strength: “Such a boy! Small, but so strong, a real ox-rocks!”

Later, too, after she had left us and gone to live in her own place, she would ask me sometimes to come move “something heavy” She and Benjamin would drink tea in her
kiichlein
while I dragged the large mattress to the verandah and beat it, wondering whether there actually was another man. I thought, Is my pounding erasing his scent or deepening it, making it penetrate?

I pass through the electric gates at the entrance to the courtyard and climb the stairs. I have already stated that I do not like this house, and the house, I must say does not like me. It senses me immediately, shines a light on me, fixes its mistrustful electronic eyes on me: Who is this person walking up the stairs? Who is coming to disturb the mistress? I remove the key from my pocket and remind myself of what is to come: open the door, walk in, quickly punch in the secret code and neutralize the alarm. But Liora’s home has already aimed a scrutinizing lens at me, has captured my image and compared it to another husband, a better one, who should have taken her for his wife, and it raises a voice of protest and horror.

“You don’t punch the code in right,” Liora responded to my complaint, patiently inclining her head over mine in the way
of yekke
fathers and tall mothers.

“I don’t even get to the stage of punching in the numbers. Don’t you understand, it doesn’t even let me get near.”

“No, I don’t.”

Once I asked her to stand next to me to see with her own eyes how her house mistreats me. We positioned ourselves in front of the door, I took out my key and said, “See for yourself,” and the house behaved as it is supposed to: it waited for me to begin, gave me time to punch in the four-digit code, informed me that I had made a mistake, and granted me time and a chance to correct it, to improve myself, to become a better husband and resident.

“You see?” Liora said.

I said, “The door opened because you’re here. It opened for you, not for me.”

She said, “You’re crazy, Yair.”

I said, “What do you mean, crazy? Can’t you see that your house hates me?”

She said, “As if you liked it.”

But that night she came, opened the wings of the sheet in which she had wrapped herself, and slid in, sprawling next to me.

“Has a month already passed since your last ‘treatment’?” I asked.

“Just about,” she replied.

A surprise. She had brought along her especially soft pillow

“Does this mean you’re going to stay here and sleep with me?”

“If you don’t press up against me too hard.”

She has that rare trait that only the luckiest women are granted: her beauty grows with the passing of time. As a young woman she possessed the beauty of a perfect vessel, shapely and cool. Now the thin lines webbing her skin, the bluish hints of her veins, the softening perceivable only to the hand, not the eye, of her belly and breasts —all these have added life and warmth to her. We fell asleep together like we used to, she on her stomach, her cheek on her pillow, one leg extended and the other bent, while I lay behind her. My hand under her breast, my thigh between her thighs, my foot beneath her foot.

When I woke up in the morning I found that she had already risen in the night and returned to her room. I went to the grocer’s, returned, awakened the neighborhood with the alarm, and arranged my purchases in the refrigerator. Then I turned to her. “How did you sleep?”

“Very poorly, thank you.”

“I actually slept quite well.”

“Great. At least there’s one thing you know how to do well.”

The financial sections of the paper were spread out around her, her laptop, with its illuminated bitten apple, buzzing lightly, her first cup of lukewarm water with lemon juice, tea-hyssop, and honey flowing toward her stomach.

She said, “If you’re making breakfast for yourself, I’d like some too, please.”

There are two things she hastened to learn and love: the Hebrew language and my breakfasts. I am overcome with pride. I turn on the kettle and the toaster, cut vegetables thin and precise, slice fresh salted cheese, fry an egg. Once I made a hard-boiled egg for her, cracked it open on her forehead, and said,
“Plaff!”That
made her angry “Stop your silly games, Yair! I’m not your mother/”

I heat the oil in the skillet, turn my back on the rest of her litany of complaints: once again she did not shut her eyes the entire night. Look at these dark circles, they’re a gift from you. There is no doubt in her mind: I steal her slumber. That, too.

Chapter Nine

T
IME PASSED.
The Baby’s uncle became a regular conveyor of pigeons from the kibbutz pigeon loft to the central loft in Tel Aviv But all the pigeons dispatched from there returned without an answer from the Girl. The Baby also dispatched a pigeongram affixed to one of the pigeons the uncle brought back with him from Tel Aviv, but no response came to that one either.

“It’s a bad age,” the uncle said to the aunt. “He is old enough to feel love but too young for such a disappointment.”

He invited the Baby to come with him again to Tel Aviv—“If you see her and she sees you, everything will be fine,” he promised—but the Baby declined. He would wait for her to send him a pigeongram; only then would he come.

Then the green pickup truck returned and Dr. Laufer alighted from it. He had visited the large pigeon lofts of
Yagur
and Merhavia and Beit Hashita, and later the one at Kibbutz Gesher, and now he had come to Miriam, “last but not least.” He brought her pigeons for dispatch and breeding, checked the loft and its residents, the cards and the lists, visited the cowshed, drank tea with lemon in the dining hall, and gave another lecture to the members of the kibbutz.

Before Dr. Laufer left, the Baby gathered his courage and asked whether the Girl had sent a message with him. The veterinarian, dispirited, admitted that she had not, and the uncle, who heard this story told the Baby: “You are nearly fourteen years old. You must make the matter clear to her. Go to Tel Aviv and bring her your pigeons yourself.”

The Baby selected and marked six pigeons that had already matured
and began training them specially His uncle dispatched them for him from Tiberias, Afula, Haifa, and Tel Aviv. One did not return and the Baby disqualified another because, in spite of her speed, she was in no hurry to enter the loft. Four months later he announced, “We ladies are ready” and said that he wanted to set out for Tel Aviv and bring the pigeons to the Girl.

The uncle tried to arrange a place for him with the milk truck, but it had already been promised to someone else. The Baby was unwilling to wait; he had to leave immediately He was fourteen years and four months of age and there was nothing to worry about, he told his aunt and uncle. The uncle gave him a little money and said, “You’ll get to Afula somehow; then buy a ticket and take the train to Haifa. From there, our relatives will put you on the bus.”

The Baby put the four pigeons in a woven wicker basket with a handle and a lid, and in his knapsack he took food and water for himself and them. At dawn he went out to the road and caught a ride with a cart driver from Menahamia on his way to Tiberias to sell fruit and buy goods. Near Kibbutz Kinneret the cart driver stopped the car of a man he knew, the principal of the school in Yavniel, and in Yavniel the principal sent him—not before scolding him for being truant from his studies—to the home of a farmer, where he could eat and sleep in exchange for helping sort and package almonds.

Almonds are the best food for a man on the road and for pregnant women,” the farmer told him. “Take some for the road—they’ll fill you up and they’re easy to carry”

The next morning a Circassian truck driver, an acquaintance of the almond farmer’s, gave the Baby a ride the rest of the way Lean and haggard, he was mostly eyes and a mustache and, to the Baby’s relief, tended to speak very little. The shifting expressions on his face were testimony to the fact that he held his conversations with himself The Baby was free to gaze at the view, to contemplate and comprehend that the longing he was fighting and the thoughts he was thinking and the will to see and hear more, to touch and feel to infinity, were what his elders called love. There was no other option, no other explanation, for if this was not love, then what was? In what other ways did it manifest itself?

The truck exerted itself on the steep curves until it reached the top. Mount Tabor revealed itself in all its roundedness and, farther off and friskier, Hamoreh Hill, too. The Baby felt his body to be a tiny speck
moving along the face of the earth, drawing ever closer to his love. The basket shifted suddenly; the pigeons twitched, and he trembled with them. Near Kafr Kana the driver suddenly boomed, “This is my home!” and fell silent again.

From Tabor village the Baby continued on foot, hitching rides from passing wagons filled with fodder or trucks laden with milk and vegetables. In those days the world was empty and the traffic slow and the distances great, and that stretch of road, which I now traverse in Behemoth in twenty minutes, took the Baby half a day In Afula two boys invited him for a glass of soda and discussed pigeons with him, and after they had left him and he went to the train station he discovered they had stolen from him the pittance he had received from his uncle. He sat for nearly an hour on the bench at the station, the basket on his lap and his heart pounding and frightened; then finally he embarked on a train and traveled in the direction of Haifa without a ticket.

In no time he was caught. The ticket collector demanded two pigeons if he wished to continue his journey The Baby pleaded, refused, nearly began to cry The ticket collector grabbed him by the neck and threatened to toss him off the train into the great, empty expanses of the Jezreel Valley He was terrified. Earlier he had seen a pack of vultures preying on the carcass of a cow, and now he feared for his own fate. In his heart he had already planned how he would send a pigeon to Miriam and his uncle would organize a team to rescue him. But then a strange and foreign woman, a tall, gaunt Dutchwoman sitting nearby and painting watercolors of starlings and goldfinches, was overcome with feelings for him and paid his ticket. Speaking to him in a language he pretended not to understand, she told him she knew what he had in his basket and why he was making this trip.

In Haifa, the Baby went to the home of the relatives, who sent him to an elderly English engineer, a friend of theirs, who was making an overnight trip to Tel Aviv The man apologized for driving slowly—at night he could not see well—and he asked that the Baby converse with him to keep him awake. The Baby feared the man would ask him about the pigeons, and the old engineer did in fact ask—not only that, he exhibited expertise in two dangerous fields: homing pigeons and the Hebrew language. It would not help the Baby to feign ignorance of English again. He told the man he lived in Haifa and had a loft on the roof of his house and that he was going to “send them flying”—he was careful not to say “dispatch”—in Tel Aviv

“Very interesting how they find their way home,” the Englishman said.

The Baby said, “They have a sense of navigation.”

“They do not,” the Englishman countered. “They do not know to find the way to anywhere but their own loft. That is not navigation; navigation is the ability to find one’s way from any place to any place, especially places with which one is not familiar, while finding one’s way home— how shall I put it, young man?—is like obeying the laws of gravity which we all do anyway Like a river knows the way to the sea without maps, like a tossed stone is not in need of a compass to return to the earth.”

By the time they crossed the Yarkon River, the horizon was lightening and from a distance it was possible to see the first lights shining from Tel Aviv The car passed by the horse paddock the Girl had told him about, where she would dispatch young pigeons, then continued farther south, where the Baby asked to alight, at a place that would not connect him to any person or matter.

“It’s still dark outside,” the English engineer said. “Where will you go?” But the Baby replied, “It’s fine, it’ll be light soon,” and he walked to the zoo. He did not know the way, but the roar of the leopard and the monkeys’ and birds’ early morning chatter could already be heard, and they led him on his way The gate was locked. The Baby sat beside it, and was awakened half an hour later by the fat man, who had come to open it.