A Pigeon and a Boy (28 page)

And that is exactly the way it happened. They dropped their demand, and the next morning the new Iraleh signed the contract and paid the money in full. Then he took photographs of the house, had them developed in the nearby commercial center, and drove off to show them to his mother.

At the time, she was at Hadassah Hospital, the internal medicine ward, lying in a bed next to the window

I stood a few moments in the doorway and observed her. Her body was thin and frail. Her bald head was wrapped in a large blue kerchief She was gazing at the view— the Castel, Radar Hill, Nebi Samuel—then turned slowly toward me.

“Hello, Mother,” I said. “New kerchief ?”

“Meshulam gave it to me.”

She looked at the photos I had brought. “I’m happy That is precisely the place I was imagining. I see a few pigeons on the roof If they’ve nested under the roof, get rid of them and close up the holes. Pigeons in the roof are a nightmare.”

“I’m not a very good photographer,” I said, “and it’s hard in these pictures to see how well the house fits into the landscape. We’ll wait until you’re feeling a little better and I’ll take you there.”

She said, “I’m afraid that won’t be happening, Yair, but Tiraleh will certainly do a wonderful job on it. You’re in good hands.”

I was so taken aback that I did not even ask how she knew about Tirzah renovating the house. “You’ll get better,” I protested, “and you’ll see the house before and after the renovations, and you’ll come there whenever you want, and you’ll hear the wind blowing in the large trees, and you’ll sip your glass of brandy facing the view that you pictured. That house is more yours than mine.”

But the next day my mother lost consciousness, and three days later she died. Meshulam said it was only right to postpone starting the renovations. “The house can wait. First you should mourn properly What’s important is that she knew you’d found it and that you’re in good hands.” Then he burst out crying once again. “Since Gershon and Goldie I haven’t felt such pain.”

We thought to bury her in her city Tel Aviv, but my mother had left surprising and explicit instructions in her will. She wanted to be buried in Jerusalem, at the top of the hill in the northwest corner of the cemetery Through his connections, Meshulam took care of matters with the burial society “This is what she said to me and the lawyer I brought her: ‘It’s not so that I can look at Tel Aviv but that Tel Aviv can look at me.’”

We sat shivah in Yordad’s flat: Yordad, me, Zohar, who arranged for a samovar and cups and cookies. And Meshulam, who brought us food from Glick’s kiosk. The Double-Ys, Yariv and Yoav, were given time off from the army and made the apartment seem full of guests even when no one was there. Liora and Benjamin came in the evenings, along with his condolence callers and friends, who told horror stories of doctors’ errors. Tirzah did not come. Meshulam passed along a message from her: she is sorry, she loved your mother very much, and the engineer has set up another meeting with her and the surveyors will come after that.

I wondered whether the two men I saw once at my mother’s flat would show up as well: the elderly gentleman who asked me about my major in school and the dark-skinned one who limped and drank strong black coffee that he prepared himself as he hummed a funny tune about King Ahasuerus of the Purim story Instead, callers came to offer their condolences to Yordad: colleagues and former students, patients he had cared for or their children—some of them in gratitude and others to see what lay behind the brass nameplate that read “
Y.
M
ENDELSOHN, PRIVATE.
”

On the last day of the seven-day mourning period a driving, late-season downpour took us by surprise. By the time I returned to Spinoza Street in Tel Aviv with Liora that evening, the streets were awash. The
radio reported flooding and a terrible thought took hold of my mind: my mother’s fresh grave might have washed down the slope from the cemetery to Soreq Creek.

At Liora’s house, listening to the whisper of raindrops —flowing in the gutters, falling on the roof, dripping on leaves in the garden and tin roofs of memory—I envisioned terrible images of severed limbs and tumbling bones. I sprang up from my bed and got dressed. At last I would put to use the new Gore-Tex rainwear and rubber boots waiting for me in a box inside Behemoth.

“Where are you going?” Liora asked from her bedroom.

I told her the truth. I suspected that my mother’s grave had washed away in all the rain and I was going to see what was happening.

“What are you talking about? She’s buried inside a cement frame.”

“You have no idea what these floods are capable of”

“We just came back from there! What kind of story are you making up?”

“You can come with me if you don’t believe me,” I told her. She would not come. She would not take part in any of my craziness.

“Even neurotic Jewish sons in America don’t go to check whether their mothers’ graves have washed away in the rain, and believe me, back home in the U.S. we have worse rains and worse mothers than yours.”

“But here, the sons are better,” I said as I left.

The weather was terrible. The wind was blowing every which way and rain lashed in all directions. Sometimes it slammed the car’s roof and sometimes fell nearly sideways. But Behemoth, as determined as its owner, plied along with confidence and paid no heed to the pleas of smaller cars stuck on the roads, making its way through the Ayalon Valley, climbing past Sha’ar Hagai, ascending, descending, and finally making three right turns from the stoplight before the entrance to the city and up into the cemetery

I got out of the car and ran among the headstones. Rivulets of water flowed on the paths between the graves, but my mother’s plot was intact, along with all the wreaths. There was a wreath from Hadassah Hospital and one from Ichilov Hospital, a wreath from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and one from the Medical Doctors’ Association, a wreath from Kirschenbaum Real Estate of Tel Aviv, Boston, Washington, and New York and one from Meshulam Fried and Daughter, Inc. There was a small, white tin plaque, too, still stuck in
a mound of mud. Wet and determined and erect, the words
RAYA
M
ENDELSOHN
were written on it in black oil paint. I circled the grave, checked it out, and returned to Behemoth to phone Benjamin. “Everything’s fine,” I announced. “What’s fine? What are you talking about?” “Mother. Her grave is in order. It’s holding up in the rain.” “Where are you, Yair? Did you go back to the cemetery?” “I was a little worried. This weather, and the grave hasn’t been covered in stone yet.”

Benjamin asked if I knew what time it was, I told him I knew, and he asked what was to become of me.

I told him that was not the problem, reminding him I had not asked his advice or assistance. I merely wanted to tell him what was happening.

“Even if you didn’t ask for advice,” he said, “I’m going to give you some. If you’re already in Jerusalem, go sleep at Yordad’s. It wouldn’t hurt you to pay a visit to a pediatrician before you turn in for the night.”

T
HE SKY CLEARED
the next morning. When I arrived at the house I was met by the faces of three surveyors. One was old and lined and weathered, one, about my age, was potbellied and red-nosed, and one was a large, happy, diligent surveyor-in-training, to whom the others would say, “Bring cold water” or shout, “If your pole’s drooping, think about Brigitte Bardot!” to which they would roar with laughter.

After they left, the next-door neighbor came out of her house, stuck two pegs in the ground, and drew a long piece of string from one to the other.

“Why don’t you put up a real fence?” I suggested.

“No need.” She stretched the string and knotted it and straightened up. “Just so they know that right here’s the boundary That way there’ll be no issues or problems,” she said sharply

The next day she made her first tour of inspection along the new boundary “There have already been issues in the past,” she shouted when I stepped out of my house and wished her a good morning. “When matters are clear, all is well.”

I did not react to her latest claim, but secretly I was surprised by the
gap between her appearance and her behavior. She was a young and beautiful woman, not the kind of beautiful that parches your throat or weakens your knees, but definitely the kind that gladdens your soul. Nothing in her smile or her gait or her demeanor gave any indication of the wrath and misgivings nesting in her heart.

I considered for a moment, then told her that according to the blueprints prepared by the surveyors, the string she had set up was not exactly the border, but in fact had nibbled off a bit of her own land. Her husband, who had come out to listen to our argument, could not resist smiling, and the fury of the young wife rose to new decibels of shouting. She was fed up with “all kinds of new people with money” who came to the village and “interfered with our lives.”

Her husband said softly, “He’s not interfering with you at all, or me either.”

This made her even angrier. “Whose side are you on, anyway, his or mine?!”

They returned to their home, and I sat on a large stone and listened to the sounds around me. The rapid-fire shooting was a woodpecker on the trunk of the neighbors’ Persian lilac tree. What sounded like the stealthy footsteps of a murderer in the underbrush were actually blackbirds pecking at fallen leaves. The raucous laughter belonged to a large and brilliantly colored member of the kingfisher family—which one, I did not know—and the loudest noises of all were those of the jays, puzzling birds: I am never able to discern whether they are fighting or playing, cursing or gossiping.

The sun set. From the nearby field, high-pitched shrieks arose. I stood up and approached to see a flock of birds on the ground. Their bodies were a brownish-grayish yellow and slightly larger than that of the pigeon, their legs long, and they shrieked like mad and pranced about with all their energy, welcoming the night with a ceremony of dance.

The blackbirds sounded their last alarms, the darkness deepened, and the first howls of the jackals rose from the hill. Suddenly I recalled how we would hear them in Jerusalem, right near the edge of our neighborhood. There was a pack of jackals nearby, and a second would answer them, sometimes even a third, farther off, whose voices could be heard in the space between the other two packs. I asked you why and about what they howled and you told me that they were not like humans, who expend so much energy on nonsense: animals are very logical
creatures. There is an explanation for their every behavior, and packs of jackals, you said, announce to one another where they are and where they plan to search for prey “Otherwise they will spend all night fighting instead of hunting for food.” I loved those little nature lessons of yours. It felt to me as though you, too, had had some teacher in your childhood, someone who taught you, someone whose lessons you loved to listen to.

I went back inside the house. The camping mattress lay on the floor, obediently inflated, and I stripped off my clothes and sprawled across it, closing my eyes. Outside, both winds you promised me were blowing: one in the large trees and a different one in the small trees. I drifted off to sleep and awakened again and again, once because of the “small, common, and hairy” owl, whose voice infused me with mystery and magic: the sounds were so uniform, so hollow, and the spaces between them so precise and measured that they brought on a pleasant sort of pain. Another time it was because I was hearing terrifying death rattles. I went outside and walked toward the source of them and found it was the breathing of a barn owl that lived in the attic of the secretariat building. I returned home, lay down, and did not fall asleep. You were right: the thin scratching overhead was pigeons walking about. Me-shulam had been right, too: the weak creaking from outside was the teeth of caterpillars in the fig tree. The pigeons would have to be banished, the holes filled, the fig tree uprooted and a new one planted in its place.

Sounds rose from over the boundary as well; nor was I mistaken about them: the neighbors were making love there, the sounds so clear that they must be doing it on the porch or even right in the garden. While he was silent, her moans were like the pleasant sostenuto of a violin as it crescendos, ending not in a loud cry but a small sigh of resignation. They made it easy for me to imagine the pleasantness of the press of her thighs and the smoothness of her neck and the soft sweetness of her sex. Let her draw strings and establish boundaries: a woman who resonated like that under her lover’s bow could never be a bad neighbor, no matter how hard that neighbor tried.

The house itself also emitted noises, becoming a sound box, a memory box. Some of the noises were clear and accidental: shutters in the wind, a door banging its lintel. Others were regular and harder to identify or define: perhaps a discussion between bricks doomed to live next to one another their whole lives; or perhaps of other times and people,
old recordings, words uttered and left behind by those long departed— a man and a woman, the dream sighs of children, a baby’s cries; perhaps light once soaked up into the walls now wishing to escape as a tone.

I listened, I learned, I sorted, I committed to memory There was no blaming the neighbors’ apartment here. This was your house, breathing around you, expanding, teeming, contracting, enwrapping. The ground, which here is not corseted with cement and straitjacketed with asphalt, shifts in a slow, never-ending dance, while we—the houses, the trees, the people, the animals—are carried about in its arms, moving on its thin outer crust.

E
VER SINCE
her divorce, Tirzah has had no home of her own. She left the house they shared to her husband when they split up. “First of all because I felt sorry for him. And second of all, if you can get through it without any disputes, so much the better. How many years do we have left to live? Seven good years followed by seven terrible years? Maybe only three, like that poor Robert Louis Stevenson you told me about, who died after finishing building that house of his on the island? So, should we waste the little we have on property and revenge?”