A Pigeon and a Boy (3 page)

“Well, at least you were happy about it, right?”

“We didn’t have the time or energy for rejoicing. We got up, started organizing the evacuation, and suddenly a little door opens up and three nuns step outside. Two of them dragged the bodies of their sister nuns inside, while the third— she was old and short, a dwarf almost, in a black habit that reached the ground—walked among us with a bottle of water and a few drinking glasses. What a picture that was: us, all those wounded and dead, and this nun wandering around like we’re at some cocktail party and she’s handing out drinks. The whole time she’s saying,
“Nero, nero,”
and we didn’t know what this
nero
was, but we knew we’d won because she’d come out to give water to the victors.
You
get it? If we’d lost, she’d have served water to the Arabs instead.”

“Nero
is water,” I told him, “in Greek.”

“If you say so,” the man chuckled. “A tour guide has to know how to say ‘water’ in all kinds of languages. Maybe one day you’ll get some Greek bird-watchers and they’ll be thirsty”

“Bird-watchers don’t come here from Greece,” I said. “They come from England and Germany and Scandinavia and Holland, and sometimes as far away as the U.S.”

But the man flashed me a look of reproach and sent me back to the
place and time to which I had led him and which I wished to avoid. “We left the monastery and went looking around; we thought we might find one of our own among all the bodies outside. First we found a dead platoon commander, his guts spilled out on the ground, and then we found him. Someone shouted, ‘Hey look, the Baby is dead.’ God, just saying ‘the Baby is dead’ makes me shake all over.”

“Did you see him, too?”

“Yes, I just told you that, and I told you that earlier, too, but you don’t want to hear it, or else you want to hear it again and again. I saw him lying in that shed near the monastery, between where the grass and the swings are today”

“Inside the shed?”

“Half in, half out.”

Apparently he saw the horror in my eyes and hastened to make himself clear. “I mean, don’t misunderstand me. His body was whole, not like that just sounded. The wall of the shed was half destroyed and he was lying with his legs inside it, but from the waist up he was outside. There was a machine gun lying next to him—a tommy gun—and lots of gardening tools, and if you’re interested, then I’ll tell you his face was whole and at peace, and his eyes were open and looking upward. That was the worst part of it: they were full of life, and they were watching. You know what I was thinking about then? Not what I’m thinking about now I thought, Where the hell did the Baby get a tommy gun! We were fighting with shitty old Stens that never stopped jamming, and
he’d
been given a tommy gun? Forty-five caliber—a bullet that no matter where it hits you, you’re dead! Now do you understand why it was easier for me back then than it is now? That’s the way it is when you’re young. I couldn’t figure out how it was that he’d been given a tommy gun and we hadn’t.”

I could no longer be sure what had brought this on, what had given birth to this outpouring: the words, the drink, me, the images in his mind. What had really happened there and what had been conceived in his memory?

“We’d been given green American battle dress, leftovers from World War II. Where the insignias and ranks had once been, the green was darker. Do you believe the bullshit I can still remember, and yet I can’t remember some of the important stuff? Anyway, he was lying there in battle dress that had once belonged to an American sergeant about twice his size, and when we picked him up his arms fell to the sides and
the battle dress opened and we saw that his pants—excuse me for telling you this—his pants had been cut open from the belt to almost the knee and peeled back to both sides, and everything was bloody and wounded and hanging out.”

Suddenly the American thrust out his arm. “Here,” he said as his hand grasped my right hip, then slipped around to my lower back and remained there. “The bullet went in here and came out here …” His hand slid to the front and pressed lightly, and I did not know what to do with the strength of the repulsion, and the pleasantness, I was feeling.

“Maybe there was more than one bullet, maybe it was a whole round, because his, his … what do you call it, I’ve forgotten the word in Hebrew … his hip, yes, his hip was just gone, completely exposed, and there were such quantities of blood, and his thigh was shredded, all the bones jutting out. I think he managed to cut open his pants but didn’t get a chance to treat his wounds and so he wound up lying there like that until he died.”

“What about the pigeons?” I asked.

He removed his hand. Grief and relief mingled one with the other. “The little dovecote he carried on his back had been shattered to pieces, and there were two dead pigeons on the floor. The third one was gone; that was apparently the one I told you about when we were there today” To my great distress, he began to hum the tune to a song I had heard my mother sing many times:
To silence the cannon yields / In abandoned killing fields.
He said, “And it was a beautiful, special kind of a day; only later we realized it was the First of May, and there was this bird rising up above all that hell, that valley of death. She’d been lucky the dovecote got smashed—that’s how she managed to escape.”

“She didn’t escape,” I told him. “He dispatched her. He did manage to do something before he died.”

The man was astonished. “Who told you such a thing?”

“There’s no other possibility That’s the only way the facts fit together.”

“What do you mean he sent her? With a letter to headquarters?”

“He didn’t send her,” I corrected him. “He dispatched her. ‘Dispatch is the correct word for pigeons, and that is precisely what he did, like Noah in the ark: And he dispatched a dove, and the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot, and she returned to him into the ark.’”

“And what about that pigeon? What happened to her?”

“He sent it to his girlfriend in Tel Aviv”

All at once I felt that feeling I’d known from long ago: the wings beating inside my body, up and down, from the vibration in my knees to the emptiness in my loins to the ache in my breast to the spasms in my gullet. Home, Odysseus of the Feathered Creatures, in a straight line. The great magnetic forces of the earth are guiding her flight, longing pushes her from behind, love is signaling to her, switching on the landing lights: come, come, come, return from afar. That was the reason why the Baby had taken her, the purpose for her domestication, her training, her heredity “Strong muscles, featherweight body, hollow bones, the lungs and heart of an athlete, the ability to navigate, a sense of direction.”

And the three desires that become one: the desire of the Baby, who at that moment had died; the desire of his beloved, who at that moment already sensed what lay ahead; and the desire of the bird to reach home. Home. Home to Tel Aviv, to the gold of the sand, to the blue of the water, to the pink tiles of the roofs.

Home. To the upraised, joyful eyes awaiting her. To the heart beating on her behalf To the hand that will greet her with seeds of hashish, the traditional gift that pigeon handlers present to their birds returning from afar. To the other hand, which will remove the message capsule from her leg. And then the terrible scream of comprehension, his name spattered from mouth to heavens, the slamming of the door to the pigeon loft and the footsteps receding in great haste.

“God,” the elderly American Palmachnik from Petah-Tikva said. “What are you trying to tell me? That that’s what he managed to do with the last moments of his life? To send a pigeon to his girlfriend in Tel Aviv?”

I said nothing, and he grew agitated. “And what exactly did he write her from there: Hello, I’m dead?”

Chapter Two

I
WENT TO FIND
myself a home. Some people shoot—themselves or others—but I went to find myself a home. A home that would heal, and soothe, and build me as I built it, and we would be grateful for each other.

Off I went, armed with the surprising gift my mother had given me: to carry out her will, the command she’d issued with a note of regret threaded through her words: “Take this, Yair. Go find yourself a home. A place to rest the soles of your feet. A place of your very own.”

“A home that has been lived in,” she instructed me, “small and old. Fix it up a bit …” She stopped talking for a moment, gulping air and coughing. “And make sure it’s in an old village and the trees nearby have matured—cypress trees are best, but an old carob tree is good too, and there should be weeds poking through the cracks in the sidewalk.”

She explained: in an old village the scores have been settled and the old enmities have grown accustomed to one another and the truly great loves—not the small bothersome ones—have settled down and there is no longer a need for guesswork or the strength for experimentation.

“Rest awhile, Mother,” I said. “It’s not good for you to talk a lot and exert yourself.”

You were lying in your sickbed, winded and impatient, several gladioluses in a pitcher on top of the cabinet, a blue kerchief covering your bald head. “Large trees, Yair, don’t forget. The wind in a big tree is different from that of young trees. Here, take this … and build your self a little outdoor shower, too. It is pleasant to shower facing the wind and the view”

My body trembled, my hand reached out and took it, my eyes looked and read. “Where did all this money come from?” my mouth asked.

“From Mother.”

You coughed, you drank the air in spasms. “Take it while my hand is warm and I am still alive to give it to you. And tell no one about it. Not your brother, not Yordad, not your wife.”

Those were truly the words: “go” and “find” and “a place of your very own.” And between your coughing fits I was reminded of that place that is not mine, the house that Liora bought us on Spinoza Street in Tel Aviv. The house and its mistress; she and her abode. The large, light-colored rooms just like her, and the proper angles just like hers; she of her wealth, of the whitewashed walls of her body, of the marvelous distance between the windows of her eyes.

B
EFORE SHE FELL ILL,
my mother was tall of stature, with fair curls and a single dimple. After she fell ill her stature bowed, her curls fell out, and her dimple was effaced. At the first memorial service we held in her honor, my brother, Benjamin, and I were still standing next to her grave when a dispute arose between us: on which cheek was that dimple? Benjamin said it was the right one, while I stood firm for the left. At first we joked about it, exchanging slaps and stinging remarks, and then my slaps grew heavier and his words became as snakebites.

After betting—we used to argue often; later we made bets, always on the very same lunch at the very same Romanian restaurant—we began interrogating anyone we could about the placement of that dimple. At once additional disputes awakened and additional brows wrinkled and additional bets were made. And when we came to investigating old photographs —with childish excitement and the sweet pain common to adult orphans—we discovered, with great disappointment and the thin, unavoidable feeling of having been cheated, that her dimple did not appear in any of them. Not on her left cheek and not on her right.

Could it be that we remembered a dimple that had never existed? Perhaps we had imagined ourselves a mother, her smile and her height and her dimple and her curls? No! We did have a mother, but it turned out that in photographs —we only learned this after her death— she did
not smile. Thus, the pictures never show her large, identical teeth or the slant of the sneer on her upper lip or her dimple or the look that took up residence in her eyes during the first year of her marriage to Yordad.

When she spoke to us of him she did not say “Father” or “Dad” but “your dad”: Tell your dad that I am waiting for him. Recount to your dad what we saw in the street today You want to own a dog? Ask your dad, but do not forget to tell him that I do not approve. And because we were little and she continued to call him “your dad,” we thought his name was Yordad and we called him this when we spoke to him or about him. It has remained his nickname to this very day He did not protest, but he did demand that we not call him this around strangers.

“Call Yordad upstairs for lunch,” my mother told us each day at her punctiliously German one-thirty and we would charge down the stairwell to his ground-floor pediatric clinic—Benjamin at three already skipping while I, five years old, still stumbled—pushing each other and shouting, “Yordad, Yordad! Mother says you should come eat …”

They both smiled, she laughing aloud in the kitchen, he while silently hanging up his smock. Occasionally he would scold us: “Children, don’t run in the stairwell—you will disturb the neighbors,” his fair head hovering at the top of his great height. And occasionally he would lean down and turn on his “color lamp” for us, a large and shiny flashlight that shone red and yellow and green and that he would use to capture and soothe the hearts of the young patients who came to his clinic.