A Pigeon and a Boy (31 page)

He hurried to the carpentry shop and succeeded in persuading the carpenter—an exact duplicate of the carping carpenter on his own kibbutz, in fact just another in a long line of carping carpenters in every carpentry shop on every kibbutz during those times—that he should take a break from his other work and help him build a new loft. The
carpenter was a small man with meticulously combed hair and work clothes that were clean and pressed. He did not dare sport a tie there, but he buttoned his shirt all the way up his neck and in the shop he had a large mirror that was far grander than any mirror kept by any kibbutz comradette in her room.

Together, the two built a large loft that would keep the pigeons safe from strong winds and dampness but would still be sun-drenched and full of air, precisely accordingly to what Dr. Laufer had told the Baby: “There are no hard-and-fast rules of loft building, just as there are no hard-and-fast rules in building for human beings. Everything depends on needs and possibilities.” The Baby found a quiet, out-of-the-way spot and, with the help of the carpenter, a mule, a cart, and two guys from the Palmach unit stationed there, he transported the loft and set it down facing south. After digging a large, square pit for waste, he washed his hands, took hold of one of the Girl’s pigeons, and attached a message capsule to her leg and tied a quill between her tail feathers. The pigeongram in the capsule was intended for Dr. Laufer: “The loft is ready to receive chicks and commence training.” The note in the quill was intended for the Girl, and it read “Yes and yes and yes.” Yes I love you, yes I miss you, yes I know and remember that you do, too, for in her last missive she had written “No and no,” that is to say, No I do not want anyone other than you and no I do not manage to sleep at night.

He raised his hands, let go, and dispatched the pigeon, watching her rise in the sky At first she darkened and then she melted and disappeared into the blue-gray sky that was the same color as she, and once again he experienced the thrill of this feeling, which persisted even after hundreds and thousands of dispatches, since that day, now receding, when he went with Miriam to the fields and dispatched his very first pigeon, to the day, now approaching, when he will lie in a pool of his own blood and dispatch his last.

A
LMOST NINE YEARS
had passed since a wounded pigeon had landed on a Tel Aviv balcony and since Dr. Laufer had come with Miriam and the pigeons to a Jordan Valley kibbutz. The Baby and the Girl had become a young man and a young woman. Miriam had smoked more than three thousand evening cigarettes. The green pickup truck had
logged many kilometers and engine hours and years of life and had grown quite old and scarcely capable of ascending from the coastal plain. But Dr. Laufer, in spite of the white that had begun to weave its way through his red hair, remained as full of energy and excitement as ever. He showed up at Kiryat Anavim with the equipment and the chicks and leapt from the pickup truck, his long narrow back stooped, his limbs flailing, the royal or humble
we
in his mouth.

“We brought you a surprise!” he shouted to the Baby and from inside the pickup truck emerged the Girl, tall and serious and curly-haired, just as blue-eyed and pink-cheeked and fair-haired as she was in his dreams and his memories.

“I came to give you a hand,” she said, a blush creeping across her face, her eyes joyful.

His heart stopped. In Dr. Laufer’s presence he did not dare touch her, but the Girl leaned her head over his. Their faces drew close, touched, caught fire. Their hands folded and unfolded, did not know where to land.

The carpenter arrived from the carpentry shop and attached the trap doors that had been brought in their frames. Dr. Laufer inspected his work and said, “It is good” and “It is very good,” and then, as was his custom, he searched the loft for splinters and nails that might cause injury and slits through which a snake or a mouse could infiltrate. He sealed and tightened and banged with his little hammer and exclaimed, “You thought we didn’t see you!” which is what he said when he inspected every new loft.

The Baby and the Girl unloaded the boxes containing the chicks and bags of seed and all the regular loft equipment from the pickup truck. Dr. Laufer dispatched several pigeons he had brought from the central loft, went to pay a visit to the Haganah loft in Jerusalem, and brought pigeons from there—young ones to dispatch from Kiryat Anavim and experienced ones to dispatch from Hulda and even more experienced ones for dispatch from Tel Aviv

“Every trip must be put to good use,” he said, then wished the Baby good luck and disappeared.

The Girl stayed on for two days at Kiryat Anavim. They arranged the bags of seed on raised strips of wood, covered them with dense chicken wire to keep them out of reach of mice, and prepared the identification bands with the month and year of banding—which was also the birth date of the pigeon—and the first letter of the name of the
pigeon handler, since it was not safe to write the name of the place or the unit. They fitted the bands to each pigeon’s three front toes gathered together, pulled them over the back toe—which had been pressed to the leg—and let go.

After that, the Girl organized the individual file cards of each chick and the breeding cards, which would be filled in when the chicks had matured and were paired off, and she entered the initial information in the flock log.

In the evening, the Baby went to the dining hall and brought back bread and olives. They sat and ate next to the loft. It was a late-summer evening, hot and dry, and, as happens in the Jerusalem hills, cool caresses were woven in with the warm breezes. When they had finished eating they spread a wool army blanket on the ground near the loft and lay down upon it, side by side.

From Abu Ghosh they could hear the first evening calls of the muezzin, the jackals competing and overtaking him as they did every night. The Girl breathed into his neck. “They’re so close,” she said.

“They’re farther away than they sound,” the Baby told her.

Several shadows passed by, slipped down to the ravine, disappeared.

“Who were they?” she asked him.

“Guys from my unit. They’re on their way to an operation.”

They awakened together before dawn. From the wadi below there arose a metallic sound of digging, hoes hitting rock, pickaxes raking stone rubble and clumps of earth.

“What’s that?” the Girl whispered.

He hesitated. He thought to tell her it was members of the kibbutz digging planting holes, but instead he told her the truth, that these were his comrades digging graves for those who would not return. He grinned. “I usually dig, too, because I don’t go out on operations, but tonight they let me skip duty because of you.”

The next day the Girl returned to the central loft. In the Baby’s loft there were only the new chicks, which had not yet undergone domestication or training, and he had no pigeon of his own to give her, but she left one of hers with him before climbing into the truck that would bring her back to Tel Aviv

When the truck disappeared from view the Baby felt more alone than ever before. Suddenly he recalled his mother, who had left him and returned to Europe and was killed in the Holocaust—by this time he understood what the adults had assumed and whispered—and he
thought, too, about his father, how he had come to visit him at the kibbutz but could not look him in the eye. And about his father’s wife, who had glanced around and said, “What a beautiful place—I wish I could live here …” And he recalled himself as well, the day he had said, “Don’t bring her here again. If you do, I’ll kick you both out.”

His heart tightened and grew sad. He went back to the pigeon loft, wondered at how such a bad start had turned so good: had his mother not left his father and returned to Europe, his father would not have remarried and he would not have been banished to the kibbutz and would never have met Miriam or Dr. Laufer or the pigeons or his beloved. Then he shook himself free of these thoughts and consoled himself that from here on there would be no more ups and downs and setbacks, only love for the Girl and the routine of the pigeons. This was good: a daily schedule, a work program, regular chores. These calmed and healed the heart, and he yielded to them gleefully

He awakened each morning, released the pigeons of his flock for their first flight—which grew longer and longer—and gathered them back to the loft with flags and whistles, then fed, confined, and washed them. At night he dug graves, and the hours he was required to give to the kibbutz he spent in the cowshed and the carpentry shop. Some of the fighters looked down on him, even scorned him: he lost neither friends nor blood, he added no sticks to their bonfires nor took part in their convoys to Jerusalem, and, as they used to joke back then, he neither killed nor was killed even once. The more soulful ones among them, however, regarded him with curiosity because there was something captivating about this short, chubby boy who caused pigeons — even transient ones—to swoop down to him and hover about his head and land on his shoulders.

Dr. Laufer once said at a conference that pigeons never look as fast or determined as when they return home, and they never look as bad-tempered or vicious as when they are fighting for their nest or their mate. The Baby, too, gave a mistaken impression. He still had the small, rotund body of his youth but his self-confidence had grown, and beneath the dimpled elbows and knees and hands that every baby has, his muscles had hardened. He had grown slightly thinner—just like me, when Tirzah had me building my new house—and people who know how to interpret the angle of someone’s lips and the expression on someone’s face saw on his direction and determination.

And still he maintained his old desire to teach pigeons—which
know to fly to only one location—to fly back and forth between two points. Such homing pigeons, the experts told him in wonder, could be found only in India and America, the former thanks to thousands of years of pigeon expertise and the latter thanks to an unending flow of funds.

“And along comes our Baby,” Dr. Laufer exclaimed at the pigeon handlers’ conference that year, “and succeeds, with no assistance or budget, in training two-directional pigeons, which now maintain regular communication between Kiryat Anavim and Jerusalem.”

How had he done it? Well, he’d selected young pigeons whose wings were ready and whose flying feathers had sprouted, and after they completed basic flight training, he taught them that they would receive food at the loft in which they resided but water only at another loft, a portable dovecote marked with a bold color that stood out. This dovecote he gradually moved until the pigeons were eating in Kiryat Anavim and drinking in Jerusalem. And since only six or seven miles separated the two lofts if traveling by air—in other words, only about ten minutes of flight—the pigeons traveled back and forth twice daily, eating here and drinking there, and they transferred reports and instructions from command to command.

Even the dove that returned to Noah’s ark, he told his audience, could be seen as a homing pigeon returning to a portable dovecote, one that stood out in its solitude. And he began to plan a large portable loft that could be pulled behind a vehicle and house many pigeons to escort armies into battle. However, at that time he had neither the budget nor the vehicle for such an enterprise, and the roads were unsafe, and the training would be impossible. The matter remained a dream, and the Baby carried on caring for the regular homing pigeons, the ones whose home was with him and the ones from the Jerusalem loft or the central loft in Tel Aviv, and these pigeons waited with longing, thinking of nothing but the screen on their prison and the great skies beyond it and the home beyond that, and they did not know what they were carrying in their wings —a love letter or commands.

I
N THE MEANTIME,
the training of a new and especially large group of chicks had been completed at the Tel Aviv zoo, and Dr. Laufer
explained to the Girl that these were destined for an important task. War would be breaking out soon and the outposts in the south would be the sole obstacle standing between the Egyptian army and Tel Aviv, so it was necessary to pay visits to all those places and provide them with pigeons that would help maintain communication with central command.

“You will travel to Negba and Ruhama,” he told her, “to Dorot and Gvaram and Yad Mordechai, and if possible, to Kfar Darom and Nirim and Gvulot as well. You will need to leave pigeons in every one of those places so they can let us know if, God forbid, they are under siege. And don’t forget to tell them absolutely not to let the pigeons out for a flight, because if we are released we will immediately fly homeward, here, to our home in Tel Aviv”

All by myself?” the Girl asked, astonished.

A command car has been acquisitioned for your use, along with two young men from the Palmach, which is a lot more than other actions are receiving. One is an excellent driver and the other was wounded in battle, but he is a very good scout and knows the south well. They are responsible for bringing you to all those places and for returning you to Tel Aviv, and you are responsible for handing out pigeons and explaining to people what they must do. In Ruhama and Dorot we have pigeon handlers and proper lofts and you will bring several of their pigeons back with you so that we can send them pigeongrams, and in other places try to catch pigeons in the cowshed. If the distance is not too great there is a chance that an ordinary pigeon will return home. We’ll paint two of its feathers yellow and green so they’ll know if she has returned.”

They prepared the supplies and the equipment; they selected and marked and recorded the pigeons in two identical notepads, one that would remain with Dr. Laufer and the other that the Girl placed in her knapsack. The next morning she woke up, took leave of her parents, and left for the zoo. Her mother cried—“Where are all the boys? Do they have to send girls?”—and her father said only that “they’re counting on you out there. Take care of yourself and of the birds.”

“Each outpost will receive six pigeons,” Dr. Laufer told her. “Four of our own and another that you will get from Shimon, the pigeon handler at Givat Brenner. You surely remember him from the conferences. We’ve asked him to mark his pigeons with red bands so that at the outposts they will know which should return to each place.”