A Pigeon and a Boy (32 page)

He was silent for a while, then said, “This is a slightly dangerous mission. Please watch out for the young men traveling with you—don’t let them get up to any nonsense. And don’t forget to take one of the Baby’s pigeons so he won’t worry about where you’ve suddenly disappeared to.”

The sound of a whistle came from the street. The fat man from the zoo opened the supply gate and a command car carrying two Palmach men entered and moved slowly toward the storeroom. The driver was short, dark, and stocky and reminded her of the Baby but with a tougher, more aggressive look than his; the scout was swarthy and large and walked with a limp. They brought the Girl a long Shinel woolen army coat—the nights were still cold, they told her—and a pistol.

“I don’t know how to use this,” she said.

“It’s really easy,” the large one told her. “You put your arms in the sleeves and button the buttons all the way to the top. Like this.”

The short one added, “And if you’re still cold, pull the collar up.”

The Girl grew angry and reddened while the boys shrieked with laughter that frightened the animals. “Don’t worry” they told her, “at Givat Brenner we’ll take you to a firing range.”

Cartons full of equipment and mail were piled into the command car; the fat man from the zoo heaped and tied the boxes containing the pigeons and the feedbags on top. The Girl said good-bye to Dr. Laufer and climbed into the vehicle, sitting on a bench fashioned by the boys from boxes and blankets.

The command car left the zoo and traveled south through the streets of Tel Aviv That war was impending could be felt everywhere: sandbags stood like fortifying walls at the entrances to buildings. Here and there they passed barricades and barbed wire. Silence prevailed. People in khaki walked purposefully their faces drawn and contemplative.

At the exit from the city they joined up with several vehicles loaded with supplies that had been waiting for them, and at the first opportunity the little convoy left the pavement and made its way through vineyards and orchards on yellowish-red dirt roads. Here they could see nothing remarkable but signs of spring: wildflowers sparkled, fruit trees gave off sweet scents, birds chirped over their nests, lizards dashed about, butterflies fluttered in the air. An unusually beautiful April reigned supreme, but the boys were constantly busy watching the sides of the roads. The dark, short one who held the wheel had even placed two hand grenades in a small box on his lap, and the large, swarthy one held his Sten gun with two hands while his eyes skittered between the
road on the map and the road on which they were traveling. When one of the vehicles in their convoy sank in the sand he commanded his people to lie low in a circle around them, watching and guarding, until the command car could pull it out.

They reached Rishon Lezion, and after passing the winery they parted from the rest of the convoy The others were traveling to Hulda, while they were heading to Givat Brenner by way of the fields. Shimon, the pigeon handler at Givat Brenner, was happy to welcome the Girl and asked her whether she still managed to meet up with the Baby

“Whenever possible,” she told him.

“Nice young man,” Shimon said.

“We ladies would agree,” the Girl said, and Shimon laughed.

“Let’s just get this war behind us and there will be time for those matters,” he said. Then he apologized. “I’m probably sticking my nose in where it doesn’t belong. I’ll shut up now”

His pigeons were already marked with red bands and waiting in their boxes. Shimon said, “Dr. Laufer thinks only expert pigeon handlers can take proper care of them, but he shouldn’t worry The folks at the outposts won’t need to tame or train them—all they need to do is feed them, give them water, make sure they’re not sick. All the people down there are farmers; they know how to raise fowl. There’s not such a big difference between chickens and pigeons.”

“Just don’t say that at the next conference,” the Girl said. “Dr. Laufer would be very offended.”

“I’d recommend that at every one of your stops you find a responsible kid to take care of them,” Shimon said.
“A
kid like that is better than any adult. We know that because we were just like that. You should teach that responsible kid how to send pigeongrams, so that if the children are moved out when it gets too dangerous, like it already has in other places, then they can send messages of encouragement to the parents, who will stay behind to fight. So now, good-bye to you, and good luck.”

They passed among broom shrubs snowy with the potency of their blossoms, alongside endless rows of almond trees that had finished blooming, by vineyards soon to flower. The red loam yellowed, the temperature of the air rose, and the boys told her of villages and towns whose inhabitants they needed to beware of, names she was familiar with from headlines in the newspapers: Bureir, El-Barbara, Majdal, Beit Daras.

The short one was a driver nonpareil. Once, a roving band approached from a ravine, shouting and shooting in their direction, and he hastened to get them out of there, sailing the heavy command car over the dunes in a most amazing manner. The large swarthy one was a master of navigation and, more than that, at guessing the right direction to take at every junction. In his knapsack he kept a jar filled with hamantaschen pastries. “My mother’s,” he explained. “I eat them all year round, not just on Purim.”

A
ND SO THEY TRAVELED,
from dry riverbeds to hillocks, from furrowed fields to watermelon patches, from fallow fields to orchards. They drove then stopped, from outpost to outpost, in a journey that she would never forget. And so they pushed southward, she and her two escorts, who did not cease to amuse her with riddles and stories and songs and with strong, unsweetened coffee, even after they had watched her dispatch a pigeon from the side of the road and knew her heart was given to the one in whose loft the pigeon would land.

“He’s probably tall and blond and handsome like you,” the short one said.

She laughed. “In fact, he looks like you: small and ugly and dark. But you’re already a young man, while he’s still a baby”

“What does he do?”

“Like me: he misses me and waits and takes care of pigeons for the Palmach.”

At each outpost she left behind pigeons and taught what she could in just a few hours. At each outpost she reminded them that it was forbidden to let the pigeons fly since their home was in a different location. At each outpost she explained to the carpenter how to fix up an old shed or shipping crate, one that would be large enough for the pigeons to fly about so their muscles would not atrophy and they would not grow weak. At each outpost she recommended that they catch a few stray pigeons around the cowshed and transfer them to a nearby kibbutz, just to be sure. And at each outpost she found and worked with a child whose eyes widened and reminded her of herself and the Baby

In places where there was no convoy they could join, they traveled at night on their own with the command car’s lights off and the engine
low, so low that they could hear the jackals howling and the whisper of the distant sea and the scratching of the pigeon’s claws in their boxes as they struggled to clutch the floor of the careening car.

The moon was nearly full. The gold of the sand faded to silver and blue. The large sycamore trees strewn across the area at that time looked like herds of dark animals. Rain fell suddenly, causing the boys to rejoice—the chance of sinking in the sand was less, the large one explained with a mouth dotted with poppy seeds —and when the clouds cleared he showed her a map of the heavens. He knew all the stars and all the mythological figures and all the astrological signs and pointed out Orion the hunter, and next to it, “the big dog,” and their neighbor, the “columba,” the heavenly pigeon in her tireless flight southward.

“She even has an olive branch in her beak,” he said. “But you need a crescent moon to see it, and a telescope helps, too.”

At each kibbutz their journey was not forgotten. The three visitors who appeared suddenly, a spot growing bigger and bigger from a distance, then turning into two young men in long coats—one large and limping and wearing a tattered Australian hat and the other, short one in a woolen stocking cap—and a tall girl with a faded pink kerchief on her head, and golden curls, also wrapped inside a Shinel, her face dusty like theirs. The rumor spread. By barks and gusts of wind, from beak to ear, in the mouths of cowshed pigeons. At every outpost people waited for them, the two young men and “the girl with the pigeons” from Tel Aviv

She handed out her pigeons like a gift giver, like the bearer of verdicts or letters of love or impending death. Never before had she experienced such switches between fear and hope, between worry and security She felt she had grown up all at once and that she would forever recall this silence, which was more terrifying than the din of war that would follow, and these treacherous roads of sand, so much more pleasant and more dangerous than paved ones, and the rush of air when the two boys deflated the tires so they would not sink and become an easy target. And the two boys themselves, singing loudly to her when they could and humming softly when it was forbidden. And the kibbutz members as they filled sandbags and dug pits and prepared for war on their very homes and tried not to think about who would die or guess who would live.

And mostly she saw and remembered the fighting units waiting at the sides of the roads. People strewn about, walking, chatting, checking
equipment, polishing their weapons, sitting around tiny campfires. Some caught a few hours of sleep, others talked about what they had already experienced, and others still argued about what was soon to happen. She saw and she knew that everything she was observing she would never forget.

And after several days she let her thoughts slip to another matter: the large number of letter writers, the ones who put their paper on the hood of the truck or on one knee or on a tree trunk or on the back of a friend, who wrote on another friend’s back in turn. More than once they stopped the command car and handed envelopes to her saying, “Put this in a mailbox when you get back to Tel Aviv” She put them inside an empty seed bag and guarded them faithfully She carried this huge message capsule as it swelled, filling up with requests and commands and fears and longings and children who would be born to some and not born to others, the delusions of returns and encounters, the hopes of parted lovers, the blessings of men about to die. And a great passion for a baby suddenly flooded her belly, along with taboo joy: her Baby was not destined for battle; he would remain with his pigeons, would await her at the loft.

Chapter Fourteen

W
HY DON’T YOU
have a drink?” the elderly American Pal-machnik asked me.

“My mother doesn’t allow me to drink with strange men,” I said.

He laughed. “You’re a big boy already.”

“Truth is, I don’t really enjoy drinking.”

A Virgin Mary for the gentleman and another whiskey sour for me,” he told the waiter, indicating his glass.

“If the Baby hadn’t been fooling around with those pigeons of his all the time,” he said, “he could have been a damn good fighter. Once we even saw him beat someone up. A few of our guys went off to Be’er Tuvia and he asked them to take a few pigeons with them and dispatch them early the next morning.”

By ten o’clock the Baby had already begun walking about the loft slightly tense, his eyes turned skyward, watching and waiting. Homing pigeons are capable of traveling at nearly fifty miles an hour or even more, and he was worried. Even when the sun reached the top of the sky they did not return. Nor when it descended; not a sign of them, not even when it set. Nothing.

The next day, too, the pigeons did not come back. When one young pigeon fails to return it can be chalked up to natural selection, an inevitable sifting. But four at once? The Baby’s worry turned to anxiety All four were healthy and strong, daughters of champion mothers and swift fathers, never tardy in any of their training flights. Two even had chicks of their own, an added incentive to return home. Something was amiss; something foul had transpired.

Five days later the men returned. They came to the loft, handed over the forms with the exact time and place and weather conditions of the dispatch, then went to the Palmach tent camp. Something in their prattle aroused his suspicions. He was bothered by the fact that they took no interest in learning when the pigeons had returned and which had arrived first, since on occasion the men would wager on the results, losing a cigarette or earning a square of chocolate. The Baby followed them to their tents, intending to ask them a few more questions. From one of the tents arose peals of laughter. He drew near, listened, and his heart stopped in its place. From bits of conversation he overheard through the flaps of tarp it became clear to him that on the very first evening they had beheaded the pigeons, roasted them over a campfire, and eaten them, one pigeon per man.

The Baby burst into the tent and began pummeling and kicking like a madman. “Murderers!” he shouted. “You fuckers, I’ll kill you!” And because there lay hidden, beneath the baby fat and the smooth skin, muscles and fury of astonishing power, several men and ropes were needed to overpower him and secure his arms and legs.