A Pigeon and a Boy (40 page)

“Funny,” said my mother, “how Dr. Laufer determined all of our fates. Yours, mine, my baby that lives, and my Baby who died.”

She moved me from one breast to the other in a decisive movement, a hurried, terrifying skip from fear to security, and said, “Dr. Yaacov Mendelsohn. It has a nice ring to it.”

“I had hoped to forget you, Raya,” said the young doctor. “But I couldn’t.”

She did not answer.

“I sent you seven letters in the first year and ten in the third and another five in the fourth, and then I stopped because you did not respond.”

“There was no point.”

He sat facing her and said, “I have always loved you, Raya, from the time you were a girl, when you lay reading on your stomach on the balcony, even before that wounded pigeon landed there. Often I would watch you from our balcony above. Once your shirt rose a little and I saw the dimples on your back and from upstairs I closed my eyes and kissed them.”

She was silent.

“And that shirt of ours that fell to your balcony on the day the wounded pigeon landed—I threw it there. It didn’t fall.”

“I thought so.”

“And if you ask me what the most important thing I learned in medical school was, I will tell you this: that things can be fixed. Not only bodies. Souls, too. They can be fixed and mended. And in my opinion that is exactly what we need to do now”

She was silent.

“I didn’t even know you’d married,” he said. “My parents wrote about all sorts of things, but they never wrote that you’d gotten married.”

“I didn’t,” my mother said.

The young doctor took a deep breath. He decided to save all the clarifications and all the surprises for other times and conversations.

“I’d like you to marry me,” he said. “And you’ll give birth to a girl, I want a daughter, and this boy I will raise exactly as if he were my own.”

And so it was, more or less. That is to say, several days later my mother told him, “We agree,” though instead of a sister, a brother was born, and Dr. Yaacov Mendelsohn become Yordad, a nickname that suited everyone from every standpoint.

Chapter Nineteen

T
HAT’S THAT,
” said my contractor who is a woman. “We’ve torn down and thrown out everything we needed to. Now it’s time to build.”

“What are you starting with?”

“Usually you put up the inner walls and lay the groundwork for water and electricity. But we’re going to start with your outdoor shower.”

She called one of the Chinese workers. “Pour the concrete here,” she instructed him, “five feet by five feet so there’s room for two, with a two-degree depression toward the drain.”

“Are you sure this is a good spot?” I queried. “I don’t want all the village kids to come and spy on me.”

“Don’t worry The Chinese invented noodles, kites, gunpowder, and outdoor showers. They know how to build them so that nobody can see you.”

The worker asked something incomprehensible and Tirzah pointed and said, “Have the water drain off to that lemon tree over there. Use a two-inch pipe.”

To me she said, “That’s all. Now we just have to leave him alone. The Chinese are just like us—it makes them mad to have someone breathing down their necks.”

“How did he understand what you said?”

“When we each speak our own language, the music of our speech is normal and our hand movements and body languages are natural, and then we understand each other.”

“How could he understand ‘a two-degree depression’?”

“What do you mean, how? He’s a professional craftsman. He knows it’s a two-degree depression.”

“So why did you have to tell him?”

“So he knows his contractor understands, too, even if his contractor is a woman. He should respect me.”

And that was how the building of my new home commenced: with an outdoor shower. The Chinese worker leveled the earth, built a wooden frame for the pouring of the concrete, laid down a metal net to which he affixed the drainpipe, and mixed and poured and smoothed with long strokes. When the cement had hardened a bit he suggested— smiling cordially, and gesturing naturally—that I sink the palms of my hands in as a memento. I did, then suggested that he do the same. He laughed, refused, walked away, and finally bent down next to me and did as I had asked.

The following day I led a barn-owl tour in the Beit She’an Valley, and when I returned Tirzah announced, “Your shower is ready Come have a look.”

I went to have a look. A narrow path of tiles—“So mud doesn’t get in between your wet toes”—led to my new spot, where I found everything one needs for an outdoor shower: a floor and a drain, towel racks, a place to put soap and a scrub brush, even a small mirror—the inspiration of the Chinese worker, who’d guessed what Meshulam and Tirzah had failed to: that I like to shave in the shower, under a light sprinkle and with my face soaped.

“Check to make sure everything works properly” Tirzah said. “So that you don’t come complaining to your contractor later.”

I turned on the faucet. There was a soft and plentiful outburst of rain—a sharp stream does not suit an outdoor shower—and the water disappeared into the whole in the floor, emerging by the lemon tree.

“The tree is no less happy than you,” Tirzah said.

“Why did you choose that one? You could have drained the water off to some other trees.”

“That tree deserves it. It gives off a wonderful scent and good fruit,” she said. She pushed me toward the worker. “Go thank him. The Chinese are just like us—they like praise and compliments.”

I thanked him with warm Hebrew words and natural body movements and he beamed and bowed and smiled. I returned his bow and told him the shower was his to use whenever he wanted. Tirzah came back from her pickup truck with soap, shampoo, hand cream, four new
towels, a wood-slat bathmat, a loofah, a small, hard brush for the palms

and nails, a razor, and five memorial candles.

“Are you nuts? What are we going to do, shower in mourning?” “It’s nice to shower in the evening with candlelight, and memorial

candles don’t drip and they don’t fall over and they burn for a long time.

And anyway, it’s nice to enjoy yourself and know that others are dead

but you aren’t.”

T
HE SUN SET
and Tirzah gave the tractor operator the keys to her pickup truck and told him to take the workers to their lodgings and bring them back in the morning. We were alone.

“Iraleh,” she said, “do you want to inaugurate the new shower I built you outside?”

“Tiraleh,” I said, “do you want to cut a ribbon and sound the trumpets?”

“No, just shower in it the first time.”

“Naked? Outside?”

“You can shower in your clothes if you want, but before you ask any more stupid questions, then yes, with me.”

I watched her while she undressed and opened the faucet, stepped under the stream. Her eyes, which were usually a yellow-green, turned blue under the water. She lifted her face to the flow, passed her fingers through her hair, squeezed her locks, pivoted to face me.

“Aren’t you joining me?” she asked.

I stripped and stepped under the water with her.

“Ever since Gershon, I haven’t showered with you,” she said. Two minutes later she turned off the water—“Jerusalemites can’t stand watching water flow for no reason”—and began soaping me with great purpose, like you bathe a child: behind the ears, the elbows, the “peepot,” the knees, between the buttocks.

“What are you doing?” I chuckled from being tickled and from embarrassment and from pleasure.

“I’m cleaning you, luvey I’m washing away everything that’s gotten stuck to you. Now you clean me like that, too.”

Tirzah’s body is solid and sturdy Her skin is naturally dark, not white with suntanned patches. I soaped her up, first hesitantly, then all over:
neck and belly, hands and back. Lengthwise and crosswise, inside and around, front and back. The way I would soap the Double-Ys when they were little and they came to their uncle’s house for the weekend. I shampooed her strong, short hair. I crouched next to her and tapped her ankle and she laughed and presented me with one foot and then the other, like a horse being shod. “I’d remembered what a jerk you are but I’d forgotten how sweet you are,” she said.

Her hand, behind my back, turned the water on again—just a little bit, so that the flow was not full and solid but rather light showers and heavy drops and random, surprising streams. Our bodies overflowed with joy Tirzah pressed against me and said, “The thing I remember best is you standing in the window of your apartment and looking at me and how all at once I loved you.”

“You were ten years old,” I said.

“What do you think, that a ten-year-old girl can’t understand what she’s feeling?” For a moment she fell silent; then she continued. “There was a time when I thought we were brother and sister, that my father had had some old business with your mother. That really turned me on.”

“If we were brother and sister, your father would never have taken such trouble to get us together.”

“Don’t talk logic to me. I knew we weren’t.”

The shadows fled. A westerly wind was blowing, a wet and pleasant shiver. Lingering gooseflesh speckled my luvey’s skin. Our hands roved and settled. Our eyes, our lips tasted and saw We embraced. Between her thighs I felt her wetness; she was wet beneath the wetness of the water and hot beneath its coolness.

“Lie on the floor,” she said. “Until now we’ve been showering and playing around. Now we’ll inaugurate the shower in proper fashion.”

And later, when she rolled over on her back and lay beside me, she informed me that this was how we would inaugurate the new floor and the new roof and the deck and the kitchen, each in its turn. “So that you know it’s me building this house for you, and so that the house knows it, too.

“I could have built it in a single week,” she said. “I could have brought forty craftsmen here, worked on it for six days, and rested on the seventh. But this isn’t the heavens and the seas and it isn’t the trees and the earth and the animals. Here it’s cement and concrete, it’s plaster and loam. Every one of those guys takes days to dry It’s not
people, my luvey, and it isn’t God: it’s the materials that hold up the work.”

That was how the thing started and how it continued. And that is the way I remember it now, when the house stands finished and Tirzah has left me and gone away I remember how she built and inaugurated, stage after stage. How she pointed and said, “Let there be a wall” and “Let there be a window” and “Let there be a doorway” and “Let there be a deck.” She built and named, inaugurated and labeled, and moved on to another day.

Chapter Twenty

T
HE VILLAGE
is a small and stagnant puddle, every stone disturbing the algae that covers it, and Tirzah and I—and the house that is being created—attract visitors and curious onlookers. There are the polite ones; since I have not yet hung the front door, they knock on the doorpost, stick their heads in, and ask, “May I come in?” And there are the rude ones; since I have not yet hung the front door, they appear and, without saying hello, enter my home as if entering their own. They look around the house and the garden with the quick and knowing eye of a marten; they tally the number of bags of cement mixture, the pipes, the ceiling mesh. In seconds they have incorrectly estimated the budget and the scope of the renovations, and as soon as my gaze rests upon them they withdraw to the underbrush.

They do not anger me. I am a recent arrival, while they are the natives. And in such a place—so old and ripe that the trees are already large and the sidewalks are cracked and weedy and scores have been settled and enmities and loves have lulled—someone new is also a threat. His memories and his experience come from different places and he does not know the local order of importance. Such a person is liable to upset tradition. He needs to be sized up.

Former residents of the house have started to show up, too. The rumor has spread and they come. To investigate, to confirm, to negate, to wonder. A man older than I appeared and asked permission to cut a single lemon from the tree. “My father planted it,” he said. “That’s his fig tree, too. What happened to it? Why don’t you take care of it? Look at the holes in the trunk, thanks to you it’ll die …”