A Pigeon and a Boy (42 page)

In the afternoon Tirzah returned, followed several minutes later by a white pickup truck with the
MESHULAM FRIED AND DAUGHTER, INC.
logo. Unlike the first vehicle, this one had no driver.

“That’s Illuz, our roofer,” Tirzah announced happily “So punctual!” The pickup truck came to a stop, the door opened, and an exceedingly thin, exceedingly short man—a dwarf, in fact—alighted. His arms were long and his head large and smiling. He said hello to Tirzah, and with the speed of a monkey he climbed up to the framework of the roof and walked along the cement edges and the wooden beams, investigating
and pronouncing judgment: “This one’s rotten!” “This one, too.” “This stays.” “That one needs replacing.”

He removed a builder’s hammer hanging from his belt and pulled out nails, dismantled and threw away several planks, measured and wrote numbers on the palm of his hand. After that he joined us for a late lunch, dousing his food with a spicy sauce he kept in his bag. He announced that most of the roof was “perfectly fine” and that he would return the next day with his brother and the new materials. Tirzah told him he should take the two workers with him in his pickup truck, sent the tractor operator on his way, and said she wanted to “inaugurate our new non-roof”

“How?” I laughed. I felt it had been a long time since I had last heard myself laugh.

“We’ll lie on our backs inside the house and look up at the heavens. We’ll see if darkness really falls, as they say or whether it rises.”

We undressed, lay down next to each other. The walls hid us away from human eyes; the gaping roof exposed us to glances from above: those of migrating birds, of pigeons returning home, perhaps even your eyes, if you really are up there.

The greater light set and disappeared; its luminescence faded, then extinguished. First it lost its beingness, then its name. Darkness neither fell nor rose. It was not created all at once, like the light or the sea or the trees or man; rather, it took shape, spread, thickened, and was. The exposed beams of the roof, which previously had stood blackened against the sky, were now swallowed up inside it. The lesser light, that evening merely a narrow sickle, brightened in the west. Exuberant stars shone. Sprawling and naked, holding hands—this too was part of Tiraleh’s orchestration—we watched them multiply and make a sieve of the dome of heaven.

Later on, my luvey began caressing me much like she used to when her brother would sit by us, watching and instructing: Touch his peepot, you touch her there, do it like this, I want to see …

We snuggled together. We kissed. I pressed myself to her, I growled and gurgled and rubbed up against her body Tirzah laughed. “Iraleh …”

“What?”

“You love me.”

Then she said, “We have photos from your wedding party in our house. Mostly you see Meshulam and your parents, but here and there you and Liora make an appearance. She’s really beautiful.”

I did not respond.

And one day, about two years ago, I saw her on Ahad Ha’am Street in Tel Aviv She was leaving a restaurant with a man and woman who looked like they were from overseas. I don’t understand what she’s doing with you at all.”

And what you’re doing with me, you do understand?”

“I feel your mother in you.”

“I don’t resemble her at all.”

“Doesn’t matter. Anyway, you and I do resemble each other. And the uglies of the world have to stick together.”

“We’re not so ugly”

“We’re not Medusa and the hunchback of Notre Dame, but we don’t exactly turn heads either.”

“You do. You’re full of light; you shine. You have a beautiful walk and a beautiful butt and long legs and a strong neck. Your nipples are two different colors and your peepot is sweet.”

She laughed. “She says nice things about you, too.”

“I’ve seen how people look at you. It’s at me they don’t.”

A man doesn’t need to look handsome; a little bit nicer looking than a monkey is enough,” she said, quoting her mother’s famous saying. “And maybe that’s what Liora likes about you. That every morning her husband thanks God for giving him such a tall and beautiful wife.”

“Why do we have to talk about her?”

“Because I want to. Because for once I want to feel what it’s like to be really beautiful. To step outside in the morning and experience what a beautiful woman does. To walk down the street every day like she does, from home to the office, like an icebreaker in the North Sea. And not only to have it happen but to know in advance, with absolute certainly, that it’s going to.”

“Have you been following her?”

Are you crazy? You yourself told me about how she walks to the office, all the looks she gets from her admirers, the guys who wait for her at the corner. When I was a little girl I saw the expression ‘a captivating woman’ in a book and went nuts from it. Gershon told me it describes a woman who captures your eyes and causes you to lose your way My mother told me it had nothing to do with capture but with bewitchment. Meshulam said it didn’t matter and it was all the same, anyway”

“Did you share these thoughts with the whole family?”

“Why not? Just like I’m sharing them with you right now It may say
that you’re a Mendelsohn on your identity card, but to me and to my father you’re a Fried.”

Two hours later, while the darkness thickened and the heat remained, we slipped away to the outdoor shower. We bathed and dressed in the light of one of Tirzah’s memorial candles—“You see? These candles are great. And you dared to make a face to me about them!”—and later we lit the string of lights strung between the branches of the carob trees and prepared an evening meal of salad, the way they eat it at Zohar’s kibbutz: with soft cheese and warm slices of hard-boiled egg and black olives and chopped cloves of garlic. Tirzah laughed when I cracked the shell of the first egg on my forehead —
“Plaff!”—
and the second on hers.

She poured some arak over ice, added sprigs of mint she had found at the edge of the shower’s drainpipe. I asked for a sip.

“It’s a little strong for you.”

“I’ll be careful.”

“Drink only a little, and slowly It softens your heart and melts your tissues.”

“Not mine.”

“That’s because the first time you drank you were told to empty the glass in one gulp.”

Soft and happy, we sat inside our roofless house, loving and sleeping beneath divinely made heavens and atop man-made cement. Tirzah lay on her stomach, melting a piece of chocolate in her mouth. “Lie on top of me,” she said. “I like your weight. It’s just right on my body” We fell asleep like that for several minutes, awakened, undressed, and lay face to face, moving slowly and slightly, looking at each other. It is pleasant to lie with a woman you love, and when I inaugurate my new home in such a fashion, my love for my contractor lights up my dark places and moves over my void. Night and morning, day after day, and the creation of the house was coming to pass.

M
Y MOBILE PHONE RANG
in the middle of the night. The display screen read
YORDAD.

“Yairi,” he said. “Is Mother at your place?”

“No,” I answered, anxious about what would come next.

“If she does show up there”—he sounded relaxed, rational—“tell her—”

I cut him off. “She isn’t going to be showing up here. How could you say such a thing? You know she won’t be coming here.”

“Why not? Have you had an argument? What happened?”

I sat up. “Because she’s dead,” I called out. “That’s why Don’t you remember we attended her funeral?”

My voice had risen, echoing in the empty space. Tirzah stirred next to me. I felt her eyes were open. Yordad said, “Of course I remember the funeral. How can a person forget such a thing? The mourning period, too. A lot of people came—in fact, too many, if you ask me. But if she shows up at your place, Yairi, tell her to enter quietly when she comes home, because if I wake up it’s very hard for me to fall back to sleep.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll tell her to enter quietly”

“Good night, then. I’m going to sleep and you should, too.”

I could not sleep. How is it possible to sleep after a conversation like that? I lay sprawled on my back. For a moment I was startled by the missing roof, but at once I took pleasure in the shedding of the black of night in favor of the deep blue that dawn spread before its arrival. Tirzah sat cross-legged at the edge of the blanket and lit a candle. I looked at her, her body naked, the silhouette of her face illuminated. Those shapely lips that had passed over the whole of my body, the fingers that had left no territory unexplored, the shame we did not share then and apparently will never share.

“Did the telephone wake you up?”

“Never mind. I have to leave early to get to a building site of ours up north anyway” She put a kettle of coffee on the gas burner. “I’m not going to make any for you because you can still sleep for another couple of hours.”

She stirred and poured and sipped from her mug. “But apropos the conversation you just had, I want to tell you something.”

“What?”

“That I went to visit your mother a few days before she died.”

I sat up. “I may as well have had coffee. Where did you see her?”

“In the hospital, of course.”

“How didn’t I see you there? What did you come as?”

“What is that supposed to mean? I came as Tirzah Fried. Meshulam was there. He phoned and said, ‘Tiraleh, I’m just leaving Raya Mendelsohn’s with the lawyer I brought for the will. If you want to say
good-bye, this is probably your last chance.’ I told him, ‘I want to, but I don’t want to run into Iraleh or anyone else from the family’ He said, ‘So drop everything and come now Professor Mendelsohn was already here with Dr. Benjamin, and Iraleh was here before and he wouldn’t stop crying and so she got mad at him and he was offended and took off Now I’m getting out of here and you can be alone with her’”

“That was nice of him.”

“Nice? Sly and clever, for sure. But not nice.”

“Sure it is,” I said. “Your father is nice and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“He’s not nice at all. You have no idea how not nice he really is. But the little niceness he has he concentrates on four people, and because you’re one of them you think he’s really like that.”

“Who’s the fourth?”

“Himself”

“So then what happened?”

“I got in the car and drove over there. It was night and nobody was around. I guess thanks to your father’s connections she’d been given a private room.”

“Or thanks to your father’s,” I interjected.

“She was awake. Very thin and weak, but she recognized me right away She said, ‘Tiraleh, it’s nice of you to come visit me. As if you’d sensed I wanted you to.’ I said, A lot of time has passed, Raya. How are you?’ She said, ‘Just the way I look.’ I said, ‘Meshulam said I could come.’ She said, Are you still calling him Meshulam? Why can’t you call him “Father”? He probably misses that terribly since Gershon was killed.’ I didn’t want to argue with her, because suddenly it seemed like a final wish. I said, ‘I’ll try to, but I can’t promise.’ She said, ‘If he told you you should come visit me now, that means he sensed you wanted to.’ I said, And it means he sensed you wanted me to, too.’ She said, ‘That’s right, I wanted you to come.’”

My mother gulped air. She coughed. Tirzah wanted to ask her about me and my life and my happiness and my wife, but she did a
FOR
and
AGAINST
and decided against it. My mother said, “We’ve reached the End of Days: Tiraleh has run out of words!” and she turned her gaze to the window “Over there in the darkness are the Castel and Bab-el-Wad and Nebi Samuel and the cemetery—they’re constantly flying at me, even in the dark. And way out there is Tel Aviv That’s where I came from, but in the end I remained here.”

Tirzah held my mother’s hand and my mother held hers and said, “You asked me what I was thinking, Tiraleh? Well, I’m doing my last
FOR
and
AGAINST,
about what’s better for me: to die or to live.” Her laughter became a groan and her groan a cough and her cough a spasm.

“That’s when she told me you’d found yourself a home and you’d signed a contract, and when you’d been there you’d shown her photographs, and before I could say anything she said, ‘So, Tiraleh, maybe this house business will give you two a second chance?’”

“So then you told her you already knew, that you’d been to the house and to the interview committee with me?”

“No,” Tirzah said. “I told her, ‘I have the impression that you and my father have concocted some sort of scheme, that you two have a story that’s above and beyond and predates Professor Mendelsohn saving my brother’s life.’”

“There certainly is a story” my mother said. “There is always a story But no scheme. Just a few things that need fixing, mending. To take care of my baby before I die.”

And what is your story Tiraleh? I asked, as usual not aloud but in my heart.

“I wouldn’t be surprised to hear,” Tirzah continued, “that Meshulam had given her that money so that she could give it to you and then you and I could meet up again. That’s him, your ‘nice’ friend. When he wants something he knows no bounds. But what do I care? I wanted to meet up with you, and when Meshulam told me you’d found a home I knew right away it might turn into more than just a meeting.”

“It’s okay with me,” I told her. “I wanted to get back together with you, too, and anyway, I’m used to acting in a puppet theater.”

“Even if he didn’t actually give her the money,” Tirzah said, ignoring what I had just said, “I do know that years ago he advised her to put away a
knipele
on the side. A person needs money of his own, especially if this person is a woman. He even invested money for her, too.
You
know, in the kind of place that people like him invest, where if your investment pans out you make a killing and if it doesn’t you need someone like Meshulam to take care of the consequences.”

Too many people are touching me, leading me, revealing secrets to me, making plans for me, I thought. Tirzah stood up and said, “In the end, what do we really care? We’re not exactly suffering.
You
have a contractor who is a woman, who sleeps with you and luveys you and isn’t
cheating you or disappearing on you suddenly in the middle of the job. And I have you. You love me too, Iraleh. I can feel it.”