A Pigeon and a Boy (48 page)

“Why are there only three? They usually fly in large flocks, don’t they?”

“The large flock will come a few hours from now These are the scouts. They’re looking for a good place to rest and eat. When they find it they’ll call the others to land.”

The three cranes flew lower, passed over the village. My heart pounded. My brain calculated: Where. When. Then. Now My stomach contracted to the point of pain. My mouth said, “I have to go, Tirzah.”

“Where?” she asked, surprised.

“Tel Aviv”

“Your home is here,” Tirzah said. “It’s finished. Put the nameplate on the door and try the keys.”

“I want to bring Liora here. I want her to see it.”

“What for?”

“I want her to know that I’ve found and bought and built a place of my own.”

“She knows all that. She also knows that I’m here. She even sent her brother and yours, those two snakes, to check it out for her.”

“I just want her to see it built and finished.”

“You don’t need victories like those. Don’t bring her here. Please, Yair.”

My stomach cinched even tighter, but I rose from my place. Tirzah grimaced suddenly, stood up, and ran outside, and when I ran after her I found her bent over and vomiting our breakfast onto the earth of the garden. I placed a hand on her shoulder and she brushed it off and moved away from me.

I began to walk toward Behemoth. Tirzah overtook me in three quick strides and stood in front of me. “Wait a minute. Do a
FOR
and
AGAINST
like your mother would have.”

“I just want her to see this house. It’s not such a big deal.”

Tirzah stepped out of my way I went to Tel Aviv

L
IORA’S STREET
honored me with a parking space. Liora’s door opened obediently toward me like the automatic doors at an airport. Liora’s alarm system welcomed me in preordained silence. Liora herself was waiting for me, sprawled on her bed, her eyes scanning one of her computer printouts. I took off my shoes and lay down next to her.

“My house is finished,” I told her.

“Congratulations. I’m sure Tirzah did a wonderful job.”

“There’s still no furniture,” I said, “but it’s got water and electricity and doors and windows and floors for the feet and a ceiling for the head.”

“So are you here to say good-bye to this house?”

“I’m here to invite you there. The time has come for you to see it.”

“When?”

“Now”

“No good. I have a meeting this evening with clients. Let’s call the office and have Sigal find a better time for us.”

“It has to be today and we’ve got to get going now We’ll get there late in the afternoon and we’ll stay over until tomorrow so you can see the view”

“So it’s also an invitation to sleep over? Is there a bed?”

Her smile slanted her eyes and stole into her voice, but there was no sign of it on her lips.

“There’s nothing there yet. We’ll take your mattress. Come on, get up. Pack a few things while I load the mattress onto Behemoth.”

“But I have meetings tomorrow morning, too.”

“Postpone them.” And with the sharpness of someone grown strong and thin, someone who has built and has been built, I added, “I’ve seen you solve bigger problems than this.”

She got out of bed, opened her closet, and took out a travel bag while I, moving quickly expansively stripped the sheets off the bed. I lifted the mattress and pulled it from the bed and dragged it outside the room. We proceeded down the hallway, me pushing and guiding, it feeling led and angry and all of Liora’s rooms—the morning rooms and evening rooms, the rooms for solitude, the rooms for arguing and treatments and sleeping and making up—watched as we passed, and they threw open doors.

We stepped outside the apartment and slid down the steps one at a time, past each and every startled camera, to the garden and the gate and the street. I pulled and lifted the mattress onto Behemoth’s roof rack. I bound it with straps and tightened them, while Liora—who had come down after me, looking gorgeous, perfectly suited to her lightweight, light-colored dress and the travel bag in her hand—regarded me with amusement. Could this be Yair? Where had this sudden vigor come from? This energy?

We drove out of Tel Aviv, swimming in the still-warm summer air now fighting for its life with encroaching winter. We spoke little. My hand, which passed between the seats, touched her own briefly Her hand, feeling the touch of mine, grasped mine for a moment and held tight. It seemed to me we were passing down an enormous corridor, from one room of the world to the other. A red, setting sun was on one wall and the moon was on the opposite wall, while we were in the middle, the mix that would not work.

The sun disappeared. The moon climbed in the sky The large, yellow ball became a flat, bluish-white disk. Behemoth turned at the junction, rounded the bends, decided not to approach through the fields this time. The entrance to the village came fast. Right turn at the secretariat building, the giant pine, the birds already settled in for the night. The cypress trees that would have gladdened your heart. Two tended gardens and one that was dry and balding.

Behemoth stopped. I got out, rushed around to the other side of the car, and opened the door ceremoniously A long, white leg stretched
from within, and then another. Liora stood beside me. She looked. The moon shone. Not strong enough to show her the entire view framing the house but enough for her to sense the great expanse beyond.

“It’s a pity your mother isn’t here. This house would suit her perfectly”

“Yes, it’s a real pity”

“How many rooms do you have here?”

“One very large one and one very small, and there’s a storage room below”

“Too few”

I pulled the mattress from Behemoth’s roof rack, dragged it along the cracked sidewalk, and we passed through the front door into the large room and out to the wooden deck that my luvey built for me.

“Here?” Liora asked. “Outside? Why not in the house?”

“Come on, lie down next to me,” I said to her. “I have a surprise for you.”

Together we stretched the sheet she had brought over the mattress. She spread her dress graciously, sat down, and sprawled out next to me in one elegant movement.

“So what’s the surprise?”

We lay there, two supines, one fair and beautiful and calm and awaiting the unknown, the other short and dark and excited at what was about to come.

We lay there some more. Our eyes grew accustomed to the light of the moon and our hands to each other’s, until Liora grew impatient and said, “So, what’s happening?” and I answered, “Wait patiently”

And still we lay there. Time passed, was measured in the hollow whistles of the small owl, amassed in the falling of dry leaves from the carob trees, spread out among the jackal’s howls from nearby and the lowing of cattle from afar. Then silence fell, a great silence, the sound-lessness that precedes the soft din. Overhead, the blackened skies began to fill up, and along with them the body’s empty spaces, at first slowly then more rapidly, with a whisper that could be heard and a movement that could not be seen. The whisper became a flapping and the flapping a chatter and the chatter a conversation. The world filled with syllables and wings, and the darkness rained down voices. The full moon skittered and winked, now hidden, now exposed behind passing shadows.

“Mommy, mommy,” Liora said in the whining voice of a baby crane, “are we there yet?”

To me she said, “It’s them.”

A narrow, twinkling path wound its way down her cheek. Her teeth attested to the sparkle of her smile. And I—in spite of the dubbing she had just done for the cranes, and in spite of my memory of her answer back then, about “Daddy Crane” and “Mommy Crane” and the little cranes that were just old enough to be making their first journey with the flock—I repeated my question about what it was they were discussing.

“Us,” she said. “They’re saying, You remember, children, the story our forefathers heard from their forefathers and we’ve told to you? About the couple we saw that night lying in the grass at the kibbutz? Well, here they are again. It’s them. Look.”

She raised herself on one elbow Her beautiful head drew near. Her lips parted and I stretched my neck toward her kiss. Her hand passed over my chest and my waist and her loins pushed close to my thigh.

“Hello, you,” she said.

My body breathed and responded.

I felt the sickle of her thigh rising and descending until it came to rest on my belly The cranes had already grown distant. The flapping of their wings was muted, but their soft croaking had not ceased, crossing distance and times. The woman my mother prophesied for me moved forward, opened, arced, returned me into her flesh.

W
HEN
I
WOKE UP
in the morning I saw her. Her long, fair, barefooted body in a pair of jeans and a white shirt, leaning over the railing of the deck, drinking coffee and looking at the view

I sat up. “Where did the coffee come from? Did you bring the gas burner in from Behemoth?”

“Of course not. The neighbor gave it to me. Very nice young woman. She apparently thinks I’m your lover and Tirzah is your wife.”

“She may look good, but nice she isn’t.”

“What’s that over by the carob trees?”

“A shower.”

“And you shower outside?”

“You want to give it a try?”

“People will see us.”

“The worker who built it is Chinese. They know how to build showers so no one sees you.”

And whose handprints are those in the cement? Tirzah’s and yours?”

“Mine and his.”

“I don’t believe you. One print belongs to a man and the other is a woman’s.”

“The Chinese have small hands.”

I stood up to explain the handprints and show her the view Before my eyes had even taken in the sight revealed to them, my pointing hand fell and my heart died. The area around my house had been cleared and cleaned and emptied. The tools, the bricks, the leftover tiles, the remains of mortar and sand and iron and gravel, the mixing pans, the pallets, the refrigerator, the table—everything had been collected and removed. The yard had been perfectly raked. Even the small cement mixer had disappeared, most likely had passed in front of us the previous night being towed to another place by a convoy of white pickup trucks with the
MESHULAM FRIED AND DAUGHTER, INC.
logo.

Tirzah, it appeared, had called in her people from other building sites, from all the intersections she was erecting and bridges she was building. In the time it took me to travel to Tel Aviv and back, every trace and track had been erased. Not even a dollop of cement, a grain of sand, a cigarette butt, a bottle cap. Only a single sheet of tin remained, leaning against the wall of the house near the window

A familiar rumble started up. The tractor operator arrived, the empty rubbish cart in tow behind him. He stopped, went over to the lemon tree, lowered from its branches the thick metal pipe he had chimed that very first day, and tossed it into the cart.

It resounded loudly The tractor operator said, “Your contractor left,” and he climbed onto the seat and drove away

I
WENT TO FIND
myself a home. I came to it returning, not arriving. Hello, house, I said to it, and it answered me.

I built and was built, I loved and was loved, my soul grew a new skin, a roof, a floor, a wall. I have a wooden deck and an outdoor shower, and time and a story and a view, and a tin to hear the rain during the
approaching winter, and two eyes to tent a hand over to watch the skies and wait.

And two weeks ago I received my first letter at my new address. It was a thick manila envelope sent from Leiden, in Holland. That gaunt old Dutchwoman who drew the birds in the Hula Valley had sent me copies of several of her watercolors, including
Birds of the Holy Land
and
Migrating Fowl.

“In appreciation of the wonderful tour,” she wrote me, and in among the pelicans and cranes she had slipped in a surprise: a portrait of me she had done in just a few brushstrokes, without my ever having noticed her doing it. Here I am, a thick, black bird, not migrating but returning, not joining the flock.

“I hope you will forgive my forwardness,” she wrote apologetically but when she was a young woman, she said, in the days when the British still ruled the country, “and you, certainly, were not yet born,” she had taken an interest in birds and even then had come to the Holy Land in their pursuit. “I am enclosing four more drawings, from several dozen I did back then, my dear Mr. Mendelsohn. Perhaps you will find them to be of interest, since today it is not easy to find such birds and such views in your country and that is a shame.”

And here they are: vultures crowding around a cow’s carcass, a large flock of starlings dotting the eye of heaven, a colorful and joyous band of finches atop tall, dry thistles, and a sole boy sitting on the bench at a railway station, a woven wicker basket on his knees, a pigeon basket with a handle and a lid.

Where Are They Now?

P
ROFESSOR
Y
AACOV
M
ENDELSOHN
gathered up his computer, his notepads, his panic button, and his books, took leave of his apartment in the Beit Hakerem neighborhood of Jerusalem, and moved into the Fried home in Arnona. Together, he and his Romanian cook take care of Meshulam, who had a stroke and is partly paralyzed.

Professor Benjamin Mendelsohn left the country He lives in Los Altos Hills in California, where he teaches and conducts research at nearby Stanford University He rarely visits Israel.

Zohar Mendelsohn went with him to California but after a year there returned on her own. She has opened a café in Ramat Hasharon and, right next door, a successful clothing store specializing in large sizes.

Liora Mendelsohn continues to succeed in business.

Yair Mendelsohn was killed in a car accident some two years after completing the construction of his home. He was on his way from the Hula Valley to pick up Tirzah at a construction site in the Lower Galilee. A truck whose driver had fallen asleep jumped lanes and hit him head-on. Yair was severely injured and died one week later.

Tirzah Fried, who had come back to him several months after she had left him, moved out of the house she had built for him immediately after his death. They had managed to live there together for “seventeen months of love and happiness and one week of horror”—that’s how she put it. Now she is involved in a “superficial romance,” as she defines it, with an El Al pilot she met one evening at a sing-along.

Yoav and Yariv Mendelsohn were accepted to study medicine at Ben-Gurion University, and they are unexpectedly studious. They often visit the house their uncle Yair willed to them. Yoav’s girlfriend joins them there, and all the village children know the place from which to watch the three of them bathing together in the outdoor shower.

The Baby’s last pigeon never left the loft again. Dr. Laufer locked her up for the purpose of breeding her, and when she died he stuffed her and placed her on his desk. She disappeared when the zoo moved from Tel Aviv to the safari park in Ramat Gan.

Dr. Laufer himself died in great old age in the Ruhr region of Germany, where he had been invited to lecture and judge pigeon races.

Miriam the pigeon handler rejected several suitors from the kibbutz and the Palmach and at the end of the War of Independence moved to Jerusalem and worked for the Jewish Agency She never married or had children, but she wrote and illustrated wonderful children’s books that were published only in Germany To her dying day she never revealed her passion and love for Dr. Laufer, either to him or to anyone else. She died in the summer of 1999 of lung cancer.

The Baby’s aunt and uncle tried to keep up the Palmach pigeon loft on their kibbutz, but did not manage to raise or train any new homing pigeons. When I visited there in 2002 there was nothing left but a pile of planks, a few troughs, and some screens. One old kibbutz member, who spotted me looking around and making notes, approached to tell me that once there had been a Palmach homing pigeon loft there and that “one of our own boys,” who had worked there, had fallen later on in the War of Independence.

“He was what we called ‘an external,’” she told me. “He didn’t get along so well with the other children, but he loved those pigeons.”

“What was his name?” I asked.

“He had some nickname. ‘The Boy’ or perhaps ‘the Baby’”

“The Boy or the Baby?”

“What does it matter anymore? He’s no longer living, and they buried him somewhere else. We remember, we remember a lot, but who can remember it all?”

Then she cast me an apologetic look. “Quite a few years have passed since then, and in the meantime others have fallen, and how much is possible? Even the pigeons don’t visit anymore.”