A Pigeon and a Boy (6 page)

I was five years old then, and Benjamin would join the reading lessons. Even though he was only three, he picked it up faster than I. Within weeks he was already reading aloud the names of the poets, his legs skipping from grave to grave and his eyes skipping from the graves to my mother’s bright eyes. I remember how he even astonished and enchanted the passengers on the No. 4 bus: a veryyoung boy with golden hair reading the shop signs on Ben Yehuda Street in a precocious voice, in spite of the speed at which they passed by the window of the bus.

And I remember the dinner on the balcony when my mother announced, “Soon we shall have a baby girl. Your little sister.”

“How do you know it will be a girl?” I asked with apprehension. “Maybe we’ll have another brother.”

“It will be a girl because that is what Mother wants,” Yordad explained. “She has done her
FOR
and
AGAINST
and decided that after wishing for and receiving two sons, now we shall have a daughter.”

Then she teased us: “The
FOR
is she and the
AGAINST
is you two.”

Within several weeks’ time she began to retch every morning, and I would retch along with her. Yordad said that pediatrics had never seen or heard of such identification between sons and their mothers and that this new phenomenon should be named for me. When he said this his lips smiled, but his eyes did not. A dull anger skittered across them, as though he were a witness to an intimacy he had never known.

Every day we would sit, he and I, shelling almonds on the balcony “A pregnant woman must take care to eat properly,” he informed us, “and since there is not enough meat or eggs or cheese in the market, these almonds are a good and nutritious substitute. This way Mother will have plenty of milk and the baby girl will be large and healthy and her teeth will be white.”

He permitted me to eat every seventh almond. “Whoever does not work does not get any”

“But I’m working,” I boasted, expecting a compliment, too.

“I am referring to your brother,” Yordad said in a loud, stern voice, to ensure that Benjamin would hear.

Benjamin was playing off to the side and did not react. I gathered up my seventh almonds and chewed them until they were pulp, then swallowed them with deep purpose and conviction. I felt the whiteness of the almonds create a whiteness of milk and teeth inside me and you. I hoped that the sister you would give birth to would be small and thick and dark, but she was born before term and died straightaway, so that it was impossible to determine what her height or coloring would have been.

A few days passed before my mother returned from the hospital. That night we heard Yordad talking while Mother said nothing.

“You see,” Benjamin whispered to me in the darkness of our room, “you shelled those almonds for her for nothing.”

I grew angry in place of you. “Why do you say ‘her? Say ‘shelled those almonds for Mother,’ not for ‘her’!”

M
ORE THAN ONCE
you sent me shopping, sometimes across Ben Yehuda Street at Zolti’s greengrocery and sometimes at the local kiosk. “There is no kiosk like this one anywhere else,” you said. “He stocks lollipops, clothespins, sardines, chewing gum, ice cream, and, if you order in advance, shoes, refrigerators, and bridal gowns.”

I remember one day when the owner of the kiosk ascended the stairs to our flat and said, “Dr. Mendelsohn, your son has been stealing money from me, and apparently from you, too.”

I tugged at your dress and you tilted your ear downward to my mouth. I whispered my question: how was it that at his kiosk this man was tall but in our house he was short? You whispered your answer back at me: in his kiosk he stands on a wooden platform, while in our house he is standing on the normal floor. Your lips were so close and so pleasant to me that it took several seconds for me to notice Yordad’s stern and piercing glare, and when I did notice it my heart stood still inside me from shame and fear. Not due to the undeserved punishment for a theft I did not commit but because the possibility that it was Benjamin who had stolen did not even cross his mind.

The owner of the kiosk understood what was happening at once. “It’s not the dark one, the one that looks like a thug,” he said. “It’s the little one who steals, the one with the Goldilocks curls and the face of an angel.”

He descended the stairs and returned to his kiosk and became tall once again, and you rested a hand on my shoulder and cast a scowl at Yordad that spun him around and drove him away, so that he sought refuge in the clinic.

And I recall the daily trek to the seashore to take exercise and swim. These days I no longer go to the beach; Liora prefers the swimming pool and, anyway, the flying paddleballs and the young women’s bathing suits make me nervous. The sun’s rays frighten me too, a fear instilled in me by Yordad that I have never overcome. Way back then Dr. Yaacov Mendelsohn warned parents against the dangerous effects of the Middle Eastern sun, but no one listened; suntans were considered to be a sign of health and the fulfillment of the Zionist dream. That’s the reason everyone went to the beach before noon and only the Mendelsohn family went late in the afternoon, when the heat of the sun had abated,
marching against the families returning home, a joyful caravan of irresponsible parents and seared and happy children with reddened noses and backs.

Many people would greet us, and some added requests and questions. In spite of his youth, Yordad already had a reputation as an excellent pediatrician, and these people wished to take advantage of the opportunity for some on-the-street advice. He would tell them, “I am in a hurry; come walk with me and we shall speak.” And he would extend his long legs into a quick stride so that the pestering party soon became befuddled and winded. But one day my mother said to him, “Be nice to them, Yaacov, it’s easier that way” And when he complained she explained, “It saves time. Try and you’ll see.” After trying, he saw, and admitted it. “You were right,” he said. “At least thirty percent less time …”

She told us that once upon a time, when she was a girl, before there were so many sidewalks in Tel Aviv, there were places where wooden planks were placed atop the sand. She loved the feel of these, the way they rocked and sank beneath one’s footstep and weight. I loved the spot between the end of the street and the start of the beach, that elusive space between two times and two places, where the city ends and the shore begins, where the asphalt and concrete end and the sand and sea begin. One leg still on the solid of the sidewalk, the other already in the soft and yielding sand.

We played with a small medicine ball, weighted according to our ages, and this was the sole sport at which I was better than my brother. I stood rooted, straining, while Benjamin was hurled backward time and again, falling in the sand and laughing, enjoying himself in spite of his failure. Yordad scolded him, “Stand firm!” Then, restraining himself—he never raised his voice, and when he was angry he whispered—he said, “Stand firm, Benjamin! How is it that Yairi can do it and you can’t?” A wave of pleasantness arose inside me: my mother called me Yair, Meshulam Fried, Tirza’s father, calls me Iraleh—“Iraleh and Tiraleh, alike as a pair of doves”—and until this very day Yordad is careful to call me Yairi,
my
Yair, as if reminding the world that I am his.

Benjamin grinned, sighed, and fell on purpose. Yordad grew angry He yanked Benjamin to his feet and sent us to run on the beach, with “knees high, Yairi, don’t drag your feet in the sand.” So we ran and sweated and breathed deeply, rhythmically We swam a little, exercised a little. We ate grapes while the sun dropped and the beach emptied, we
gathered our belongings and retraced our steps home. I liked coming home better than going there and preferred the transition from sand to sidewalk too, one foot still feeling its way and sinking, the other already finding its resting place, the answer to its needs.

Yordad marched at the head, erect, I followed behind, and my mother and brother were behind me or ahead of me or next to me playing skipping games on the paving stones, “because if you step upon the crack, you will break your mother’s back.” A benign sun, soft and low, lengthened our shadows. There’s mine, wider and shorter than the others and, like its owner, darker, wrapped inside a long terry-cloth robe. That shadow was sullen and enraged and stepped on the cracks on purpose, and its robe was an old robe of my mother’s that she had tailored for me after much pleading. That robe drew a large share of mockery and teasing, but it filled its role—to conceal the strangeness of my body—quite successfully

So fair and tall and slender were the three of them, their tans so golden and burnished, and I was so dark and thick and coarse. More than once I had feared I was adopted, and Benjamin, who perceived every chink and impaled every foible, made me angry with a little song he wrote. “They sent you in a package, / They found you in the trash / They took you from an orphanage, / To Gypsies we paid cash …”

My mother was angry “That’s enough of your nonsense, Benjamin,” she said, but her dimple glinted, giving away a smile. Sometimes even she would joke about that very same matter. “What’s going to be with you, Yair? One day your real parents will come and take you for their own and we’ll miss you terribly”

I would turn to stone; Benjamin would join in her laughter. Yordad reprimanded them. “Do not be offended by them, Yairi, and as for the two of you—please stop this immediately!”

Adopted or not, I shall write here what I felt but never dared to state back then: that I was not turning out well and that my brother was the correction of the mistake.

O
N THE FIRST DAY
of summer vacation in 1957, we moved to Jerusalem. Yordad had been promised a position at the new Hadassah Hospital, which was just being built west of the city, and the opportunity
to engage in what he had been prevented from doing in Tel Aviv: research and teaching, as well as maintaining a clinic in which he could see private patients.

I was eight years old and Benjamin was six. Two trucks draped with tarps, one small and one medium-sized, were hired to transport our belongings. We stood by the kiosk, eagerly awaiting their arrival. My mother said one large truck would have sufficed, but Yordad decreed that it was “forbidden to mix the clinic with the family”

Dr. Mendelsohn was in the habit of classifying and separating and isolating elements. He instructed us to return the blocks we played with to their box according to their colors and sizes. He sorted his clothing not only by season and type but also by time of day worn, shades of color, and fabric. He did not drink while eating nor eat while drinking, and he moved from food to food on his plate: first the schnitzel and only afterward the potatoes; first the fish and only afterward the rice; first the omelette and only afterward the salad. My mother said that if he had the time he would eat each component of the salad in turn: first he would gather bits of cucumber, then the peppers, and at the end, the tomatoes. But his prohibition against mixing extended far beyond food: he did not mingle one matter with another, or alcohol with secrets, or types of medications. He assigned each its own importance, and each brought that small smile to your face along with that single dimple in your left cheek and the asymmetry of your upper lip, which mocked Yordad openly whenever he was overly strict with us in the matter of table manners. Sometimes he would ask—and I do not know if he was being serious or joking—“What would happen if the queen of England were to invite you for supper?” And you would retort, “Exactly the same as would happen if we were to invite her.”

Yordad prepared the salad for all of us himself. He cut the vegetables with great expertise, seasoned them with oil and salt and pepper and lemon; then, when he had taken his share, he announced, “Now you people cut the onion and add it to your own salad.”

Years later, when Benjamin brought home Zohar, the woman he would marry, to present her to his parents, she said, “Dr. Mendelsohn, in my house we call the salad you prepare ‘children’s salad.’”

Yordad sized her up with his eyes. “Interesting,” he said. “And what kind of salad does one eat in your house?”

She laughed. Her laughter roused me because it reminded me of Tirzah Fried’s. “Salad in our house is made with meat and potatoes,” she
said. “But if we do use vegetables, then we add soft cheese and warm slices of hard-boiled egg and black olives and chopped cloves of garlic.” Her description was so simple and true that I felt the need to taste it right away. Zohar smiled at me, and I was flooded with an affection for her that has not ended to this very day She is a large woman— full-bodied, full of life—who loves to eat and read: “Abadi’s Oriental cookies and fat novels.” In the Beit She’an Valley kibbutz she hails from she has three brothers as big as she and some dozen nieces and nephews, “all the same size: extra-, extra-, extra-large.”

Like many other affections, this one, too, stems from similarity Not the similarity between us—we are not similar at all—but the similarity between our spouses, between her husband and my wife, and as Zohar herself said to me many years later, in a moment that mingled alcohol with embarrassment, laughter with loneliness, “Our troubles are very similar. It’s just that your trouble is crappier than mine and my trouble is shittier than yours.” I felt a covenant had been established between us, that of two interlopers who had been appended to the same eminent family

I love her twins, too—Yoav and Yariv—in spite of the jealousy I felt when they were born, and I am proud to say that I am the one who coined their nickname, the Y-Team, which stuck at once and has even undergone a number of improvements: Liora turned them into the Double-Ys, while Zohar decreed separate nicknames for each of her boys. Yoav, the firstborn, became Y1, while Yariv, born several minutes later, was Y2.

The family lust for eating made its appearance in the twins during their very first days of life. More than once Zohar said she planned to nurse them for years and years because their nursing was so hardy that it brought her to the verge of losing consciousness and she was addicted to these moments when her “boobs emptied and her boys filled up” and everything blurred and her body was light and bent on flying, while her boys grew full and heavy, becoming the sandbags that weighted her to the ground.