A Pigeon and a Boy (2 page)

From there I took them to the Palmach cemetery at Kiryat Anavim, then into Jerusalem, to the monastery and this surprise: that the eldest of the six Americans I was ferrying about and guiding—a senator, his
aide, his adviser, and three businessmen, all of them guests of the Foreign Ministry—had once been a member of the Palmach and had fought in the battle that had taken place there, which I was attempting to describe for them. And from there to the even bigger surprise of the homing pigeon that had suddenly taken wing from the pigeonholes of his memory

“Did you know him?” I asked.

“Who?”

“The pigeon handler you told us about earlier.”

His face filled the rearview mirror of Behemoth. “Not really He wasn’t one of the fighting gang—he’d come to our brigade to set up an operational pigeon loft. They said he was a top-class professional, that he’d been handling pigeons since he was a boy”

His eyes did not let up their vigil; they continued to pin me down like the hooked spines of a caper bush. “I don’t even remember his name anymore. A lot of other friends of mine were killed, and it’s been so many years.”

At the stoplight facing the German Colony cemetery I turned left. I took advantage of the crowds of people and the cars that slowed us to a crawl to spread my wares: the Rephaim and the Philistines, the British and the Germans. “Gentlemen, please note the verses from the Bible inscribed on the portals. And over there is the old Jerusalem train station. It’s no longer in use, but when I was a child I would travel from here to Tel Aviv with my mother. In a steam engine, can you believe it?”

The train would rumble its way slowly, creaking along the metallic curves of the ravine. I remember the tiny, well-tended vegetable beds of the Arabs on the far side of the border, the soapy froth amassed by sewer water. The wind would set aloft bits of ash from the steam engine and you would brush them from your hair, happy: we were going home, to Tel Aviv …

I am revisited by the scent of bread, hard-boiled egg, and tomato, the provisions you always brought with us. My forehead would shudder—just as it is shuddering now, as I write these words —in anticipation of the egg you would rap on it, your favorite game.
“Plaff!” you
would shout, laughing. Each time I was taken by surprise; each time you laughed. And the rustling of your fingers in the wax paper as they pinched salt and sprinkled it. And that little song you would sing with a child’s inflections:
The engine’s sounding, choo, choo, choo / Now take your seat, and that means you!
And the smile that spread across your face the
farther we got from Jerusalem, a smile of joy and contentment: home, to Tel Aviv

Yes, of course they believe it. Why wouldn’t they? The tour has been meticulously planned; the sandwiches, coffee, and juice have awaited them at the appointed hours and places, lending reliability and validity to the tour guide’s memories and explanations. At the café of the Cinemathèque, the reserved table appears as promised, as do the sunset and the view That’s Mount Zion, and over there is David’s Tomb, if anyone’s interested in those kinds of sites and stories; and down below, Sultan’s Pool, and the ancient spigot “that waters the parched and weary”

And over there—the hills of Moab turning gold in the last light of day “Yes, they’re so close you can reach out your hand and touch them. That’s where Moses stood on Mount Nebo and gazed at the Promised Land. He thought it was pretty close, too, but from the other side.”

“Maybe that’s the real problem for you people,” observed one of the businessmen in the group. He was wearing a ridiculous safari vest full of pockets, the kind that tourists and foreign correspondents love to sport while in the Middle East. “Everything’s so small and close and crowded over here, so that from every place you see more and
more
places.”

The tour guide—that is I, Mother; make no mistake, do not forget— responded with an “Absolutely” and a compliment of “That’s right.” Indeed, small and close and crowded with people and events and memories. “In such a Jewish manner, I might add,” he said, and then he mixed in history and etymology truths and fables, and pointed out the Valley of Hinnom, or Hell, and he told about the film festival held there and the graves of the Karaites and the awful child sacrifices of Moloch, and who’d ordered iced coffee? The tiny victims cry out from the altars.

With nightfall I delivered my small and distinguished group to the King David Hotel, where an important member of Knesset—“From the opposition, in fact,” I was told by the Foreign Ministry staff member who had set up the visit—would be dining with them. Afterward he would make a speech and answer the delegation’s questions about current affairs, “because the foreign minister not only agrees they should hear differing opinions, he
insists
on it.”

I went up to the room assigned to me—not all groups are as generous as this one—and I showered and phoned home. Six rings and a sigh of relief: no answer; Liora is not at home. Or maybe she is at home and she knows it’s me and has decided not to pick up the phone. Or perhaps it’s
the telephone itself, once again identifying the caller and once again choosing to ignore me and remain silent.

“Hello,” I said. “Hello …” and then: “Liora? It’s me. If you’re there, would you be kind enough to pick up?”

But it was my own voice—matter-of-fact and polite—that responded: “You have reached the home of Liora and Yair Mendelsohn. We can’t come to the phone right now,” and after my voice, hers — impatient and enthralling in its Americanness, its hoarseness: “Leave your message after the beep.”

I hung up and phoned Tirzah on her mobile. Tirzah never answers with “Hello.” Sometimes it’s “Yes,” and sometimes “Just a moment, please,” and then I can hear her giving instructions to people, and I listen with pleasure.

“All right,” she said, “I’m with you now”

“Why don’t you come up to Jerusalem, Tiraleh? They gave me a bed that’s too big and a full moon and a window overlooking the walls of the Old City”

“It’s you, luvey? I thought it was that pest of an engineer from the Public Works Department.”

Tirzah doesn’t use my name. Sometimes she calls me Iraleh, the way her father did when we were kids—“Here are Iraleh and Tiraleh,” he would proclaim whenever he saw us together—and sometimes, affectionately, she calls me “luvey”

“It’s me. A different pest.”

She laughed. Now she’s finally convinced: not
that
pest, but
this
pest. When Tirzah laughs, I’m happy I can take it as a compliment; she laughs because of me.

“Where are you?”

“At the King David. So, are you coming?”

She laughed again. Certainly a nice proposition, absolutely, she and I and the bed and the window with the moon and the walls of the Old City a very tempting proposition, but the next morning they would be pouring the concrete at a project in Haifa Bay and she had two meetings with people from the Defense Ministry—one with the jerk from the Building Department and one with the nice guy from Finance—“and I was hoping we’d have a chance to meet at our house, because there are a few decisions we have to make.”

I ignored the “our house” and asked what decisions she was talking about.
“The usual: floor tiles, window frames, what colors to paint the walls. Don’t worry, I’ll decide; you just have to be there.”

“Tomorrow I finish up with these Americans and then I can come.”

“How are they?”

“You won’t believe it: one of them was in the Palmach.”

“You love me?” she asked playfully

“Yes. And yes,” I answered, preempting her next question, which would be, as always, “And you miss me?”

“Do you want to hear what else we’ve managed with the renovations?”

“I’ve got to tell you something this guy suddenly told me.”

“Stories are for bedtime.”

“I’m in bed.”

“For when we’re both in bed, not just you. Tomorrow night. We’ll inaugurate the full moon and you’ll tell me everything. And bring me one of those fried-egg “samwiches” from Glick’s kiosk—have them go heavy on the salt and tell them to sear the hot pepper on the grill. Tell them it’s for me. Don’t forget to tell them: It’s for Meshulam Fried’s daughter!”

I got dressed, looked at myself in the mirror, and decided to skip the dinner and the important member of Knesset from the opposition and his differing opinions. I stripped off my clothes, climbed back into my large bed, and napped fitfully, annoyingly facing the full moon and the walls of the Old City, and awakened more tired than before, then got dressed and went down to the bar.

T
HE OLD LION
was lying in wait on an armchair in the corner of the lobby, alert and smelling of aftershave. His eyes and his watch glowed in the dim light, his white mane coiffed, his wrinkles deep, his silver eyebrows standing on end.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” he said as he rose to greet me, though it was not clear whether from politesse or to remind me of his advantage over me—in years, in height, in knowledge. His eyes had seen, while mine had not. His ears had heard, while mine had merely imagined. His mind was shelves of memory, while mine was rolls of conjectures.

“I was promised an important delegation from America,” I told him.
“They never mentioned anything about a guy who served in the Palmach.”

“I wanted to thank you,” he said. “I hadn’t been back to most of those places since then, and I thought it was going to be tough for me.”

“Well, certainly not as tough as back then, during the war.”

“You’d be surprised, but in some ways it was easier then. I was a colt, really eager to see battle, ready to take on anything and quick to heal. I was just what a war wants its soldiers to be: a guy without a potbelly or a brain or kids or memories.”

“So where was it most difficult for you today? At the cemetery or the monastery?”

“The monastery At least at the cemetery there was one good thing: they’re dead but I’m still alive. Once upon a time I felt guilty about that, but not anymore.”

“He’s buried there too,” I said.

“Who is?”

“The guy you told me about today, the pigeon handler who went to battle with you guys and got killed.”

“The Baby!” he cried. “That’s the reason I’ve been waiting for you here. To tell you I remembered: we all called him the Baby”

And when you recall his name, can you picture him, too?”

“His face? Not really More the image—kind of blurry without all the features. But it’s him all right. He was called the Baby because he was short and chubby, and someone from the Jordan Valley told us that’s what he was called at school and on his kibbutz. He was always busy with his birds, and he never let anyone get near the loft because he didn’t want to frighten them. He explained to us that pigeons need to love their home; otherwise they won’t return to it. Will you look at this! When I talk to you, more and more memories come back, but I can’t for the life of me recall his real name.”

He leaned over me as he had at the monastery, and in spite of his eighty years the scent of a predator filled the air: a breath of chocolate and mint, a whiff of alcohol, faint aftershave, rare meat—bloody on the inside, seared on the outside—a nonsmoker. My nostrils informed me that his shirt had been laundered with Ivory, like my wife’s undies, and underneath it all was battle smoke, dust from roads that never settles, embers from a bonfire.

“It’s remarkable, you know: the older and denser I get, the more things rise to the surface. We never had a single night when we weren’t
busy, and there was a division of labor: whoever didn’t go out to battle dug graves for the ones who didn’t return. I can still hear the sound of the pickaxes in the valley, metal on rock, even more than the sound of gunfire. You just dig and dig, you don’t even dare think about who exactly it’s going to be this time. Incidentally, he was one of the regular grave diggers.”

“Who was?”

“The Baby After all, until the battle at the monastery he didn’t fight with us. So he dug graves for the ones who did. The graves were supposed to be ready when the guys came back in the morning with the bodies. The dead hate to wait.”

How strange, I thought to myself: the man doesn’t seem the talkative type. But now he appears to be purging himself of everything that has piled up inside him and been waiting for release since then. I recalled a story you told me when I was a teenager. You said that words are born and multiply in lots of ways: some subdivide like amoebas; others send out shoots and branches. With this guy the letters were mating with memories.

“And what about you? Did you join the war as a volunteer from America?”

“What?! You’re insulting my Hebrew! I’m originally from Petah-Tikva; I still have family there. I’m a product of Mikveh Israel, agricultural training school, and the reserves and Haportzim, the fourth battalion of the Palmach. Judging by the tour you gave us today you know these places just as well as I do: the Castel, Colonia, Bab-el-Wad, and Katamon, of course. And then the war ended and I wasn’t accepted at the Technion, so I went to study engineering in America instead. I met a girl there, got a job with her father—”

“He really
was
called the Baby,” I said, putting a stop to his prattle. “And the pigeon you were talking about this afternoon really
was
one of his.”

“I see you’ve taken a great interest in that pigeon handler,” said the elderly American Palmachnik. “Did you know him?”

“How could I? I wasn’t even born then.”

“So what’s your connection to him?”

“I’m interested in homing pigeons,” I told him. “Maybe because I’ve taken visiting bird-watchers around the country in search of migrating birds.”

The gold in his eyes faded to blue, his wrinkles softened, his expression
grew friendlier, as if he wished to recount more and, without knowing it, to offer consolation as well—to explain and to heal.

“We won the battle at the monastery by a hair,” he said, “and with major casualties and wounded. Even a few poor nuns got killed. Among the living there was a kind of a joke about it: like us, the nuns died for Jerusalem; like us, they died virgins. We fought right through the night, and when the sun rose, instead of encouraging us it filled us with despair. In the light of day we could see they had more and more reinforcements, and an armored vehicle with a machine gun and a cannon, and worst of all, we could see the true color of our wounded and we knew who might live and who was sure to die. We had so many down that we’d already begun to wonder what would happen if the order was given to retreat: who would we take with us and what would we do with the ones we couldn’t. And then, like some heaven-sent miracle, the transmitter started working again and announced that the Arabs had started beating a hasty retreat from the whole area, with their commander at the lead, and we should just hold on a little longer. What can I tell you? In the end we won, but it was one of those victories where the winner is more surprised than the loser.”