A Pigeon and a Boy (24 page)

“I remember you—you work in Miriam’s loft,” he told him. “Your girlfriend hasn’t come yet, but come on in, come in, you can wait for her inside.”

O
N HIS WAY
home two days later, the Baby traveled by bus. Four pigeons, given to him by the Girl, lay in the wicker basket. Dr. Laufer told the two of them, “Pigeongrams of love are very nice, but we have work and training exercises to carry out. With every pigeon you dispatch, add a pigeongram with the information about the time and weather. And do not mix up our message capsules with your goose quills; otherwise we ladies are liable to read what you ladies write to one another,
haw, haw, haw …
Now, since you are on duty I am giving you a little money for the trip and your bus ticket.”

He thought about her throughout the trip, about the walk they had taken together along the Tel Aviv seashore, about the street where she had removed her hand from his and the alley where she had not. About the kiss she had given him, about the kisses he had given her, about the way in which she had brushed his hand from her breast and exhaled, about their mingling tongues. He asked that she teach him to whistle, and when he failed with one finger and also with two, she said, “So let’s try like this,” and put her fingers in his mouth.

“Whistle!” she said, but his tongue was stuck between her fingers and his diaphragm filled with desire and his lungs could not inhale.

“Whistle!” she repeated, and his whistle turned into the laughter of surprise and endearment. The Girl said, “Now like this,” and she took both his index fingers into her mouth, and when she blew in his face he felt that he was blowing, too. He had never felt such exhilaration before. The sea was churning. Their eyes met, close to the point of blurring, deep to the point of drowning.

“Yes or no?” he asked.

“Yes or no what?”

“Can I take a pigeon of yours? Yes or no?”

He recalled the look on her face as she took his pigeons, as well as her expression when she gave him her own and said, “We ladies agree.” And because the country was small and the longings were intense, two pigeons were dispatched the very next morning, one from a loft in the Jordan Valley, the other from the central pigeon loft in the Tel Aviv zoo.

The pigeons, which naturally crossed paths en route, arrived and alighted, their shiny breasts beating powerfully The Girl and the Baby each in her or his place, passed along to Dr. Laufer and to Miriam the contents of their message capsules, unlaced the silk strings that held the quill to the pigeons’ tails, and stepped aside to read the words meant just for them. Short, numbered words, as was the practice with homing pigeons: Yes and yes and yes and yes. Yes we are in love, yes we miss you, yes we have not forgotten, yes we remember.

Never had they imagined that words so short, so few, and so simple could bring such joy Never had they known how many times one could read and reread them. Miriam and Dr. Laufer, he in Tel Aviv, she in the kibbutz, regarded the Baby and the Girl with a sigh and a smile. They knew that this was how things would be: after a love letter brought by a pigeon, the sender and the addressee would never again consent to any other type of postman. Nothing would ever compare to the dispatching,
the vanishing before escorting eyes, the appearance—at the very same moment—before awaiting eyes.

Here she is: diving, arriving, flying straight as an arrow, the thrum of the beating of her wings mixing with the thrum of blood in the temples, the heart. What can compare to holding her? To the soft feathers of her breast? To removing the letter from the quill? To the beating of her heart? And how does she have the strength to carry so much love? And what is more rousing: the release of the dispatcher or the grasp of the receiver?

Dr. Laufer was satisfied, too. On one of the northbound flights a local record was broken: a pigeon had flown from the Girl to the Baby at an average speed of seventy-four kilometers per hour, just three less than the male pigeon Alphonse, the Belgian record holder for that year.

Every two months the Baby would come to Tel Aviv, bringing and taking new pigeons, and after a year the Girl came to him in the kibbutz.

“This is the girl you’ve been telling me about? The one that was there when you took him and the pigeons to the zoo?” the Baby’s aunt asked her husband.

“She’s grown a little since then, but that is absolutely the one,” he confirmed.

“Who would have believed,” the aunt said, “that the most beautiful and most intelligent girl ever seen around here would come for our little
kelbeleh?
You watch and see how the girls will chase after him now Girls can smell things like this. I just hope he won’t do anything foolish.”

Chapter Ten

E
VEN WHEN
Meshulam said, “Their price is too high” and “We can bring those slime bags to their knees,” I did not argue. The price was set and I was invited to “bring the wife” to a meeting of the membership committee.

“What am I going to do?” I asked him. “Liora will make the wrong impression with her expensive clothes. She’ll raise objections and talk in English.”

“So bring Tiraleh instead,” Meshulam said. “She’ll make a great Mrs. Mendelsohn. For the committee, too.”

“What do you mean, ‘bring Tiraleh.’ How?”

“By car, that’s how!”

“She’s not my wife! They said, ‘Bring the wife.’”

“Exactly They said, ‘Bring the wife’; they didn’t say ‘Bring
your
wife.’”

“And what if she won’t agree? How do you know she’ll go along with it?”

“That you can leave to me.”

The next day I was informed over the phone by Meshulam that his Tiraleh agreed. Not only did she agree, she had broken into one of her big laughs. But her father had yet another idea: “If you two are already going to the village together anyway, why don’t you pick her up early, say ten in the morning, from our Tel Aviv office?”

“But the committee meeting is only at night,” I said.

“Summer’s not here yet,” Meshulam said patiently “It’s still spring. There are anemones and cyclamen in shady places, and a few lupines
and cornflowers and buttercups. Even Tiraleh deserves half a day off now and then, no? Take her on a little journey, maybe a nice little picnic with all kinds of goodies. I’ll send someone to buy stuff to fill up a cooler for you. Take a trip, eat, enjoy some time together, and then go to the interview”

“What if she doesn’t have time? What if she isn’t interested? What if she’s got a meeting with someone else?”

“She’s got time, she doesn’t have any meetings, and she’s interested!”

S
OUTHWARD IN SILENCE,
our first time alone together, we departed from Tel Aviv Mine is the tongue-tied silence of awkwardness, hers the smiling silence of anticipation, and then we utter inanities to each other, like “Meshulam arranged beautiful weather for us” and “I like these kinds of clouds, like on
The Simpsons”

I pointed out a high-flying flock of large, soaring birds and told her, “Those are pelicans, heading north.” And she asked, “How can you tell what they are from so far away? Maybe they’re storks.” I informed her that pelicans change colors as they wheel and storks do not.

“Migrating birds have winter homes and summer homes,” I continued several minutes later. “But which of the two is the real one, the one they come home to?”

“The whole world’s their home,” Tirzah said. “When they fly down to Africa all they’re really doing is moving from room to room.”

I told her about the
yaylas,
the summer residences of shepherds in the mountain ranges of northeast Turkey In winter they abandon them and descend to the villages in the valleys and the seaside towns; then in spring they return with their flocks.

“I didn’t know you’d been there,” Tirzah said. “Who did you go with?”

“Nobody,” I told her. “I haven’t even been there myself I went to a lecture about the Kaçkar Mountains at the Traveler shop.”

“Why don’t you go visit the Kaçkar Mountains for real, instead of just listening to other people’s stories?”

“I don’t like going places—I like coming home,” I said, and I recited the other poem I know by heart, the beautiful lines about returning home that are engraved on the tombstone of Robert Louis Stevenson,
about which I also heard at a lecture on Fiji and Samoa and other islands in the Pacific Ocean:

The lecturer read them, told about
Treasure Island and
the house that Stevenson had built for himself in Samoa, noting that he had lived in it for only three years before dying, and about the natives, who had loved him and had carried his body for burial at the top of the hill, and suddenly my hearing and memory finished their mutual evaluation and I understood that Stevenson, and not my mother, had written the lines she would recite for me outside the door of our home on Ben Yehuda Street in Tel Aviv—“Home is the sailor, home from the sea / And the hunter home from the hill”—reciting as she would hand me the key and lift me up to insert it into the lock, telling me, “Open the door and say ‘Hello, house.’”

I
RECALL HOW PLEASED
I was with that childish word
yayla
when I first heard it at that lecture. Not a
Zimmer,
not a dacha, not a summer home, but a yayla. I wondered about the owner of such a yayla, denying the morning frost, ignoring the falling leaves, turning his back on the first snow flurries until finally he has no choice but to shut the door behind him and descend to the apartment he has in a small and decrepit town on the shores of the Black Sea, and for an entire moldy winter that is all coal smoke, mud, and raki, he misses it, his corner of the world in the mountains, this place that is his own, until at last, in the spring, he returns to it, ascends into the mountains, and climbs the wooden stairs and opens the door and breathes in the air that has been awaiting him inside, and he says, “Hello, yayla …” And the yayla, in the manner of homes to which one returns, breathes in and answers him.

“What can I tell you,” chuckled my contractor who is a woman. “It’s a good thing you bought this house. Just in the nick of time.” And she told me that her engineer had already paid a visit and given orders for thickening
the foundations as well as for the addition of a few beams and girders. “Which means, Iraleh, that we need to start discussing the rooms.”

I told her that the division of the rooms—a living room and two small bedrooms —was just fine.

Tirzah said I was a real conservative. “There are no absolute rules in building a house. Everything depends on need and opportunity.” She asked, “Anyway what do you need rooms for? Why don’t we knock a few walls down and make the place into one very large room, plus a small one just in case, and a bathroom and toilet?”

“Because that’s the way it’s supposed to be!” I grumbled, threatened in part by her use of “we.” “Because houses need rooms. Bedrooms and workrooms and guestrooms. That’s the way everyone’s house is. What do you mean, ‘What do you need rooms for?’”

“Don’t get worked up, Iraleh. That’s not why we met today We met to build you a house, and you’d better thank God that I’m your contractor, because you have no idea what a nightmare renovations like these can be.”

“I’m sorry”

“And who is this ‘everyone’ and what’s this ‘that’s the way it’s supposed to be’ business? A home is not a department store that you divide up into ‘home furnishings’ and ‘clothing’ and ‘kitchenware.’ A home should be built around people, not functions. In your case, you’re not raising children and it doesn’t seem like you’ll host a lot of guests; there’s no need for more than a large room for living and cooking and eating and sleeping and reading, and another smaller room with a bed— just in case—and a bathroom, and there should be large windows and doors open to the view, and a big deck, and I haven’t forgotten the shower you requested outside.”

“When do I have to decide?”

As soon as possible. But for now, that’s enough about the house. Where are you taking me?”

I was headed for my three hills: every year they begin with anemones and end with buttercups. Tirzah caught sight of them from far away and, like me the first time I saw them, she could not believe that all that redness could possibly be flowers. But Behemoth drew closer and the scarlet blanket came into focus as red petals with black hearts and the light green of buttercup buds not yet opened and the white-gray of anemone seeds floating in the air.

“Stop!” she cried. “It’s so beautiful, stop!”

She got out of Behemoth, stood facing the red field, and spread her arms wide. I unfurled the blanket and sat down on it. She leaned over me and kissed my mouth, her lips slightly open, neither gaping nor clenched: an amused, exploratory kiss. Her tongue did not enter my mouth; instead, it moved about between my teeth and my upper lip, scrutinizing me. Had this leopard changed his spots? Had my taste changed? This first kiss since the days of our youth made me tremble, both from its similarity to those wanton, clumsy kisses of old and its dissimilarity