A Pigeon and a Boy (36 page)

Meshulam grabbed me tightly around the waist and pulled me in to his short, thick, sturdy body which was like mine.

“Professor Mendelsohn,” the young doctor said through the speaker, “my father was your student many years ago. Please, this conversation is only meant to test whether the equipment is functioning properly”

“This bed, on which I am lying, alone,” said Yordad, pursuing his own agenda, “was our bed. When I lie in it I feel very bad, and when I lie in some other bed I feel even worse.”

“Why didn’t you say so?” Meshulam let go of me and burst into Yordad’s room. “I’ll bring you new beds right away!”

“Thank you, Professor Mendelsohn,” said the young doctor. “The equipment is working. I am ending this conversation.”

The director, the electrician, and the technician departed. The cook that Meshulam had found for Yordad appeared, laden with groceries. At that moment I felt useless, since a friend and a cook are far more helpful to Yordad than I.

“Stay for a meal,” Meshulam told me. “There’ll be kebab and salad within twenty minutes.”

“No, I’ll leave,” I said, thinking I should not have come in the first place. As usual, Benjamin had been right. There are things you need to do with a friend, not with your sons. With a technician, not with family And there are stories better told to a stranger, through a microphone and a buzzer and a speaker, through wires and panic buttons.

T
WO DAYS LATER
I paid him another visit.

“How are you, Yairi? I didn’t hear you come in; the panic button didn’t ring.”

I decided not to explain or correct him.

“How are Liora and the girls?” Yordad asked.

My skin turned to gooseflesh. How had those dead fetuses been reconceived in his brain? How had his mouth given birth to two live girls?

“Liora is fine,” I said. Should I remind him of that bird-watching gynecologist who said, “It was a boy,” and then, “This boy was a girl”? Should I quote Liora, whose words were no less terrible: “It’s the two of us together that’s the problem”?

“I have a new joke,” Yordad said. “Would you like to hear it?”

“Where do you get these jokes from? Do you have new friends I don’t know about?”

“From the Internet. I find them and record them in a notepad.”

And he extended a beautiful, white hand to the small table next to his bed, opened a drawer, and removed a notepad. I have already mentioned that Yordad loved notepads and always had a number of them on hand. And just as he classified and separated everything, so too did he divide them up: his patient notepad and his list-of-chores notepad and his ideas notepad, which he would suddenly remove from his pocket to record something that he would conceal with blatant stealth. And although he had become a knowledgeable amateur of computers, he claimed there were situations in which a notepad was quicker and more user-friendly Now jokes had their own notepad, so that if, heaven forbid, guests should come, he could read them jokes instead of being amicable and conducting a conversation.

“Lots of people are interested in being friends with us,” my mother used to tell him. “But you build walls between us and them.”

“I am tired,” he would say, and “Anyway you invited people only yesterday,” and “I have a headache.”

“Those are the kinds of excuses women make, Yaacov”

He would take offense and fall silent, then walk straight-backed down to his clinic.

My mother loved guests and flourished when hosting. She knew how
to seat them so that conversation would flow and no one would feel abandoned or out of the loop. She knew who to place near whom and, more important—Meshulam’s joke—who to keep away from whom. She recognized the woman who needed to stay near her husband and the woman who would blossom if separated from him. Her eyes sparkled in anticipation of their arrival, her smile shone. Only now, in my new house, many years after she left home and a few months after her death, does it occur to me that she invited guests so as not to remain alone with Yordad.

Pleasant aromas wafted from the refreshments she prepared for guests. There was a sort of simple pastry she was renowned for, small puffs of seasoned dough stuffed with tiny frankfurters. The secret, said mouths astonished into joy, was the sauce in which they were cooked, a sort of “dainty-dainty” sauce, she called it, made of mustard and black cumin, which she had concocted herself

After my mother left home, Yordad’s friends and acquaintances also began to disappear. And he, when his walls of arrogance and isolation had fallen, discovered that behind them there was no one. No enemy no companion, no battering foe, no knocking guest. There remained nothing but the infrequent visitor: doctors, students, lawyers asking his opinion on issues of medical malpractice, and us: Benjamin, rarely; Liora, who comes to see him whenever she is in Jerusalem on matters of business and they enjoy a conversation together in English; me, who comes whenever I am in Jerusalem on matters of idleness and emotion; and the Double-Ys, his grandsons, who, even today, at twenty, continue their regular entertainment with him, which began when they were babies —a trip through the pages of the large German atlas, the very same atlas he had traveled years earlier with us.

“Come, children,” he says to them just as he said to us, “let’s take a trip in the atlas to all sorts of lands.” And those two enormous twins sit obediently Y- 1 on his grandfather’s right and Y-2 on his left, but unlike Benjamin and me, who followed him through deserts and crossed rivers and mountain ranges with him, they stop at their favorite map, the one of food and agriculture. They scan the meat countries and the fish countries, the olive oil countries and the butter countries; they take pity on the puree-deprived and deplore the eaters of tofu and lettuce and seaweed. They spy out land after land, the fat with the lean.

The world is split, Yordad explains to them again: this part eats corn, this part eats rice, and here, in our part, people eat wheat. And they
inform him, “Not anymore, Grandfather. Everyone eats everything. We eat corn, too, and different kinds of rices, as well as wheats.” And they ask when Yordad’s cook will be there, the Romanian laborer whose culinary skills Meshulam discovered and who he then sent to our house after my mother left. He was a young worker when he first came to us, and he has grown old along with Meshulam and Yordad. He cleans the house, too, does the laundry and ironing and shopping, clips Yordad’s toenails since Yordad cannot bend down to them anymore, and helps him get in and out of the shower.

Meshulam has warned him not to dare add onion to Professor Mendelsohn’s salad, and instead
of mamaliga
and
icre,
Romanian specialties that met with a cool “No, thank you,” he learned to prepare
linsen-suppe mit wurst
—lentil soup with bits of sausage—and to season potatoes with
schnittlauch
and butter. The Romanian foods he makes include pickled vegetables,
ciorba, and mititei.

He does not sit with Professor Mendelsohn at the table, although on occasion he will pour the two of them a little
fuicd
as a digestif, and he will stand next to him and say
Salut!,
after which he will clean the kitchen and assist Professor Mendelsohn on his walk outdoors.

Meshulam himself also visits. Three times a week, sometimes more. Even though he has his own key he knocks at the door, gently (“Maybe Professor Mendelsohn is sleeping just now?”) but loud enough (“Maybe a lady friend is visiting just now?”), and only then does he unlock the door and enter silently If Yordad is sleeping, he makes his little “tour of the house”: he oils hinges, tests the straps that lift the jalousies (“We’re going to have to tighten this little lady”), checks the faucets and outlets (“We’re going to have to replace this guy”). And sometimes he ascends to the large apartment upstairs, where we once lived, to see if everything is in order at the renters’ place (“So they won’t drive Professor Mendelsohn nuts if there are problems up there”).

And if Professor Mendelsohn is awake, Meshulam prepares coffee for them both, sometimes pours them each a shot—“Raya loved brandy,” they both recall then—and chats with him. Meshulam can talk with anyone about any topic; he makes up for his ignorance with intelligence and curiosity

I told Yordad I was jealous of this masculine friendship. And after a brief
FOR
and
AGAINST
I added, “You know what? I can’t help thinking that if Gershon were alive he could have been my friend like Meshulam is yours.”

“Gershon died a long time ago,” Yordad said dryly “I would recommend, Yairi, that you find another friend.”

“It’s not so easy,” I said. “At my age people don’t make new friends.” I told him that wooing a man was far more difficult than wooing a woman because with women “you can send your body on ahead of you, lay your life on the line. With men you have to start with your brains and your heart.”

A cloud of dissatisfaction passed over Yordad’s face. He gave this terrifying possibility several seconds of consideration, then said, “Yes, Yairi, that is truly an interesting predisposition.” And suddenly he added, “I have heard you are building a house for yourself, Yairi.”

“I’m not building, I’m renovating,” I told him.

“But you have a beautiful home in Tel Aviv ”

“The house in Tel Aviv is Liora’s. She chose it, she bought it, she designed it. Now I am renovating a home for myself.”

“A home of my own,” Yordad said, correcting me. He gazed at me and I panicked: Was he interpreting me or quoting you? Was he aware that you had given me money to buy this house? If so, who had told him? Meshulam? You? And if he knew about it, who else did? My brother? My wife?

“Take me there, Yairi. I’m interested in seeing it.”

“With pleasure.”

“Let’s make a date,” he said as he pulled a different black notepad from the drawer in the table next to his bed.

“You need a datebook to make plans with me?”

“I am not the idler you and Benjamin think I am,” Yordad grumbled. “I have meetings, I still write articles, and every morning I go on the Internet, and there is mail waiting for me from medical journals. I also look for myself there. It turns out I’m still alive. People quote me.”

I praised him for his speedy adjustment to using computers and e-mail and word processing.

“It wouldn’t hurt you either to move ahead, learn something new,” he told me. “All those who stay behind and worship what used to be forget that in that wonderful past half of all children died of disease before the age of five. And what’s there to be afraid of with something that makes life so much easier? I download music, Yairi, I go to concerts of Beethoven and Mozart, I attend conferences —”

“What about other composers?”

“There are no other composers. At my age you already know what is good and what is less so.”

“Mother loved opera,” I said.

“She did not love opera, she loved one opera. Only one:
Dido and Aeneas.
And from that, only one aria, the one successful aria in an opera that is otherwise simply a nuisance.”

He began reciting it with solemn proficiency

“Come, Yairi,” Yordad said when he had finished, “let’s make a date for our trip.”

I took out my datebook, too.

“You see,” Yordad said after rejecting the first three dates I suggested, “I am busier than you.”

We found a time that was convenient for him, and I suggested we combine our trip to the house with a little journey “I’ll bring some food, we’ll sit somewhere pleasant with shade, you’ll breathe a little fresh air, and your eyes will be revived by the view”

On the way home I bought a compact disc: Beethoven, not a complete work but a collection of selected bits. That way he would enjoy himself on the way and I would not suffer. I also bought a folding chair in case he accepted my suggestion about parking somewhere along the way and having a bite to eat. And a pillow: perhaps Yordad would get tired and want to doze a bit.

O
N THE APPOINTED DAY
I rose and left Tel Aviv early in the morning. When I arrived at Yordad’s, I found Meshulam there as well.

“Seven in the morning,” I said in wonder. “What, do you sleep here, too?”

“We old guys get up early anyhow, so I come visit. If we don’t help one another, who will?”

Professor Mendelsohn made a grand appearance. His thick hair crowned the heights of his head like a silver diadem. Age had not lessened his stature by even an inch; nor had it added an ounce to his weight or diminished the natural elegance and ease of his body

“Good morning, Yairi.” He beamed in my direction. “I am ready You undoubtedly thought you would have to wait.”

“Look at him! As fresh as a palm branch during the Sukkoth holiday
“Oysgeputst!
Notify the police: Professor Mendelsohn is stepping out of the house, put all the girls behind key and lock!”

He was right. Yordad was dressed in long khaki trousers, perfectly creased, and a soft, pale blue shirt underneath a sand-colored cashmere jacket, with comfortable brown suede shoes.

“Cruisewear!” Meshulam proclaimed. “All he needs is a cravat and he’s Prince Monaco!”

He gave a supporting arm to Professor Mendelsohn, who trembled as he descended the four steps. Then Meshulam hastened to bring him his straw hat and walking stick, and when Yordad refused to take them Meshulam handed them to me, to put in Behemoth. In spite of the desire burning in him and apparent in his every movement, he was smart enough not to raise the idea of joining us.

“Did you know that, Meshulam?” Yordad asked. “Yairi is building himself a house, so that he will have a home of his own.”

“A very good idea,” Meshulam said, feigning innocence. “A small, old house, a few flowers, big trees in the garden. And most important, a view Iraleh, how is it that you haven’t told me? I can help you with the renovations.”