by Meir Shalev
“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.
4
THE 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.”
“Well, at least you were happy about it, right?”
“We didn’t have the time or energy for rejoicing. We got up, started organizing the evacuation, and suddenly a little door opens up and three nuns step outside. Two of them dragged the bodies of their sister nuns inside, while the third— she was old and short, a dwarf almost, in a black habit that reached the ground—walked among us with a bottle of water and a few drinking glasses. What a picture that was: us, all those wounded and dead, and this nun wandering around like we’re at some cocktail party and she’s handing out drinks. The whole time she’s saying, “Nero, nero,” and we didn’t know what this nero was, but we knew we’d won because she’d come out to give water to the victors. You get it? If we’d lost, she’d have served water to the Arabs instead.”
“Nero is water,” I told him, “in Greek.”
“If you say so,” the man chuckled. “A tour guide has to know how to say ‘water’ in all kinds of languages. Maybe one day you’ll get some Greek bird-watchers and they’ll be thirsty”
“Bird-watchers don’t come here from Greece,” I said. “They come from England and Germany and Scandinavia and Holland, and sometimes as far away as the U.S.”
But the man flashed me a look of reproach and sent me back to the place and time to which I had led him and which I wished to avoid. “We left the monastery and went looking around; we thought we might find one of our own among all the bodies outside. First we found a dead platoon commander, his guts spilled out on the ground, and then we found him. Someone shouted, ‘Hey look, the Baby is dead.’ God, just saying ‘the Baby is dead’ makes me shake all over.”
“Did you see him, too?”
“Yes, I just told you that, and I told you that earlier, too, but you don’t want to hear it, or else you want to hear it again and again. I saw him lying in that shed near the monastery, between where the grass and the swings are today”
“Inside the shed?”
“Half in, half out.”
Apparently he saw the horror in my eyes and hastened to make himself clear. “I mean, don’t misunderstand me. His body was whole, not like that just sounded. The wall of the shed was half destroyed and he was lying with his legs inside it, but from the waist up he was outside. There was a machine gun lying next to him—a tommy gun—and lots of gardening tools, and if you’re interested, then I’ll tell you his face was whole and at peace, and his eyes were open and looking upward. That was the worst part of it: they were full of life, and they were watching. You know what I was thinking about then? Not what I’m thinking about now I thought, Where the hell did the Baby get a tommy gun! We were fighting with shitty old Stens that never stopped jamming, and he’d been given a tommy gun? Forty-five caliber—a bullet that no matter where it hits you, you’re dead! Now do you understand why it was easier for me back then than it is now? That’s the way it is when you’re young. I couldn’t figure out how it was that he’d been given a tommy gun and we hadn’t.”
I could no longer be sure what had brought this on, what had given birth to this outpouring: the words, the drink, me, the images in his mind. What had really happened there and what had been conceived in his memory?
“We’d been given green American battle dress, leftovers from World War II. Where the insignias and ranks had once been, the green was darker. Do you believe the bullshit I can still remember, and yet I can’t remember some of the important stuff? Anyway, he was lying there in battle dress that had once belonged to an American sergeant about twice his size, and when we picked him up his arms fell to the sides and the battle dress opened and we saw that his pants—excuse me for telling you this—his pants had been cut open from the belt to almost the knee and peeled back to both sides, and everything was bloody and wounded and hanging out.”
Suddenly the American thrust out his arm. “Here,” he said as his hand grasped my right hip, then slipped around to my lower back and remained there. “The bullet went in here and came out here …” His hand slid to the front and pressed lightly, and I did not know what to do with the strength of the repulsion, and the pleasantness, I was feeling.
“Maybe there was more than one bullet, maybe it was a whole round, because his, his … what do you call it, I’ve forgotten the word in Hebrew … his hip, yes, his hip was just gone, completely exposed, and there were such quantities of blood, and his thigh was shredded, all the bones jutting out. I think he managed to cut open his pants but didn’t get a chance to treat his wounds and so he wound up lying there like that until he died.”
“What about the pigeons?” I asked.
He removed his hand. Grief and relief mingled one with the other. “The little dovecote he carried on his back had been shattered to pieces, and there were two dead pigeons on the floor. The third one was gone; that was apparently the one I told you about when we were there today” To my great distress, he began to hum the tune to a song I had heard my mother sing many times: To silence the cannon yields / In abandoned killing fields. He said, “And it was a beautiful, special kind of a day; only later we realized it was the First of May, and there was this bird rising up above all that hell, that valley of death. She’d been lucky the dovecote got smashed—that’s how she managed to escape.”
“She didn’t escape,” I told him. “He dispatched her. He did manage to do something before he died.”
The man was astonished. “Who told you such a thing?”
“There’s no other possibility That’s the only way the facts fit together.”
“What do you mean he sent her? With a letter to headquarters?”
“He didn’t send her,” I corrected him. “He dispatched her. ‘Dispatch is the correct word for pigeons, and that is precisely what he did, like Noah in the ark: And he dispatched a dove, and the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot, and she returned to him into the ark.’”
“And what about that pigeon? What happened to her?”
“He sent it to his girlfriend in Tel Aviv”
All at once I felt that feeling I’d known from long ago: the wings beating inside my body, up and down, from the vibration in my knees to the emptiness in my loins to the ache in my breast to the spasms in my gullet. Home, Odysseus of the Feathered Creatures, in a straight line. The great magnetic forces of the earth are guiding her flight, longing pushes her from behind, love is signaling to her, switching on the landing lights: come, come, come, return from afar. That was the reason why the Baby had taken her, the purpose for her domestication, her training, her heredity “Strong muscles, featherweight body, hollow bones, the lungs and heart of an athlete, the ability to navigate, a sense of direction.”
And the three desires that become one: the desire of the Baby, who at that moment had died; the desire of his beloved, who at that moment already sensed what lay ahead; and the desire of the bird to reach home. Home. Home to Tel Aviv, to the gold of the sand, to the blue of the water, to the pink tiles of the roofs.
Home. To the upraised, joyful eyes awaiting her. To the heart beating on her behalf To the hand that will greet her with seeds of hashish, the traditional gift that pigeon handlers present to their birds returning from afar. To the other hand, which will remove the message capsule from her leg. And then the terrible scream of comprehension, his name spattered from mouth to heavens, the slamming of the door to the pigeon loft and the footsteps receding in great haste.
“God,” the elderly American Palmachnik from Petah-Tikva said. “What are you trying to tell me? That that’s what he managed to do with the last
moments of his life? To send a pigeon to his girlfriend in Tel Aviv?”
I said nothing, and he grew agitated. “And what exactly did he write her from there: Hello, I’m dead?”
Chapter Two
1
IWENT TO FIND myself a home. Some people shoot—themselves or others—but I went to find myself a home. A home that would heal, and soothe, and build me as I built it, and we would be grateful for each other.
Off I went, armed with the surprising gift my mother had given me: to carry out her will, the command she’d issued with a note of regret threaded through her words: “Take this, Yair. Go find yourself a home. A place to rest the soles of your feet. A place of your very own.”
“A home that has been lived in,” she instructed me, “small and old. Fix it up a bit …” She stopped talking for a moment, gulping air and coughing. “And make sure it’s in an old village and the trees nearby have matured—cypress trees are best, but an old carob tree is good too, and there should be weeds poking through the cracks in the sidewalk.”
She explained: in an old village the scores have been settled and the old enmities have grown accustomed to one another and the truly great loves—not the small bothersome ones—have settled down and there is no longer a need for guesswork or the strength for experimentation.
“Rest awhile, Mother,” I said. “It’s not good for you to talk a lot and exert yourself.”
You were lying in your sickbed, winded and impatient, several gladioluses in a pitcher on top of the cabinet, a blue kerchief covering your bald head. “Large trees, Yair, don’t forget. The wind in a big tree is different from that of young trees. Here, take this … and build your self a little outdoor shower, too. It is pleasant to shower facing the wind and the view”
My body trembled, my hand reached out and took it, my eyes looked and read. “Where did all this money come from?” my mouth asked.
“From Mother.”
You coughed, you drank the air in spasms. “Take it while my hand is warm and I am still alive to give it to you. And tell no one about it. Not your brother, not Yordad, not your wife.”
