by Meir Shalev
Indeed, as he walked about the kibbutz, the Baby’s eyes were always cast downward, not from fear or embarrassment but because they were on the lookout for a shiny beetle or a glittering stone or the darting green lightning of a lizard. And sometimes he would notice a coin or a key that had fallen from someone’s pocket. Then he would rush to his aunt and hand over, quite officially, the new find, and she would pat him on his neck and say, “What a nice little kelbeleh you are.” Then she would give him a note to pin to the notice board in the dining hall: the lost item could be retrieved from her at the cowshed by providing identifying marks. The Baby had been certain that a kelbeleh was a puppy and it was only years later, after joining the Palmach, that he discovered it meant “calf,” and he did not know if he should be happy or irritated. One way or the other, this virtue of his became known around the kibbutz, and more than once he was called upon to find something important that had gone missing, because his eyes were quick at searching and scanning and finding that which was lost, just as in the future they would know how to identify each returning pigeon while it was still high in the sky and far off.
So it was one morning that he was standing with the other children who were waiting for their ride to the collective school when suddenly a strange truck appeared and stopped at the edge of the road. Everyone regarded it with curiosity Vehicles were not at that time a common sight, each and every car arousing the interest of children, and thus an unknown truck even more so.
A man in work clothes and boots — the kind of thin man whose age could be anywhere from thirty to sixty, the kind of man who seems both very familiar and completely unfamiliar at the same time— alighted from the truck. He shouted, “Thank you very much, driver-comrade!” and “Good morning, children-comrades!” as he began walking with long strides. He was very tall, in his hand a woven wicker basket with a handle and a lid, his nose slightly hooked, his freckles plentiful and densely scattered, his thick red hair parted precisely in the middle of his head.
The visitor made straight for the tent camp of the Palmach, presented himself to the platoon commander, and the two headed purposefully for the kibbutz carpentry shop. In the carpentry shop they were met by planks, nails, screens, a carping carpenter, and tools. In those days every kibbutz had a carpentry shop, and every carpentry shop had a carping carpenter, and every such carping carpenter, when asked to carpenter some thing, even if he was told that this thing was important for the nation soon to be born and the war drawing near, would grow even surlier. But this visitor was accustomed to carping carpenters, was familiar with their habits and manners, and even knew the best way to draw out their patience: he showed them “top secret” sketches. He whispered, “You may not reveal this!” He gestured with freckled hands that explained and requested, and, most important, he asked questions that gave his cohort the impression that he was not issuing orders but, rather, asking for advice.
The two began toiling over something that at first appeared to be a giant box or a tiny shed, the walls of which sported openings of various heights and sizes; a person could move about erect in this space, his arms spread. A short time later, internal compartments were added, and shelves on the outside, and screened windows covered with wooden slats, and double doors, the inner one with screens.
For two whole days the sounds of pounding and sawing and arguments and instructions in Yiddish, German, and Hebrew could be heard. On the third day the platoon commander sent several young men from the Palmach tent camp around to the carpentry shop. They loaded the small screened-in shed onto a cart, pulled it to the petting farm of the kibbutz children, and set it up there, facing east. The visitor checked to make sure that no nail or splinter was sticking out, and when he was satisfied he said, several times, “That is good,” and “That is very good.” Then he opened the lid of the wicker basket he had brought with him and removed from it a pigeon. It was a pigeon like any other: bluish-gray similar to a thousand other pigeons, but broad-winged and short-tailed, a light-colored swelling where the beak met the head. The visitor placed the pigeon in the small shed, and while everyone understood that this was a pigeon loft, they had no idea for what purpose it had been built and why only one pigeon had taken up residence there.
The visitor served his pigeon a dish of water and some seeds, then went to the dining hall but did not eat a full meal there. At first he pecked at his plate, then began dunking an endless series of cookies into an endless series of cups of tea with lemon, an act observed by many eyes and interrupted only when the Baby’s aunt approached his table.
“Hello, Doctor,” she said, and added, “how are you?” Then she invited him to pay a visit to the cowshed to see a calf leaning toward death.
Thus everyone learned what only the dairy-farmer aunt knew: that this was not just any redhead who builds pigeon lofts and places in them a single pigeon, but a veterinarian. And not just any cattle curer from some nearby town or kibbutz but a real doctor, with a diploma! The visitor examined the calf, collected ingredients from various women—the dairy farmer, the medic, the supplies administrator—as well as from the kitchen of the children’s house, and concocted a tepid and putrid remedy, which he siphoned into the calf’s mouth from a bucket; after this he went to the room allotted him and, according to the night watchmen, did not extinguish the light in there until dawn.
First thing in the morning, the visitor left his room, hurried to the cowshed, administered more of the remedy he had mixed the day before, and said, “Patience, calf-comrade, soon you will heal and forget.” From there he proceeded, limbs flapping, to his pigeon loft, where he removed a small notepad from his shirt pocket, wrote something on a thin slip of paper, tore it out, rolled it up, and placed it inside a capsule he had taken from his trouser pocket. He took hold of the pigeon, attached the capsule to her leg, and let her fly
There was something pleasant and pleasing in the way his hands dispatched the pigeon, a gesture that contained the granting of freedom and the handing over of power and a wave of good-bye and hope and envy Everyone present at that moment was stupefied. Their gazes followed the pigeon until she disappeared in the distance. Even the veterinarian was stirred, despite having dispatched thousands of pigeons since he was a boy in the German city of Köln, where he had been born and raised, and where he had dispatched his first pigeon.
For a moment his hands remained outstretched, as if helping the pigeon in her ascent; then he pulled them in and tented them over his eyes. His gaze escorted her as she grew distant, his lips wishing her a safe and swift journey There is joy and newness in every dispatch, he thought to himself, and when she could no longer be seen he removed a second pad from a different pocket and scribbled something.
The next day a green pickup truck entered the kibbutz laden with metal boxes and wood-frame crates with screens; small, bulging burlap sacks; more woven wicker baskets; troughs; and tin vessels. At the wheel sat a silent young woman, the kind whose knee never stops jiggling when she is seated, and she, too, had brought with her a single bluish-gray pigeon. A certain type of know-it-all began to gabble about female drivers and those who give them licenses, while another type of know-it-all began to argue whether it was the same pigeon the visitor had dispatched the day before.
In the metal boxes there were tools and instruments, the burlap sacks were stuffed with seeds and grain, and from the wooden crates there arose soft noises, an impatient scratching and a dull cooing. It did not take a genius to connect the sounds to the sights and the guesses to the smells, and to understand that inside these crates there were more pigeons. The veterinarian and the silent young woman emptied the truck, put everything in the shade, and went to check that all was in order in the new pigeon loft. Afterward, they gave the carpenter “the trap door,” a set of thin metal bars rotating on a common axis that can be set to swing outward only, or inward only, or in both directions, or in neither.
The carpenter affixed the trap door to the opening of the pigeon loft, and the veterinarian brought th
e troughs and tin vessels inside and secured them. Spying the tip of a nail that was pointed inward and had managed to escape his notice, he said, “You thought we didn’t see you!” and pounded it with his hammer. Then the silent young woman smiled a smile that no one had suspected her of harboring and she took out a handsome and colorful sign written in Hebrew lettering and adorned with childish flowers and blossoms and birds. The letters spelled out PIGEON LOFT. She hung the sign over the door of the loft, took two steps back, looked at it, straightened it, then smiled again, while among the onlookers a third type of know-it-all began to wonder whether, after smiling so much to herself, she might not smile at others.
Then she took a hoe and a pickax, moved away from the loft, and dug a large, square pit. She was strong and diligent, she neither stopped work nor straightened up until she had completed the task, and she answered with a shake of her head “all the fighters from the pioneer training program and all the tough guys from the fields and all the big bruisers from the locksmith’s workshop”—that is the way the story would be told in the future—who approached her one after another and offered their assistance.
She returned to the pigeon loft, sprinkled seeds, ladled water into the vessels, and brought the screened crates inside. She straightened up and looked to the veterinarian as if waiting for instructions.
“Open them, Miriam, open them,” the veterinarian said. “These pigeons are yours.”
The young woman opened the crates. Some forty pigeon chicks, most of which were already fully feathered but some of which still sported remnants of down, burst out of them, filling up their new home and falling upon the food and water. She cleaned the empty crates and put them out in the sun to be sterilized; then she took the waste from inside the crates and dumped it in the pit she had dug earlier and covered it with a thin layer of dirt.
2
IN THE EVENING the two appeared in the dining hall, and after having dunked cookie after cookie into glass after glass of “lemon with tea”— that is what the kibbutz jokers were already calling it—the redheaded veterinarian stood up and tapped his glass with a fork. A stunned hush ensued: who was it that dared to make such a bourgeois salon sound in the dining hall of a kibbutz?
“Good evening, comrades,” he said. “Dr. Laufer here.” He presented them next with the silent young woman: “Her name is Miriam, and she is an expert pigeon handler.” He asked if there were any strangers among them or if all present were members of the kibbutz or the Palmach, because “we are harboring a secret of sorts.”
“Only members here” came the answer from the crowd.
“We shall start with words of gratitude,” Dr. Laufer began. “We wish to thank you for agreeing to take in under your roof a pigeon loft for Haganah homing pigeons. The pigeons we have brought here are four weeks old. Soon they will begin their flight training, and at the age of six months they will be yoked to a life of family and work.”
People in the crowd began to murmur. Expressions like “yoked to a life of work” were not foreign to their ears, but speaking in the plural, as the doctor did, instigated a quarrel among the veteran kibbutz members: was this the pluralis majestatis, the “royal we,” primarily the aggrandizement of the speaker, as in the Book of Genesis—“Let us make mankind in our image, after our likeness”—and also the Koran, or was this the pluralis modestiae, the amplification of humility?
Dr. Laufer did not wait for this important matter to be clarified; he announced that this pigeon loft was “secret and important” and had been placed in the children’s petting farm so as not to arouse suspicion. “Should the English army come to make a search, one must say this is the children’s pigeon loft.” He explained: “Homing pigeons are very similar to regular pigeons, and only the discerning eye of an expert can tell the difference between them. Still, one must exercise caution. The English are certainly familiar with homing pigeons; they dispatched thousands of them at the front during the Great War. We are telling you all this so that you will know to maintain the secret and the loft and you will not reveal them to anyone.”
Now it became clear to the astonished crowd that the pluralis used by Dr. Laufer was a new and different kind of “royal we,” in fact a plu-ralae, a feminine plural. At once, additional arguments erupted: there were those who said this was nothing more than an erroneous use of Hebrew, just another in the list of errors made by yekkes, the German-speaking Jews; there were those who felt they were being presented with a certain sort of humor, the kind of joke of which yekkes are particularly fond; and there were those who said that Dr. Laufer spoke thus because he had grown accustomed to living among pigeons and the Hebrew language refers even to male pigeons in the feminine.
“It is impossible to overstate the importance of homing pigeons,” Dr. Laufer announced. “From the days of the pharaohs and the first Olympic games in Athens, pigeons carried out their missions and delivered news on their wings. Many a time has a single pigeon saved an entire battalion of soldiers or a lost convoy, and on occasion has even sacrificed her own life for man. The Phoenicians brought the pigeon with them in their ships. The sultan Nur-ad-Din connected the entire Muslim empire through a network of pigeon lofts. Homing pigeons brought the news of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo to Nathan Rothschild three days before it reached the European capitals and their rulers, and there are those who claim,” said the veterinarian, suddenly whispering, “that he owes the beginnings of his fortune to them.
“And just last year,” he said, raising his voice again, “a homing pigeon brought along by fishermen saved three boats caught in a storm off the coast of New England, in the United States of America.”
Dr. Laufer recited a line from Ovid, declaimed a florid poem about pigeons written by a medieval Spanish Jewish poet, and added that the pigeon is the incarnation of the Holy Spirit in the New Testament, quoting fluently and precisely two of the four versions: “And straightway coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens opened, and the Spirit like a dove descending upon him,” as well as “I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it abode upon him.”
“Of course we do not need to remind you of pigeons in our own Bible,” he said. “From the Song of Songs we have ‘my dove who art in the clefts of rocks’ and yonati tamati, my undefiled dove of innocence. And then there is the dove dispatched by Noah from the ark that kept returning until it found rest for the sole of its foot.” Charmingly involuntarily, he waved his long arms as if dispatching a pigeon, raising a voluntary smile on the faces of the attentive crowd.
“Indeed,” he asked with emphasis, “who but the Jewish people returning to their homeland can better appreciate the tremendous yearning of the pigeon for her home and homeland …” He lowered his voice as he neared his conclusion. “For that reason we must plead with you once again to keep this matter a secret. Do not unwittingly reveal the existence of this pigeon loft to anyone, and certainly not wittingly either.”
He had one additional request: that comrades not loiter in the vicinity of the loft, nor open it, nor thrust a hand inside, nor make unnecessary noise, nor frighten the pigeons. “A homing pigeon must love her home; otherwise she will not wish to return to it,” he said. Then he thanked the comrades once again before taking his seat and dunking more cookies into more glasses of tea. And when he had eaten and drunk to satiation and had amassed in front of him an impressive pile of squeezed half lemons, he took his leave of the carpenter and the district commander and the Palmach platoon commander and the calf that was now recuperated and the Baby’s aunt, the dairy farmer, and he went to the room that had been allotted to him and at long last sank into sleep.
Early the next morning he awoke, started the engine of the green pickup truck, and drove off to where he had come from. And all at once everything settled back to the way it had been. The aunt returned to the cowshed and the calf that skipped gaily toward her. The platoon commander returned to his command and his training exercises. The carping carpenter—who only now comprehended ho
w pleasant the veterinarian’s company had been—returned to the tediousness of cabinets and beds. And Miriam the silent pigeon handler returned to the new pigeon loft, which was her responsibility She cleaned up, refilled water, put the wooden crates in the storeroom, reviewed each pigeon’s individual file card and the list of band numbers recorded in the flock’s log. As the sun set she seated herself on an empty crate and took pleasure in the jiggling of her knee and an evening cigarette.
3
THE SPEECH Dr. Laufer made in the dining hall bore fruit. No one mentioned the pigeons, but they certainly did mention the pigeon handler, Miriam. They discussed the cigarette she smoked, wondered about her jiggling knee, pondered, too, the other knee and the distance between the two, the jiggling one and the quiet one, and they came to the conclusion that these were not agitated knees or lazy knees or knees that went out dancing, but rather knees of self-confidence and strength and stability The cigarette, too, they came to realize, was not something on which to pin their hopes, for Miriam smoked only after completing her daily chores. That is to say, it was a cigarette of unwinding from hard work and not a cigarette of recklessness.
For the first three days, Miriam kept her pigeons enclosed inside the new loft. She fed them at the appointed hours, quarantined two sick pigeons, and broke the neck of a third pigeon, whose throat had become inflamed with an infectious malady, after which she burned its body and buried its ashes in the pit.
