by Meir Shalev
She wrote lists in the loft log, shooed away cats that displayed more than the usual feline curiosity, caught with her pickax a tenacious black snake that had tried repeatedly to slip into the loft through gaping loops in the window screens. And, like all the other members of the Palmach training program, she worked at all kinds of jobs demanded of her by the kibbutz. At dusk she would sit down, smoke her lone daily cigarette, and jiggle her knee.
The children, who were not interested in Miriam’s knees but in the new pigeons and the new loft that stood in the yard of their very own house, were told that it was forbidden for them to enter the loft or feed its residents and that they might regard the pigeons but only from afar. This was enough to double their curiosity and triple their questions because the new pigeons were plain and simple-looking, but there were too many strangers flocking around them and it was clear to the children that the pigeons were steeped in mystery and secrets. In their petting farm there were already two pairs of pigeons: white ornamental pigeons, their heads pulled tautly backward and their tail feathers spread like those of a peacock. No one knew which were the males and which the females because their primping and preening habits were quite similar one to the other’s, and so self-absorbed were they that they failed to bring descendants to the world; thus it was impossible to discern which was being wooed and which was doing the wooing, which was not laying the eggs and which was not doing the mating.
Miriam went to the village of Menahamia and brought back a few more ornamental pigeons, whose job it was to blur the presence of the new homing pigeons. They were housed in an adjacent loft that appeared to be connected to the new loft but in fact was separated by an internal screen. There were dandified French pigeons that looked and acted like small chickens, with feathered necks and enlarged craws and an arrogant gait, and other pigeons that the children dubbed “slipper pigeons” because soft feathers covered their toes and slid across the floor.
The guys from the Palmach, too, tried to add a few pigeons to the new loft—large, meaty birds that one of the boys had brought back from his parents’ home in Magdiel—and they claimed it was not for their succulent taste that they had been enlisted but in order to serve as camouflage for the homing pigeons. But then Miriam proved that she was not silent at all, that she was capable of speaking if necessary and even shouting: she did not want these pigeons anywhere near her loft! She knew what the boys were up to, and she was not willing for someone to go poking about, sticking his hands into the loft and pulling out some hapless pigeon for slaughter.
“It’s likely to frighten them. Let them fly away and find a home somewhere else!” she said, then repeated Dr. Laufer’s motto: “Apigeon has to love her home; otherwise she won’t want to return to it.” And the Baby, who was standing next to the loft just then and hoping that she would take him in and let him help with the work, recalled that day as the one on which she had smoked two cigarettes, one after the other, and even her quiet knee jiggled.
Even the woman in charge of the children’s house had an important issue she insisted be raised: she was not willing—so she announced— “for a sign to hang in the petting farm, so near the children’s house, with a mistake in the Hebrew!” When asked what all the commotion was about, she said that when vowels were added to the Hebrew letters signifying “loft”—shin and vav and kaph — they would make the word shovakh and never shovekh, as Dr. Laufer’s sign had it spelled. Miriam responded by telling her that anyone who knew Dr. Laufer knew that this was not the only mistake pigeon handlers made in Hebrew
For example, she explained, the trap door at the entrance to the loft is called a loked, and not a lokhed, as would be grammatically correct. Even she, Miriam, called it a loked, although she knew this to be a mistake, and she would not take down the sign with the word shovekh instead of shovakh because not only must the homing pigeon love her home, the pigeon handler must as well.
Lo and behold, not long ago I found such a shovekh, not in the petting farm of some out-of-the-way kibbutz but in a poem written by Natan Alterman his very selfness (I’ve adopted an error or two of Meshulam Fried’s):
Fields that have paled and trees trailing veils
Left open to your white light.
Cherry trees for you illumined while up over the shovekh
Doves make dizzy the Night.
I was really excited. Miriam the pigeon handler had been right. After all, no one can claim that Alterman—Alterman!—wrote in erroneous Hebrew Still, the poet made a mistake of a different nature: pigeons do not fly at night. I wanted to tell this to my mother, and to ask if she knew which came first, the shovekh in the poem or the shovekh on a kibbutz in the Jordan Valley But my mother had already died, and Benjamin, whom I phoned to ask, told me that the time had come for me to stop this nonsense of mine, that my reliance on the riches of my wife and the memory of my dead mother were turning me into a bum and an idiot.
“Shovakh, shovekh, it’s all the same. Poets will do anything to make their rhymes and meters fit!” he said before hanging up, adding that if I have trouble falling asleep at two in the morning that is no reason to wake up him too. That’s what God made woman for. Wake her up.
4
ON THE FOURTH DAY, after all the new pigeons had become familiar with the look of the loft and its scents and sounds and setup, Miriam took them out for a flight, the first in a series of morning and late afternoon flights designed to make clear to them that, unlike their wild counterparts — the rock pigeons—who leave home to search for food, homing pigeons return home for that very purpose.
From that time on, the regularity of training exercises continued. Every morning Miriam awakened early, made a thorough search of the loft and its surroundings, and then, several minutes after sunrise, she opened wide the windows and shooed the pigeons outside by waving a white flag and clapping her hands. For a moment they would perch on the landing boards and then, happy to spread their wings, they lifted off and circled their new home overhead.
Several minutes later, when they were ready to return, Miriam waved the white flag at them again; after a quarter hour she exchanged it for a blue flag, reversed the latch on the trap door so that it could only be entered, and whistled loudly To the children she said, “Go away, they want to come home.” And when the pigeons came close she sang to them, “Come, come, come to eat,” and she rattled the seeds noisily inside the tin vessels.
The pigeons landed, at first hesitantly and later willfully, and Miriam recorded which pigeons had landed first and which last, which had managed to pass easily through the bars of the trap door and which had not. Miriam moved those that tarried or even refused to enter again and again to a different section of the loft, where they would not set a bad example for the others.
During the first two days, the returning pigeons found seeds scattered on the ground, but after that Miriam was careful to serve them only from the troughs. Pigeon food is very dry, and pigeons finish off every meal with water. When the first pigeon finished eating and began to drink, Miriam cleaned up all the leftover grains, leaving nothing for the laggards or the tardy, and certainly nothing for those who remained on the roof of the loft. After the meal she went to do her kibbutz chores as required of her as a member of the Palmach, and the pigeons remained incarcerated. In the late afternoon she returned, opened the windows, and waved the white flag to announce the second flight. Upon return the pigeons received their main meal of the day Miriam then finished her work and sat down to smoke her evening cigarette and jiggle her knee, and then she went to sleep in the Palmach tent camp.
Very quickly the pigeons learned the white of takeoff and the blue of landing and the shrillness of fingers whistling and the various locked and unlocked positions of the trap door and the magical promise of the rattling of seeds in a tin vessel. Within a few days Miriam had lengthened the flights to half an hour in the morning and an hour in the late afternoon, and during the time the pigeons spent airborne she cleaned the loft, changed the water, and threw out the waste.
The children drew near, stared, asked questions. But Miriam kept silent and signaled to them to keep away She exchanged flags, and the hungry flock descended as one. The pigeons all entered the loft, and the pigeon handler was satisfied. She checked them one by one, made records in a number of pads and on various cards, and she gave thought to making successful matches among them. And so it was, day after day: the feeding, the watering, the flight, the whistle, the cleaning, the waving of flags, and she did not answer the children’s questions, nor even bestow a glance in their direction.
Quickly, the children grew accustomed to these sights and they stopped drawing near and peeping—all except one, the short, chubby boy they all called the Baby That was his nickname back then, and when he was an adolescent, and when he joined the Palmach; and thus spread the cry down the footpaths of the kibbutz nine years later: “The Baby has been killed,” “The Baby fell in battle,” and all the others, which contained not only grief and pain but also the shock created when those two such opposing words are joined: “baby” and “dead.”
5
THE PIGEON LOFT drew him in. The contrast between the humble appearance of the homing pigeons and their lofty title jolted him. Miriam’s work awakened thoughts in him. The hour of his rising grew earlier as if by itself, and, unlike his custom until then, he no longer remained in bed, savoring those moments of the day that were entirely his own. Instead he rose, dressed quickly, grabbed two slices of bread from the bread box in the kitchen of the children’s house, and ran to watch as the pigeons were released for their morning flight. Miriam gestured to him to keep his distance and he moved back, behind a nearby palm tree. Without meaning to, he imitated her movements: he waved imaginary flags, tented his hand over his eyes, adopted the habit of raising his gaze skyward, at times following the birds until they disappeared from view and at times awaiting their reappearance, the gaze of all pigeon handlers in every place and at every time.
Miriam smiled to herself, though she turned only an angry expression in the Baby’s direction. Her eyelids narrowed. “Go away!” Her brow darkened. “You’re frightening the pigeons!” The Baby withdrew even farther and watched from afar, but after several days he began to draw closer again, until one day he dared offer to help her. He was prepared, he said, to do any kind of work. He was small, he admitted, but industrious and strong—“Look at these muscles, touch right here, don’t be afraid, push hard,” he said as he thrust out his bent arm and his face reddened—and he would not drive her crazy or disturb her in any way he would come straight from school and would accept and carry out every instruction, no questions asked.
Miriam said, “I don’t need help!” but on that very day there appeared a crack in a joint of the water pipe serving the pigeon loft, and Miriam needed someone to open and close the main valve until she managed to fix and tighten one side. The Baby carried out the task nicely, and she was pleased with his work and allowed him to clean the troughs. She watched him, fairly captivated, much as Dr. Laufer had watched her when she was his age and her mother had brought her to the zoo in Tel Aviv and she had paid no heed to the leopard or the lion or the monkeys, standing and looking only at the pigeons, never leaving the loft, until the exceedingly tall, redheaded man invited her to enter. Now she stood watching the Baby, who was industrious, thorough, and, most important, moved inside the loft with a natural tranquillity and soft, fluid movements that did not cause the pigeons to be frightened of his presence.
She instructed him to sweep the floor of the loft and sent him to bury the waste in the pit, and, several days later, when she had stubbed out her evening cigarette, she asked him suddenly how old he was.
“Eleven,” he told her.
“That’s a good age. Do you want to keep on pestering the pigeons and me or do you want to learn to be a real pigeon handler?”
“What’s a pigeon handler?” the Baby asked.
A pigeon handler is the person who looks after homing pigeons,” she said. “I’m one, for example.” Then suddenly she added, “This is my favorite hour of the day Now the sun’s setting in Tel Aviv, too, and the zoo is full of shrieks and roars and growls, and Dr. Laufer is giving his pigeons their evening meal and saying good night to them.”
“So these really are homing pigeons?” the Baby asked. “Like he said?”
“Yes.”
“So where do they take their messages? Wherever they’re told?”
She smiled. “Homing pigeons know how to do only one thing: return home. If you want someone to send you a letter with a pigeon, you have to give him pigeons that were raised in your loft.”
“Yes,” the Baby said, “I want to learn to be a real pigeon handler.”
“So we’ll see what we can do,” Miriam said as she stood, a sign that she was leaving now and so should he, because it was forbidden for him to be near the loft when she was not around. The pigeons might grow frightened, and we have already stated that pigeons must love their home; otherwise they will not return to it.
6
AND NOW, a coincidence that no one understood then but the effect and importance of which will be known hence: on the day that Dr. Laufer left Miriam and her birds in the loft he built on the kibbutz, a wounded pigeon landed on a certain balcony on Ben Yehuda Street in Tel Aviv Landed or dropped, then convulsed a bit, dripped a few spots of blood on the tiled floor, and collapsed.
On the balcony just then were a boy and a girl. She, an only child of about twelve, lay reading on her stomach, while he, fifteen and a half, the son of the third-floor neighbors, had come downstairs a few minutes earlier to retrieve a shirt that had fallen from their clothesline onto this very balcony.
The two knelt quickly near the wounded bird and looked it over. It was an absolutely normal-looking pigeon, bluish-gray with red feet, similar to a thousand other pigeons. But its eyes were clouded with pain and its right wing crooked and dangling. Its thin broken bone could be seen whitely through the shredded flesh.
The Boy raced upstairs to his apartment to fetch a box upon which was written VERBANDSKASTEN in beautiful white lettering. Back on the balcony he removed from the box bandages and sterilizing solution, cleaned the pigeon’s wound with iodine, and used raffia and a twig to bind the broken right wing. The Girl, wishing to get a better view, leaned her fair and curly head on him so that a light, pleasant thrumming shook his body in a way he had never dared feel even in the dreams he dreamt of her.
The Girl, who did not know what she was awakening in his heart, pointed to the pigeon’s tail. “Look,” she said. A thin string held two quills tightly together. “This feather’s hers and this one isn’t.”
And indeed, one of the quills was featherless and not embedded in the skin and, judging by its thickness, belonged to a chicken or even a goose. The Boy slit the string with a small pair of scissors, released the quill, and lifted it up to the light. There was something inside it: a small, rolled-up slip of paper. He used a matchstick to push it out, then spread it out and said, “Read it. There’s a message here.”
There were only three words written on the slip of paper: YES OR NO? they demanded, or asked. As short as any words can be.
“What does that mean, ‘'Yes or no?’” he wondered.“ ‘'Yes or no’what?”
The Girl’s heart pounded. “It’s a yes or no of love. Someone wants to know if someone else gives her consent.”
“Why love?” the Boy asked. “It could also be a letter between relatives or businesspeople or some Haganah matter.”
But the Girl persisted. “It’s a love letter. Now the pigeon is here and the boy doesn’t understand why the girl isn’t answering.”
From this the reader can grasp that neither earthquakes nor world wars are necessary to change the course of a person’s life and create an uproar. Sometimes it takes nothing more than a child’s slingshot or a cat’s claws or an opportunity that falls in the path of a hawk. Whatever the reason, because the pigeon needed urgent care and the Boy needed an opportunity, he too
k an old wooden crate, lined it with netting, and placed the bird inside. “I know what we’ll do!” he said. “There must be a veterinarian in the zoo. If you want we can go there together, and I’ll help you carry the crate.”
First they walked northward on Ben Yehuda Street; then they turned east and walked down the boulevard until they reached the sandstone hillock familiar to all the people of Tel Aviv. Many of them swam in the pool that had once provided the water for an orchard.
“Tickets!” said a man who stood at the entrance to the zoo. He was very fat and wore khaki, a cap with a visor on his head.
“But we have a wounded pigeon here.”
“This isn’t a hospital for animals. If you want to enter, you got to pay”
The two skulked off. “What a mean man,” said the Girl.
“Don’t you know him?” the Boy asked. “He’s the fat man of the zoo—that’s what everyone calls him. He’s not mean, that’s just his job. But if you bring him stale bread for the animals, he lets you in.”
“So go get some, fast! People always leave bread on fences; you’re never supposed to throw it away”
The Boy raced off, and just then a green pickup truck appeared in the street. A long-limbed, thin, extremely tall, redheaded man of undis-tinguishable age and a narrow, crooked nose alighted from it and turned toward the gate of the zoo. The fat man said, “Hello, Doctor,” and the Girl did not hesitate. She approached him and said, “Are you perhaps an animal doctor? I have a wounded pigeon here.”
The man glanced at the pigeon. “Come in,” he told her. “We’ll see what we can do.”
The fat man stepped aside from the gate. Dr. Laufer rushed in, his arms and legs flapping, his body bent forward, his freckles skittering along in the air. The Girl followed him on a path her feet would tread thousands of times in the coming years, passing first the turtle pens, then the cages of a few smaller animals whose names she did not yet know—types of ferrets and weasels and martens—and then the lion and lioness and their bitter-souled neighbor, the lone leopard. From there the path curved and the terrain opened up a bit, and in the middle of a clearing stood the pigeon loft, not a round structure on a pedestal as she had imagined, but a shed. A real shed, with a door and screened windows and a roof and walls, and it faced south, a pool for waterfowl and monkey cages next to it, and beyond, the elephant’s yard.
