by Meir Shalev
It’s good like this: hiking clothes and walking shoes and knapsacks and storm tents and sleeping bags are piled in the closet and in Behemoth, my feet are up on the bed, resting, my lungs fill up and empty quietly and only my eyes step between the altitudinal lines and guess the view, expanding the two dimensions of the map to the three of reality: here is a ravine, here is a hilltop, here is a tributary; here it is steep and here is it level; here is a cliff. Here I climb and here I slide and here I pitch my tent and light a fire.
Sometimes I even set out for real. From the house to the garden, and from there to the view from the hills. I discover walking trails that people have trampled, and cow trails, and narrow trails made by ants and hedgehogs, hunting trails made by porcupines and jackals and wild boar. This is what I do everywhere and with every opportunity: I make myself known to the system of tracks and dirt roads, to the possibilities of escape, detour, flight.
“Where is this paranoia of yours from? Why does an Israeli guy have the fears of Jews abroad?” Liora asked on my first and last trip overseas, to marry her in her parents’ home in New Rochelle. I had gone off on a morning walk and returned after an absence that had worried the entire family
“What happened? Where were you?” everyone asked, frightened.
“I went out to get familiar with the surroundings.”
Her father, her mother, her brother, her sister-in-law, uncles, aunts, their sons and daughters —all the Kirschenbaums who had come to observe the groom Liora had brought back from Israel—they all looked from one to the other and shook their heads.
“You don’t just go walking around here,” they told me. “Around here you go by car, or you run in a jogging suit, or you go out walking in a track suit on special walking trails. People who simply walk around the streets get picked up for loitering.”
“What for?” Liora asks every time I drive off the asphalt to check out a new dirt path. “There are roads. They were paved with taxes that I pay When we travel on them we get part of our money back.”
On one of my treks I even found the wells that had been mentioned in the membership-committee interview. They were large and deep, and dry stone troughs had been placed near their openings. Once this place had been settled and populated with people, sheep, and homes, and now the only reminder of that were rope marks etched in the limestone edges of the well’s mouth. Who among you dug here first? The Canaanites? The Philistines? The Arabs? My forefathers from the days of the Bible?
Not far from there is a large thicket of trees, called the Woods by the villagers, an odd mixture of oaks, carobs, and terebinths alongside test groups of pine, eucalyptus, and cypress trees, the remnants of a temporary nursery fostered here by the Jewish Agency for Israel in the 1950s. There are wild shrubs, too, of a number of varieties, and aged almond trees, and among them I found ancient winepresses, and graves, signs of excavation in the soft boulders already black and gray from lichen. This is not a woods in which wolves and bears move about, but its scent is that of a forest and its shadows are those of a forest and its stillness is that of a forest—a stillness that is not silence but, rather, the murmur and rustle of falling leaves and passing winds, the sprouting of seeds, the fluttering of wings.
And in the heart of this forest there are several small and shaded clearings good for being alone or committing suicide, but usually populated by large families of new immigrants. The longing for Russian forests forces them to suffice with the local thicket. They drink and eat, play musical instruments and chess, roast meat on tiny fires, gather mushrooms. Once I came upon an elderly woman sobbing here. She had stepped in between the trees and lost her way I had her climb into Behemoth, and we spent an hour scouring the area, she speaking an emotional Russian whose consonants were stuck together with tears while I contemplated the possibility of kidnapping her so that I could have a mother instead of you. In the end we heard her real children running about shouting, “Mama!” Their suspicion turned to gratitude, their anxiety to joy, and I accepted their invitation to eat with them, and even drank a bit, and I felt envy and closeness.
On occasion I come across another kind of sojourner, not the weekend reveler but the weekday refugee: the seekers of solitude, the returnees to adolescence, the not-quite-proper couples in search of a hiding place—or perhaps they are proper couples in search of renewal; unlike Tirzah or Liora, who would know immediately, I am incapable of discerning which are which. Among them are men my age, and we make do with a nod and an exchange of glances of “we’ve identified you.” Many things have happened to us, our eyes say to each other: we walk a straight line, we hurt, we are lacking, fading away being forgotten, departing, disappearing into the underbrush.
7
FIRST I TOOK HOLD of the scythe, my back stooped, hands thrashing, sawing, initially wary of the angry thistles, then finding shelter in the new work gloves. One hand grasped the handle while the other tightened around the victim’s neck. Later, when my back began to ache and my heart had filled with confidence, I tried my hand at the sickle. I felt my movements were wrong but I did not know how to correct them. Just when I had decided to return to the scythe, someone touched my shoulder. It was the tractor operator.
“Slower,” he said, “and not so firm.” Already I could feel his two hands behind me, the left on my shoulder and the right on my waist, like a puppeteer. My spine became the pivot for a sail, a mast turning on itself The rough strength of my thighs rose inside it, split and spread to the space between my shoulders, grew softer and flowed to my hands, converging finally in the moving blade. The sickle, too, felt all this and began circling on its own, whispering near the ground, so sharp and precise that even the driest and most delicate plants did not bend or break but were decapitated and fell as it passed.
The tractor operator disappeared, but the touch of his hands on my body remained and I worked that way for more than an hour. Even though I am unaccustomed to physical labor I possess—as my mother often said—something of the strength and purposefulness of a beast of burden: the thick, low back, the protruding brow, the short thighs. “Yair’s body rises from his bottom,” I heard you say once to Yordad when we were little, “and Benjamin’s descends from his neck.”
Sweat dripped down my forehead, passed my eyebrows, gliding and searing. Pain glowed in my vertebrae, but my muscles were not fatigued. The thorns and weeds had been shorn, all of them. I raked and piled them up at the side and began to tackle the creepers, which had wound themselves around the branches of the carob trees like boa constrictors. They had sprouted shoots and leaves, had climbed to the treetops in their quest for sunlight and air. I climbed after them, first on a ladder and then on the branches themselves, cutting them, prying them free, casting them to the ground. The tractor operator reappeared, hauling an empty rubbish cart behind him. I piled everything inside with a pitchfork and he drove off to unload the cart at the village dump.
As I was drinking cold water from the cooler in Behemoth, Meshulam arrived. He looked around and said, “Look how these little gals love you now.”
“Why gals?”
“They’re female carob trees.”
“How do you know that?”
“Don’t you see all this fruit? Carobs are like us: the males stink and the females make fruit. What’s with these crappy shears and saw? This is what you’re going to use to prune?”
“It’s what your daughter gave me.”
“Let Tiraleh deal with buildings. She doesn’t know the first thing about gardens. Go over to my car for a minute—I happen to have a few tools that are just right for you.”
On the back seat I found two pairs of long-handled shears and two Japanese saws, all in their original packaging. A pair of scary-looking treetop shears, too, with a string and pulley and pole, and a container filled with a thick green liquid for smearing on the stumps of branches just severed.
Meshulam was beaming. “What luck I happened to have all this with me today right? First we’ll take down the low bran
ches so that the trees will have trunks and a person can stand up straight underneath them.”
We hacked away and cleared up the branches, piling them to the side, and Meshulam began teaching me the art of pruning from inside the tree. “Every branch that grows inward—take it down. The ones growing outward you just need to thin out. And every once in a while take a few steps backward and have a look, like an artist observing his painting. Make sure the top and sides look like a roof and walls because a carob tree is like a house. The leaves don’t fall off it in the fall, and if you prune it back right it keeps the rain out in winter and the sun out in summer, like a roof”
We continued working for three hours or so, Meshulam below, giving instructions and directions, me on the ladder or on the branches themselves. Tirzah showed up twice. The first time she said, “You’re still here, Meshulam? Who’s minding the store?” The second time she laughed and quipped, “Very nice, boys, really very nice.”
Now the carob trees looked like two large, thick umbrellas. It was possible to stand erect beneath them and look upward and see airy refreshing spaces and a dense green roof
The tractor operator returned with the rubbish cart. Meshulam asked if I knew how to back up a tractor with the rubbish cart attached and I told him I had never tried.
“Backing up with a cart isn’t exactly playing a violin or something,” he joked. “If you’ve never tried, then you don’t know”
He sat in the driver’s seat of the tractor and maneuvered it skillfully backward. “Once I was the best driver in the whole Palmach,” he said. “Me, the son of Fried the tinsmith of Herzl Street in Haifa. Better than all the kibbutz boys and moshav boys that looked down on me. Now load up the rubbish and I’ll go have a rest. I’m only allowed to work as much as I want to, not as much as I need to anymore.”
He removed a bottle of beer and a folding chair from his car, sat down, and sipped. He told me, “Once, when Tiraleh was little, I liked that she called me ‘Meshulam.’ But ever since Gershon, I keep begging her to call me ‘Father’ A person can’t suddenly not hear himself being called ‘Father’ There are enough people who call me ‘Meshulam’ or ‘Mr. Fried.’ ” Then he shouted to her: “You call me ‘Father’ You hear me? Call me ‘Father!’”
Tirzah was in the house. She heard him but did not appear or answer.
“If it’s so important to you, Meshulam,” I said, “I can call you ‘Father’ every once in a while.”
“How about once a week,” he said.
He dozed on the chair for a while, awakened, and left.
Chapter Eleven
1
FROM TIME TO TIME the Haganah pigeon handlers would gather for in-service training sessions. They listened to lectures on message capsules, parasites, illnesses, and foods, related anecdotes to one another, and traded opinions and pedigree pigeons too old for flight but still good for mating.
These conferences were usually held at one of several kibbutzim in the center of the country, but Dr. Laufer decided to hold the 1945 conference in Tel Aviv Since it was summer and school was no longer in session, he was given a classroom in the Ahad Ha’am School, in which he had previously run a petting zoo for the pupils. The participants visited the central pigeon loft in the zoo, but not as one large group, rather “in dribs and drabs”—said Dr. Laufer with unusual eloquence—“so as not to draw attention.” They were housed with families active in the Haganah in Tel Aviv, and the Girl’s mother recommended “a certain honest and decent housewife” who would prepare a modest dinner for all at a discounted price.
Miriam departed for Tel Aviv two days before the Baby in order to help Dr. Laufer prepare for the conference, and he, before leaving the kibbutz, made certain that his replacement—a veteran chicken breeder, not just some youngster from the Palmach—had recorded everything and understood what he was meant to do. Over his right shoulder the Baby hung a small satchel that contained a few toiletries, writing implements, a shirt, and a change of underwear. In his left hand he carried a basket with pigeons for the Girl and in his pocket, a bus ticket that one of Miriam’s pigeons had brought him from Tel Aviv.
By the time he arrived at the Ahad Ha’am School there were several participants already there, all of them adults; they all eyed him, curious. Dr. Laufer looked favorably upon the Baby and introduced him to all present as “the future generation” and as “Baby-Comrade.” The Girl was not there, occupied with all kinds of last-minute matters. Just before the opening lecture she entered and sat in the place he had saved for her next to him, and at once she pressed her arm against his. He was sixteen years old, and his body stirred.
The walls had been hung with anatomical diagrams of the body of a pigeon—inside and out—and a number of quotations, like “Who are these who fly as a cloud, and as the doves to their windows?” and “When the pigeons go abenting / Then the farmers lie lamenting,” as well as sayings made up by Dr. Laufer himself: “PIGEON = PARTNER, PAL, POETRY-IN-MOTION” and “IN RAIN OR SLEET OR WIND OR HAIL, OUR FRIEND THE PIGEON SHALL ALWAYS PREVAIL.” This year a new motto had been added, too: “PIGEONS OF A FEATHER DOCK TOGETHER,” which provoked discussion. Was this yet another yekke error or was one expected to add a Haw, haw, haw after it?
Between the diagrams and the quotations hung portraits of “hero pigeons,” whose names were often Mercury or Comet or Arrow And, as with every opening lecture given by Dr. Laufer, so did this one overflow with winged heroes. In 1574, when the city of Leiden was under siege and had nearly been razed and the citizens were contemplating surrender, who was it that brought them the news that help would arrive within two hours? The pigeon. During the time of Queen Marie Antoinette’s imprisonment, who passed messages from her to her advisers outside Paris? The pigeon. And during the campaign against Fort Souville at Verdun, who was it that succeeded in taking off above the clouds of poison gas spread by the Germans and transporting a message to the front? Only a French homing pigeon.
He updated the participants on important pigeon-related information from around the world. The English, he told them with a grimace, had trained peregrine falcons to snare enemy homing pigeons. In Germany, he told them with a grave demeanor, a law had been passed requiring all breeders to register and place their pigeons in the nation’s service during national emergencies and, in turn, Germany would finance the transport of pigeons for training and competitions. A Canadian homing pigeon named Sunbeam had rescued fishermen whose boat nearly capsized in the frozen waters off Newfoundland. And in Belgium—the world’s powerhouse for pigeons and pigeon handlers in spite of a meager population of only four million inhabitants — there were some one hundred thousand registered pigeon breeders. “And there is no clipping the wings on those numbers, haw, haw haw … ”
Several of the participants spoke as well. A tearful pigeon handler from Jerusalem read a heartwarming short story she had written about a pigeon that had become entangled in electrical wires and had reached her destination two months after being dispatched, “walking on the burnt stumps of her legs.” A pigeon handler from Kibbutz Yagur read a report filed by an American officer in the First World War: “We awaited news from the battlefield when the pigeon Cher Ami arrived, his body in shreds. The pigeongram he carried said, ‘Our artillery is firing on our own troops. Adjust sights or we shall all fall victim.’”
After that someone told about a homing pigeon that delivered a “highly disturbing pigeongram” to the starved citizens of besieged Candia, on the island of Crete: It read EAT ME. This led to a moral discussion. One person shouted out that the story was unbelievable and improbable. Dr. Laufer hushed the gathered crowd and announced loudly, “And now—pigeons in Hebrew poetry!” He asked the Girl to rise and stand beside him to read from a poem he had asked her to prepare, “penned by the famous poet Dr. Shaul Tchernichovsky” who described many varied types of pigeons:
These are Egyptians pigeons, and these are called Saxon Monks,
And there are others, the Cropper pigeons;
Like peacocks they puff out their trunks.
The Fantails enhance their fancy tails,
The Jacobins do up their coifs.
A band of Rhine Ringbeaters
Meets with Hungarian ringleaders.
In the corner lovers coo,
Roman Owl Pigeons and Blackhead Moors by the pair;
While Indian Pearl Highfliers can be spotted
As they descend from the air.
And a chick from the family of Priests—do not miss
Nor the Italians, the Syrians, the Swiss.
This the Girl recited, with great seriousness, a light blush deepening the pink of her skin. Dr. Laufer thanked her and said, “It would appear that the poet forgot to mention here the homing pigeon, noting only the ornamental pigeons”—he could not help himself and called them man-made “monsters”—but a closer reading revealed the Syrian pigeons at the end of the list, “and we have no doubt that the poet was hinting at the prized homing pigeons of Damascus.”
Most of the assembled pigeon handlers were adults, and during lunch the Baby and the Girl exchanged glances and pressed their thighs one to the other underneath the table. Though shorter and younger than she, as he would remain to the day of his death, he was no longer bashful—neither with her or others —and even expressed his opinion like a veteran pigeon handler.
The afternoon sessions dealt with protein-enriched seeds versus seeds rich in fats, and with the question of whether the hand-feeding of chicks was liable to imprint a pigeon and prevent her from mating later on. After that they moved on to the problem of smallpox and how to disinfect a pigeon loft during a plague of dysentery and from there to matters with no solution or resolution: Does the pigeon navigate by using her sense of direction alone or does she remember landmarks? Or perhaps both are right? The Baby dared to speak up in order to point out that the participants were projecting a human perception of maps and directions and compass roses onto pigeons. But perhaps, he said, she is unfamiliar with all of these, understanding one direction only, and its name is “homeward,” unaware that humans give this direction other names — sometimes “southward” and sometimes “eastward” and sometimes “north-by-northwestward.”
