by Meir Shalev
I tossed a small stone into the cistern. It hit lightly, dryly The pit was empty; there was no water in it, yet pigeons still flew from its abyss. The beating of the pigeons’ wings alarmed their sisters in adjacent cisterns, and they, too, lifted off from their oblivions. The earth, so it suddenly seemed, opened its mouth beneath me and spit out pigeons, more and more of them, and they flew overhead like a cloud of feathered breasts and flailing wings.
Afterward, the pigeons gathered into a large flock, forming an enormous circle with me centered beneath them. And when I left there, they dived and returned to their dovecotes as if sucked into the chasm. I climbed into Tirzah’s pickup truck and headed to my new house.
5
THE WORKERS HAD FINISHED unloading the materials and equipment. They pulled an old refrigerator off one of the trucks, stood it under the house in the space between the support columns, and plugged it into an extension cord dangling from the window Next to the refrigerator they set up a cabinet and a table with an electric kettle and a gas burner. A tall, yellow-haired youth filled the refrigerator with vegetables, containers of yogurt, cottage cheese and hard cheese, bottles of beverages, boxes of milk and eggs.
The unpacking completed, Tirzah’s loading crew took to its wheels and disappeared. Meshulam hung the building authorization notices endorsed by the local council on the wall, as required. “You see? One phone call by Meshulam saved you a whole mess of running around.”
As if on cue the tractor operator reappeared in the yard. He pulled his rubbish cart up to the back of the house, removed from it a thick metal pipe, and hung it from the lemon tree. He struck the pipe soundly and it resounded; the two Chinese workers, the tall, yellow-haired youth, the tractor operator, and another sturdy laborer all lined up in front of Tirzah. Since I did not know what to do with myself, I remained at the side.
“Men,” said my contractor, who is a woman, “I have taken you off our big jobs because this fellow needs a place of his own. We’re going to make a little Garden of Eden for him here. He’ll have a floor and a roof, water and light, grass and trees, birds and animals. He’ll have new plumbing, new electricity, windows, doors. We’ll reinforce the foundations, we’ll plaster and whitewash, we’ll build him a small outdoor shower and a large wooden deck on which he’ll be able to sit and relax facing the view”
The workers chuckled, nodded in my direction, and entered the house.
“What a speech!” I told her. “Are you sure they understand Hebrew?”
“They don’t need to understand Hebrew, Iraleh; that speech was for you. Now let’s go inside, because we’re going to start soon and you need to be there for the beginning.”
Not with anything else—not the signing of the contract with the village, not the transfer of the first payment—was there the decisiveness, the feeling of in-the-beginning, as there was at this moment, the start of the work or, more precisely, the first strike of a heavy hammer against a wall doomed to destruction.
The chosen wall was the western wall of the main room, which faced the view It had one frightened little window, the dimensions of which expressed its aspiration to remain shut rather than its ability to open. Now both—the window and the wall—had been condemned to vanish. Tirzah said an enormous opening would be ripped out here, beyond which the wooden deck would be built.
Tirzah instructed the sturdy laborer to take up the hammer; then she gave a slight nod of her head and raised her eyebrow in the direction of the wall. The laborer did not spit into the palms of his hands, nor did he rub them together. He grasped the very end of the long wooden handle in order to increase the strength of the blow and swung it over his left shoulder. Like an iron pigeon whose message is its landing, the hammer lifted off, circled the man’s head and shoulders, and hit squarely, tearing a hole in the wall.
The house reverberated. For days it had been sensing the commotion, had taken note of Meshulam’s profession thanks to his rapping and tapping and his voice, had listened in on my conversations with Tirzah, had watched the surveyors and the engineer and the trucks and the equipment that emerged from them, and it had already prepared itself for what was coming: the slam of the hammer, the pecking of the chisel, the sawing of the disc, the crowbar, the extraction and the shifting and the removal. But none of this reduced the shock it was feeling just then, and the knowledge that the matter would not end with this one strike. A new resident had arrived and he would change the ways of the house—its entrances and exits —and he would re-create its light and its darkness, he would erase memories and footprints and aromas, he would proclaim the establishment of a new relationship between its insides and its outsides.
The sturdy laborer pounded around the first gaping hole, demolishing the bricks in an orderly and systematic manner. And when there was nothing left of the wall but a heap of crumbs and dirt and lumps, the two Chinese workers attacked it with large shovel and heaved it into the rubbish cart put in place below, in the yard, by the tractor operator.
“And there was light!” Tirzah said. “Look how much light there is in your house all of a sudden.”
In the same manner, the man pulled down two more internal walls, and with the disc cutter he enlarged the window openings in the external walls. The Chinese workers drained rusted pipes and pulled them from the walls, then did the same with the electric cables, which, now that they were powerless, looked like dead snakes. They removed, too, the old windowsills and doorposts and lintels.
Tirzah said to the tall, yellow-haired youth, “Go down and put a big pot of soup on the burner so we have something to eat for lunch.”
“What kind?” he grumbled.
“The kind you like to eat at your mother’s house.”
“But I don’t know how to make her soup.”
Tirzah removed the mobile phone from her pocket and handed it to him. “Here. Call her and ask how she makes it.”
The youth stepped aside and held a conversation in Russian, during which he wrote copious notes; then he approached Tirzah and told her something, received the keys to her pickup truck along with several bills, and drove off. Less than an hour after his return, a delicious aroma rose from the gas burner below He had prepared a large, thick pot of soup as his mother had taught him, brimming with potatoes, barley onion, turnips, carrots, garlic, beef, and bones. He asked Tirzah when she wanted it to be served.
“When it’s ready I’m famished.”
And when it was ready the yellow-haired youth struck the metal pipe that the tractor operator had hung from the lemon tree and called one and all to eat their first lunch in my new home.
6
THE NEXT DAY Tirzah sent the Russian youth and the sturdy laborer to other building sites of hers, while we remained with the two Chinese workers. “It’s us and them to the end,” she said. “Except for a few craftsmen who will join us later on.”
The two of them climbed to the empty space between the ceiling and the roof tiles. They could be heard sawing and prying. Bits of roofing—crumbling old plaster held together by rusted iron mesh—plunged downward and raised dust. The pigeons living there and hoping up to that very moment that this was some kind of mistake flew off in a panic. They darted about under the roof tiles, then fled through the new, large window
I told Tirzah my mother had ordered me to get rid of them.
“She was absolutely right. Get those filthy birds out of here and make sure they don’t come back,” she said. “We’ve got to plug up every crack and hole. That’s all you need: pigeons on your head.”
The removal of the ceiling doubled the open space of the house and filled it with echoes. Tirzah stood a ladder there, climbed it, and walked expertly about on the planks, locating pigeons’ nests. At once she destroyed them with the tip of her boot. The spindly twigs, covered with dung, fell to earth along with several white eggs, which splattered on the floor.
“Pigeons,” she said, “are very nice when they fly in the air, and even nicer when they bring letters, and nicest of a
ll when served with rice and herbs, but in the roof they are not nice at all. Not here, ladies. Go find yourselves another home.”
She came down. “Want to work?” she asked me.
“Okay” I said, “but don’t forget I’m no expert. Give me something simple to do.”
She broke two floor tiles in the far corner of the room and handed me a crowbar. “Take this guy and pry out the old tiles, then clear them out with the wheelbarrow, along with the refuse from the ceiling.”
I enjoyed the way the tiles surrendered, their parting from the floor, the removal of all those feet that had previously walked about in this house. I placed everything in the wheelbarrow and wheeled it to the edge of the room, where at the beginning of the day there had been a wall and where now there was a huge opening toward the view I tipped the wheelbarrow into the rubbish cart parked underneath and returned for more. Later, I cleaned up with a large pushbroom all the way down to the cement.
“Nice work,” Tirzah praised me. “I like this stage of maximum height, from the cement to the roof tiles, no floor, no ceiling. The biggest space possible.”
When she finished speaking, Meshulam showed up with a gaunt and sinewy old man whose hands were so broad that it seemed they had been borrowed from some other man.
Tirzah beamed. “This is Steinfeld the tiler, our most veteran employee. I’ve known him from the time I was born. Back then he was a hundred years old, so you can imagine how old he is today”
In one of his massive hands Steinfeld was carrying a bucket that held a long, flexible, transparent pipe, a small funnel, and a collapsible wooden measuring stick. A thick yellow pencil was stuck behind his ear and a very old schoolbag hung across his back, its leather tattered, its buckles peeling, and its shoulder straps so ancient that it raised the suspicion that he himself had been the pupil who had carried this school-bag to the first grade.
On one of the walls he drew a small triangle three feet above the cement floor.
“Hold the end of this here, kid,” he said as he handed me the pipe.
“He’s not an employee, Steinfeld, he’s the home owner,” Tirzah said. “The Chinese guy over there is the worker.”
“The Khinezer?” he asked, slipping into Yiddish. “How can I tell him what to do? Which does he prefer, Yiddish or Hebrew?”
He ladled water into the mouth of the pipe he was holding and began pulling it from wall to wall and from room to room and from corner to corner and from opening to opening, skimming the walls and drawing small triangles and shouting in my direction, “Don’t move!”
“Do you understand what he’s doing?” Tirzah asked me.
“No.”
“You’re doing the stichmuss.”
“Now I get it. It’s all perfectly clear.”
“Don’t you remember back in high school, the law of communicating vessels? All those little triangles are exactly the same height. They’ll determine the height of everything in the house later on—the floor, the thresholds, the windowsills, the countertops, the windows. Neat, huh?”
“I hope it’s accurate, too.”
“What are you talking about? The stichmuss is the most accurate thing there is! It’s not a way of measuring with a ruler or visually or with your hand. It’s relative to the floor or the ceiling of the house. It’s relative to the world. Isn’t it nice to know that the windowsill over your kitchen sink and the sill on your bedroom window are exactly the same distance from the center of the earth?”
“That certainly is nice, yes.”
Chapter Thirteen
1
THE NAME of the Baby is written on the memorial plaque for fallen soldiers in the Jordan Valley Regional High School, but the truth is, he was a weak student who rarely visited the classroom, and his teachers were constantly scolding him. At fifteen he decided that pigeons interested him more than anything he was learning there, and two years hence, Miriam also informed him she had nothing more to teach him.
Indeed, at seventeen the Baby was already a respected duvejeck who attended in-service training sessions and won competitions and hybridized excellent males with female racing champions, and sometimes he would travel to Tel Aviv, either on pigeon business or to meet the Girl, to talk to her, to whistle with her, to touch her in the same manner that she touched him, and to take his pigeons to her and to take her pigeons back with him. At eighteen he announced that it was time for him to enlist in the Palmach.
His aunt and uncle were terribly anxious on his behalf, but Dr. Laufer assured them that the Baby would continue his avocation in the Palmach and, like Miriam, would set up a pigeon loft. “Anybody can light a campfire and shoot a Sten gun and steal chickens,” he said, “but how many expert pigeon handlers are there?” He reassured them that their Baby would soon be training and rearing pigeons and, when necessary, dispatching pigeons to central command or providing a battle-bound unit with a pigeon for dispatch.
In anticipation of his enlistment, the Baby went to the kibbutz carpentry shop, and with the help of the carpenter he prepared a one-of-a-kind dovecote he could carry on his back, with four stories — three built of wood and screens, the fourth of tarp sewn with compartments for message capsules, strings, quills, pigeongram forms, mineral powder, medicines, eating and drinking implements for the pigeons, and tea, sugar, and a glass mug for him. He added a curtain to guard the pigeons against rain and the beating sun, and his uncle sewed wide, thick shoulder straps for him.
And this is how he enlisted: in work boots and faded khaki clothing he had received from the kibbutz warehouse and a brand-new tembel hat on his head, and in his small suitcase there were clothes and underwear, a sweater and a woolen stocking cap knitted by his aunt, and toiletries and writing implements and a sewing kit, and three pigeons in the dovecote, one of Miriam’s and two from Tel Aviv
Although it was numbingly heavy, he maintained that same gaping, slightly sky-bound look of fascination, that same heavyset body, that same expression of wonder he’d had upon awakening on that very first day the new pigeon loft had been erected next to the children’s house. And so it is easy to imagine the reaction he received when he appeared thus at the Palmach tent camp in Kiryat Anavim, near Jerusalem, where he had been sent. There was a huge outburst of laughter; someone called him a “donkey carrying birds” and someone else called him kel-beleh, or “calf,” just like his aunt had named him; however, this kelbeleh had not been uttered in love but in scorn, the smile accompanying it an evil one full of long rat’s teeth. Suddenly a guy who had studied two years ahead of him in school appeared and said, “The situation must be pretty bad if the Palmach has started enlisting babies.” And so his nickname became known and it stuck to him here, too.
But the Baby took it all in stride. He laid down his belongings, fed and watered his pigeons, and went to investigate the loft in which he would raise the chicks he would soon be receiving from the central loft in Tel Aviv When he saw it he deemed the loft and its location unsuitable, both for the pigeons and for operational needs. “A homing pigeon must love her home,” he said, declaiming the pigeon handler’s motto. “No pigeon will want to return to this loft.”
He hurried to the carpentry shop and succeeded in persuading the carpenter—an exact duplicate of the carping carpenter on his own kibbutz, in fact just another in a long line of carping carpenters in every carpentry shop on every kibbutz during those times—that he should take a break from his other work and help him build a new loft. The carpenter was a small man with meticulously combed hair and work clothes that were clean and pressed. He did not dare sport a tie there, but he buttoned his shirt all the way up his neck and in the shop he had a large mirror that was far grander than any mirror kept by any kibbutz comradette in her room.
Together, the two built a large loft that would keep the pigeons safe from strong winds and dampness but would still be sun-drenched and full of air, precisely accordingly to what Dr. Laufer had told the Baby: “There are no hard-and-fast rules of loft building, just as
there are no hard-and-fast rules in building for human beings. Everything depends on needs and possibilities.” The Baby found a quiet, out-of-the-way spot and, with the help of the carpenter, a mule, a cart, and two guys from the Palmach unit stationed there, he transported the loft and set it down facing south. After digging a large, square pit for waste, he washed his hands, took hold of one of the Girl’s pigeons, and attached a message capsule to her leg and tied a quill between her tail feathers. The pigeongram in the capsule was intended for Dr. Laufer: “The loft is ready to receive chicks and commence training.” The note in the quill was intended for the Girl, and it read “Yes and yes and yes.” Yes I love you, yes I miss you, yes I know and remember that you do, too, for in her last missive she had written “No and no,” that is to say, No I do not want anyone other than you and no I do not manage to sleep at night.
He raised his hands, let go, and dispatched the pigeon, watching her rise in the sky At first she darkened and then she melted and disappeared into the blue-gray sky that was the same color as she, and once again he experienced the thrill of this feeling, which persisted even after hundreds and thousands of dispatches, since that day, now receding, when he went with Miriam to the fields and dispatched his very first pigeon, to the day, now approaching, when he will lie in a pool of his own blood and dispatch his last.
2
ALMOST NINE YEARS had passed since a wounded pigeon had landed on a Tel Aviv balcony and since Dr. Laufer had come with Miriam and the pigeons to a Jordan Valley kibbutz. The Baby and the Girl had become a young man and a young woman. Miriam had smoked more than three thousand evening cigarettes. The green pickup truck had logged many kilometers and engine hours and years of life and had grown quite old and scarcely capable of ascending from the coastal plain. But Dr. Laufer, in spite of the white that had begun to weave its way through his red hair, remained as full of energy and excitement as ever. He showed up at Kiryat Anavim with the equipment and the chicks and leapt from the pickup truck, his long narrow back stooped, his limbs flailing, the royal or humble we in his mouth.
