by Meir Shalev
She has that rare trait that only the luckiest women are granted: her beauty grows with the passing of time. As a young woman she possessed the beauty of a perfect vessel, shapely and cool. Now the thin lines webbing her skin, the bluish hints of her veins, the softening perceivable only to the hand, not the eye, of her belly and breasts —all these have added life and warmth to her. We fell asleep together like we used to, she on her stomach, her cheek on her pillow, one leg extended and the other bent, while I lay behind her. My hand under her breast, my thigh between her thighs, my foot beneath her foot.
When I woke up in the morning I found that she had already risen in the night and returned to her room. I went to the grocer’s, returned, awakened the neighborhood with the alarm, and arranged my purchases in the refrigerator. Then I turned to her. “How did you sleep?”
“Very poorly, thank you.”
“I actually slept quite well.”
“Great. At least there’s one thing you know how to do well.”
The financial sections of the paper were spread out around her, her laptop, with its illuminated bitten apple, buzzing lightly, her first cup of lukewarm water with lemon juice, tea-hyssop, and honey flowing toward her stomach.
She said, “If you’re making breakfast for yourself, I’d like some too, please.”
There are two things she hastened to learn and love: the Hebrew language and my breakfasts. I am overcome with pride. I turn on the kettle and the toaster, cut vegetables thin and precise, slice fresh salted cheese, fry an egg. Once I made a hard-boiled egg for her, cracked it open on her forehead, and said, “Plaff!”That made her angry “Stop your silly games, Yair! I’m not your mother/”
I heat the oil in the skillet, turn my back on the rest of her litany of complaints: once again she did not shut her eyes the entire night. Look at these dark circles, they’re a gift from you. There is no doubt in her mind: I steal her slumber. That, too.
Chapter Nine
1
TIME PASSED. The Baby’s uncle became a regular conveyor of pigeons from the kibbutz pigeon loft to the central loft in Tel Aviv But all the pigeons dispatched from there returned without an answer from the Girl. The Baby also dispatched a pigeongram affixed to one of the pigeons the uncle brought back with him from Tel Aviv, but no response came to that one either.
“It’s a bad age,” the uncle said to the aunt. “He is old enough to feel love but too young for such a disappointment.”
He invited the Baby to come with him again to Tel Aviv—“If you see her and she sees you, everything will be fine,” he promised—but the Baby declined. He would wait for her to send him a pigeongram; only then would he come.
Then the green pickup truck returned and Dr. Laufer alighted from it. He had visited the large pigeon lofts of Yagur and Merhavia and Beit Hashita, and later the one at Kibbutz Gesher, and now he had come to Miriam, “last but not least.” He brought her pigeons for dispatch and breeding, checked the loft and its residents, the cards and the lists, visited the cowshed, drank tea with lemon in the dining hall, and gave another lecture to the members of the kibbutz.
Before Dr. Laufer left, the Baby gathered his courage and asked whether the Girl had sent a message with him. The veterinarian, dispirited, admitted that she had not, and the uncle, who heard this story told the Baby: “You are nearly fourteen years old. You must make the matter clear to her. Go to Tel Aviv and bring her your pigeons yourself.”
The Baby selected and marked six pigeons that had already matured and began training them specially His uncle dispatched them for him from Tiberias, Afula, Haifa, and Tel Aviv. One did not return and the Baby disqualified another because, in spite of her speed, she was in no hurry to enter the loft. Four months later he announced, “We ladies are ready” and said that he wanted to set out for Tel Aviv and bring the pigeons to the Girl.
The uncle tried to arrange a place for him with the milk truck, but it had already been promised to someone else. The Baby was unwilling to wait; he had to leave immediately He was fourteen years and four months of age and there was nothing to worry about, he told his aunt and uncle. The uncle gave him a little money and said, “You’ll get to Afula somehow; then buy a ticket and take the train to Haifa. From there, our relatives will put you on the bus.”
The Baby put the four pigeons in a woven wicker basket with a handle and a lid, and in his knapsack he took food and water for himself and them. At dawn he went out to the road and caught a ride with a cart driver from Menahamia on his way to Tiberias to sell fruit and buy goods. Near Kibbutz Kinneret the cart driver stopped the car of a man he knew, the principal of the school in Yavniel, and in Yavniel the principal sent him—not before scolding him for being truant from his studies—to the home of a farmer, where he could eat and sleep in exchange for helping sort and package almonds.
Almonds are the best food for a man on the road and for pregnant women,” the farmer told him. “Take some for the road—they’ll fill you up and they’re easy to carry”
The next morning a Circassian truck driver, an acquaintance of the almond farmer’s, gave the Baby a ride the rest of the way Lean and haggard, he was mostly eyes and a mustache and, to the Baby’s relief, tended to speak very little. The shifting expressions on his face were testimony to the fact that he held his conversations with himself The Baby was free to gaze at the view, to contemplate and comprehend that the longing he was fighting and the thoughts he was thinking and the will to see and hear more, to touch and feel to infinity, were what his elders called love. There was no other option, no other explanation, for if this was not love, then what was? In what other ways did it manifest itself?
The truck exerted itself on the steep curves until it reached the top. Mount Tabor revealed itself in all its roundedness and, farther off and friskier, Hamoreh Hill, too. The Baby felt his body to be a tiny speck moving along the face of the earth, drawing ever closer to his love. The basket shifted suddenly; the pigeons twitched, and he trembled with them. Near Kafr Kana the driver suddenly boomed, “This is my home!” and fell silent again.
From Tabor village the Baby continued on foot, hitching rides from passing wagons filled with fodder or trucks laden with milk and vegetables. In those days the world was empty and the traffic slow and the distances great, and that stretch of road, which I now traverse in Behemoth in twenty minutes, took the Baby half a day In Afula two boys invited him for a glass of soda and discussed pigeons with him, and after they had left him and he went to the train station he discovered they had stolen from him the pittance he had received from his uncle. He sat for nearly an hour on the bench at the station, the basket on his lap and his heart pounding and frightened; then finally he embarked on a train and traveled in the direction of Haifa without a ticket.
In no time he was caught. The ticket collector demanded two pigeons if he wished to continue his journey The Baby pleaded, refused, nearly began to cry The ticket collector grabbed him by the neck and threatened to toss him off the train into the great, empty expanses of the Jezreel Valley He was terrified. Earlier he had seen a pack of vultures preying on the carcass of a cow, and now he feared for his own fate. In his heart he had already planned how he would send a pigeon to Miriam and his uncle would organize a team to rescue him. But then a strange and foreign woman, a tall, gaunt Dutchwoman sitting nearby and painting watercolors of starlings and goldfinches, was overcome with feelings for him and paid his ticket. Speaking to him in a language he pretended not to understand, she told him she knew what he had in his basket and why he was making this trip.
In Haifa, the Baby went to the home of the relatives, who sent him to an elderly English engineer, a friend of theirs, who was making an overnight trip to Tel Aviv The man apologized for driving slowly—at night he could not see well—and he asked that the Baby converse with him to keep him awake. The Baby feared the man would ask him about the pigeons, and the old engineer did in fact ask—not only that, he exhibited expertise in two dangerous fields: homing pigeons and the
Hebrew language. It would not help the Baby to feign ignorance of English again. He told the man he lived in Haifa and had a loft on the roof of his house and that he was going to “send them flying”—he was careful not to say “dispatch”—in Tel Aviv
“Very interesting how they find their way home,” the Englishman said.
The Baby said, “They have a sense of navigation.”
“They do not,” the Englishman countered. “They do not know to find the way to anywhere but their own loft. That is not navigation; navigation is the ability to find one’s way from any place to any place, especially places with which one is not familiar, while finding one’s way home— how shall I put it, young man?—is like obeying the laws of gravity which we all do anyway Like a river knows the way to the sea without maps, like a tossed stone is not in need of a compass to return to the earth.”
By the time they crossed the Yarkon River, the horizon was lightening and from a distance it was possible to see the first lights shining from Tel Aviv The car passed by the horse paddock the Girl had told him about, where she would dispatch young pigeons, then continued farther south, where the Baby asked to alight, at a place that would not connect him to any person or matter.
“It’s still dark outside,” the English engineer said. “Where will you go?” But the Baby replied, “It’s fine, it’ll be light soon,” and he walked to the zoo. He did not know the way, but the roar of the leopard and the monkeys’ and birds’ early morning chatter could already be heard, and they led him on his way The gate was locked. The Baby sat beside it, and was awakened half an hour later by the fat man, who had come to open it.
“I remember you—you work in Miriam’s loft,” he told him. “Your girlfriend hasn’t come yet, but come on in, come in, you can wait for her inside.”
2
ON HIS WAY home two days later, the Baby traveled by bus. Four pigeons, given to him by the Girl, lay in the wicker basket. Dr. Laufer told the two of them, “Pigeongrams of love are very nice, but we have work and training exercises to carry out. With every pigeon you dispatch, add a pigeongram with the information about the time and weather. And do not mix up our message capsules with your goose quills; otherwise we ladies are liable to read what you ladies write to one another, haw, haw, haw … Now, since you are on duty I am giving you a little money for the trip and your bus ticket.”
He thought about her throughout the trip, about the walk they had taken together along the Tel Aviv seashore, about the street where she had removed her hand from his and the alley where she had not. About the kiss she had given him, about the kisses he had given her, about the way in which she had brushed his hand from her breast and exhaled, about their mingling tongues. He asked that she teach him to whistle, and when he failed with one finger and also with two, she said, “So let’s try like this,” and put her fingers in his mouth.
“Whistle!” she said, but his tongue was stuck between her fingers and his diaphragm filled with desire and his lungs could not inhale.
“Whistle!” she repeated, and his whistle turned into the laughter of surprise and endearment. The Girl said, “Now like this,” and she took both his index fingers into her mouth, and when she blew in his face he felt that he was blowing, too. He had never felt such exhilaration before. The sea was churning. Their eyes met, close to the point of blurring, deep to the point of drowning.
“Yes or no?” he asked.
“Yes or no what?”
“Can I take a pigeon of yours? Yes or no?”
He recalled the look on her face as she took his pigeons, as well as her expression when she gave him her own and said, “We ladies agree.” And because the country was small and the longings were intense, two pigeons were dispatched the very next morning, one from a loft in the Jordan Valley, the other from the central pigeon loft in the Tel Aviv zoo.
The pigeons, which naturally crossed paths en route, arrived and alighted, their shiny breasts beating powerfully The Girl and the Baby each in her or his place, passed along to Dr. Laufer and to Miriam the contents of their message capsules, unlaced the silk strings that held the quill to the pigeons’ tails, and stepped aside to read the words meant just for them. Short, numbered words, as was the practice with homing pigeons: Yes and yes and yes and yes. Yes we are in love, yes we miss you, yes we have not forgotten, yes we remember.
Never had they imagined that words so short, so few, and so simple could bring such joy Never had they known how many times one could read and reread them. Miriam and Dr. Laufer, he in Tel Aviv, she in the kibbutz, regarded the Baby and the Girl with a sigh and a smile. They knew that this was how things would be: after a love letter brought by a pigeon, the sender and the addressee would never again consent to any other type of postman. Nothing would ever compare to the dispatching, the vanishing before escorting eyes, the appearance—at the very same moment—before awaiting eyes.
Here she is: diving, arriving, flying straight as an arrow, the thrum of the beating of her wings mixing with the thrum of blood in the temples, the heart. What can compare to holding her? To the soft feathers of her breast? To removing the letter from the quill? To the beating of her heart? And how does she have the strength to carry so much love? And what is more rousing: the release of the dispatcher or the grasp of the receiver?
Dr. Laufer was satisfied, too. On one of the northbound flights a local record was broken: a pigeon had flown from the Girl to the Baby at an average speed of seventy-four kilometers per hour, just three less than the male pigeon Alphonse, the Belgian record holder for that year.
Every two months the Baby would come to Tel Aviv, bringing and taking new pigeons, and after a year the Girl came to him in the kibbutz.
“This is the girl you’ve been telling me about? The one that was there when you took him and the pigeons to the zoo?” the Baby’s aunt asked her husband.
“She’s grown a little since then, but that is absolutely the one,” he confirmed.
“Who would have believed,” the aunt said, “that the most beautiful and most intelligent girl ever seen around here would come for our little kelbeleh? You watch and see how the girls will chase after him now Girls can smell things like this. I just hope he won’t do anything foolish.”
Chapter Ten
1
EVEN WHEN Meshulam said, “Their price is too high” and “We can bring those slime bags to their knees,” I did not argue. The price was set and I was invited to “bring the wife” to a meeting of the membership committee.
“What am I going to do?” I asked him. “Liora will make the wrong impression with her expensive clothes. She’ll raise objections and talk in English.”
“So bring Tiraleh instead,” Meshulam said. “She’ll make a great Mrs. Mendelsohn. For the committee, too.”
“What do you mean, ‘bring Tiraleh.’ How?”
“By car, that’s how!”
“She’s not my wife! They said, ‘Bring the wife.’”
“Exactly They said, ‘Bring the wife’; they didn’t say ‘Bring your wife.’”
“And what if she won’t agree? How do you know she’ll go along with it?”
“That you can leave to me.”
The next day I was informed over the phone by Meshulam that his Tiraleh agreed. Not only did she agree, she had broken into one of her big laughs. But her father had yet another idea: “If you two are already going to the village together anyway, why don’t you pick her up early, say ten in the morning, from our Tel Aviv office?”
“But the committee meeting is only at night,” I said.
“Summer’s not here yet,” Meshulam said patiently “It’s still spring. There are anemones and cyclamen in shady places, and a few lupines and cornflowers and buttercups. Even Tiraleh deserves half a day off now and then, no? Take her on a little journey, maybe a nice little picnic with all kinds of goodies. I’ll send someone to buy stuff to fill up a cooler for you. Take a trip, eat, enjoy some time together, and then go to the interview”
�
��What if she doesn’t have time? What if she isn’t interested? What if she’s got a meeting with someone else?”
“She’s got time, she doesn’t have any meetings, and she’s interested!”
2
SOUTHWARD IN SILENCE, our first time alone together, we departed from Tel Aviv Mine is the tongue-tied silence of awkwardness, hers the smiling silence of anticipation, and then we utter inanities to each other, like “Meshulam arranged beautiful weather for us” and “I like these kinds of clouds, like on The Simpsons”
I pointed out a high-flying flock of large, soaring birds and told her, “Those are pelicans, heading north.” And she asked, “How can you tell what they are from so far away? Maybe they’re storks.” I informed her that pelicans change colors as they wheel and storks do not.
“Migrating birds have winter homes and summer homes,” I continued several minutes later. “But which of the two is the real one, the one they come home to?”
“The whole world’s their home,” Tirzah said. “When they fly down to Africa all they’re really doing is moving from room to room.”
I told her about the yaylas, the summer residences of shepherds in the mountain ranges of northeast Turkey In winter they abandon them and descend to the villages in the valleys and the seaside towns; then in spring they return with their flocks.
“I didn’t know you’d been there,” Tirzah said. “Who did you go with?”
“Nobody,” I told her. “I haven’t even been there myself I went to a lecture about the Kaçkar Mountains at the Traveler shop.”
“Why don’t you go visit the Kaçkar Mountains for real, instead of just listening to other people’s stories?”
“I don’t like going places—I like coming home,” I said, and I recited the other poem I know by heart, the beautiful lines about returning home that are engraved on the tombstone of Robert Louis Stevenson, about which I also heard at a lecture on Fiji and Samoa and other islands in the Pacific Ocean: