by Assaf Gavron
Roni showed up with an air rifle that his classmate Tsiki liked to use for shooting at birds—and cats, if the rumors were true. Gabi and Yotam followed him off the kibbutz to an abandoned Muslim inn where dozens of pigeons were perched on the roof, flying off from time to time, returning, landing on the electricity wires. Roni approached as close as he could without attracting their attention, took his position with the butt of the rifle pressed into his shoulder, closed one eye, placed a finger on the trigger, and began firing. By the time the pigeons realized they were caught in a battle zone and flew off, two unlucky ones had fallen to the ground.
The two boys were unaware that serving the body of the pigeon as is to the falcon wasn’t the way to go. The falcon looked at the fat corpse and then at them. Had it been blessed with shoulders, it surely would have shrugged them—and if with lips, an incredulous smile would surely have followed. The boys revisited Yotam’s father, who explained that the meat itself was the answer. They looked at each other. That makes sense. Who wants to eat feathers? On the other hand, isn’t it the falcon’s job to get to the meat? After all, it doesn’t have cooks to prepare its food in the wild. When they returned an hour or so later, the pigeon’s status was unchanged. The falcon hadn’t gone near it. Gabi picked up the pigeon, went into the field outside the children’s dormitories, and, with the aid of the large penknife Roni received for his bar mitzvah and passed down to him, first cut off the dead bird’s head, and then its legs, and finally the wings. He tried not to inhale through his nose, and also not to see what he was doing while cutting into the bird. Yotam stayed back. Gabi then sliced down the length of the pigeon’s stomach, removed the internal organs, and did his best to cut away the breast meat and separate it from the small bones. “Bring a plate,” he said, continuing to hack at it. He heard footsteps leaving and returning, and a plate landed by his side. He transferred the pieces of butchered flesh to it, rose from his crouch, lifted the plate high in front of him with bloody hands, entered the building, and headed to the small storeroom. He placed the plate in the cage and went to wash his hands. The plate was clean when he returned. If the falcon used his tongue the way a human would, he thought, the pinkish puddle of blood on the plate would be gone, too.
Roni was a rare sight at the kibbutz; and when Gabi caught up with him one day during recess, in the smokers’ den behind the high school building, Roni said he wouldn’t be coming to the kibbutz anytime soon, and that he wouldn’t be able to bring the air rifle again, or ask for it for Gabi, who was too young to shoot it. So, after the falcon had polished off the meat of the first two doves, Yotam and Gabi were forced to upgrade their hunting tactics.
They first lured the pigeons to the window of the small storeroom in the children’s dormitory with the help of seeds and various pigeon delicacies they’d read about in the encyclopedia of birds, and after a sufficient number had gathered there, they frightened them inside and shut the window. It was pretty crafty, but pretty simple, too; pigeons, they discovered, are really dumb. They left the birds in the dark room for several days to blind them. Then Gabi went into the room and caught one—easy enough, given that the room was small and the bird was blind—and carried it out to the yellowish thorny field alongside the children’s dormitories. He gripped the head of the bird between the forefinger and middle finger of his right hand, lifted his arm high above his head, and with four or five lassolike twirls of his wrist to gain speed and momentum, he threw his hand forward, leaving the bird’s head between his fingers, while the body, disengaged from the head, flew five or six meters forward from the impact and landed on the ground, the wings still fluttering.
Gabi looked down at the head still in his hand, kissed it lightly above the beak, and tossed it aside; then he walked over to the warm, shaking body and, using the penknife again, sliced it open and cut away the best pieces of flesh and served them to the falcon on a plate. All told, the entire process lasted mere minutes once he had mustered sufficient experience, cool-headedness, and skill. Yotam helped with laying the traps and chasing the pigeons into the room. The rest of the work was left to Gabi—the carrying, the swinging, the decapitating throw, the discarding of the head, handling the meat.
And thus things continued until the grade’s head teacher got wind of the rumors spread by some of the girls who were grossed out by it all and turned up to confirm them. She told Yotam and Gabi that they weren’t allowed to keep a falcon in their room. It was to be released into the wild right away, and they’d been wrong not to go to see the vet. Who knows what diseases it might be carrying, and where it actually came from, and the whole business of killing the pigeons had to end.
Following their scolding, Yotam told Gabi he was sick and tired of the falcon anyway. Gabi agreed; the head teacher’s timing was good. They thought about releasing it on the mountain, but there was still a problem with the bird’s leg, they thought, so they handed it over to someone at the kibbutz’s livestock department. Then they returned to the small storeroom and issued pardons to the two blind pigeons that remained imprisoned there.
The Jaw
Not long after the falcon incident, Gabi was abducted while walking alone through the plum orchards toward the mountain. He didn’t know who abducted him—a man, an adult, large-bodied, with hairy arms and big hands—that’s what he had felt. Over the days that followed, he paid close attention to the arms of the kibbutz men. The abductor covered Gabi’s eyes and mouth with his hands and embraced him powerfully for several minutes with a force that far outweighed Gabi’s ability to resist—until Gabi got used to the idea and realized he’d be better off simply accepting his fate. The abductor then released his one hand and immediately tied a bandanna in its place—first over the mouth and then the eyes. He pulled Gabi’s arms back and tied them behind his back—Gabi could hear the flexing and clicking of the plastic—with a zip tie.
His abductor pushed him forward, into a walk. Because he had hiked through the area during nights of total darkness on many an occasion, he knew he was being led between the plum trees to the far end of the orchard, where there was a gravel road. Then he was loaded onto an open vehicle of sorts, a pickup truck or a jeep (over the days that followed, he paid close attention not only to hairy arms but also to the kibbutz’s fleet of vehicles, in an effort to find clues), and driven south, to the edge of the orchards and the cattle fields beyond.
Not a word was spoken throughout the ordeal, nor was he beaten. All the abductor did was fill his mouth with black beetles and, perhaps, various other bits of flesh, insects, dirt, stones, fluids that smelled like the urine of certain animals, soft solids whose sharp and concentrated taste indicated they were possibly animal feces of some kind—and force him to swallow. There were black beetles for certain, because at the hospital the following day, they found pieces of legs stuck between the braces that still graced Gabi’s teeth; and there was probably a frog, too, because something resembling the leg of one turned up after they flushed out his stomach.
He couldn’t recall how long he was there. He lost his sense of time and place at some point, between the vomiting and the refilling of his mouth. They didn’t hit him, but they didn’t exactly caress him, either. He didn’t know how many of them there were. The large man who grabbed him must have been there, as well as a driver, because the man remained alongside him during the drive. There may have been others. He tried not to think about the things that were being stuffed into his mouth, and to block out the stench of their odor and their sour taste.
Years later he realized that the blindfold had been his savior—because, in general, being sickened by food wasn’t related to its taste but rather to its appearance. Nevertheless, and despite his savior, he understood what they were doing, and he could feel ants crawling over his hands and on his tongue. He identified the beetles—a likely flashback of his tastebuds to his experience as an infant. The rest felt like things one doesn’t usually put in one’s mouth—too dry, too smooth, too abrasive—but he tried not to think, and
ate and threw up, and ate and threw up. They left him, bound and blindfolded, outside the room of his adoptive parents.
The last time he’d been at Ziv Hospital was some two months previously, when his parents, teachers, and more or less the entire kibbutz insisted he visit Eyal. Dad Yossi went with him. They approached the bed and all Gabi could see were Eyal’s eyes and the black rings around them. The remainder of his face was in a plaster cast, while the rest of his body lay hidden under a blanket in the small bed. The new school year had started a few weeks earlier, and Eyal had yet to begin second grade, but children and teachers from his class had been coming to his bedside to tutor him and fill him in on things. Eyal’s eyes stared up at him, cold and dull. They looked nothing like the plucky and mischievous eyes that had looked at him alongside the cottage cheese, when he addressed Gabi as Jaws. The spectacle amused Gabi and filled him with a sense of satisfaction, but he tried not to let on. Eyal’s mother and father—both named Yonah, an interesting coincidence in and of itself and the source of many a joke in the kibbutz newsletter and dining hall—were standing on the opposite side of the bed. Dad Yossi nudged his shoulder, and he looked at the parents and then at Eyal.
“I’m sorry,” Gabi said, and then could no longer hold back—and cracked up laughing.
“Gabi!” Dad Yossi commanded, and Eyal turned away, and his parents shook their heads in disbelief.
After the abduction, everyone was sure it had been an act of vengeance by someone close to Eyal. There could be no other explanation for such revenge on Gabi. No one looked into it, of course; no one thought to report it to the police. God forbid! The abduction and abuse of a young boy might have been a criminal offense, but dirty laundry isn’t aired in public; the kibbutz has a very efficient washing service. Gabi’s cannonball onto Eyal remained an in-house matter, too. Roni would learn the identity of the abductor only many years later.
For Eyal, the pool incident had resulted in a broken jaw. He struggled to open his mouth for months afterward. Initially, he couldn’t eat; his bottom teeth were bent out of shape and pushed against his molars. He spent years undergoing mouth and jaw surgery and never regained the ability to whistle or yawn. And as long as Gabi lived on the kibbutz, every time he ran into him on the concrete pathways or in the dining room or the basketball hall, Eyal’s crooked face would remind him of what he had done and what he had suffered in return—the stares of the horrified kibbutz members, dozens of pairs of eyes glaring at him at every meal in the dining hall; the attitude of his friends, or those he once considered his friends. Even Yotam and Ofir gave him the silent treatment for a long time afterward, despite being the ones who had encouraged Gabi not to hold back. They fanned the flames of the humiliation. They were the ones who ignited the fire that propelled him with outstretched legs off the high concrete diving platform and into the face of the small wiseass boy.
They didn’t come to see him at Ziv after the abduction. He wasn’t sent any candy, and no one sat at his bedside to help him catch up on the schoolwork he missed. Aside from Mom Gila, Dad Yossi, Roni, and Roni’s girlfriend, Yifat, he couldn’t recall any other visitors. They gave him an enema, and his stomach was flushed twice. Blood and urine tests were done to ensure no traces remained of food poisoning, intestinal infections, or other harmful effects from the unidentifiable creatures he was fed. It turned out he had in fact contracted a disease called toxoplasmosis, but the doctor claimed it had been dormant in his body for quite a while, long before the abduction and assault. Was he in the habit of eating beetles and other creepy-crawlies before the assault? Gabi shook his head—not since the age of two. Had he been in contact with cats or had he touched their feces? No. Had he had any contact with pigeons or touched their secretions? Gabi stopped shaking his head.
He continued to vomit at frequent intervals in the days following his return from the hospital. And after his first attempt on Independence Day to enjoy a mouthful of barbecued steak, he was overcome by such intense convulsions that he stopped eating meat—all meat, of any animal, finned, winged, or on legs, nauseated him. He could hardly bring himself to eat salads and cheese and eggs. He wouldn’t particularly enjoy food at all for a number of years. This time, the memory of the beetles would remain fresh in his mind for a long while. He was no longer the two-year-old for whom sorrowful events would course through his veins only to quickly fade from memory. He was twelve, and when the legs of beetles get stuck in your braces, when the slimy skin of a frog is dragged over your tongue, and when your lips feel the ooze of a deshelled snail, you don’t forget quite so fast.
Yonah, Eyal’s father, had smooth arms. The arms of the fathers of Eyal’s friends were smooth, too. The volunteers’ arms were smooth. Baruch Shani had large, hairy arms; but Baruch was Roni’s friend, and Roni assured Gabi there was no way he would have done such a thing. Baruch aside, the largest and hairiest arms on the kibbutz belonged to Shimshon Cohen. And Shimshon Cohen, as everyone knew, had during the course of his life done far more serious things than stuff a few beetles into the mouth of a ten-year-old boy. Gabi, who had always considered himself on friendly terms with Shimshon and didn’t fear him like the other kids did, tried to test his theory. He greeted him every time he saw him, smiled at him, even tried to get up close to him to smell him, to see if he could recognize the sweetness of an aftershave or a sour odor of sweat. The findings were inconclusive. Shimshon remained kind toward him, continued to smile and pinch his cheek, and never showed a hint of hostility or anger. But Shimshon did work on the avocado team with Yonah, Eyal’s mother, so there was a possible link.
A few days after his discharge from the hospital, when Roni came to visit him at the dormitory with Yifat, Gabi suddenly noticed just how beautiful she was. He understood then what Roni saw in her and why he spent every free moment of his time in her company. Her eyes, deep and brown, smiled at him with concern. Her teeth flashed at Roni’s jokes. Her head nodded in agreement at his promises to exact revenge, to watch Gabi’s back “because no one messes with us.” Semi-prone in bed, Gabi watched as Roni’s hand constantly reached out to touch hers, and how he’d lean in from time to time to kiss her and be kissed in return.
When she wasn’t at his side, Roni spoke about her. They spent almost every minute of the day together. They sat next to each other in class, and they made out during recess until they got in trouble with their teacher. They skipped classes to kiss in the hallway and played hooky to linger in their room on the kibbutz, in bed, to touch and talk for hours. She knew how to touch him better then he knew how to touch himself. She told him he was her first, and he thought either she was not telling the truth and did have experience, or she had a natural talent, because she touched him so perfectly, knew precisely the right intensity, the right softness, the right rhythm, when to speed up and when to slow down. Her endless kisses sent him to a heaven from which he never wanted to return, and the feel of her body on his, the weight, the scent, the long brown hair were intoxicating.
The first time they did it was when she turned sixteen. Some girls started younger—like the beautiful Orit with Baruch Shani on the shores of the Kinneret between eighth and ninth grades, and some of Yifat’s friends from the kibbutz. But she had told him not before her sixteenth birthday, and he accepted it. He was pleased he’d be her first, and she his. Some of his friends had already been baptized by fire, but he wasn’t in a hurry, he wasn’t wanting for anything; and in the winter, it arrived.
* * *
Winter on the kibbutz. The rain came down hard on the roof of the Upper Galilee Regional Council’s bus; the cold seeped in through the cracks between the windows and their frames. Yehiel, the driver, his gray tembel hat a permanent fixture on his head, whistled softly under his mustache. The large wipers on the front windshield moved from side to side with labored clumsiness, out of sync, each emitting a dull thud at the end of its respective arc—one after the other, one after the other. After passing through the hoof-and-mouth wheel disinfection dip at the entran
ce to the kibbutz, the bus continued onward and tried to get as close as possible to the children’s dormitories, but there was still quite some distance to cover, and the children spilled through the door of the vehicle, hunched over and breaking into a fast walk, some of the girls with umbrellas, some of the boys covering their heads with their school bags, others displaying indifference, their heads held high between the drops. So intense was the grayness that it was almost dark out, and large brown puddles dotted the road and yards and open expanses, and a rich smell rose from the earth and blew in from the mountains and spiraled up from the agricultural fields that embraced the kibbutz.
Gabi and Yotam hurried to their room, and Ofir joined them. The rain brought them together—there’d be no walks to the mountain, no girlfriends, no swimming pool. Unrelenting rain has that quality, the ability to comfort and reunite. They paged through the magazines with pictures of totally naked girls that Roni had given his brother a few weeks ago, and also a small book with a torn cover by Shulamit Efroni that Roni had bought at Tel Aviv’s Central Bus Station, which contained stories about totally naked girls. When he showed up with the shopping bag full of magazines and books, Roni told Gabi that it was about time he learned about such things, but Gabi knew that Roni simply wanted to clean out his room in case Yifat showed up; he didn’t want to make a bad impression on her.
The three teens, each with a magazine or small book in hand, read with complete focus and in silence. The only sounds in the room came from the rain beating against the shutters, and the radiator, which emitted a metallic groan every few minutes, and the rustling of pages. Yotam lay sprawled on his bed. Gabi and Ofir shared Gabi’s, each in his own corner. Yotam cleared his throat.
“What’s all this wetness?” Ofir asked.