A Pigeon and a Boy Read Free Page A

LION was lying in wait on an armchair in the corner of the lobby, alert and smelling of aftershave. His eyes and his watch glowed in the dim light, his white mane coiffed, his wrinkles deep, his silver eyebrows standing on end.
    “I’ve been waiting for you,” he said as he rose to greet me, though it was not clear whether from politesse or to remind me of his advantage over me—in years, in height, in knowledge. His eyes had seen, while mine had not. His ears had heard, while mine had merely imagined. His mind was shelves of memory, while mine was rolls of conjectures.
    “I was promised an important delegation from America,” I told him.“They never mentioned anything about a guy who served in the Palmach.”
    “I wanted to thank you,” he said. “I hadn’t been back to most of those places since then, and I thought it was going to be tough for me.”
    “Well, certainly not as tough as back then, during the war.”
    “You’d be surprised, but in some ways it was easier then. I was a colt, really eager to see battle, ready to take on anything and quick to heal. I was just what a war wants its soldiers to be: a guy without a potbelly or a brain or kids or memories.”
    “So where was it most difficult for you today? At the cemetery or the monastery?”
    “The monastery At least at the cemetery there was one good thing: they’re dead but I’m still alive. Once upon a time I felt guilty about that, but not anymore.”
    “He’s buried there too,” I said.
    “Who is?”
    “The guy you told me about today, the pigeon handler who went to battle with you guys and got killed.”
    “The Baby!” he cried. “That’s the reason I’ve been waiting for you here. To tell you I remembered: we all called him the Baby”
    And when you recall his name, can you picture him, too?”
    “His face? Not really More the image—kind of blurry without all the features. But it’s him all right. He was called the Baby because he was short and chubby, and someone from the Jordan Valley told us that’s what he was called at school and on his kibbutz. He was always busy with his birds, and he never let anyone get near the loft because he didn’t want to frighten them. He explained to us that pigeons need to love their home; otherwise they won’t return to it. Will you look at this! When I talk to you, more and more memories come back, but I can’t for the life of me recall his real name.”
    He leaned over me as he had at the monastery, and in spite of his eighty years the scent of a predator filled the air: a breath of chocolate and mint, a whiff of alcohol, faint aftershave, rare meat—bloody on the inside, seared on the outside—a nonsmoker. My nostrils informed me that his shirt had been laundered with Ivory, like my wife’s undies, and underneath it all was battle smoke, dust from roads that never settles, embers from a bonfire.
    “It’s remarkable, you know: the older and denser I get, the more things rise to the surface. We never had a single night when we weren’tbusy, and there was a division of labor: whoever didn’t go out to battle dug graves for the ones who didn’t return. I can still hear the sound of the pickaxes in the valley, metal on rock, even more than the sound of gunfire. You just dig and dig, you don’t even dare think about who exactly it’s going to be this time. Incidentally, he was one of the regular grave diggers.”
    “Who was?”
    “The Baby After all, until the battle at the monastery he didn’t fight with us. So he dug graves for the ones who did. The graves were supposed to be ready when the guys came back in the morning with the bodies. The dead hate to wait.”
    How strange, I thought to myself: the man doesn’t seem the talkative type. But now he appears to be purging himself of everything that has piled up inside him and been waiting for release since then. I recalled a story you told me when I was a teenager. You said that words are born and multiply in lots of ways: some