A Pigeon and a Boy Read Free Page B

subdivide like amoebas; others send out shoots and branches. With this guy the letters were mating with memories.
    “And what about you? Did you join the war as a volunteer from America?”
    “What?! You’re insulting my Hebrew! I’m originally from Petah-Tikva; I still have family there. I’m a product of Mikveh Israel, agricultural training school, and the reserves and Haportzim, the fourth battalion of the Palmach. Judging by the tour you gave us today you know these places just as well as I do: the Castel, Colonia, Bab-el-Wad, and Katamon, of course. And then the war ended and I wasn’t accepted at the Technion, so I went to study engineering in America instead. I met a girl there, got a job with her father—”
    “He really
was
called the Baby,” I said, putting a stop to his prattle. “And the pigeon you were talking about this afternoon really
was
one of his.”
    “I see you’ve taken a great interest in that pigeon handler,” said the elderly American Palmachnik. “Did you know him?”
    “How could I? I wasn’t even born then.”
    “So what’s your connection to him?”
    “I’m interested in homing pigeons,” I told him. “Maybe because I’ve taken visiting bird-watchers around the country in search of migrating birds.”
    The gold in his eyes faded to blue, his wrinkles softened, his expressiongrew friendlier, as if he wished to recount more and, without knowing it, to offer consolation as well—to explain and to heal.
    “We won the battle at the monastery by a hair,” he said, “and with major casualties and wounded. Even a few poor nuns got killed. Among the living there was a kind of a joke about it: like us, the nuns died for Jerusalem; like us, they died virgins. We fought right through the night, and when the sun rose, instead of encouraging us it filled us with despair. In the light of day we could see they had more and more reinforcements, and an armored vehicle with a machine gun and a cannon, and worst of all, we could see the true color of our wounded and we knew who might live and who was sure to die. We had so many down that we’d already begun to wonder what would happen if the order was given to retreat: who would we take with us and what would we do with the ones we couldn’t. And then, like some heaven-sent miracle, the transmitter started working again and announced that the Arabs had started beating a hasty retreat from the whole area, with their commander at the lead, and we should just hold on a little longer. What can I tell you? In the end we won, but it was one of those victories where the winner is more surprised than the loser.”
    “Well, at least you were happy about it, right?”
    “We didn’t have the time or energy for rejoicing. We got up, started organizing the evacuation, and suddenly a little door opens up and three nuns step outside. Two of them dragged the bodies of their sister nuns inside, while the third— she was old and short, a dwarf almost, in a black habit that reached the ground—walked among us with a bottle of water and a few drinking glasses. What a picture that was: us, all those wounded and dead, and this nun wandering around like we’re at some cocktail party and she’s handing out drinks. The whole time she’s saying,
“Nero, nero,”
and we didn’t know what this
nero
was, but we knew we’d won because she’d come out to give water to the victors.
You
get it? If we’d lost, she’d have served water to the Arabs instead.”
    “Nero
is water,” I told him, “in Greek.”
    “If you say so,” the man chuckled. “A tour guide has to know how to say ‘water’ in all kinds of languages. Maybe one day you’ll get some Greek bird-watchers and they’ll be thirsty”
    “Bird-watchers don’t come here from Greece,” I said. “They come from England and Germany and Scandinavia and Holland, and sometimes as far away as the U.S.”
    But the man flashed me a look of reproach and sent me back to theplace and time to which I