A Pigeon and a Boy Read Online Free Page A

special kind of a day; only later we realized it was the First of May, and there was this bird rising up above all that hell, that valley of death. She’d been lucky the dovecote got smashed—that’s how she managed to escape.”
    “She didn’t escape,” I told him. “He dispatched her. He did manage to do something before he died.”
    The man was astonished. “Who told you such a thing?”
    “There’s no other possibility That’s the only way the facts fit together.”
    “What do you mean he sent her? With a letter to headquarters?”
    “He didn’t send her,” I corrected him. “He dispatched her. ‘Dispatch is the correct word for pigeons, and that is precisely what he did, like Noah in the ark: And he dispatched a dove, and the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot, and she returned to him into the ark.’”
    “And what about that pigeon? What happened to her?”
    “He sent it to his girlfriend in Tel Aviv”
    All at once I felt that feeling I’d known from long ago: the wings beating inside my body, up and down, from the vibration in my knees to the emptiness in my loins to the ache in my breast to the spasms in my gullet. Home, Odysseus of the Feathered Creatures, in a straight line. The great magnetic forces of the earth are guiding her flight, longing pushes her from behind, love is signaling to her, switching on the landing lights: come, come, come, return from afar. That was the reason why the Baby had taken her, the purpose for her domestication, her training, her heredity “Strong muscles, featherweight body, hollow bones, the lungs and heart of an athlete, the ability to navigate, a sense of direction.”
    And the three desires that become one: the desire of the Baby, who at that moment had died; the desire of his beloved, who at that moment already sensed what lay ahead; and the desire of the bird to reach home. Home. Home to Tel Aviv, to the gold of the sand, to the blue of the water, to the pink tiles of the roofs.
    Home. To the upraised, joyful eyes awaiting her. To the heart beating on her behalf To the hand that will greet her with seeds of hashish, the traditional gift that pigeon handlers present to their birds returning from afar. To the other hand, which will remove the message capsule from her leg. And then the terrible scream of comprehension, his name spattered from mouth to heavens, the slamming of the door to the pigeon loft and the footsteps receding in great haste.
    “God,” the elderly American Palmachnik from Petah-Tikva said. “What are you trying to tell me? That that’s what he managed to do with the last moments of his life? To send a pigeon to his girlfriend in Tel Aviv?”
    I said nothing, and he grew agitated. “And what exactly did he write her from there: Hello, I’m dead?”

Chapter Two
1
    I WENT TO FIND myself a home. Some people shoot—themselves or others—but I went to find myself a home. A home that would heal, and soothe, and build me as I built it, and we would be grateful for each other.
    Off I went, armed with the surprising gift my mother had given me: to carry out her will, the command she’d issued with a note of regret threaded through her words: “Take this, Yair. Go find yourself a home. A place to rest the soles of your feet. A place of your very own.”
    “A home that has been lived in,” she instructed me, “small and old. Fix it up a bit …” She stopped talking for a moment, gulping air and coughing. “And make sure it’s in an old village and the trees nearby have matured—cypress trees are best, but an old carob tree is good too, and there should be weeds poking through the cracks in the sidewalk.”
    She explained: in an old village the scores have been settled and the old enmities have grown accustomed to one another and the truly great loves—not the small bothersome ones—have settled down and there is no longer a need for guesswork or the strength for experimentation.
    “Rest awhile, Mother,” I said.