A Pigeon and a Boy Read Online Free Page B

“It’s not good for you to talk a lot and exert yourself.”
    You were lying in your sickbed, winded and impatient, several gladioluses in a pitcher on top of the cabinet, a blue kerchief covering your bald head. “Large trees, Yair, don’t forget. The wind in a big tree is different from that of young trees. Here, take this … and build your self a little outdoor shower, too. It is pleasant to shower facing the wind and the view”
    My body trembled, my hand reached out and took it, my eyes looked and read. “Where did all this money come from?” my mouth asked.
    “From Mother.”
    You coughed, you drank the air in spasms. “Take it while my hand is warm and I am still alive to give it to you. And tell no one about it. Not your brother, not Yordad, not your wife.”
    Those were truly the words: “go” and “find” and “a place of your very own.” And between your coughing fits I was reminded of that place that is not mine, the house that Liora bought us on Spinoza Street in Tel Aviv. The house and its mistress; she and her abode. The large, light-colored rooms just like her, and the proper angles just like hers; she of her wealth, of the whitewashed walls of her body, of the marvelous distance between the windows of her eyes.
2
    B EFORE SHE FELL ILL, my mother was tall of stature, with fair curls and a single dimple. After she fell ill her stature bowed, her curls fell out, and her dimple was effaced. At the first memorial service we held in her honor, my brother, Benjamin, and I were still standing next to her grave when a dispute arose between us: on which cheek was that dimple? Benjamin said it was the right one, while I stood firm for the left. At first we joked about it, exchanging slaps and stinging remarks, and then my slaps grew heavier and his words became as snakebites.
    After betting—we used to argue often; later we made bets, always on the very same lunch at the very same Romanian restaurant—we began interrogating anyone we could about the placement of that dimple. At once additional disputes awakened and additional brows wrinkled and additional bets were made. And when we came to investigating old photographs —with childish excitement and the sweet pain common to adult orphans—we discovered, with great disappointment and the thin, unavoidable feeling of having been cheated, that her dimple did not appear in any of them. Not on her left cheek and not on her right.
    Could it be that we remembered a dimple that had never existed? Perhaps we had imagined ourselves a mother, her smile and her height and her dimple and her curls? No! We did have a mother, but it turned out that in photographs —we only learned this after her death— she didnot smile. Thus, the pictures never show her large, identical teeth or the slant of the sneer on her upper lip or her dimple or the look that took up residence in her eyes during the first year of her marriage to Yordad.
    When she spoke to us of him she did not say “Father” or “Dad” but “your dad”: Tell your dad that I am waiting for him. Recount to your dad what we saw in the street today You want to own a dog? Ask your dad, but do not forget to tell him that I do not approve. And because we were little and she continued to call him “your dad,” we thought his name was Yordad and we called him this when we spoke to him or about him. It has remained his nickname to this very day He did not protest, but he did demand that we not call him this around strangers.
    “Call Yordad upstairs for lunch,” my mother told us each day at her punctiliously German one-thirty and we would charge down the stairwell to his ground-floor pediatric clinic—Benjamin at three already skipping while I, five years old, still stumbled—pushing each other and shouting, “Yordad, Yordad! Mother says you should come eat …”
    They both smiled, she laughing aloud in the kitchen, he while silently hanging up his smock. Occasionally he would scold us: “Children,