A Pigeon and a Boy by Meir Shalev

Author:Meir Shalev [SHALEV, MEIR]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8052-4268-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-01-05T16:00:00+00:00

4

WE ENTERED the village.

“Lovely” Tirzah said. “Pitch-black streets, huge potholes, and of course they don’t sell anchovies in the local grocery”

“What’s so lovely about that?”

“It means they don’t have a penny It means they need us more than we need them.”

Two cars and several bicycles were parked next to the secretariat. We entered; Tirzah peered into a room in which several people were sitting and said, graciously, “Hello. We’re the Mendelsohns.”

“We’ll be with you in just a few minutes,” said a voice.

“Three men,” she whispered, “and two women. How predictable. Those are exactly the faces I expected to see here.”

We looked at the aerial photographs hanging on the walls. The village: its homes, its chicken coops, its cowsheds, its fields.

“Nothing much happens here,” Tirzah said. “That’s very good.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because nothing’s changed from the black-and-white photos to the color ones. Same public buildings, a bit of construction on the farms. Look at this place: in the black and whites there are still a few cows, but not in the color photos. The houses have stayed the same, too.”

All the secretariats in all the villages have the same photos,” I informed her.

She told me she had not imagined I could be familiar with so many village secretariats, and I told her I had searched a lot of places for our house before finally finding it here.

She smiled. “You don’t have to call it our house yet, Iraleh.”

I said, “I’m just practicing for the interview, Tiraleh.”

“It’s not easy to come and live in a place like this,” she said. “Small and old. You’ll never know its little secrets, the language of the place, who hates who and why, who is a tree that bears fruit and who is a tree that does not. You’re liable to make friends with the village outcast, or praise one man to another when he’s actually sleeping with the guy’s wife. You have to be careful.”

Two more men arrived and entered the room; right away a voice called, “Come in, please.”

Tirzah was right. At once I had them figured out: Mr. All-Is-Lost, Mr. How-Shall-This-Man-Save-Us, the birdman, the old maid, the maiden of hopes, the deputy battalion commander in army reserves, and the self-appointed watchdog. Thirteen eyes—the birdman wore a patch over his left eye— scrutinized us with a mixture of mercy and authority

Tirzah apologized for the muck stuck to our shoes. “We didn’t want to be late,” she explained. “We left home early, and when we got here we took a little walk around.”

“Tell us about yourselves,” the deputy battalion commander and All-Is-Lost said at the same time. They exchanged angry looks. Tirzah smiled to herself.

“My name is Yair Mendelsohn,” I said, the manly head of the household, “and this is my wife, Liora. I was born in 1949, I’m a tour guide, and now, with the economic situation the way it is, I’m in transportation. As for Liora—”

“Where would you bring tourists in this area?”

“In my field, which is bird-watching and history, there aren’t a lot of attractions around here.

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