A Pigeon and a Boy by Meir Shalev Read Free Book Online

how similar they are to one another. They all have handsome dogs and children, each man looks like the next, each woman like the other, each man identical to his woman, each woman to her mate.
    I head right, toward the memory of the visit to the zoo. Sometimes I enter through the what-was-once-the-gate and sometimes I stroll along the no-longer-a-fence. Then I take another right and walk the length of the large square, the sycamores and citrus trees of which have long since been chopped down and whose sands are choked under the paving stones. I cross Frishman Street and pass by the French bookstore and reach Masaryk Square and the small and pleasant playground where a few young women are always sitting with their children and I wonder who among all these little ones will grow up and write about his mother; who will refer to her as
she
and who as
you,
who will call her
Mother
and who
my mother.
    From here King George Street leads me in a straight line to Dizengoff Center. I enter and paddle along in a sea of screaming children and short, dumpy women with exposed bellies and clear plastic bra straps, and I make my way up to the third floor, to the Traveler shop, my destination. Whoever situated the shop particularly in this spot did so wisely A few minutes in that vacuous space suffice to awaken a desire to travel as quickly and as far away as possible from there.
    In the shop I purchase hiking equipment I will never put to use, listen to lectures about trips I will never take and places I will never visit. Iobserve with a gaze of jealous longing the young people making travel plans, and they observe with a gaze of jealous longing the expensive sleeping bag, lightweight and especially warm, that I carry to the cash register, and the alpine camping stove that burns for eight hours straight even in gale-force winds. I scan the notes pinned to the notice board by anxious young ladies with modern names and modern spellings, like Tal and Nufar and Noa and Stav and Ayelet, looking for companions to share a soft landing and perhaps even a trek in the dangerous, distant East.
    Overwhelmed with no less dangerous and distant delusions, I leave there, taking Bograshov Street toward the sea, plowing through the sidewalk cafés filled with people, and at Ben Yehuda Street I turn left and proceed southward to the head of the street, past the house in which I spent my first years and which has been razed. A few years ago it was torched by one of the many religious fanatics our land is blessed with because, after we moved out and relocated in Jerusalem, the place changed hands and roles until, eventually, it became a brothel.
    Back in those days Ben Yehuda Street was far more pleasant. I recall that there were many German-speaking neighbors, a language that my mother and Yordad understood but did not speak, except on rare occasions. We took our evening meals on a balcony overlooking the street. I remember the kiosk that stood underneath, and the royal poinciana tree that reddened the back garden, and the morning glory that climbed the balcony wall and that opened what she called “one thousand blue eyes” every day
    “That’s that,” she would say at the end of every meal. “The plant is already closing its eyes, so let us, too, go to sleep.”
    She loved that house very much. Whenever we returned to it, from far or near, she grew excited, filled with high spirits. “Soon we’ll be home!” she would say, and once arrived she would add, “Here we are, we’re home!” and sometimes she would even ceremoniously recite the lines of a poem that repeated itself as well: “Home is the sailor, home from the sea / And the hunter home from the hill.”
    The keyhole of our apartment door was the height of a person’s head. You would lift me in your arms and say, “You open it.”
    I would thrust the key in and turn it. You would press on the handle and open the door and say, “Hello, house …” to the cool dimness. “You two, say hello