A Pigeon and a Boy by Meir Shalev Page A

kind whose knee never stops jiggling when she is seated, and she, too, had brought with her a single bluish-gray pigeon. A certain type of know-it-all began to gabble about female drivers and those who give them licenses, while another type of know-it-all began to argue whether it was the same pigeon the visitor had dispatched the day before.
    In the metal boxes there were tools and instruments, the burlap sacks were stuffed with seeds and grain, and from the wooden crates there arose soft noises, an impatient scratching and a dull cooing. It did not take a genius to connect the sounds to the sights and the guesses to the smells, and to understand that inside these crates there were more pigeons. The veterinarian and the silent young woman emptied the truck, put everything in the shade, and went to check that all was in order in the new pigeon loft. Afterward, they gave the carpenter “the trap door,” a set of thin metal bars rotating on a common axis that can be set to swing outward only, or inward only, or in both directions, or in neither.
    The carpenter affixed the trap door to the opening of the pigeon loft, and the veterinarian brought the troughs and tin vessels inside and secured them. Spying the tip of a nail that was pointed inward and had managed to escape his notice, he said, “You thought we didn’t see you!” and pounded it with his hammer. Then the silent young woman smileda smile that no one had suspected her of harboring and she took out a handsome and colorful sign written in Hebrew lettering and adorned with childish flowers and blossoms and birds. The letters spelled out PIGEON LOFT. She hung the sign over the door of the loft, took two steps back, looked at it, straightened it, then smiled again, while among the onlookers a third type of know-it-all began to wonder whether, after smiling so much to herself, she might not smile at others.
    Then she took a hoe and a pickax, moved away from the loft, and dug a large, square pit. She was strong and diligent, she neither stopped work nor straightened up until she had completed the task, and she answered with a shake of her head “all the fighters from the pioneer training program and all the tough guys from the fields and all the big bruisers from the locksmith’s workshop”—that is the way the story would be told in the future—who approached her one after another and offered their assistance.
    She returned to the pigeon loft, sprinkled seeds, ladled water into the vessels, and brought the screened crates inside. She straightened up and looked to the veterinarian as if waiting for instructions.
    “Open them, Miriam, open them,” the veterinarian said. “These pigeons are yours.”
    The young woman opened the crates. Some forty pigeon chicks, most of which were already fully feathered but some of which still sported remnants of down, burst out of them, filling up their new home and falling upon the food and water. She cleaned the empty crates and put them out in the sun to be sterilized; then she took the waste from inside the crates and dumped it in the pit she had dug earlier and covered it with a thin layer of dirt.
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    I N THE EVENING the two appeared in the dining hall, and after having dunked cookie after cookie into glass after glass of “lemon with tea”— that is what the kibbutz jokers were already calling it—the redheaded veterinarian stood up and tapped his glass with a fork. A stunned hush ensued: who was it that dared to make such a bourgeois salon sound in the dining hall of a kibbutz?
    “Good evening, comrades,” he said. “Dr. Laufer here.” He presented them next with the silent young woman: “Her name is Miriam, and sheis an expert pigeon handler.” He asked if there were any strangers among them or if all present were members of the kibbutz or the Palmach, because “we are harboring a secret of sorts.”
    “Only members here” came the answer from the crowd.
    “We shall start with words of gratitude,” Dr.