A Dove of the East Read Online Free PDF Page B

started, and then cheered. As we trotted away from the bull’s body I looked back. There were two large red holes in the neck. I had remembered only one shot.
    We visited the cows one by one and killed them. The horse seemed more frightened of them than of the bull. My father said, “Now we are going to have to get rid of all this meat, and buy new cows dammit.”
    â€œNew ones?” I said. He did not answer. “Can we...?” I did not finish.
    We went up the hill at a walk. It was hot, and the hooves of the black horse were scarlet.

FIRST RUSSIAN SUMMER
    H IS HAND shaking, fingers spread so that the old man was imploring with the very breadth of his grasp for the attendant to be silent, he made the room still. The curtains ceased billowing inwards, and a reddish light from afternoon and the bricks seemed to dim. The difference between an old man and a boy is so great that in explaining himself, assuming that he can, an old man will want much time and silence. In order to give time and silence one must have great respect, perhaps the reason the young are taught to defer, not for the sake of deference itself, but to give them an opportunity to learn lessons of difficulty. Of course there are old fools, but when guiding young fools their experience can be invaluable. If a man, even an average man, has learned well by observation, then he should be in great demand. One might think young men could easily consider their fathers and grandfathers a most precious resource, aside from allowance and inheritance. Since it is not that way and wisdom finds no market, old men spend much time talking to white walls.
    This old man, though he lived in the Hebrew Home for the Aged, was not the kind of fellow to spend all morning putting on his pants. He was aged it is true, and he had no one, no one, and nothing, that is true too. But age was something inappropriate to him, having come by accident in between observations of great magnitude. He looked quite unlike the other patients in that he was tan and ruddy. His strong face and gleaming eyes showed that he spent many hours in the sun, if only in the garden, and that here was a man who although heavy with age was as light inside as a man could be, a man whose imagination and memories kept him in steady forward flight and beat down time as easily as white gulls rise high on currents of shimmering blue air.
    At eighty he found himself able to make a powerful case for that which he thought just and good, and like all good men he found himself most of the time alone in a world which insists on the worship of local gods, a world blind to the fact of its own creation, being, and turning, a world of clever bugs who have a buggish strut and who make excuses for their mortality in the minute and insignificant gas of their works. The greatness of the world he thought is not in anything man has done but in what God has done. And this made him remember a time long ago. It was a simple memory, but he loved it, and in recalling it he felt the color of his life.
    As a little boy he had gone for the summer to his grandfather’s timber forests. That was in 1884, and his little boy’s face and eyes were to see the whole world shudder and break and become alive again more than once. But then he was just a child who had seen nothing, more than thirty years before the October Revolution, in the Russia of Czar Nicholas, when he remembered the world to be vastly green and young, with so many colors just beyond his sight, and he had for a little boy such a grown-up sense of the beauty of the world. It impressed him deeply then with the simplest it had to offer, lessons taken early from no man but from his first views, which in all their power saw him through the shaking of history and into his age.
    His grandfather met him at the station. It seemed as if the train had taken a lifetime for it had gone more than a thousand miles from Odessa. And a small sleepy blond boy with large brown