A Pigeon and a Boy Read Online Free PDF Page A

don’t run in the stairwell—you will disturb the neighbors,” his fair head hovering at the top of his great height. And occasionally he would lean down and turn on his “color lamp” for us, a large and shiny flashlight that shone red and yellow and green and that he would use to capture and soothe the hearts of the young patients who came to his clinic.
    Now my mother is dead and Yordad has retired and turned his small clinic into his apartment. But then he was a pediatrician, four years older than my mother and twenty years more aged than she. More than once did he gaze at her as though she were a child, too, sometimes adding a gentle rebuke as well, and with the years, as happens with husbands whose wives do not age with them, he began making up useless rules, instructing her about what to wear because it was cold outside and what to eat because it was hot and pointing out “Once again you’ve forgotten!” about that which had slipped from his own memory
    On occasion the need to establish rules and regulations arose in her as well, though these were very different from his. “What does a person need?” she proclaimed one day after the first spoonful of dessert. “Not much: something sweet to eat, and a story to tell, and time and space, and gladioluses in a vase, and two friends, and two hilltops, one on which tostand and the other upon which to gaze. And two eyes for watching the heavens and waiting. Do you understand what I mean, Yair?”
    And another time, when we were already living in Jerusalem, you suddenly closed the book you were immersed in reading—a small, chubby book with a light blue cover, though my brother, Benjamin, believes it was gray—you closed your book and made another pronouncement: “I can’t take it anymore.”
    “I can’t take it anymore.” I heard you then just as I do now “I can’t take it anymore,” you said; and fell silent, so that all those listening could be properly unsettled by what you had said; then you opened your small, chubby book and I—though this past February turned forty-nine, a sluggish, aging bull—I grow sad once again recalling that distant moment, for the colors of that book’s cover and the edges of its pages and its silk bookmark—the bright blue, the soft pink, the deep gold—I remember well. Your eyes, your skin, your hair were precisely the same colors. But I no longer recall the name of the book, nor will I ever read from it, to search out and find and know what was the sentence that so agitated you, that caused you to utter those words. To clarify for myself whether the idea that eventually led you to leave home sprouted then.
    My mother left home in the manner that characterized everything she did: with a decision that swelled and ripened slowly and once made could be rescinded by no one. She would sit at the kitchen table with a large sheet of paper that she would divide into two columns. At the top of one she would write FOR and at the top of the other AGAINST. For and against painting the stairwell white, for and against chemotherapy and radiation, for and against committing suicide, for and against veal schnitzel with potatoes boiled in salt water and sprinkled with
schnittlauch
— chopped chives —and drowned in butter, or Sabbath afternoon meat pies with bay leaves. She made her lists, counted on her fingers, and made her decision only after tabulating and weighing. Sometimes I try to guess what you wrote there before you left home— and I am overcome with dread of the FOR and AGAINST of curiosity
    That is what she would say to us, to me and my brother, Benjamin: “I am for going to the sea, but Yordad is against!” That is also the way she would shop or exile books she did not like from our home, the ones in which “the writer enjoyed himself too much or suffered too much while he was writing.” And with that very same decisiveness she composed our Family Constitution, over which Benjamin and I can no longermake bets, for