A Pigeon and a Boy Read Online Free PDF Page B

followed her. We took Bialik Street down to the little garden planted by residents of the Beit Hakerem neighborhood to commemorate their sons who had fallen in the War of Independence, and at Halutz Street we turned left. Next to the plot of land used for growing crops adjacent to our school— to our relief, this time she did not jump over the fence to steal parsley from the vegetable beds —we descended to the valley, emerging on the other side, where today there stands an ugly row of hotels. Sometimes I pick up visiting bird-watchers from the doorways of these hotels, and sometimes Liora’s brother, Emmanuel. When her extended familycomes to visit from America they stay at the King David, but Emmanuel is tightfisted, so that when he comes alone he stays at one of these hotels, near the entrance to the city
    Back then an old pathway ascended from the valley, a remnant from the days of the Arab farmers and the peddlers and the mule drivers who passed from Malkha to Lifta and from Sheikh Bader to Dir Yassin. Benjamin, as usual, skipped and jumped from rock to rock while I plodded along, my eyes glued to my mother’s heels, my nose enjoying the scent of hot dust and my ears the crackle of leaves and stems of the end of summer.
    Next to the large garage for buses belonging to the Mekasher company there was a small abandoned fruit orchard: a pair of pomegranate trees, a few grapevines and fig trees enclosed by a row of prickly-pear cacti. The pomegranates were not yet ripe, the prickly pears were already rotten, and the young grapes had turned to raisins, but the fig trees were bearing fruit. My mother loved figs. She explained that they should be plucked, not picked, so we plucked and ate until a passerby fainting from righteousness and heat and the fast shouted at us. “Shame on you for eating figs! Today is Yom Kippur!”
    My brother, bolstered with the strength and courage of sinners by my mother’s presence and the sweetness of the fruit, shouted back at him, “Pious shmious!”
    My mother said, “Stop that, Benjamin. There is no need to answer.”
    The man cursed and went on his way and we entered the large bus garage, where we crossed a dirt path and came to the lot with the old buses waiting to be sold or dismantled. My mother sat on a boulder and, as though distracted, began juggling three stones. I, as usual, went looking for crabs and beetles. Benjamin leapt from boulder to boulder without looking ahead or to the sides or backward, as though he had eyes in the soles of his feet.
    Suddenly, after her surprisingly successful tossing and catching of stones, my mother stood up and, without prior warning, flung them quickly, forcefully, one-two-three at one of the buses.
    The silence shattered into a thousand resounding shards. Benjamin, close by her, and I, a little farther off, watched her anxiously, astonished. She bent down, picked up two larger stones, then two more, and smashed two more windows.
    “What are you doing, Ra-a-
ya
?” my brother said, imitating Yordad.
    “Go on—you two give it a try, too,” my mother advised us. “It’s very pleasant.”
    “Shame on you, busting up buses,” Benjamin said. “Today’s Yom Kippur.” But I bent down like you, collecting, then pitching two stones.
    “It really takes talent,” Benjamin mocked, “to miss hitting a bus from seven feet away”
    My mother laughed and I, hurt and angry, stooped to pick up a stone as large as a loaf of bread. I moved around to the front of one of the buses and, with both hands raised over my head, hurled the stone against the windshield. The thick glass cracked but did not shatter while I, in the throes of rage and delight, cast about for an even larger stone to throw
    “Wait, Yair,” my mother said. “I’ll show you how”
    Over at the side stood the frames of several rusting seats that had been removed from one of the buses. She grabbed hold of one of them, a bench seat from the back of the bus that was nearly ten feet