Free A Pigeon and a Boy by Meir Shalev Page B

this very day some forty years later. He was unfamiliar with the music to which Yordad listened, he drank libations from which Yordad abstained, he spoke loudly and with ridiculous mistakes and on occasion even spluttered obscenities. But Dr. Mendelsohn, who in general stayed away from people, found in him a good friend, a male friend, something every man needs, and something that I, for one, have never been prudent enough to find.
    From every such visit Yordad returned with a small basket of chilled figs in hand. “They have a whole orchard,” he said, telling us of the contractor’s garden, and his fruit trees, and of the garden shed he’d built with a tin roof so that he could sit and enjoy listening to the pounding rain.
    And he put another sheet of tin outside the bedroom window,” Yordad said, “so that he can hear the sound of the rain at night, too. And by the way, Yairi, the patient’s sister asked why you haven’t come along for a visit.”
    Two days later I joined him. Benjamin was beside himself with jealousy He remained at home, trying to digest the unfathomable: thatsomeone could prefer me to him, and that the convertible top on the Thunderbird exposed me to the gazes of all the neighborhood children.
    The Fried family lived in Arnona, at the southeast corner of the city. The distance between our houses, the sudden appearance of an endless desert landscape, the sweet, far-off singing of two muezzins, heard but not seen, their voices entwined and competing with each other, the close and distant chiming of herds and churches —all these gave me the feeling that I was traveling to the other side of the world.
    “This is the border,” Yordad told me, confirming my feelings. “You see, Yairi, right there on the other side of those cypress trees, that’s the kingdom of Jordan! And over there,” he added solemnly, “are the hills of Moab. Look how beautiful they are in the light from the setting sun and how close they appear to be. If you reach out your hand perhaps you’ll be able to touch them. Right there is where Moses stood on Mount Nebo and looked in this direction, and he also thought it was very close, but from the other side.”
    The trip made together, the conversation, the warmth of his nickname for me—Yairi—and his hand on my shoulder, the compliance of the setting sun, which illuminated whatever he wished lit up—all these bolstered my stature. I was overwhelmed with love for him, and the anticipation of more such excursions with him.
    The Fried home astonished me: large-windowed and built of pink Jerusalem stone, it managed, in spite of its immensity, to project a feeling of humility and simplicity on its surroundings. Fruit trees encircled it, and Tirzah, who was waiting for me by the front gate, invited me to pick pomegranates in the front and prickly pears in the back, and to pluck figs of all kinds—yellow and green and purple and black. Her mother, Goldie Fried, a quiet redheaded woman, served us fresh lemonade with thick slabs of bread slathered in butter, along with a jar of her homemade pickles; then she disappeared. Her pickles were so delicious that on subsequent visits I would already begin to salivate when we neared the train station, a distance of three kilometers from the pickle jar and the Fried home, just as I am salivating now from a distance of nearly forty years.
    “Look, look at this guy,” Meshulam would say, holding one of these pickles over his plate. “Even Caesar’s table didn’t know from pickles like my Goldie’s.”
    He was terribly proud of his Goldie and loved everything she did. “A woman of valor! The cherry in the crown! She runs the house and thefamily and the money in the bank, and I’m in charge of the workers and the trees in the garden.”
    Meshulam Fried’s contracting business was large and complex, but his garden was simple—not the garden of a rich man, like the one I saw years ago in America, my in-laws’ garden, all fertilized and