“You know what ‘liberty’ means?” Yoni asks me. I’m eight years old. “It means freedom. That’s why this bird is called a ‘liberty’ in Hebrew. Because he can’t live without it.”
Yoni and his friend, both fourteen, are standing in front of me in our yard. I’m sitting on the ground, my arm around the cage I’ve made: a cardboard box closed with a screen, with a sparrow inside.
A kid from the neighborhood, the kind who’s always roaming the streets doing nothing in particular, found the bird in the small patch of woods by the school, and for some reason decided to give it to me. How attached I suddenly became to that fledgling! I padded the cage with dry grass, scattered bread crumbs in it, and put in a tiny dish of water. It was a perfect world, the work of my own hands, that I’d built for the little bird. Early the next morning, as I rushed around the side of the house to see my bird again, I heard a fierce hissing and was struck by fear. I started running. A large, spotted cat was pulling his claws across the top of the cage, trying to tear off the screen, his mouth wide open, fangs showing. He turned his head, caught sight of me and the stone I’d flung at him, and within a split-second had shut his mouth and nimbly disappeared over the fence. The bird behind the screen, tiny and grey, stood frozen in one corner. Only its beak moved non-stop, issuing one terrified squeak after another. My heart went out to the little bird.
I’d been sitting there a long time, guarding the cage and wondering what to do, when Yoni and his friend appeared. Now I try to come up with reasons to convince Yoni that the bird should stay with me, but he patiently explains to me what freedom is — for a bird that’s meant to fly above and for people below.
“Moishy and I will take it back to the woods,” he says after I explain where it came from. “We’ll find a nest for it.”
In the end he convinces me. Carefully, I open the screen. Yoni puts his hand through the narrow opening I made and scoops up the bird. They walk away from me on the dirt road that leads from our home to the woods.
When Yoni comes back, alone, he tells me simply that everything is all right — they found it a good nest.
I don’t ask questions. And I don’t know whether he was trying to spare me something when he didn’t take me with him to the woods.
I’m sitting in one of the two rooms of Yoni and Tutti’s apartment. Yoni, now a university student, is studying, and I’m doing my own homework for high school. I ask Yoni to go over Tchernichowsky’s “Before a Statue of Apollo” with me. After spending more than four years in America, I’ve been back in Israel for over a year, but I’m still having trouble with Hebrew poetry. The winter before it was Bibi who helped me with my essays on Bialik’s poetry, sitting with me at night after coming home tired and sick on a short leave from basic training.
Little by little, as Yoni goes through the poem with me, the verses begin to take hold of him. This guileless enthusiasm of his for the lofty, the beautiful, is so familiar to me — it’s the driving force in his life. Toward the middle of the poem he begins to read it aloud in a quiet voice, letting himself feel the melody of the words on his tongue:
“…For I am first of them who return to thee,
Now, as I throw off death throes of generations,
Now, as I break the chains of the soul,
My living soul, that clings to this good earth,
...Before life I how down, before courage, beauty… ”
His voice sounds pensive, adult, not quite the same as the voice I had heard reciting Jabotinsky’s Hebrew translations of poetry years before, when he first discovered them. The family was sitting in the dining room in the Philadelphia, and Yoni was late coming to the table. Finally, he appeared in the door, an open book in his hand, and read to us, almost against our wills, the translation of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven,” and then of “Annabel Lee,” marveling over the sounds and the moods of the poems. I wanted him to finish already and sit down. Yet even though his almost childish enthusiasm was irritating at the time (to me — an eleven-year-old!), it’s surprising how deeply this scene etched itself in my memory — the power with which he read those beautiful lines, the excitement in his voice, the way his eyes shone as they looked at the page. And it’s curious that when I was older I searched for those translations, after the English originals failed to satisfy me. This time, in Jerusalem, I listen to him patiently and follow the words of the poem on the page as he reads. When we finish analyzing the poem, Tutti urges me to stay the night. Outside it’s pouring rain. I refuse for some reason and go outside to wait for a bus. It’s already dark, and it’s cold, and the rain lashes my face.
“I was driving today,” he tells Bibi and me. It’s already a year since, in eleventh grade, he got his American driver’s license. “Suddenly, I realized I was driving fast, as I always do, and for a second the car skidded on the curve, and I thought: 'Now I’ll turn the wheel too hard, I won’t step on the brakes fast enough, and that’ll be it, my life’s over.’ Life suddenly felt so tangible, so valuable, that I started driving very slowly, carefully. It was as though my life were dangling by a thin thread, and if, at any instant, I weren’t concentrating completely on every move I made, the thread would snap.”
A year later, on a snowy winter day, I go up to the attic to be alone. I find Yoni’s notebooks from twelfth grade, before he went back to Israel to go into the army, and on one page there’s a poem by Shakespeare. I read it slowly. I understand only parts of it, mostly with the help of a short composition he had written on it in class. But that’s enough, because I’ve gotten the gist of it:
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end;
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil allforwards do contend.
We are sitting around the dining room table in our home in Jerusalem, having Sabbath lunch. Our parents sit at either end, and we children, all school age, sit on the sides. The white tablecloth is spread, on it are dishes and crumbs from the meal, and our voices fill the room with easy conversation. The open window facing us brims with the red flowers of the tree my mother had planted in the garden.
Yoni, on my right, sips the water in his glass. “Water,” he says, in a tone full of pleasure. “There’s so much flavor in it.”
He takes another sip — this time leaving the water in his mouth, swishing it once or twice from side to side, tasting it, finally letting it slip down his throat. He smiles to himself, satisfied. Life is worth more than anything to him at this moment; it tastes amazingly good.