The Note

     When my great-uncle saw his first pigeon, he knew he had come to a land of promise.
     There were no pigeons in Vilna.
     This was not due to rules of migration or habitat but simply because pigeons have a keen sense of anticipation.  They are, after all, in it for the long haul and, without nostalgia, have no problem fleeing places that have no future.
    But Manhattan, which is more of a wish than an actual city in any case, was full of promise for both the pigeons and for Isaac Rabinowitz, my father’s uncle.

     In a way it was love at first sight.  Stout-bodied with a short neck and a jerky gait, the pigeons he saw at the window of his apartment on Second Avenue seemed to mirror his own reflection in the pane itself.  Isaac watched them intently for an entire season as they made their pairings, tended their nests together, fed their young.
     He envied them their birdy love and wondered if he too would ever find a mate.  The city was not like the village where things like marriages could be arranged.  How could he ever find someone here in the busy streets with all that humming and thrumming?
     But the pigeons did.

     You may talk about doves all you want – the one Noah released after the flood, the one lauded in the Song of Songs, the ones sacrificed after Jesus’ circumcision, the ones who helped Muhammad in the Hijra – but they are pigeons all.  And Isaac saw in the group that he fed at his windowsill a certain fortitude that might yet rub off.
     One of those birds in particular caught his eye.  It was gray and gray but with a beautiful iridescent blue on its neck.  In fact, this was no ordinary bird…it was Columba livia, a rock pigeon with a keen sense of place.  A homing pigeon, in other words, who arrived at the same time each day with the same attitude of belonging.  It was 1920 and by that time all the stories about the valorous pigeons of the War were well known.  Like Cher Ami, for example, shot through the chest, who flew for 25 miles to headquarters and saved the lives of the American battalion trapped behind enemy lines near Belleau Wood. 

     Isaac read about that with sad delight and he thought then to use the bird for his own kind of salvation.  And so he wrote a message in tiny script and taped it around the bird’s leg.  Who knows what he was thinking as the bird flew off.  What was he expecting?  Where could it possibly go since it had to, by nature, return to the exact same spot.  But that is the nice thing about hope which does not just spring eternal but drowns all logic, and Isaac watched the bird fly off as though it was on a mission to save him from himself.

     The bird rose high into the sky until the rooftops became jigsaws far below.  It rose higher until the whole city was just a memory and then higher than that.  It flew above the clouds and the earth dwindled.  It flew too close to the sun.  It flew into the slim air at the edge of the world and then, through the intricate infolding that is time, it flew through the walls of the continuum that trap us all.
     When the bird finally returned it was indeed to the same sill at the same window in the same building on the same street in the same city.  It was a homing pigeon after all and very good at finding its way back.  But things were different.  It was now 1990, seventy years later, and Isaac and his yearning had passed into another history.  The wooden table at the window had been replaced by a glass one, the china cup by a ceramic mug, the rose in the glass by a cactus in a pot.
     Nabia Khalan, who knew nothing of the great heroic birds of World War I and saw these pigeons mostly as a nuisance, was having her breakfast.  The homing bird chucked and hoobled the way pigeons do when they want something, but to no avail.  It stepped and strutted but Nabia ignored it completely.
     Then she noticed that there was something wrapped around the bird’s leg and she tentatively reached out for it.  To her shock, the bird did not fly off.  Unknown to her, it was used to being handled and even extended its leg so that she could unwrap the paper taped around it.
     Nabia spread the paper out and saw the message handwritten in a strange language she did not know.  The message said: Zukhn far libe.
     And there it might have ended in that great black hole of lost words except that it just
so happened that Nabia too was “searching for love” at that time.  And so, on a whim and a wing and with a wink, she wrote her own note on the back of the paper and wrapped it back around the bird’s leg.  When she watched the bird fly off that time, it was with no good riddance at all but instead a great sense of promise.

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