The first flight, part 1

Sometimes, at the first pale hour of morning, dark shadows swept across the wall of the house opposite ours. A crow would soon descend upon the railing of my balcony, black as a torn piece of night. The instant it saw me, it vanished again into the air. And each time, a quiet fear stirred within me for the two little pigeons.

They were nearing their first flight.

With tender cunning, the parent birds coaxed them away from the safety of the nest. Food was their promise, crop milk their final nourishment before the sky would claim them.

One morning I watched the darker chick attempt its first true flight. It fluttered clumsily onto the balcony rail, tangled itself among the branches of the maple tree, then dropped at last onto the terrace floor — bewildered, trembling, alive. Its wings were still learning the language of air.

For months we had planned a journey to Venice. Yet when the day of departure arrived, it felt almost impossible to leave the little pigeons behind. Before we left, I stroked their feathers softly and whispered like a blessing:

May you be protected during your first flight.

I knew I would never see them again. During all the fragile days of their growing, I had accompanied them. My heart felt strangely bound to theirs.

We traveled by night train toward Venice. Four years earlier, thieves had entered our locked compartment while my daughter and I slept and stolen our wallets. This time, I intended to hide mine beneath my pillow. But fate had already chosen another path.

As I boarded the train, a faulty sliding door suddenly trapped me. A man with a rough beard and weary eyes forced it open with all his strength and freed me. I thanked him. Yet before the train had even departed, my wallet was gone — money, cards, identification, vanished like smoke. I realized it only after reaching the compartment.

My husband and I passed a sleepless night. As though the theft were not enough, he had forgotten his essential medication in Vienna. The city we had longed for now seemed impossibly distant, almost unreachable. We resolved to return home on the next train.

But Venice dissolved that decision the moment we arrived.

The instant we stepped out of Santa Lucia station, a strange lightness overtook us, as though the city itself had lifted our sorrow from our shoulders. We forgot the theft, the exhaustion, the fear. We stayed.

Venice is a city of pigeons.

We took the vaporetto to our hotel, and there, in the green courtyard beside a worn stone fountain, sat a pigeon drinking quietly from the water. It seemed like a greeting from Vienna, a small messenger that had crossed the distance before us.

Soon afterward, my husband’s medication awaited us in a Venetian pharmacy, as though the city itself had made provisions for our arrival.