• • •

Ora yawns and enjoys seeing Avram unwittingly repeat her yawn. “Let’s continue tomorrow,” she says. Although he would like to hear more, Avram gets up and clears away their dinner, picks up the trash, and rinses the dishes, then rolls out his sleeping bag near hers. He does all this in silence, and she sees the thoughts and the questions darting around his forehead and tells herself: Tomorrow, tomorrow. She goes behind some bushes to do her business and thinks of Scheherazade, and then they both undress, back to back, and zip themselves up in their sleeping bags, and lie with their eyes open by the glowing embers of the fire. Avram, restless, gets up and fills two bottles at the river, douses the embers, and lies down again.

As soon as the fire goes out, all the creatures around the river awake and a chorus of toads, night birds, jackals, foxes, and crickets erupts into a deafening commotion. They wail, screech, snort, caw, yowl, and chirp. Ora and Avram lie there feeling the entire riverbed rustle and stir around them. Small and large animals pass next to them and over them, running or flying, and Ora whispers, “What’s going on?” Avram whispers back, “They’ve all gone mad.” The dog stands up restlessly, her eyes aglimmer in the dark. Ora needs Avram to come and lie next to her, even just hold her hand and calm her with a caress, with long, quiet breaths, the way Ilan does—did—but she doesn’t say a word. She won’t push him, and he does not offer, but the dog moves closer, step by cautious step, until finally she is standing beside her. Ora reaches out and strokes her fur in the dark, and the fur trembles with tension because of the sounds all around, or because of the human touch, her first contact in such a long time. Ora strokes and strokes, rubbing delightedly, feeling the warmth of this new body, but the dog suddenly recoils, unable to bear it any longer, and goes off to lounge not far away and watches Ora.

The three of them lie quiet and slightly afraid, and the commotion gradually dies down and gives way to the hum of mosquitoes. Meaty and impudent, they hack at every exposed inch of flesh. Ora hears Avram slap himself and curse, and she curls up in her sleeping bag and zips it around her head, leaving only a tiny opening for air, and she sinks down into herself, sleepily arranges her head so it nestles in her favorite place, in the round of Ilan’s shoulder, and then, subtly, like the gushing of a small spring, a longing awakens in her for the house in Ein Karem. She yearns for their house, for the scents embedded in it and the textures woven through the window lattices at different times of day, and for Ilan’s and the boys’ voices rolling through the hallways. She walks through the house, room by room.

When Ofer surfaces in her, she gently moves him away, tells him it’s okay, not to worry, she’s doing what needs to be done. He shouldn’t think about her right now. He should look after himself there, and she’ll look after him here.

A few months after she and Ilan separated, she had gone back for one last time to the empty house. She opened the blinds and the windows in all the rooms, turned on all the faucets, watered the neglected garden, rolled up the rugs, dusted, swept the floor, and washed it thoroughly. She spent almost a whole morning there, without sitting down or drinking a glass of water. When she was finished cleaning, she drew the blinds and closed the windows and turned off the power and walked out.

It should at least be clean, she thought. It’s not the house’s fault we broke up.

Avram’s voice came through: “Ora, are they similar?”

She has almost fallen asleep, and his question shocks her awake. “Who?”

“The boys. Today. Are they similar?”

“To who?”

“No, I mean … to each other. Their personalities.”

She sits up and rubs her eyes. He is sitting up bundled in his sleeping bag.

“Sorry, I woke you up,” he mumbles.

“It’s okay, I was barely asleep. But what’s the sudden …” Her tongue steals a circle of delight around his “boys.” As though he has finally accepted her own vision of them, even her tone of voice when she thinks about them. She watches him affectionately. For a moment it seems possible: Uncle Avram. “Maybe we should make some tea?”

“Do you want some?” He jumps up and runs to gather branches in the dark. She hears him walk into a bush, curse, slip on the wet stones, grow farther away and then closer. She holds in her laughter.

“Yes and no,” she says afterward, with a cup of tea warming her hands and face. “They’re completely different in the way they look, I told you. On the other hand, you couldn’t have any doubt about them being brothers. Although Adam is more—”

“More what?”

She stops. Afraid that now, in her state, in the state of her relationship with Adam, she may get carried away into all sorts of unnecessary and unfair comparisons between Adam and Ofer. How could she—

She sighs deeply, and the dog looks up and comes to sit next to her.

“What?” Avram asks tenderly. “What did you remember?”

“Wait.”

She, whose mother always had compared her to others, even in front of total strangers, and almost always to her detriment. She, who had sworn at a very young age that when she had her own children she would never, ever …

“Ora?” Avram asks carefully. “Listen, we don’t have to …”

“No, it’s okay. Just give me a minute.”

Of course she and Ilan had often compared the boys to each other. How could they not?

“At first, what was difficult in the first few years with Ilan, what I found really intolerable, was the way he looked at the boys. You know how he is, with his exact, objective definitions.”

“Oh yeah, I know that. I know all about Ilan and his onslaughts of rationalism.”

“Yes, that’s exactly it.” She laughs and scratches the dog’s head.

Ilan’s definitions, in which he summarized Adam’s and Ofer’s personalities, their virtues and their shortcomings, seemed to determine their fate for all eternity without any possibility of appeal or even the change and development that come with age. Only years later—she finds that she can talk about this now with Avram; she thinks he understands—only years later had she learned that she could contradict those definitions of his with statements that were no less thoughtful and lucid, with a sober and different perspective that always illuminated the boys in a brighter, more generous light. When she did so, she found how relieved and even happy Ilan was to agree and adopt her position. It sometimes even appeared as though she had redeemed him from something in himself.

“Why is he like that, can you tell me?” she asks Avram. “You knew him so well”—she almost says, You knew him better than I did—“so you tell me, why does he always fight himself? His softness, his gentleness. Why must he always be such a clenched fist?”

Avram shrugs his shoulders. “With me, he wasn’t like that.”

“I know. He really wasn’t.”

They sit quietly as the cicadas around them go berserk. Ora wonders if she is doomed to keep trying to understand Ilan and his illusions for the rest of her life, or whether the day will come when she can simply be herself, with none of his echoes inside her. But the idea offers no relief or gladness, and her yearnings descend in full force.

She thinks back to the way she and Ilan used to talk about the boys. The talking was such an enjoyable part of the labor of family, and they did so much of it. And she often thought it might be thanks to Avram that she and Ilan had been able to talk like that. Had they not met him, had he not tutored them when they were still teenagers, they might have remained far quieter and more shy. So thank you, she tells him silently. Thank you for that, too.

More than anything, they liked to talk about the boys on their evening walks, after the bedtime ritual. Without asking Avram whether he wants her to, she takes him straight there, to the boys’ messy bedroom, roiling with the tumultuous preparations for the difficult, complicated sail into the night, with its shadows and foreignness, and the exile it imposes upon every child in his little, separate bed. After giving them one last hug, another cup of water, pee-pee again, and one more nightlight, and another kiss for the teddy bear or the monkey, and after Adam and Ofer had finished chattering and finally fallen asleep …

At first, when they still lived in Tzur Hadassah, they would walk the path to Ein Yoel. They passed by the plum and peach orchards of Mevo Beitar, and the remnants of quince, walnut, lemon, almond, and olive groves in the Arab villages that had ceased to exist—every so often Ora told herself she had to at least find out their names—and sometimes they walked to the Ma’ayanot River, down in a wadi full of gushing water and little gardens where the villagers of Hussan and Battir planted eggplants, peppers, beans, and zucchini. When the first intifada started and they were afraid to walk in that part, they chose a wooded area near a fork in the road—“in autumn, there are crisscrossing meadows of crocuses and cyclamens; maybe I’ll take you there one day; remind me”—and when they moved to Ein Karem, even before locating the nearest grocery store, they sought out a walking path that was not too capricious but not boring either, not remote but not too popular, a path where a couple could walk and talk calmly and sometimes hold hands or kiss. Over the years they found other paths, less open ones, in wadis and among olive groves, near sheikhs’ tombs and the ruins of houses and ancient watchmen’s huts. They walked these paths whenever they had time, which was sometimes early in the morning, but that was only when the kids were older and more independent, and Ofer could make fancy omelets and sandwiches for school, for both himself and Adam. Even during Ilan’s busiest times, he never gave up their daily walk: “Our walk.”

Avram listens and sees Ora and Ilan. A couple. Ilan’s sideburns might be gray by now, and Ora is almost entirely silver-haired, wearing glasses. Perhaps Ilan has glasses, too. They walk along their hidden path, at the same pace, very close to each other. Every so often her head turns to him. Sometimes their hands find each other and link. They talk in soft voices. Ora laughs. Ilan smiles his three-wrinkled smile. Suddenly Avram misses Ilan. Suddenly he is horrified to realize that he has not seen Ilan for twenty-one years.

“We have this way of talking, where I almost always know what he’s going to tell me. From the way he breathes before he starts a sentence, I know the direction he’ll take and which words he’ll use. And I’m so happy it’s that way, that we can guess what the other is thinking.”

But apparently Ilan found it annoying, she tells Avram. “It bored him that he could guess my mind by the way I breathed before I spoke or laughed or before I told a joke. Or maybe he just needed a break from me. That’s what he said. I guess I’m hard work.” She shrugs her shoulders. “But I started telling you something else—what was it? I’m so scattered. It’s wrong, and it’s not true either, it’s really not the whole truth, he doesn’t deserve it.”

She and Ilan on the path, in the evening, breaking the day into pieces and then tasting them together, holding them in their mouths, comparing impressions, adding more and more details to the big picture of their life, laughing at this and that, embracing, separating, arguing, consulting each other about work. Ilan didn’t understand much about her business, she tells Avram, and she didn’t expect him to. After all, how exciting can it be to hear about rubbing a sprained ankle or resetting a dislocated shoulder? But she was disappointed that he didn’t get as excited as she did over the little dramas she heard while releasing a bad back or a face whose musculature had gone wrong. She, on the other hand, had become his confidential advisor over the years, his secret jury, his final adjudicator. In his office it was an open joke: “Ora hasn’t confirmed it yet”; “Ilan is waiting for the supreme court decision.” She blushes—it’s a good thing it’s dark—and notes that he really did have complete confidence in her, utterly amazing confidence in her instincts, her intuitions, her wise heart (“Ilan said that,” she adds apologetically), even though she wasn’t really interested in the convoluted legal aspects of intellectual property, confidentiality agreements, non-compete contracts, trademarks for an irrigation system or a generic drug, or the question of when exactly an idea contained that slippery, mysterious thing that Ilan liked to call, with glimmering eyes, the inventional spark. And truth be told, she had never been attracted to the complex process of patent registration in Israel, or in the United States or Europe, nor in all of Ilan’s persuasive tricks that were meant to cause wealthy people to invest in a young doctor from Karmiel who had developed a medical camera that disintegrated in the bloodstream after use, or in a biochemist from Kiryat Gat who had discovered a cheap way to produce diesel from oil. “And Ilan, being Ilan …” She laughs. “That man, I’m telling you, he should have been a chess champion, or a politician, or a Mafia consigliere. You never knew that side of him, it only started developing after you.”

On their path, in the evening, Ora and Ilan easily and generously divvied up the next day’s chores. “We never fought over who would do what, you know? We were such a good team.” They quickly settled household affairs, bills, repairs, shuttling the kids, finances, and a few burning foreign and domestic topics, like finding an old-age home for her mother, or what to do about their lazy, lying, manipulative cleaning lady, whom neither of them had the courage to fire for years—even Ilan was afraid. Only their separation had put an end to her regime.

And more than anything else, they would circle above and around their children, constantly amazed at the two joyous young people sprouting up between them day by day. They quoted to each other things Adam had said and replayed things Ofer had done, and watched in astonishment, and compared them to who they had been years ago, or even weeks ago, amazed at how much they could change in such a short time—“Oh God, they’re growing up so fast!” They delighted in fragments of memories and inconsequential moments that grew between him and her, to be mighty and shining, because only to the two of them were they so precious, the riches of their lives.

“Ofer, too?” Avram asks softly. “Was Ofer also … I mean, for Ilan—Ofer, too?”

She smiles at him, her eyes full of light. Avram can see it even in the dark, and he takes a big sip of his boiling tea, burning his tongue and the roof of his mouth, and he holds the burn in his mouth with strange pleasure.

When she and Ilan walked and talked, they could feel the flowing force of life itself, the glory of life that lifted up their two little boys and carried them to their futures. Time after time they marveled at the strong bond between the boys—“they have some kind of secret; to this day there’s a secret between them”—and without ever saying it out loud, they both sensed that this connection between Adam and Ofer might be the central axis of their home and was probably the strongest and most solid and alive of all the currents—hidden and visible—that held the four of them together.

Avram listens and recites: remember, remember it all. Sometimes Ilan and Ora tilt their heads toward each other as they walk. They lean on each other and dare to guess—cautiously, keenly aware of how fragile things are—what the future will bring for the boys and where their lives will lead them. They wonder if Adam and Ofer will continue to sustain their precious enigmatic couplehood.

She sits alone one evening in Ilan’s study, staring at the legal books on the shelves, unable to do a thing. Adam has had two therapy sessions in the past week with a very experienced elderly female therapist who seems pleasant and tranquil. He said nothing to her either, and he hid the “phenomena” from her, too. But she was not worried. She told Ora and Ilan that these sorts of symptoms were not unusual at Adam’s age, just before physical maturation began, and added that something in Adam’s eyes told her he was a fundamentally strong young man. Just in case, and to reassure them, she referred him to a prominent specialist for neurological tests. He cannot see them for another three weeks, and while Ilan has tried to pull strings and get an earlier appointment, Ora feels that she is losing her mind.

Adam and Ofer are in the kitchen, engaged in a deep conversation about rhinos. She sends her usual maternal sonar waves out to them every few seconds and processes the returns almost unconsciously. Only after several minutes does she vaguely realize that she hasn’t heard this sort of talk between them for a long time. Adam’s tone of voice sounds lighter this evening. He is even helping Ofer with a project for his summer “creativity day camp.” He invents a water rhinoceros with two big fins and a curly rhino and then a pearly rhino—“he’s an unendangered animal,” he dictates to Ofer, “who sits looking at himself in the water for hours. And there’s also a girly rhino.” They both roll around laughing. “But the girly one is invisible,” Adam warns. “Then I’ll just draw his footprint!” Ofer says. He cheers. “Give it to me, I’ll draw it for you.” Their chatter flows on, and Adam heartily goes through all his rituals. Ora can hear the rhythmic breaths, the lip-sucking, the faucet turned on for quick rinses. She sinks back into herself, but perks up when she hears Ofer’s thin voice asking very calmly, “Why do you do that?”

She doesn’t know what Ofer is referring to, but a subterranean wave rolls through the kitchen and all the way to her chair, wraps itself around her, and squeezes.

“What?” Adam asks suspiciously.

“Wash your hands and all that.”

“No reason. I just feel like it.”

“Are you dirty?”

“Yes. No. Stop it, you’re bugging me.”

“But what from?” Ofer asks in that same calm, lucid voice, the balanced and matter-of-fact tone she wishes she could have, especially in these moments.

“What from what?”

“What d’you get dirty from?”

“I don’t know, okay?”

“Just tell me one more thing.”

“What now?”

“When you … when you wash like that, then do you get clean?”

“Kind of. I don’t know. Now shut up!”

Silence. Ora does not dare move. She thinks of how Ofer has held it in all these weeks and not asked Adam anything. Something in his voice, in his persistence, hints that he has planned in advance what to ask, chosen the circumstances well, and perhaps carefully primed Adam’s mood for this moment.

“Adam—”

“What now?”

“Will you let me, too?”

“Let you what?”

“Do one instead.”

“One what?”

Ora can feel Ofer’s arc of boldness and audacity grating on her nerves. She does not twitch an eyelid. She wonders what risky, daring game he is playing.

“One of these.”

“Hey!” Adam makes an effort to laugh, but Ora can hear his embarrassment. “Are you crazy?”

“Just one, what do you care?”

“But why?”

“So you’ll have to do one less.”

“What?”

“Stop it, you’re getting water on my drawing!”

“What did you say?”

“That if I do one, then you’ll have one less to do.”

“You’re crazy, you know that? Totally nuts. Anyway, this doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

“Whaddayacare? Just one. A loaner.”

“Which one?”

“Whatever you say. This one, or like that, or—”

She hears a chair flung aside and quick steps. She guesses Adam’s little steps around himself on his way to the faucet, his eyes now scurrying in panic.

“Adam—”

“I’m gonna beat the crap out of you. Shut up!”

A long silence.

“Come on, Adam, just one.”

She hears steps and a thud. Panting and bodies falling to the floor. A chair turned over. Stifled grunts. She realizes that Ofer is holding back his shouts so she won’t come in to separate them and ruin his plan. She stands up.

“Give in?”

“Just let me do it once.”

“You’re such an annoying kid!” Adam screeches. “Don’t you have any friends, you midget? Pest!”

“Just once and that’s it, I swear.”

She hears the slaps, one and two, and Ofer’s deep, stifled yelp. Without realizing it, she is biting her fists.

“Now d’you understand?”

“Whaddayacare, just once each time.”

Adam lets out a high-pitched giggle of amazement.

“I’ll do it so you won’t even know,” Ofer groans.

Adam sucks his lips, blows on the backs of his hands, and spins around. Finally, he says quietly, “No. I think I have to do them all. The whole thing.”

“Then I’ll just do them next to you.”

The faucet is turned on. A quick rinse. Blows. Silence. Then the faucet again, a little longer this time, and different blowing, stronger and slower.

“Did you do it? Okay, now get lost.”

“Let me do one every time,” Ofer says with an assertiveness that amazes Ora. Then she sees him run out of the kitchen with a serious, focused look on his face.

Over the next few days, Ofer and Adam spend all their free time together. They seldom leave their room, and it’s hard to know what’s going on. When she listens behind the door, she hears them playing and blathering the way they used to when they were seven and four. They seem to be returning, together, to an earlier era, as if drawn instinctively to some moment in time when they were both little children.

One morning, after she wakes them up and lets them lie chattering in bed for a while, she walks by and hears Adam ask: “How many today?”

“Three for me, three for you.”

“But which three?” Adam’s voice sounds so submissive and soft that she hardly recognizes him.

“You do the water and the feet and the turning, and I’ll do all the rest.”

“Can I do the mouth, too?” Adam whispers.

“No, I’m doing the mouth.”

“But I have to …”

“I already have dibs on the mouth. That’s it.”

She places both hands on her temples. Ofer must have dropped an anchor inside Adam. She has no other words to describe it. He’s already there, working in the depths of Adam with that same calm determination with which he builds giant LEGO castles or dismantles old televisions.

“Aren’t I allowed any today?” Adam asks at the breakfast table, out in the open, in her presence.

Ofer thinks about it and decrees, “None. Today I’m doing them all.” Then he comes around: “You know what? You can do the one with the lip. When you fold it.”

“And everything else is you?” Adam asks. His voice is childish and obedient, and it horrifies her.

“Yes.”

“But d’you remember to do it?”

“All the time.”

“Are you sure, Ofer?”

“I never missed any till now. Come on, let’s go to the room.”

She practically runs to her post behind the closed door. Her body, she notes to Avram, remembers that station very well from childhood, when she used to eavesdrop on her parents from behind the closed door of her own room, trying to pick up hints, voices, giggles. Human traces. Forty years have gone by—declares the tight-lipped judge in her mind—and what has madam done in those four decades? I’ve changed sides at the door, your honor.

“The cop’s name will be Speed,” Ofer says.

“And the thief?”

“Let’s call him Typhoon.”

“Okay.”

“Speed rides a motorbike and he has a hovercraft.”

“And the thief?” Adam asks weakly.

“The thief will have long hair, and on his shirt there’s a black star, and he has a bazooka and a laser drill.”

“Okay,” Adam says.

Ora puts her hand to her neck. This is an ancient game. They used to play it—how long ago? Two years? Three? They would lie on the rug and make up pairs of cops and robbers, or orcs and halflings. Except that back then Adam was the creator and Ofer the nodding pupil.

“Don’t,” Ofer says casually. “I’m doing the fingers today.”

“Did I do the fingers?”

“You didn’t notice.”

“Then do it already.”

“Wait. You have to pay a fine, ’cause you did mine.”

“What’s the fine?”

“The fine,” Ofer answers thoughtfully, “is that I’m taking the eye thing from you too, where you blink hard and open them.”

“But I have to do that one,” Adam whispers.

“Well, I took it.”

“I don’t have anything left.”

“You have the hands and feet left, and the one where you blow.”

There is a long silence. Then Ofer picks up as if nothing has happened. “Now I’m bringing in a cop with an iron fist. He’s called Mac Boom Boom, and he can open his shirt—”

“How many days are you taking mine for?”

“Three days not counting today.”

“So today I can still do it?”

“No, today neither of us can.”

“Neither of us? Then who’s going to do it?”

“No one. It doesn’t get done today.”

“Is that allowed?” Adam whispers sadly.

“Whatever we decide,” says Ofer in a Dungeon Master’s voice.

Ora tells Avram she will probably never know what really went on behind Adam and Ofer’s closed door during that whole period. Because what, in fact, did happen? Two kids, one almost thirteen, the other just over nine, spent every day together, usually just the two of them, for three or four weeks during summer vacation. They played computer games and foosball, chattered for hours, made up characters, and every so often they cooked shakshuka or pasta together. “And while they did all that—don’t ask me exactly how it happened—one of them saved the other.”

“You were asking if they’re alike?” His question from the night before suddenly pops into her head.

“Yes, that’s what I asked.”

“Ofer, I think, is a little more … Actually, a little less, um …”

“What?”

“Oh, it’s complicated. Look, let me put it this way: Adam is kind of … Kind of what? What am I trying to say?” She pouts. “It’s funny how hard it suddenly is to describe them. Almost everything I want to say about them sounds so inaccurate.” She shakes herself off and gathers her thoughts. “Adam—I’m only talking about outward appearances now, right? Well, he’s less, say, he draws less attention at first glance. You know? But on the other hand, when you really get to know him, he’s a very charismatic young man. The most charismatic. He’s the kind of guy who can—”

“What does he look like?”

“You mean, you want me to describe him?”

“You know me—I like details.”

The detaileater: a distant relative of the anteater, a virtually extinct subspecies of the order Pilosa, survives exclusively on details. That was how Avram had defined himself in a booklet he put together in his senior year at high school, “The Class of ’69 Encyclopedia of Human Fauna.” It contained his descriptions of the students and teachers, with precise illustrations, arranged by their zoological categorizations.

“He’s a little bit short, relatively speaking. I told you that. And he has very black hair, like Ilan’s, but he parts it in the middle and it comes down in a kind of wave over his left ear.” Ora illustrates. Her face sparkles at Avram.

“What?”

“Nothing at all,” she answers and shrugs one shoulder provocatively. But the more Avram comes back to life—quiet and heavy and lacking as he is—the more he magnetizes her to an internal precision, a private nuance that spreads the kind of warm ripples through her body she hasn’t felt in years.

Two young couples pass by. The women nod hello and look at them curiously. The men are immersed in a loud conversation. “We’re mostly into biometric identification smart cards,” the taller one says. “We’re working on a card called BDA, and what it does is that a Palestinian who wants to get in just has to hold his hand and face under the biometric reader. Get it? No contact with soldiers, no talking, no nothing. Clean as a whistle. CWC—communication without contact.”

“So what’s ‘BDA’ stand for?” asks the second man.

The first one snickers. “Actually, it’s an acronym for biometric access device, but we realized that that came out BAD, so we changed it.”

“And his left ear,” Ora says when the people have gone, “is always exposed. It’s cute, like a little pearl.”

She shuts her eyes: Adam. His cheeks still look a little red beneath his shadow of stubble, a childhood souvenir. And he has long sideburns. And big, bitter eyes.

“His eyes are what stand out most. They’re big, like Ofer’s, but completely different, more sunken and black. All in all we’re a family of eyes. And his lips—” She stops suddenly.

“What about them?”

“No, I think they’re beautiful.” She concentrates on her hands. “Yes.”

“But?”

“But … but here, on the top one, he has a sort of tic, a permanent one. Not a tic, but an expression—”

“What sort of expression?”

“Well …” She takes a deep breath, girding her face. The time has come.

“You see what I have here?”

He nods without looking.

“So it’s this. Except his is turned upward.”

“Yes.”

They skip from stone to stone across a shallow creek, holding on to each other every so often.

“Tons of flies today,” Avram says.

“It must be the heat.”

“Yes. This evening it will be more—”

“Can I ask you something?”

“What?”

“Does it really stand out?”

“No, no.”

“Because you didn’t say anything about it.”

“I hardly noticed.”

“I had this thing, it was nothing, something in the nerves on my face, about a month after Ilan left. It happened in the middle of the night. I was alone at home. I was terrified. Does it look awful?”

“I’m telling you, you can hardly see it.”

“But I can feel it.” She touches the right corner of her upper lip, pushes it slightly up. “I keep thinking my face is falling to one side.”

“But you really can’t see anything, Ora’leh.”

“It’s just a couple of millimeters that I can’t feel. The sensation in the rest of my lips is totally normal.”

“Yes.”

“It should go away at some point. It won’t always be like this.”

“Of course.”

They walk down a narrow path among orchards of strawberry and walnut trees.

“Avram, tell me something.”

“What?”

“Stop for a minute.”

He stands waiting. His shoulders hunch up.

“Would you mind giving me a little kiss?”

He comes up close to her, rigid and bearish. Without looking at her, he hugs her, and plants a decisive kiss on her lips.

And lingers, and lingers.

“Ahhh.” She breathes softly.

“A-ah.” He sighs in surprise.

“Avram.”

“What?”

“Did you feel anything?”

“No, everything’s normal.”

She laughs. “ ‘Normal’!”

“I mean, like you used to be.”

“You still remember?”

“I remember everything.”

“Remember how I get dazed from kissing?”

“I remember.”

“And that sometimes I almost pass out from kissing?”

“Yes.”

“You be careful when you kiss me.”

“Yes.”

“How you loved me, Avram.”

He kisses her again. His lips are as soft as she remembered. She smiles as they kiss, and his lips move with hers.

“One more thing—”

“Hmmmmm …”

“Do you think we’ll ever sleep together?”

He presses her against his body and she feels his force. She thinks again of how much good this journey is doing him, and her.

They walk on, at first hand in hand, then they let go. Threads of new awkwardness stretch out between them, and nature itself winks behind their backs and plays nasty tricks on them, scattering yellow clods of asters and groundsel, blanketing purple clover and pink flax, erecting stalks of huge—but smelly—purple arum flowers, sprinkling red buttercups, and hanging baby oranges and lemons on the trees around them.

“Very arousing,” Ora says. “This walk, and the air. Isn’t it? Don’t you feel it?”

He laughs, embarrassed, and Ora—even her eyebrows suddenly feel warm.

He’s known Neta for thirteen years. She claims that she sat several evenings in the pub where he worked, on HaYarkon Street, and he did not take his eyes off her. He says he didn’t even notice her until she threw up and passed out on the bar one night. She was nineteen and weighed eighty-two pounds, and he carried her in his arms, against her will, on a stormy winter night—not a single cabdriver would take them—to a doctor friend in Jaffa. She squirmed in his arms the whole way, her gaunt limbs swirled around him and hit him mercilessly, and she hurled vile curses at him. When she ran out of those, she worked her way through the insults showered upon Sholem Aleichem by his stepmother, in the alphabetical order in which he had recorded them, calling him “carbuncle,” “forefather of all impurities,” “leper,” and “purloiner.” Avram himself mumbled the occasional choice curse to fill in what she omitted. When these ran out too, she started to pinch him painfully, and as she did so she laid out in detail the various uses one could make of his flesh, his fat, and his bones. Here Avram raised an eyebrow, and when she told him about the strips of wax she would be glad to produce from him, Avram—who never forgot a line he read—mumbled into her ear, “It was the idea also, that this same spermaceti was that quickening humor of the Greenland Whale.” This was a sentence he and Ilan had loved to quote in their youth, when Moby-Dick served as a particularly fertile ground for quotations. The tangle of vipers in his arms fell silent at once, gave a cross-eyed glance at the heavy monster exhaling condensation into the downpour, and noted, “There are some similarities between you and the book.”

“She was nineteen?” Ora asks. And thinks: I was sixteen when we met.

Avram shrugs. “She left home at sixteen and wandered around Israel and the whole world. The gypsy from next door. About two months ago was the first time she ever rented a real apartment. It was in Jaffa. Yuppified, you know.”

Ora doesn’t feel like talking about Neta now.

Reluctantly, she learns that Neta always looks starved—“not necessarily for food, but a general, existential starvation,” Avram explains with a laugh—and that her fingers almost always shake, maybe from drugs or maybe because, Avram quotes with a smile, “life zaps her at high voltage.” For years, she spent every summer living in an ancient Simca that a friend had left her. She also had a small tent, which she pitched whenever she found a place she wasn’t asked to leave. As he talks, the name “Neta” begins to etch a circle of frost in Ora’s gut, even though the sun is shining. What is this flood of speech suddenly coming out of him? What is he doing sticking Neta between us now?

“How does she make a living?” (Be generous, she commands.)

“This and that. It’s not really clear. She needs very little. You wouldn’t believe how little she needs. And she paints.”

Ora’s heart sinks a little lower. Of course she paints.

“Maybe you saw in my apartment, on the walls? That’s her.”

The huge, stirring charcoal drawings—how had she not asked him about them before? Perhaps because she had guessed the answer—prophets breast-feeding goats and lambs, an old man bending over a girl turning into a crane, a maiden being born from a wound in the chest of a godlike deer. She thinks about the drawing of a woman with a mohawk, and asks if that’s how Neta looks.

Avram chuckles. “Once, a long time ago. I didn’t like it, and now she has long hair, all the way down to here.”

“Yes. And the empty albums I saw at your place, the ones without any photos—are those hers, too?”

“No, those are mine.”

“Do you collect them?”

“I collect, I search, I aggregate. Things people throw out.”

“Aggregate?”

“You know, I put together all sorts of alte zachen.”

They are walking down the side of a cliff. The river, far below, is invisible. The dog leads, Ora walks behind her, and Avram brings up the rear as he tells her about his little projects. “It’s nothing, just something to pass the time. Like photo albums that people throw away, or albums that belonged to people who died.” He takes the photos out and puts in ones of other people, other families. He copies some of the photos onto tin boxes, right on the rust, or on the sides of ancient, rusty engines. “I’m very interested in rust lately. That place, or that moment, when iron turns to rust.”

It’s a good thing you found me, then, Ora thinks.

The path descends into the channel again, and suddenly Avram is alert and bright. He excitedly describes an atlas he found in the trash, printed in England in 1943. “If you looked at it, you wouldn’t understand anything about what happened in the world back then, because all the countries are still in their old borders, there’s no annihilation of the Jews, no occupation of Europe, no war, and I can sit looking at it for hours. So on the corners of the maps, I stuck pieces of a Russian newspaper I found in the dump, The Stalinist, also from ’forty-three, and there the war is described in detail, with battle maps and vast numbers of casualties. When I put those two objects together, I can really—Ora … I can feel electricity going through my body.”

She discovers that he and Neta do joint projects sometimes, too. “It’s this thing we have going together,” he says, blushing. They look for old objects and junk on the street, then they fantasize about what they could do with the things. “I’m always a little more practical,” he says with an apologetic snort, “and she’s much bolder.” He inadvertently drops himself from the story and describes some of what Neta has done in her brief life, her trials and tribulations, the skills she’s learned, her hospitalizations and adventures, and the men who have passed through her life. Ora thinks he is describing the life of a seventy-year-old. “She’s so brave,” he says admiringly, “much braver than I am. She may be the bravest person I’ve ever met.” He laughs softly when he remembers that Neta says she’s composed mainly of fears. Fears and cellulite.

Ora sees the crossed-out black lines over his bed, and a thick streak runs from them to the charcoal drawings in his living room. A spark lights up in her: “Avram, does she know?”

“About Ofer?”

Ora nods quickly. Her heart starts to pound.

“Yes, I told her.”

She walks ahead in confusion, with her hands held out. She steps into the stream, balancing on the slippery stones. This is the Amud River, she thinks. I hiked here in high school, on a sea-to-sea trip. It seems like it was yesterday. As if just yesterday I was still a young girl. She rubs her eyes. The hillside across the way is covered with thick growth, and a family of hyrax dots the rocks. The scene blurs, and she finds it’s best to look only to the next steps: pay attention, you’re going up again, walking on the rock ledge, and the river below plunges into a waterfall, and just don’t fall, hold on to this railing, and Neta knows.

The dog comes over and rubs against Ora’s leg as if to encourage her. Ora leans down and strokes her head distractedly. Neta knows. The secret bubble has been burst. The sealed, stifling bubble that Ora has taught herself to breathe in. Avram himself has punctured it. A stream of outside air bursts in. Such relief: a new, deep breath.

“What did she say?” Ora asks as her legs almost fail her.

“What did she say? She said I should go and see him.”

“Oh.” She lets out a thin, involuntary coo. “That’s what she said?”

“And I thought, when I called you, that evening, before you came. That’s what I wanted to tell you.”

“What?”

“That.”

“What?” She is almost suffocating. Her entire body hunches over the dog, burying ten trembling fingers in her fur.

“That if he’s finished with the army,” Avram says, hewing word by word, “I would like to, but only if you and Ilan didn’t have any objection …”

“What? Say it already.”

“Maybe see him one day.”

“Ofer.”

“Just once.”

“You would like to see him.”

“Even from a distance.”

“Yeah?”

“Without him … Look, I don’t want to interfere with your—”

“And you’re telling me this now?”

He shrugs his shoulders and plants his feet firmly on the rock.

“And when you phoned”—she finally gets it—“I told you he was …”

“Going back there, yes. And then I no longer—”

“Oh.” She moans, holds her head in both hands and presses hard and curses this war from the depths of her heart—this eternal war that has once again managed to shove its way into her soul. She opens her mouth wide and her lips roll back to expose her gums, and the cord of a sharp scream leaves her throat and shocks all the birds into silence. The dog looks up and her wise eyes expand until she can bear it no longer, and she too erupts into a heart-rending howl.

• • •

The last time he’d seen her was when he went to help paint her new apartment in Jaffa. A one-bedroom fourth-floor walk-up with a kitchenette and a rooftop. She was standing on a tall painter’s ladder with a joint in one hand and a brush in the other, and he was on an aluminum stepladder. Her three cats slunk around between the ladders. One had a kidney disease, one was retarded, and one was a reincarnation of her mother, who in this form continued to make Neta’s life a misery. Before she moved in, the apartment had housed foreign workers from China, and one whole wall was still studded with little nails hammered in a pattern whose meaning she and Avram were trying to discern. She insisted on wearing a man’s gray undershirt full of holes, which she’d found in a pile of trash left behind in the apartment. “This is how I honor the memory of the one billion,” she said, and he was just happy to see her in an undershirt.

“Every so often she stocks up my fridge,” he tells Ora, “and cleans my apartment. Gives me a makeover. Does this even interest you?”

“Yes, of course, I’m listening.”

With money she didn’t have, Neta bought him a first-rate stereo system, and they listened to music together. Sometimes she read entire books to him out loud. “And she doesn’t say no to any drug. She even does coke and heroin, but somehow she doesn’t get addicted to anything.”

“Except you,” Neta laughed when he suggested she quit her Avram addiction and go into rehab.

“Nothing good will come of me for you,” he’d said.

“And what are illusions, chopped liver?”

“You’re young, you could have children, a family.”

“You’re the only person I’m willing to familiate with.”

But maybe she’s fallen in love with someone else? The thought pains him far more than he had imagined it would. Maybe she finally changed her mind?

“What?” Ora asks. “What is it?”

“I don’t know.” Avram hastens his steps. He suddenly realizes that if Neta is not in his life, or he in hers, he may not have a reason to go home after this trip. “I’m a little worried about her. She’s disappeared on me lately.”

“Is that unusual for her?”

“It’s happened before. That’s how she is, she comes and goes.”

“When we reach a phone, try calling her.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe she left you a message at home.”

He walks quickly. Tries to remember her cell-phone number, but cannot. He, who remembers everything, every bit of nonsense, every stupid sentence anyone said to him thirty years ago, every random combination of numbers his eyes fall upon. In the army he could recite all the serial numbers of all the soldiers and officers in the listening bunker; and the unlisted phone numbers of all the unit commanders; and of course the names and serial numbers of all the Egyptian units and divisions and armies, and of the commanders of all the military airfields in Egypt; and their private addresses and home phone numbers, and sometimes the names of their wives and children and mistresses; and the lists of monthly code names of all the intelligence units under the Southern Command. But now, with Neta, he can’t get the numbers straight!

“She’s very young,” he murmurs. “I’m old, and she’s so young.” He laughs glumly. “It’s a bit like raising a dog who you know will die before you do. But I’m the dog, in this case.”

Ora distractedly covers the bitch’s ears with her hands.

Through Neta he has met a whole gang of people. People like her. Kind and hardworking. “Chipped mugs,” she calls them. They roam in packs. The beaches of Sinai, Nitzanim, the Judean Desert, ashrams in India, music festivals with drugs and free love in France, Spain, and the Negev.

“Do you know what an Angel Walk is?”

“Something in sports?”

He takes Ora to a “rainbow gathering” in the Netherlands or Belgium. “Everyone shares everything,” he explains enthusiastically, as if he himself has been there. “Everyone helps out with meals and pays for food with whatever they have. The only thing that costs money is drugs.”

“I see.”

“One evening she took part in an Angel Walk.” Avram gives Ora a smile that is not intended for her, the likes of which she has not seen on him since he was a boy. Like the flicker of a candle in an old, dusty lantern. The smile is irresistible. “Two rows of people stand opposite each other, very close”—he demonstrates with his hands—“and usually they don’t know each other. Total strangers. And one person goes in with his or her eyes shut, and walks all the way down between the rows.”

The two rows of hitters, Ora suddenly remembers. So many times he’d talked about them, in a thousand different contexts and digressions, until sometimes it seemed that the entire world was those two rows, into which a person is thrown when he is born, and he gets pummeled around between them as they hit and kick, until finally he is spat out, bruised and crushed.

“And they lead this one person slowly, gently, between the rows, and everyone strokes him, touches him, hugs him, whispers in his ear: ‘You are so beautiful, you are perfect, you are an angel.’ It goes on that way right to the end, and then someone is waiting for him with a big, pampering hug, and then he steps back into the rows of givers.”

“Did she get hugged like that?”

“Wait. First she was in the rows, and for a few hours she stroked and hugged and whispered all those lines, which usually make her giggle. Those kinds of words really don’t work for her.” He perks up. “Listen, you have to meet her.”

“Okay, when we have a chance. And then what happened?”

“When her turn came to receive, to walk through the lines, she didn’t go in.”

Ora nods. Even before he said it, she knew.

“She ran away to the forest and sat there until morning. She couldn’t do it. She felt that it wasn’t her time to receive yet.”

Ora suddenly knows what Avram and Neta share: they have both found that those who stroke can also hit. She hugs herself tightly as she walks. This girl Neta arouses conflicting emotions in her, because suddenly, in the last few moments, she feels affection toward her, and a maternal tenderness. And Neta knows about Ofer. Avram told her about Ofer. “Does she know anything about me?”

“She knows you exist.”

Ora swallows heavily, then finally manages to cough the pit out of her throat. “And do you love her?”

“Love? What do I know? I like being with her. She knows how to be with me. She gives me space.”

Not like me. Ora thinks about the boys and their complaints.

Too much space, Avram thinks fearfully. Where are you, Nettush?

After they’d finished painting her little apartment, they took the ladders out onto the roof and she taught him how to ladder-walk. “In her wanderings, when she travels sometimes, she makes a living as a street performer. She swallows fire and swords, she juggles, and joins street circuses.” Like two drunken grasshoppers, they’d walked toward each other under the evening sky, between the water tank and the antenna. Then she leaped up off the ladder onto the roof ledge and Avram’s blood froze.

“So what do you say?” she asked with her sweet, sad smile. “It’s not going to get any better than this. Should we get it over with now?”

He leaned over and gripped his ladder. Neta crab-walked along the edge of the roof. Behind her he could see rooftops and a bloodred sunset and a mosque dome. “You’re a tough nut, Avram,” said Neta, almost to herself. “You’ve never, for example, told me that you love me. Not that I ever asked you, as far as I can remember, but still, a girl needs to hear it from her man once in her life, or something like it, even a paraphrase. But you’re cheap. At most you’ll give me an ‘I love your body’ or ‘I love being with you’ or ‘I love your ass.’ That kind of witty sidestep. So maybe I should get the message already?”

The ladder’s legs clicked against the stone lip of the roof. Avram decided in a flash that if something happened to her, he would, without thinking, throw himself after her.

“Go into my room,” she murmured. “On the table, next to the ashtray, there’s a small brown book. Go and get it.”

Avram shook his head.

“Go, I won’t do anything until you get back. Scout’s honor.”

He got off his ladder and went into the room. He was there for a second or two, and every vein in his body yelled out that she was jumping. He grabbed the book and went back to the roof.

“Now read where I marked it.”

His fingers trembled. He opened the book and read: “ ‘ … for I had my life support in Vienna. I use this expression to describe the one person who has meant more to me than any other since the death of my grandfather, the woman who shares my life and to whom I have owed not just a great deal but, frankly, more or less everything, since the moment when she first appeared at my side over thirty years ago.’ ” He turned over the book: Wittgenstein’s Nephew by Thomas Bernhard.

“Keep going, but with more feeling.”

“ ‘Without her I would not be alive at all, or at any rate I would certainly not be the person I am today, so mad and so unhappy, yet at the same time happy.’ ”

“Yes,” she said to herself, her eyes closed in deep concentration.

“ ‘The initiated will understand what I mean when I use this expression to describe the person from whom I draw all my strength—for I truly have no other source of strength—and to whom I have repeatedly owed my survival.’ ”

“Thank you,” said Neta, still swaying on the ladder as if in a dream.

Avram said nothing. He seemed loathsome and despicable in his own eyes.

“Do you understand what the problem is?”

He moved his head to indicate something between yes and no.

“It’s very simple. You are my life support, but I’m not your life support.”

“Neta, you’re—”

“Your life support is her, that woman who had a child with you, whose name you won’t even tell me.”

He buried his head between his shoulders and did not answer.

“But look.” She smiled and brushed the hair away from her eyes. “It’s not such an original tragedy, what we have here. And not such a big problem, either. The world is just a very unfocused picture. I can live with that—how about you?”

He did not answer. She asked for so little, but he could not give her even that. “Come on, Neta.” He held out his hand.

“But think about it?” Her soft eyes lingered on him, full of hope.

“Okay. Now come on.”

A flock of starlings soared by with a flutter of wings. Avram and Neta stood there, both immersed in themselves.

“Not yet?” she murmured to herself after a while, as though responding to an unheard voice. “It’s not time yet?”

With two swift strokes she landed the ladder on the rooftop floor. “Look at you,” she said, sounding surprised. “You’re shaking all over. Are you cold inside? In your no-heart?”

Ora tells him more about Adam the next day. She would prefer to talk again about the old Adam, baby Adam, about the three years when he was hers alone. But he asks about today’s Adam, and without holding anything back, she describes her older son, whose eyes are always red and bloodshot, whose body is slender and a little stooped, hunched forward with troubling languor, his hands and fingers drooping to the ground, his lip pulled up with a slightly contemptuous expression of subtle, nihilistic scorn.

She is struck by the things she says about him and by the fact that she is capable of looking at Adam this way. Ilan’s objective view of the boys is now hers, too. She is learning to speak a foreign language.

Note by note, she depicts a young man of twenty-four who looks both weak and tough at the same time, conveying a quiet strength beyond his age. “I don’t quite understand it,” she says hesitantly, “this strength he has. It’s something elusive, even a bit”—she swallows—“dark.” There, I’ve said it.

“His face isn’t anything special, at least not at first sight—he’s pale, with cheeks darkened by stubble, sunken black eyes, and a very prominent Adam’s apple—still, to me he looks exceptional. I find him really beautiful from certain angles. And he has this combination of features that looks as though several of his ages are all there at the same time. I find it so interesting sometimes just to look at him.”

“But what is that strength? What do you mean?”

“How can I explain it?” She knows she must be precise now. “It’s like you can’t surprise him with anything. Yes, that’s it. Not with anything happy or anything sad, and not with something really painful or really terrible, either. You’ll never surprise him.” Having said it, she realizes for the first time how accurate her perception of him is. She also understands how different he is from her—the opposite. “He has such power,” she says in a fading voice. “The power of contempt.”

She’s seen two of his shows. One he invited her to, and the other she snuck into after he’d dropped her. There were dozens of young boys and girls there, and their faces leaned toward him in the blinding lashes of light whipped from every direction, all drawn, with their eyes closed, to his indifferent, slightly sick frailty, which sucked them out of themselves. “You should have seen them. They looked like … I don’t know what. I don’t have the words to describe it.”

Avram sees a field of albino sunflowers. Albino sunflowers in a solar eclipse.

They rest at the peak of Mount Arbel, above the thirst-quenching Kinneret Valley. The area is full of hikers. A school group of screeching girls and boys arrives. They take one another’s pictures and scurry around. Buses spit out groups of tourists, and their guides compete against one another in a shouting match. But Ora and Avram are immersed in their own affairs. A soft breeze refreshes them after the exhausting ascent. On the way up they hardly spoke—it was an especially steep climb. Carved steps and iron posts in the rock helped them, but every few steps they had to stop for a breather. From the Bedouin village at the foot of the hill came roosters’ crowing, a school bell, and the commotion of children. Above them, in the cliff side, a chain of gaping mouths: the caves where the Galilean rebels hid from Herod (“I read about it somewhere,” Avram murmured). Herod’s soldiers had cleverly propelled themselves down the mountain in cages and used rods fitted with iron hooks to hunt down the cave dwellers and hurl them into the valley.

Above the mountain, above the human tumult, a large eagle glides against the blue sky, floating on a warm, transparent air column that rises up from the valley. In broad circles, with spectacular ease, the eagle hovers above the air column until its towering warmth evaporates, then glides away in search of a new breeze. Avram and Ora take pleasure in its flight, and in the mountains of the Galilee and the Golan, glowing purple in the warm vapors, and the blue eye of Lake Kinneret, until Ora notices a plaque in memory of Sergeant Roi Dror, of blessed memory, who was killed below this cliff on June 18, 2002, during a training operation of the Duvdevan special forces unit. “He fell as gently as a tree falls. There was not even the slightest sound, because of the sand” (The Little Prince). Without a word, they get up and flee to the opposite end of the mountaintop, but there is another monument in their new place of refuge, in memory of Staff Sergeant Zohar Mintz, killed in ’96 in Southern Lebanon. Ora reads with tears in her eyes: He loved the country and died for it, he loved us and we loved him. Avram pulls her hand but she does not move, so he forcefully tugs her away. “You started telling me about Adam,” he reminds her.

“Oh, Avram, where will this end? Tell me, where will this end? There’s no more room for all the dead.”

“Now tell me about Adam.”

“But listen, I remembered that I wanted to tell you something about Ofer.” She could feel it again. The slight push she gives Ofer to the front of the stage every time she thinks Avram is too drawn to Adam.

“What about Ofer?” he asks, but she can feel that his heart is still caught in the riddle of Adam.

They walk down the mountain heading south, toward Karnei Hittin. On either side of the path are fields of wheat ears turning golden in the sun. They find an isolated patch, like a little nest on the ground, surrounded by a meadow of purple lupines. Avram sprawls out, Ora lies down opposite him, and the dog nuzzles under Ora’s head. Ora feels the warm, breathing body, which needs her, and thinks she might break the vow she’d made after Nicotine died and adopt this dog.

“When Talia left Ofer—I guess my boys always get deserted; so they did inherit something from me after all. But wait, I have to explain that Adam never had a serious girlfriend, I mean a true love, before Ofer had Talia. And think about that. Two boys like them, they’re not that bad, are they? They’re definitely a catch, but neither of them had a girlfriend until a pretty late age. Think about us at their age. Think about you.”

Of course he already has. She sees in his face that he is instantly there, at seventeen and nineteen and twenty-two. Buzzing around her like mad, but at the same time pursuing every other girl he laid eyes on. She could never understand his taste in girls, and he found every one of them worthy of his undying love. Each grew greater and more beautiful in his eyes, even the stupidest and ugliest ones, and especially the ones who scorned and tormented him. “Remember how …,” she starts, and he shrugs his shoulders in embarrassment. Of course he remembers. She thinks about his efforts to enchant, to seduce, and how he would hollow out his soul for them, humiliate himself, stammer, blush, and then poke fun at himself: “What am I? Nothing more than a hormonal fermentation bacterium.” And now, thirty years later, he still has the nerve to argue with her: “It was all because you didn’t want me. If you’d said yes right away, if you hadn’t tortured me for five years before giving in, I wouldn’t have needed that whole march of folly.”

She hoists herself up on her elbows. “I didn’t want you?”

“Not the way I wanted you. You wanted Ilan more; I was just the zest.”

“That’s not true. That’s really inaccurate, it’s a lot more complicated than that.”

“You didn’t want me, you were afraid.”

“What did I have to be afraid of?”

“You were afraid, Ora, because the fact is you gave up on me in the end. You gave up. Admit it.”

They both sit quietly. Her face is flushed. What can she tell him? She couldn’t even explain it to herself back then. When she was with him for that one year, she sometimes had the feeling that he was flushing through her en masse, like a whole army. What can she tell him? After all, she wasn’t even always convinced it was her he loved so much, that she was the one creating that love storm. Perhaps it was someone he had once fantasized about, and he just kept on daydreaming her with all his creative powers. She also suspected that simply because he had fallen in love with her once, in a hasty, crazy moment, in the isolation ward, he would never admit, not even to himself, that she wasn’t right for him. With his peculiar, Quixotic chivalry, he would never go back on his resolution. (But how could she have told him that at the time? She hadn’t even had the courage to say it to herself, as she was doing now.) Sometimes she felt like a mannequin on which he constantly piled more and more colorful outfits that only underscored her dryness, her diminution, her narrowness. But every time she told him, full of sorrow and a broken heart, a little of what she felt, he was deeply insulted, amazed at how little she knew herself and him, at how she could hurt the most beautiful thing he had ever had in his life.

Why does everything have to be so exaggerated with him? Why does everything have to have such force? she used to wonder. And then she’d feel ashamed, and she’d think of the girl who jumped out of his bed because he was too intimate for her. She also often felt that he had so much love and passion that he was invading her, raging inside her body and soul like an oversized carnivorous puppy, without even imagining how much it pained her and ripped her apart. At times he would look into her eyes so intently. There were no words to describe what was in his eyes at those moments. And it didn’t necessarily occur in times of passion. Usually it came after the passion. He would look at her with such exposed, piercing, almost mad love, and she would teasingly touch his nose, or giggle, or make a funny face, but it was as if he did not sense her embarrassment. His face would take on a strange expression, imploring her for something she did not understand, and for one long moment he would sink into her eyes without taking his look off hers, and he was like a massive, shadowy body drowning in dark liquid, and he would gradually disappear as he looked at her, and her eyes would slowly close and cover him inside them, sheltering from herself, too. She could no longer look, and yet she did, and she saw his gaze emptying to reveal something else, something skeletal and terrible, with no end. He would dive deep inside her, hold her tight against his body, clutch her until she almost choked in his grip, and every so often he shuddered powerfully as though he had absorbed something from her that he could not tolerate. She did not know what was there, what she’d given him, what she’d received.

“I couldn’t be with you,” she says simply.

The sun sets slowly, and the earth gives off a fresh, steaming scent of insides. Ora and Avram lie motionless in their nest on the field. Above them the sky mingles with the various evening blues. Take a hat and put two slips of paper in it. No, you don’t have to know what you’re drawing lots for. You’re allowed to guess, but do it silently. And quickly. Ora, they’re waiting for us, there’s a command car outside. Now pick one out. Did you do it? Which one? Are you sure?

Her face grows long in the shadows. She shuts her eyes. Which one did you pick? And which one did you want to pick? And which one did you really pick? Are you sure? Are you really sure?

“Listen, I just couldn’t breathe. You were too much for me.”

“How could it be too much?” Avram asks quietly. “What is too much when you love someone?”

“Adam and Ofer were so lazy, it took them forever to find girlfriends,” she tells Avram the next day, walking through Switzerland Forest. “They spent almost all their time with each other, always shared a room. They refused to be separated until finally, when Adam was about sixteen, we gave them separate rooms. We thought it was time.”

“Where did you put the rooms?”

Ora hears the flicker in his voice and tenses. “In … you know, downstairs, where the storage room was. That basement? Where your mother’s Singer sewing machine was?”

“So you partitioned the basement?”

“With drywall, yes. Nothing major.”

“Wasn’t it too crowded?”

“No, it came out nicely. Two rooms, kind of nooks. It was great for teenagers.”

“And a bathroom?”

“A small one, you know, with a tiny sink.”

“What about air?”

“We put two windows in. More like peepholes. Symbolic.”

“Yes,” he says thoughtfully. “Sure.”

When he’d finished all his treatments and surgeries and hospitalizations, Avram had decided he didn’t want to go back to his mother’s house in Tzur Hadassah. Not even to visit. Ilan and Ora, with help from Ora’s parents, and loans and a mortgage, bought the house from Avram. They made a point of buying it at a higher price than its real value—much higher, Ilan liked to stress whenever the topic came up—and they followed all the rules and carried out the transaction through a lawyer who had been a friend of Avram’s from before. But Ora—and perhaps Ilan too, although he always denied it—never forgave herself for that heartless act, for their prolonged torment of him (there, she’s finally said it to herself), which ended only when she and Ilan moved to Ein Karem. Now, faced with his pained look, as though blinded by the attempt to follow the innovations and changes in the home that was once his, she can hardly resist giving him the list of rationales that are always on the tip of her tongue, ready for use: everything was done with the best of intentions, thinking only of his needs; they wanted to save him from having to deal with buyers and agents; they really thought he’d feel better if he knew that in some way the house was staying in the family. But they purchased his house from him (at full price, yes, at an excellent price), and they lived their lives in it, she and Ilan and Adam and Ofer.

Sometimes, when no one was looking, she would touch a wall as she walked by, in the rooms or in the hallway, slowly sliding her fingers over it. Sometimes she would sit and read, as he had, at the top of the steps to the yard, or on the windowsill facing the wadi. There were the window handles, which she would linger on every time she opened them, as if in a secret handshake. There were the bath and the toilet, the cracked ceilings, the cabinets with their dense smell. There were the sunken tiles and the ones that stuck out. There were the rays of sun that came from the east in the morning, and she would stand and bathe in them for long moments, sometimes with little Ofer in her arms, quietly watching her. There was the evening breeze, which came from the wadi, which she would sway in, letting it float over her skin and breathing it deep inside.

“Surprisingly, Ofer had a girlfriend before Adam did.” Ora hopes this information will make Avram happy. But he darkens a little and asks what she means by “surprisingly.” She explains: “After all, he’s younger. But I guess Adam needed Ofer to pave the way in that realm, too. Even when they were grown up, they were both at home with us all the time until Adam’s military service, until the army separated them, and then everything changed. Suddenly Adam had friends, lots of friends, and so did Ofer, and then Ofer found Talia. All at once they both opened up and went out into the world—so the army did them some good after all. But until Adam turned eighteen, until his enlistment, most of the time it was just him and Ofer. I mean, him and Ofer and us, the four of us together”—she mimes stuffing something tightly into a suitcase or backpack. “Even though they always had lots of things going on, school, and Adam’s band, we still felt, Ilan and I, that they were mostly directed inward, to the house, and even more, to their own relationship. I told you, they had this secret.” Her hands grip the backpack straps and her head tilts slightly. She hardly sees what is in front of her: cliffs, raspberry hedges, blinding sunlight. It suddenly occurs to her that within the longer, cumbersome secret, Ofer and Adam had made their own little secret, a kind of igloo in the ice.

“It was fun, that togetherness. They were always with us, they went everywhere with us—‘like bodyguards,’ Ilan used to joke, or maybe complain—and we went on trips together, and sometimes to movies, and they even came with us to our friends’ sometimes, which is really hard to believe.” She gives a meager laugh. “They would come with us and sit on the side and talk as if they hadn’t seen each other in a year. It was wonderful, I’m telling you, it was such a rare thing. But still, Ilan and I always have—always had—the feeling that it was a bit, how can I put it—”

For an instant, in the wandering beam of her gaze, Avram sees the four of them moving through the rooms of the familiar house. Four bright, elongated human spots, with a dim light around their edges, like figures seen through night goggles, foggy shadows surrounded by a greenish, downy halo, stuck to one another, moving clumsily together. And when they briefly come apart, they each leave in the other strands of sticky, glowing fibers. To his surprise, he senses a constant effort emanating from them. There is tension and caution. He is even more astounded to discover that there is no ease or pleasure in the four of them. They do not evince the joy of living together, which he had always pictured when he thought of them, when he had given in to thoughts of them, when he had drizzled into his veins, drop by drop, the poison of thinking about them.

“And when Ofer had a girlfriend,” he asks hesitantly, “wasn’t Adam jealous?”

“At first it wasn’t easy. Yes, Adam had a hard time with Ofer finding a new soul mate, and with the fact that he had no part in this very close connection they shared. Just think—it was the first time that had happened since Ofer was born. But they were a nice couple, Ofer and Talia. There was a tenderness between them.” She finds it hard to talk. “Later, later.”

She picks up after a while. “When Talia left Ofer, he crawled into his bed and barely left for a week. He stopped eating, completely lost his appetite. He just drank, mostly beer, and friends came to see him. All of a sudden we saw how many friends he had, and even though it wasn’t planned, they basically began to sit shiva in our house.”

“Shiva?!”

“Because they sat around his bed and consoled him, and when they left others came, and the door was open all week long, morning, noon, and night, and he kept asking his friends to tell him about Talia, to tell him everything they remembered about her, in great detail. And by the way, he wouldn’t let them say anything bad about her, only good things. He’s such a kind soul.” She giggles. “I haven’t even told you anything about him, you haven’t begun to know him …” Suddenly she is flooded with nostalgia. Simple, hungry, incautious longing. She hasn’t seen him for a long time, or talked to him. This may be the longest she has gone without speaking to him since he was born. “And the guys played him songs Talia liked, and watched one of her favorite movies, My Dinner with André, in an endless loop. And they gobbled down bags and bags of Bamba and Tuv Taam, which she was addicted to. And this went on for a whole week. And of course I had to feed and water the whole tribe. You wouldn’t believe the quantities of beer those guys could down in one evening. Well, you probably could, because of the pub.”

Maybe, she thinks, Ofer or Adam, or even both of them together, on one of their pub crawls in Tel Aviv one evening, when they were on leave from the army, had turned up at his pub. Could he have somehow recognized them? Known without knowing?

“Ora?”

“Yes.” She smiles to herself. “Look, I guess it turned into this thing around town”—like everything Ofer touched, she intimates—“and people started turning up who didn’t really know Ofer but had heard that something was going on, this kind of love shiva. They came and sat there telling stories about their own soured loves, and about affairs that had ended, and all sorts of heartbreaks they’d experienced.”

An afternoon ray of sun smooths her forehead, and Ora distractedly turns her cheek to pamper herself in the warmth. Her face is young and lovely now, as though nothing bad has ever happened to her. She can get up now and go out into life, whole and innocent and pure.

“And by the way, that’s how Adam met Libby, who became his girlfriend. She’s like an overgrown puppy, a homeless puppy, a bear cub, although she’s a head taller than he is. During the first days of the shiva she just sat in a corner and cried nonstop, and then she pulled herself together and started to help me with the food and the drinks and the dishes, emptying ashtrays and taking out empty bottles. But she was so exhausted from something that she would fall asleep in any available bed around the house. Just collapse into a slumber. And somehow, without us noticing, in our sleep, she came into our lives, and now they’re together, she and Adam. I think they’re happy, because even though Libby is a puppy, she’s also very maternal toward him.” A tinge of sorrow trails behind Ora’s voice. “I think he’s really happy with her. At least I hope so.”

She surrenders to a deep, pent-up sigh, a sigh of total bankruptcy. “Look, I wasn’t exaggerating when I told you a few days ago that I know nothing about his life now.”

The dog stops and comes up to Ora when she hears her sigh. Ora leans down to the damp, sharp snout nuzzling between her thighs. She speaks to Avram over the dog’s head. “Sometimes, when I say a certain word, or if I say something in a slightly different tune—”

“Or when you laugh suddenly—”

“Or cry—”

“She responds immediately.”

“Yesterday, when you were chasing the flies around with a towel and shouting, did you see how upset she was? What did that remind you of, sweetie?” Ora tenderly rubs the dog’s head as she leans into her. “Where did you come to us from?” She kneels on one knee, holds the dog’s face between her hands, and rubs noses with her. “What happened to you? What did they do to you?”

Avram watches them. The light turns Ora’s hair even more silver and glows in the dog’s fur.

“So you don’t have any contact with him, with Adam?” he asks when they start walking again.

“He totally cut me off.”

Avram does not reply.

“There was this thing,” she mutters. “Not with him. It was with Ofer, actually, in the army. We had this whole story with him, some screwup that happened in his unit in Hebron. No one died, and Ofer wasn’t to blame—he certainly wasn’t the only one. There were twenty soldiers there, so why would it be his fault? Never mind, not now. I made a mistake, I know that, and Adam was very angry at me for not supporting Ofer”—she takes a deep breath and portions out, one by one, the words that have been tormenting her ever since—“for not being able to support Ofer wholeheartedly. Do you understand? Do you understand the absurdity? Because with Ofer I’ve already made up long ago. Everything’s fine between us”—but her eyes shift a little, this way and that—“but Adam, because of his lousy principles, won’t forgive me to this day.”

Avram doesn’t ask anything. Her heart pounds in her throat. Did she do the right thing by telling him? She should have told him long ago. She’s afraid of his judgment. Maybe he’ll also think, like Adam, that she’s an unnatural mother.

“Do they hug?” Avram asks.

“What did you say?” Ora jolts out of a fleeting daydream.

“No, nothing.” He sounds startled.

“No, you asked if they—”

“Hug. Sometimes, yes. Ofer and Adam.”

She looks at him gratefully. “Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know, I’m just trying to imagine them together, that’s all.”

That’s all? She rejoices inside: That’s all?

They’ve walked far. At the village of Kinneret they had stocked up on food and visited the nearby cemetery, where they leafed through the book of Rahel’s poems chained to the ground next to her grave. They crossed the Tiberias-Tzemach highway, strolled through orchards of date trees, and paid their respects to a mule named Booba, buried near the Jordan River, who had Loyally Plowed, Tilled, and Furrowed the Kinneret Soil in the 1920s and 1930s. They saw pilgrims from Peru and Japan sing and dance as they dipped in the river. They walked a ways between the clear river and a foul-smelling sewage channel, until the path led them away from the Jordan and toward the Yavne’el. At Ein Petel they enjoyed a feast fit for kings in the shade of eucalyptus and oleander trees. They could see Mount Tabor and knew without a doubt that they would reach it.

The day is extremely hot and, feeling toasted, they dip in the occasional spring or run through giant sprinklers on the fields. They get scratched by raspberry bushes, and every so often they doze in a spot of shade, then get up and walk for a while longer. They slather themselves repeatedly with sunscreen; he spreads it on the back of her neck and she does his nose, and they sigh at how unsuitable their skin is for this climate. As he walks, Avram carves “the stick of the day” for Ora with Ofer’s penknife, and today it’s a thin oak branch, slightly crooked and partially gnawed, perhaps by a goat. “Not the most convenient thing,” she announces after trying it, “but it’s full of personality, so it can stay.”

“When they were boys they almost never hugged,” she tells him when they sit down on a heap of stones in the shade of a large Atlantic terebinth on the heights of the Yavne’el mountains. The spot has a rare view of the Kinneret, the Golan, the Gilead, Mount Meron, the Gilboa mountains, Mount Tabor, the Shomron, and the Carmel. She even sensed that the boys were a little embarrassed by each other’s bodies. She found this awkwardness strange: they shared a room, and when they were little they always showered together, but to touch each other, body to body … They wouldn’t even hit each other, she thinks now. They only fought when they were little, but not much. And when they grew older, almost never.

What she wouldn’t give to know whether they talked about puberty, about the changes in their bodies, or about girls, and about masturbation and making out. She guesses they didn’t. Puberty seemed to embarrass them both, as though it were some alien force that had invaded their intimate twosome and expropriated parts they preferred to keep silent about. She often wondered, and asked Ilan repeatedly, where they’d gone wrong in bringing up the boys. Maybe we didn’t hug enough in front of them? We didn’t show them what it’s like when a man and a woman love each other?

“I find it very strange,” she says, trying to sound amused, “how modest and shy my boys are about that kind of stuff. I used to try to get them to be crude, to curse here and there, what’s the big deal? When Ofer was little he gleefully joined in. He’d say rude words and giggle and blush terribly. But when they grew up, especially when they were with the two of us, it almost never happened.”

It’s Ilan with his lousy puritanism, she thinks. Always on guard, making sure not a hint of lining sticks out, God forbid. “Sometimes I had the feeling—you’ll laugh—that they thought they had to preserve our innocence, as if we didn’t know which end was up. Come on, let’s walk, this is getting on my nerves.”

The trail is now a path of cracked, dry clods of earth. Bare stones and narrow cracks, spindly weeds trampled yet resprouting. Here and there some humble white and yellow chamomile earn the pity of their feet, which avoid them. Dry leaves from last spring, crumbled and perforated, translucent, only their spines remaining. A rocky path, yellowing brown, dusty and warty, no form nor comeliness, exactly like a thousand others, scattered with withered twigs and orange-brown pine needles. A line of black ants carries crumbs and shelled sunflower seeds. Here a deep ant-lion pit, there a pattern of gray-green lichen on fractured rocks, a shriveled pinecone, and the occasional glistening black mound of deer droppings or crumbly brown mound of a queen ant returned from her nuptial flight.

“Listen,” Ora says and holds his hand.

“To what?”

“To the path. I’m telling you, paths in Israel have a sound I haven’t heard anywhere else.”

They walk and listen: rrrrsh-rrrsh when their shoes drag in the dirt; rrrhh-rrrhh when their toes hit the path; hhhhs-hhhhs when they stroll; hwassh-hwassh when they trot; a rapidly drumming rrish-chrsh when little stones fly up and hit each other; hrappp-hrappp when their feet step through bushes of poterium. Ora laughs. “It’s a good thing they all have the right sounds in Hebrew. How would you possibly describe these sounds in English or Italian? Maybe they can only be accurately pronounced in Hebrew.”

“Do you mean these paths speak Hebrew? Are you saying language springeth out of the earth?” And he runs with the idea that words had sprouted up from this dirt, crawled out of cracks in the arid, furrowed earth, burst from the wrath of hamsin winds with briars and brambles and thorns, leaped up like locusts and grasshoppers.

Ora listens to his flow of speech. Deep inside, a fossilized minnow stirs its tail and a wavelet tickles at her waist.

“I wonder what it’s like in Arabic,” she says. “After all, it’s their landscape too, and they have rhonchial consonants too, that sound like your throat is choking on the dryness.” She illustrates, and the dog pricks up her ears. “Do you still remember the Arabic words you learned for all those thistles and nettles, or didn’t they teach you that in Intelligence?

Avram laughs. “Mostly they taught us about tanks and planes and munitions; for some reason they didn’t get around to nettles.”

“A grave mistake,” Ora decrees.

He’d asked whether they hug. She remembers going out to a restaurant on Adam’s birthday, not long ago. It was a new place, “a little too froufrou for my taste,” she says, on one of the moshavim in the Jerusalem hills, surrounded by fields and empty chicken coops—it occurs to her that although Avram has worked in a pub and a restaurant and God knows where else, he may not know what it’s like to go out for a family meal, being as socially illiterate as he is. So she explains, before anything else, how they choose a restaurant in her family. Adam has refined, picky taste, so first they have to call and find out if there’s anything for him to eat, course by course. Once they choose a place and get there and sit down—“You can’t imagine what an operation it is just to sit down! We have a whole settlement policy. For a simple family we’re pretty complicated.”

She talks on and on, and Avram can see it.

“First of all, Ilan has to find the perfect table: far from the bathroom and the kitchen, with the right lighting—not too bright, not too dim—and as quiet as possible, and a spot where he can sit facing the door, to be aware of any danger that might threaten his little family—and the evening I’m talking about was at the height of the terrorist attacks.”

“When isn’t it?” Avram grumbles.

“And Adam has to sit as close as possible to a wall, almost hidden, with his back to everyone, but he also has to be able to embarrass his parents with his torn pants, dirty shirts, and the quantities of alcohol he pours down his throat. And Ofer is like me: he doesn’t care about anything, he’ll happily sit anywhere as long as the food is good and there’s lots of it.” Ora herself wants privacy, of course, but also to be able to show off her family a little.

“So after we sit down comes the ordering, with Adam’s performances. The waitress always marks him straightaway as problematic, an obstacle in the rhythmic flow of her execution, because of his pedantic instructions—nothing with cream in it; can it be fried in butter? Do any of the dips, God forbid, contain eggplant or avocado, in any form? And Ilan’s usual wisecracks with the waitress.” Ora is always amazed and amused to see how utterly blind he is to the fact that the poor girl—any poor girl, at any age—goes weak when he floods her with the arctic green of his glowing eyes. And then there’s Ora’s heroic struggle with her own eye, which keeps veering to the prices. Every time anyone orders anything, she conducts a secret negotiation between gluttony and frugality—okay, let’s get all the embarrassing facts out. With her, it’s cheapness, quite explicitly. There, she’s admitted it. Somehow she finds it easy to confess to Avram what she has held back from Ilan all these years. She sighs. “Where was I?”

“Cheapness,” Avram comments with slightly malicious glee.

“Yes, use it against me, go ahead.” A spark flies between her eyes and his.

She is always the one who feebly suggests: “Why don’t we just order three entrées? We never finish everything anyway.” And they argue with her, always, as though her proposal contains a veiled slight of their appetites, perhaps even their masculinity. In the end they order four entrées and never finish even three of them. Adam orders a horribly extravagant aperitif—why does he need to drink so much? She and Ilan exchange glances—leave him alone, let him enjoy it this evening, on me! And when the waitress heads to the kitchen with their orders a sudden silence—freezing, obviating—falls on them all. The three men stare at their fingertips, study a fork, or ponder a philosophical conundrum—“an abstract, even cosmic problem,” Ora hisses.

She knows everything will be fine soon, even good. They always enjoy themselves at restaurants, and the boys like going out with her and Ilan. All in all the four of them are a great team. Soon the jokes will come, and the giggles and the waves of affection. In just a short while she’ll be able to splash around in the warm, sweet latency that commingles—“for such rare moments; far rarer than you might imagine”—complete happiness and family. But there’s always that lousy, unavoidable moment before, a sort of transit toll they charge her, the three of them, on her way to that sweetness. It is a regular torture ritual that she perceives as cunningly, conspiratorially, aimed solely at her, which she alone provokes in them, and it is precisely because they sense how much she yearns for that sweetness that they tighten ranks to withhold it from her and make her path to it a little harder. “Why? Don’t ask me, ask them.” They sit there in front of her, the three of them and their fingertips, the three of them in their eagerness for a little scheming against her, unable to resist the temptation, not even Ilan. “He didn’t used to be like that,” she says, letting out what she never meant to tell. She and Ilan used to be … well, of one mind—she almost said “of one flesh”—and when they had to, they presented a united front against the boys. He was a full partner. But the last few years—“I really don’t understand it,” she says, seething with overdue anger—since the boys started growing up, something went wrong, as though he had decided it was time for him to be an adolescent, too.

When she thinks about it now, it seems to her that recently, particularly since the time of their separation, around a year ago, she keeps finding herself faced with three rebellious adolescents who act angrily and impudently—the toilet seats were always left up in bold defiance—and she wishes she knew what it was about her that aroused this idiotic, infantile compulsion, and what turned them instantly into three ravenous kittens when a ball of conspiracy against her rolled at their feet, and why on earth it was her responsibility to rescue them from the silence at a restaurant. What if one day she partook in the grave pondering of the fingertips? What if she hummed an intricate song to herself all the way to the end, until one of them broke down—and it would probably be Ofer; his sense of justice would step up, his natural compassion, his urge to protect her would eventually overcome even the pleasure of belonging to the other two. But her heart quickly fills with tenderness for him—why would she trip him up on their men’s games? It was better for her to break down rather than him.

Again the same old thought: if only she’d had a girl. A girl would have stitched everyone back together with her cheerfulness, her simplicity, her ease. With everything Ora used to have and lost. Because Ora was a girl once, let that be clear. Maybe not as happy and lighthearted as she would have liked to be, but she certainly had wanted and tried to be that kind of girl, a joyful, carefree girl just like the daughter she never had was supposed to have been. And she remembers only too well, she tells Avram, the sudden hostile silences that often came between her parents. Silences with which her mother punished her father for sins he could not even conceive of. Back then, Ora was the magic needle that quickly scurried between her father and mother to stitch up the unraveled moment through which the three of them had almost plunged to the depths.

That silence in the restaurant lasts no more than a minute, Avram understands from Ora’s stammered description and her lowered eyes, but it feels like a cursed eternity. Everyone knows that someone has to talk and melt away the silence, but who will start? Who will step up? Who will proclaim that he is the most spineless, the doormat, the softy? Who will break down first and say something, even something silly? Hey, silly is what we do best, Ora knows. Even a snide remark will play well. Like her story about the plump Russian lady who had shared Ora’s umbrella earlier that week in a rainstorm. She hadn’t asked, hadn’t apologized, just said to Ora with a smile, “We walk together now awhile.” Or she could tell them about the elderly spinster who came to her clinic with a sprained ankle and laughingly told Ora her trick for making dough rise: she takes it into bed, lies down for forty winks with the dough under the blanket, and that’s how it gets its first rise! Yes, Ora would prattle on, and they’d all laugh warmly and wonder how the Russian woman had picked out Ora as a sucker even in the middle of a storm. They’d make fun of the old lady with the dough and tease her about her other patients and her job in general, which they found slightly odd: “You just come up to a total stranger and start prodding them?” And the little flame she lit would start curling and burning, and they would be warm and happy. “Do you understand what I’m getting at? Do you see the picture, or am I just …”

He nods, fascinated. Maybe he did see a thing or two in his pub after all, she thinks, or at the Indian restaurant. Or just walking the streets, or on the beach. Maybe he didn’t give up those eyes of his after all. Maybe he noticed and watched, and peeked and eavesdropped, and collected it all inside. Yes, that’s just like him, a detective gathering evidence for a crime of extraordinary scale—the human race.

“And after that everything’s all right, we’re all totally there, and we laugh and jab and talk. The three of them are sharp, witty, cynical, and horribly macabre, just like you and Ilan were.” This fills Avram with sadness, perhaps because he can also sense what she is not disclosing: she always has the feeling that something in the conversation is beyond her grasp, that a subliminal lightning bolt has flashed between them but she hears only the thunder that follows. When the food arrives, the buzz of commerce begins, and that’s what she likes most. Plates and bowls and spoonfuls are passed from hand to hand, forks peck at one another’s dishes, the four of them compare, savor tastes, criticize, and offer to share. A canopy of generosity and delight spreads above them, and this, finally, is the quiet, honeyed moment, her portion of happiness. She follows the conversation only superficially now. The conversation is not the main point—it’s even a distraction. She thinks they’re poking fun at themselves, at the dishes soaring back and forth like flying saucers, and at what the people at the other tables must think of them. Or else they’re discussing the army, or some new CD. What difference does it make? The point is this moment: embraced.

“That sucks,” she heard Ofer say to Adam. “We spent the whole summer killing flies in Nebi Musa, and it turns out we killed the weak ones, so we created a generation of resistant flies, and now their genetics are much stronger.” They laughed. They both have lovely teeth, Ora thought. Adam described the rats that run freely around the kitchen at his reserve duty unit. Ofer struck back with a winning card: a fox, maybe even a rabid one, had infiltrated his crew’s room while people were dozing and stolen a whole cake out of someone’s backpack. They spoke in loud, deep voices, as they always do when they talk about the army. “But that might also be because Ofer’s ears are always full of dust and grease,” she explains to Avram. Ora and Ilan laughed and laughed, delighted, and gobbled down pieces of herb bread. Their role here was clear: they represented the sufficiently blurry background, the sounding board against which their children repeatedly declared their maturity and independence, and from which their declaration echoed back to the children themselves, at every age, so that they could finally believe in it. The boys changed the topic to accidents, big and small. There was practically a permanent order to these conversations, Ora realizes now, an organized, gradual escalation. Adam told them about how when he started his service in the Armored Corps, one of the commanders had demonstrated what could happen to a tank driver who got stuck in the gun’s side traverse. He set a wooden crate on the hull, rotated the gun sideways, and showed how the barrel shattered the crate, “which is exactly what could happen to anyone who steps out of a tank without coordinating,” Adam cautioned his younger brother, and Ora felt a chill.

“We have this soldier,” Ofer said, “poor guy, a real screwup, he’s the company’s punching bag—everyone who walks past him gives him a punch. About a month ago, in a camouflage drill, he fell off the tank and his arm swelled up. So they sent him to rest in the DT”—the “discipline tent,” he begrudgingly translated when he saw Ora’s look—“and there an antenna fell on his head and cracked it open.” Ilan and Ora exchanged quick glances of horror, but they knew they must not respond to the story with a single word. Anything they said, any concerned expression, would be met with mockery (“skirt on the left,” Adam liked to warn Ofer against Ora), but Adam and Ofer of course picked up on their glances, and everyone got what they wanted, and now, once the foundations were laid, once the parents had been duly enlightened about the many and varied dangers from which they could no longer protect their sons, Ofer told them casually that the suicide bomber who had blown himself up two weeks earlier at the central bus station in Tel Aviv, killing four civilians, had probably passed through his roadblock—meaning, the roadblock his battalion was responsible for.

Ilan asked guardedly if they knew when exactly the terrorist had gone through, and whether anyone was holding Ofer’s battalion responsible. Ofer explained that there was no way to tell who was on shift when he’d gone through, and that he could have been carrying a new kind of explosive that was impossible to detect at the roadblock. Ora was dumbstruck, unable to speak. Ilan swallowed and said, “You know what? I’m glad he blew himself up in Tel Aviv and not on you at the roadblock.” Ofer was outraged: “But, Dad, that’s my job! I stand there precisely so they’ll blow themselves up on me and not in Tel Aviv.”

And Ora—what was she doing at that moment? Her memory is hazy, she cannot reconstruct it. All she remembers is that she suddenly felt hollow, a shell of herself. There was something stuck in her mouth, probably pine nut–studded rye bread dipped in walnut pesto. Ofer and Adam were already deep in conversation about a soldier they both knew, who on parents’ day at the end of training had come up to a strange couple with his arms outstretched and shouted, “Mom, Dad, don’t you recognize me?” Ofer and Adam, and probably Ilan too, rolled around laughing, and Ora sat with her mouth half open while nymphlike waitresses hovered around the tables and whispered: “How is everything?” And two weeks ago a terrorist packed with explosives had walked right past Ofer, and that was Ofer’s job: he stood there precisely so that terrorists would blow themselves up on him and not in Tel Aviv.

Then Ofer turned very serious, and he told Adam and Ilan about his stint in Hebron during the past week. He wasn’t allowed to talk about it, but he could give them the gist. The battalion was sent there to wage a campaign to eliminate wanted men in the kasbah—Ora was no longer really listening to him; she’d been transported—something they hadn’t done before and which had never been one of their duties. They commandeered a whole building to use as a lookout post, and locked up the residents in one apartment. “We actually treated them really well,” he said and gave her a sideways glance, but she was no longer there. Had she been listening, perhaps she could have changed something. Or perhaps not. And then—how did the conversation end up there? Only in retrospect, through a supreme effort that lasted weeks and months, was she able to piece together the fragments of that conversation into an approximate tapestry of the entire evening. Ofer asked Adam to explain something about the procedure for arresting a suspect, but here too she heard only fragments. You yell three times, in Hebrew and in Arabic, “Stop! Who’s there?” And then three times, “Stop or I’ll shoot” (Adam). “Wakef wa’la batukhak” (Ofer). And then you cock your weapon and aim at sixty degrees through the sight (Ofer again?). And then you shoot (Adam). The music of their voices, Ora dimly noticed, sounded exactly like it did when they used to study for Adam’s grammar exams together, when Adam was the teacher and Ofer the student. “You aim for the legs, yeah, knees-down, static, through the sight, and if he doesn’t stop, you go for the center of the body mass and you shoot to kill.” Ofer sheepishly admits that he doesn’t remember what that “mass” is, exactly. Adam scolds: “Didn’t you learn any physics at school?” Ofer says, “Yes, but where is it on a person?” Adam scoffs: “When I was in the Territories they told us, ‘Shoot between their nipples.’ ” Ofer said, “At my last target practice, I shot the dummy in the stomach, and the P.C. goes, ‘I told you to aim for the knees!’ So I say, ‘But, sir, won’t he go down this way, too?’ ” They both laughed, and Ofer threw Ora a cautious glance. He knew she didn’t like that kind of joke. Adam, who also knew, grinned and said, “Some soldiers are convinced that the Arabs walk around with bull’s-eyes on their faces, just like in practice.”

And now here she is with them again. She’s back. The temporary fault in her brain has been fixed. She had experienced some sort of electrical short when Ofer said, “But, Dad, that’s my job! I stand there precisely so they’ll blow themselves up on me and not in Tel Aviv.” She laughs with them, laughs despite herself, laughs because the three of them are laughing and she can’t afford to stay outside their circle of laughter. But something is not right. She looks helplessly from Ilan to Ofer to Adam and back. Something smells funny, and she laughs nervously and tries to figure out whether they can detect it, too. At the moment of the electrical short, she saw something: a picture, a real one, completely tangible, of someone who came running in from outside, from the fields, jumped up on the table, pulled down his pants, crouched down between them, and dumped a huge stinking pile of shit among the dishes and glasses. And they kept on talking as if nothing had happened, her guys, and everyone at the other tables was behaving normally too, and the nymphs fluttered and chirped, “How is everything? Is everything okay?” Yet something did not make sense to her, and everyone else seemed to have passed a course on how to act in this situation, when your son tells you something like, “But, Dad, that’s my job! I stand there precisely so they’ll blow themselves up on me and not in Tel Aviv,” and it turns out that she’s missed a lot of classes, and the air in the restaurant suddenly becomes unbearably hot, and now she realizes what happened, she feels the signs coming closer, and she starts to drip with sweat. She’s had these kinds of attacks before. It’s purely physical, it’s nothing, just hot flashes, the rampages of menopause. It’s completely beyond her control, a little intifada of the body. It happened at the ceremony after the advanced training course, in the parade courtyard at Latrun, when the formation passed by a huge wall covered with thousands of names of fallen soldiers; and at a fire demonstration in Nebi Musa to which the parents were invited; and on two or three other occasions. Once her nose bled, another time she threw up, and once she cried hysterically. And now—she laughs nervously—now she thinks she’s going to have diarrhea, and it’s entirely possible that she won’t even make it to the bathroom, it’s that bad, and she clenches and constricts her body, even her face is strained. How can they not notice what’s happening to her? She looks weakly from one to the other as they talk. It’s good for them to laugh: Go ahead, laugh, she thinks, let out the week’s tension. But inside her body the systems are collapsing. She is a shell containing only fluids. She is a coconut. Maybe they are actors? Maybe her family has been switched? Her heart pounds. How can they not hear it? How can they not hear her heart? Loneliness closes in on her. The basement loneliness of childhood. It’s so hot in here, I swear, it’s like they turned on all the ovens and shut all the windows. And it stinks. Horribly. She practically gags. She has to pull herself together, and most important, she must not show them anything, not ruin this wonderful, happy evening. They’re having such a good time, it’s so fun here, and she’s not going to ruin it for them with the stupid nonsense coming from her body, which has suddenly turned bleeding heart on her. One more minute and she’ll have everything under control, it’s just a matter of willpower. She just has to not think about the severity and the responsibility and the gravity with which he said, “But, Dad, that’s my job!” And now, right in front of Ilan and Adam and Ofer’s laughing faces, oh God, it’s coming back, he’s here again, in this soft lighting, among the dainty dragonflies—“How is everything? Is everything cool?”—there he is, jumping right up on the table with both feet and dumping a huge pile of shit, and a terrifying wave rises inside her, one second from now she’ll have no more room in her body, it will burst out of her mouth, her eyes, her nostrils, and she desperately closes everything off, scurries among the treacherous orifices, and all she can think about is the relief of that guy, the immense, scandalous relief of the lowlife who jumped onto the table with two solid legs, and just like that, among the little white dishes and the delicate wineglasses and the napkins and the dark bottles of wine and the asparagus spears, simply crouched down and shat out a huge, steaming pile of radioactive stench. And Ora struggles with all her might to uproot her gaze from the center of the table, from the huge naked fiend smiling at her with excremental seduction—he isn’t, he isn’t here, but he’s about to split her open—wait for me! she chirps with charming sweetness and pursed lips, and flits away.

A long time ago, at the beginning of Ofer’s service in the Territories (“This is parenthetical,” she tells Avram. “It has nothing to do with that evening in the restaurant”), they were living in Ein Karem, and she heard a strange sound from the steps that led from the back of the house down to the garden. She followed the sound to the edge of the garden and saw Ofer sitting there, wearing shorts and an army shirt—he was on leave—carving a beautiful stick with his penknife. She asked what it was, and he looked up at her with his ironic, arched eyebrows and said, “What does it look like?”

“Like a rounded stick.”

He smiled. “It’s a club. Club, meet Mom. Mom, meet club.”

“What do you need a club for?”

Ofer laughed and said, “To beat up little foxes.” Ora asked if the army didn’t give him weapons to protect himself with, and he said, “Not clubs, and clubs are what we need most, they’re the most efficient weapon in our situation.” She said that scared her, and he said, “But what’s wrong with a club, Mom? It’s minimal use of force.”

Ora, with uncharacteristic cynicism, asked if they had an acronym for that, “MUF, or something.”

“But clubs prevent violence, Mom! They don’t create it.”

“Even so, allow me to feel bad when I see my son sitting here making himself a club.”

Ofer said nothing. “He usually avoids getting into these arguments with me,” she tells Avram. “He could never be bothered with that kind of talk, always said politics just didn’t interest him.” He was doing his job and that’s that, and when he got out, when everything was done, he promised her he would think over exactly what had happened.

He kept on smoothing the stick until it was completely round. Ora stood over him, at the top of the steps, and hypnotically watched his skilled hands at work. “He had wonderful hands. You should see some of the things he’s made. A round dining table. And the bed he made for us.”

Ofer wrapped elastic webbing around the head of the stick. Ora went down and asked to touch it. For some reason it was important to her to touch it, to feel what it’s like when it strikes you—“a black, rigid, unpleasant sort of fabric,” she reports to Avram, and he swallows and looks out into the distance—and Ofer added more brown binding around the stick itself, and then the club was ready, and that’s when he made the move. She shows Avram how Ofer hit his open palm with the club three times to assess its strength, to appraise its hidden force. And he played around with it, like someone would with a dangerous animal whose training has only just begun. “That was a bad moment, when I saw Ofer sitting there whittling a club. And it was important to me that you know about that.”

Avram nods to confirm that he has accepted this too from her.

“Where was I?”

“Hugs,” he reminds her, “and that restaurant.” He likes the way she asks “Where was I?” every so often. A sloppy, dreamy, distracted young girl peers out of her face when she does.

Ora sighs. “Yes. We were celebrating Adam’s birthday, and the truth is we didn’t even think they’d both be home that Shabbat until the last minute. Adam was on reserve duty in the Bik’ah, and Ofer was in Hebron and wasn’t supposed to get out for the weekend, but they let him go at the last minute, there was a vehicle leaving for Jerusalem, and he got home late and was exhausted. He even nodded off during dinner a couple of times. He’d had a hard week, we later learned, and he was so tired he barely knew where he was.”

Avram looks at her expectantly.

“It was a lovely evening,” she says, skipping tactfully over the sudden indigestion that meant she ate almost nothing the whole meal. “And then I wanted us all to toast Adam,” she continues in the same tense voice, hoping she has managed to establish for Avram the fact of Ofer’s abysmal exhaustion, his main line of defense in the inquiries and questionings held afterward, and in his endless arguments with her. “We always have a little toasting ritual when we’re celebrating something …”

She hesitates again: All these family affairs of ours, all our little rituals, do they pain you? His eyes signal back to her: Go on, go on already.

“Normally, Adam never let us toast him. We weren’t allowed to do that in public, where strangers could hear. He’s so much like Ilan that way.”

Avram smiles. “God forbid you might be overheard by all those people who booked tables months in advance so they could eavesdrop on you?”

“Exactly. But that evening Adam said yes, though only if Ofer would do it. Ilan and I quickly said, ‘Fine,’ we were so surprised he’d agreed at all. And I thought I’d give him my toast later, when I was alone with him, or I’d write it for him. I always used to write birthday wishes for him, to all of them actually, because I think, I thought, that these occasions were an opportunity to sum things up, or to summarize a period, and I knew he kept my cards—Hey, have you noticed we’re really talking now?”

“So I hear.”

“We’ll have to hike the whole country three times to fit everything in.”

“That’s not a bad idea.”

She says nothing.

“Where was I?” Avram says a while later instead of her, and replies, “The restaurant. Ofer’s toast.”

“Oh, the birthday.”

She sinks back into her thoughts. That weekend, those final moments of the careful, fragile happiness. And she realizes what she’s been doing here all these days: reciting a eulogy for the family that once was, that will never be again.

“So Ofer leaned his head between his hands and thought quietly for a few minutes. He wasn’t in any hurry. He’s always a little slower than Adam. In general, there’s something heavier, more solid about him, his movements, his speech, even his appearance. Usually strangers who see them both think he’s older than Adam. And it was so nice, the way he treated Adam’s request so seriously.

“Then he said that first of all he wanted to say how happy he was to be Adam’s little brother, and how in the last few years, since he’d started going to Adam’s high school, and even more once he joined the battalion where Adam had served, he was getting to know Adam through all the other people who knew him—teachers, soldiers, officers. At first it got on his nerves the way everyone kept calling him Adam by mistake, and treating him as just Adam’s little brother, but now …”

“Seriously,” Ofer said in his slow, raspy, deep voice, “people are always coming up to me and talking about you—what a great guy you are, what a good friend, and how you always took the initiative. Everyone knows your jokes, and everyone in the battalion has a story about how you helped him, how you cheered him up when he was bummed out—”

“This is Adam?” Avram asks carefully. “You’re talking about Adam, right?”

“Yes, we were also intrigued by this new side of him. Ilan even joked that Ofer was recklessly destroying the reputation Adam had spent years building up at home.”

“Or like the bingo you invented,” Ofer told Adam with a giggle, “which is still named after you at school.”

“What’s that?” Ilan interrupted.

“You pick seven words that are totally unlikely for a teacher to say in class. Like ‘pizza,’ or ‘belly dancer,’ or ‘Eskimo.’ And when class starts, everyone has the words written down in front of them, and they have to ask the teacher questions that sound all innocent, like they have something to do with the material, so that the teacher himself, without knowing it, says all the words.”

Ilan leaned forward with a glimmer in his eye and slowly interlaced his fingers. “And the teacher doesn’t know anything about it, of course.”

“Not a thing.” Adam smiled. “He’s just happy to see the students suddenly so interested in his boring class.”

“Ha!” Ilan said and looked admiringly at Adam. “I’ve raised a real snake.”

Adam bowed his head modestly, and Ofer said, smiling at Ilan, “An ‘inventional spark,’ don’t you think?” Ilan confirmed this, and bumped his shoulder against Ofer’s. Ora still didn’t get the rules of the game, and she didn’t like what she did understand. She was impatient to get back to what Ofer had started saying to Adam.

“And who wins?” asked Ilan.

“Whoever makes the teacher say the most words from the list.”

Ilan nodded. “Okay. Give me an example of how you get him to say a word.”

“But Ofer was in the middle of telling Adam something,” Ora reminded them.

“Hang on, Mom,” Ofer said cheerfully, “this is super cool. Go on, gimme a word.”

“You pick one,” said Adam.

“But don’t let me hear it, I’m the teacher!” Ilan laughed.

The boys leaned in, whispered, laughed, and nodded.

“But it’s a history lesson,” Adam said, adding a twist.

“Then we’ll do the Dreyfus affair,” Ilan decided. “I still remember that one a bit.”

Ilan launched into an account of the French Jewish officer accused of treason, and Ofer and Adam bombarded him with questions. He talked about the trial, about the silencing of Dreyfus’s defenders, about the conviction. They were more interested in Dreyfus’s family, its customs, its dress and food. Ilan stuck to his lecture and avoided all the traps. Theodor Herzl showed up in the audience at Dreyfus’s public humiliation. The boys’ questions grew more frequent. Ora leaned back and watched, and the three of them felt her watching them and picked up the speed. Dreyfus was imprisoned and exiled to Devil’s Island, Emile Zola wrote his J’accuse!, Esterhazy was captured and convicted, Dreyfus was released, but the boys were more interested in Herzl. Der Judenstaat was published, and then came Herzl’s meetings with the Turkish Sultan and the German Kaiser. Ilan leaned forward and licked his lips. His eyes sparkled. The boys salivated on either side of him like two young wolves closing in on a buffalo. Ora found herself swept up in the excitement, though she was entirely unsure whom she wanted to win. Her heart was with the boys, but something about the wild enthusiasm on their faces made her crumple, and she felt compassion for the new, scant grayness gradually emerging on Ilan’s temples. The First Zionist Congress convened in Basel, Altneuland was published, Britain offered the Zionists a state on a large piece of land in Uganda—“ ‘a land that will be beneficial for the health of whites,’ ” Ilan quoted, recalling his high school days—and Adam wondered what things would have been like had the offer been accepted: all of Africa would have been stricken with frenetic zeal had the Jews gone there and started stirring things up with their hyperactive nervousness. Ilan added, “And you can be sure that within sixty seconds there would already be deep-seated anti-Semitism.”

Ofer laughed. “And then we’d have had to occupy Tanzania.”

“And Kenya and Zambia!”

“Of course, just to protect ourselves from their hatred.”

“And teach them to love Israel and give them a little Yiddishkeit with chicken soup!” Adam rolled around laughing.

“Not to mention gefilte fish,” Ilan snickered, and the boys jumped up and cheered: “Bingo!”

The main courses arrived. Ora remembers every dish. Adam had steak tenderloin, Ilan ordered the goose leg, and Ofer got steak tartare. She remembers her gaze being drawn to Ofer’s raw meat; she missed the vegetarian Ofer. In the weeks and months that followed, during the sleepless nights and nightmarish days when she replayed the events of that evening, minute by minute, she often wondered what really went through Ofer’s mind when he ate the steak, or during that game of bingo, and whether he honestly did not remember anything—after all, they had talked about occupation and hatred and had even mentioned locking up people and releasing them, and there was even something about silencing. How could it be that not a single alarm bell had sounded in him? How had he not picked up even the vaguest association between all of that and, say, an old man with his mouth gagged, trapped in a meat locker in the cellar of a house in Hebron?

“He was just really tired,” she states apropos of nothing. “His eyes were half closed and he could barely hold his head up. He hadn’t slept for two whole days, and he’d had three beers, too. But somehow the game and the joking around kept him up.”

There was a moment, she thinks, when it seemed as if he remembered. He suddenly asked for Adam’s phone and wanted to call the army. She can see it: he held the phone in his hand. His eyebrows moved. His forehead was strained. He was trying to gather something in through the tiredness. But then he saw the screen and got excited about some new function he’d never seen before, and Adam demonstrated it for him.

“Ofer, you didn’t finish toasting Adam,” Ora said.

“You’re off the hook,” said Adam and started to devour his steak.

“No fair!” Ora pleaded. “He hasn’t said anything yet!”

“Only if he wants to,” Adam said. “And no violins!”

Ofer turned serious again. His face softened and hardened intermittently. His chiseled, generous lips, Avram’s lips, moved unconsciously. He put down his fork. Ora noticed the exchange of amused glances between Adam and Ilan: Watch out, their eyes said, get your handkerchiefs ready.

Then Ofer spoke. “The truth is, I don’t even know how I would get along in life without your help, and without the way you took care of me in all kinds of bad situations that Mom and Dad don’t even know about.”

That was surprising. Ora perked up, and so did Ilan. “Because we only knew the opposite situation, where Ofer took care of Adam. And he suddenly opened up a whole world we’d never known, but which I’d always somehow hoped did exist, you know? Do you understand?”

Avram nods vigorously. His lower lip surrounds his whole mouth.

“And I saw Adam lower his gaze, and he got this kind of flush on his neck, and I knew that it was true.”

“And I think,” Ofer continued, “that there’s no one else in the world who knows me like you do, knows all my most private stuff, and who always, from the minute I was born, did only good things for me.”

Adam did not comment or crack a joke. Ora felt that he really wanted her and Ilan to hear these things.

“And there’s no one in the world I trust like you, and value and love like you. No one.”

Ora and Ilan bowed their heads so the boys wouldn’t see their eyes.

“Even though I always used to get mad at you, especially when you got preachy, or made fun of my taste in music.”

“Guns N’ Roses is not music,” Adam put in, “and Axl Rose is not a singer.”

“But I didn’t know that back then, and I was so mad at you for ruining my enjoyment of them, and in the end I realized you were right. See, you improved me in every way. And you protected me from all kinds of crap, and even though you weren’t exactly a bruiser, and I couldn’t threaten the kids who hit me and tell them my brother would come and beat the crap out of them, I still felt that you always had my back, and you wouldn’t let anyone do anything to me.” Then he blushed, as though only now comprehending the candor he’d permitted himself.

There was a long silence. Everyone’s heads were bowed. They had touched on the root of the matter. Ora held her breath and prayed that Ilan wouldn’t try to make them laugh. That none of them would give in to their stand-up-comic reflex.

“Lechayim,” Ilan said softly. “Here’s to our family.” There were tears in his eyes, and he looked at her gratefully and held his glass up to her.

“Lechayim,” Adam and Ofer repeated, and to her surprise they also looked straight at her and raised their glasses. “To our family,” Ofer added quietly, and his eyes met hers on a new frequency, and for one brief moment she thought—he knows.

“After that he seemed a bit stiff, stunned by his own speech, and then he leaned his head on his hands again, like this, and Adam turned to him and hugged him. He really hugged him, with both arms”—Avram sees, he sees them—“and small as Adam is compared to him, he still enveloped him, and Ofer’s head leaned in, like this.”

She remembers his handsome, shapely head. Back then he wasn’t shaving it yet, and it was very fair after his haircut. For a minute it looked like Adam was smelling Ofer’s hair, the way he used to do when Ofer was a baby and he’d just had it washed.

Her head unconsciously reconstructs the gesture and nestles into her own shoulder.

“Ilan and I watched them, and I had a feeling, maybe Ilan did too, I never asked him—”

“What feeling?”

“When they hugged, I suddenly knew, body and soul, that even when Ilan and I were gone they would stay together, they wouldn’t grow apart, they wouldn’t be cut off, they wouldn’t be alienated, and they’d help each other out if there was a need. They would be family, you see?”

Avram’s mouth stretches out in a tortured grimace.

“What’s going to happen, Avram?” She looks up at him with tear-filled eyes. “What will happen if he—”

Avram almost shouts: “Tell me, tell me about him!”

On the drive home from the restaurant, everyone was full and soft and pliable. The boys sang a silly Monty Python song about a sexed-up lumberjack who likes to wear women’s clothing, and Ora noted the heartwarming deviation from their usual puritanism, as though they were confirming that they now viewed their parents as grown-ups. In the backseat they slapped their knees, stomachs, and chests while they sang—Ofer’s broad chest produced a dense, drum-like echo that excited her—and then they discussed which pub to go to. Ora and Ilan were amazed that they still had the energy to go out drinking so late, when Ofer had barely been able to keep his eyes open. Ilan asked only that they not go together into the same place and reminded them that a month ago a terrorist strapped with explosives had been caught trying to enter a Jerusalem bar. The boys put their hands to their hearts and promised gravely that they would split up: Ofer would go to the “Shahid Hope” pub, and Adam to the “Hezbollah Martyrs” nightclub. “Then we’ll meet up in “Seventy Virgins” square and hang around downtown for a while, mostly in crowded places, and we’ll get right up close to people with Middle Eastern features and piercing looks.”

The next day, at eight a.m., Adam and Ofer were still asleep—they’d probably come home around dawn—and she and Ilan sat in the kitchen, still basking in the ambience of the night before, getting ready for their morning walk. Before leaving, they made a big salad for the boys, and jachnun and hard-boiled eggs and crushed tomatoes, to be ready when they got up. They peeled and chopped and spoke in quiet voices about the dinner, the things Ofer had said to Adam, and the rare hug. Suddenly there was a cautious knock on the door, and then a firm, foreign-sounding ring.

Ilan and Ora glanced at each other. It made no sense, but still, that kind of ring, at that time on a Saturday morning, could only mean one thing. Ora put her knife down and looked at Ilan, and his eyes grew wide. A lightning flash of insane, almost inhuman terror clotted between them. Everything slowed down until it finally froze. Even the definite knowledge that Adam and Ofer were at home iced over—because in fact, maybe they weren’t. “We hadn’t seen them for a whole night, and one night is a long time in Israel. Maybe something had happened, maybe they’d been called back to the army urgently. We hadn’t even heard the news, how could we not have turned on the news?”

Ora’s eyes sought out the car keys that Adam had taken the night before. She thought she could see them hanging on the hook, but maybe it was a different bunch. Another impatient ring. “They’re at home, they’re both at home now,” Ora insisted adamantly, “they’re asleep, there’s no way this has anything to do with them.” Maybe they’d left the lights on in the car and a neighbor had come to let them know. Maybe someone had broken into the car—she could accept that, she would welcome it. Another sharp knock, and neither of them moved, as though hoping to hide their existence here.

Everything suddenly had the strange quality of a dress rehearsal, as though they were practicing for something that had always been lurking, but they still could not play their parts. Ilan leaned one hand on the countertop. She saw how old he’d grown in recent years, since the boys’ army service. His face was drawn, almost defeated, and she could read his thoughts: the sweet illusion in which they’d existed had been shattered. Their private underground cell had been breached. For twenty years they’d walked on air above an abyss, always knowing it was there below, and now they were falling, and they would fall forever, and life was over. Their previous lives were over.

She wanted to go to him so he could hold her, gather her in, as he always did, but she couldn’t move. Another jarring ring came, and for a moment Ora experienced a peculiar sensation, the merging of two utterly different dimensions of reality: in the one, Adam and Ofer were sleeping soundly in their beds, and in the other the army had come to notify her about one of them. The two dimensions were concrete yet somehow did not contradict each other. She heard Ilan murmur, “Open the door, why aren’t you opening the door?” Ora said in a foreign voice, “But they’re both home, right?” He shrugged his shoulders with submissive misery, as if to say, And even if they’re at home now, how long will we be able to protect them? And then Ora thought: But which one of them? Her fog was pierced with the memory of the lots. Take a hat, take two pieces of paper…

Ora opened the door and found, to her horror, a pair of awkward-looking men in uniform. They were two very young MPs, and her gaze skipped beyond them to look for the doctor who always comes with the notification team, but it was just the two of them. One had very long eyelashes, crowded like a soft brush. The fact that she noticed such trivial details was completely un-survivor-like; in this country you need sharper instincts. The other, whose face was still pocked with acne, held a printed document signed with a large stamp. He asked if Ofer was home.

In the notebook they swiped back from the man at the Kedesh River, there are still some blank pages and lines, and Ora covers one of them with tiny handwriting:

Thousands of moments and hours and days, millions of deeds, countless actions and attempts and mistakes and words and thoughts, all to make one person in the world.

She reads it to Avram.

“He’ll be fine, you’ll see. We’re making it so he’ll be fine.”

“You really think so?” she asks.

“I think you know exactly what to do, always.” After a pause, he says, “Show it to me for a minute.” She hands him the notebook. He holds it carefully and reads to himself in a whisper: “Thousands of moments and hours … countless actions … mistakes … all to make one person in the world.” He puts the notebook in his lap and looks at Ora, and a cloud of slight fear darkens in his eyes.

“Add another sentence,” she says without looking at him, and hands him the pen. “One person, who is so easy to destroy. Write that.”

He writes.

She remembers:

“Let’s work on nested parentheses. Do you know how to do that?”

“You start with the square brackets and then do regular parentheses?”

“Let’s do it like the example. They give you an example here.”

“But it’s tons of numbers … Can’t you just do it for me?”

“How will you learn if I do it for you?”

“Have you no mercy on a poor child?”

“Enough, stop being a wiseass. And sit up straight, Ofer, you’re practically on the floor.”

“I don’t even know how to read this!”

“Stop whining.”

“I stopped.”

“Believe me, I have plenty of things to do other than teach you about nested parentheses.”

“Is the artichoke ready?”

“Wait, it takes time.”

“The smell is driving me crazy.”

“At least clean the table if you’re going to do your homework in the kitchen. You’ll stain your notebook. What page are you on?”

“A hundred and fifty. It’s a huge test. I’ll never pass.”

“Calm down. Let’s do these equations first. Read this one. Go on, stop staring.”

“Maaaan…”

“I’m not a man. Now read it already!”

“ ‘What—separates—the—2x—and—the—3?’ ”

“Well, what separates them? Leave the cake alone!”

“How should I know? I don’t understand what this says. Is it even in Hebrew?”

“Come on, start with the internals.”

“But what do I do with this lousy 2x?”

“You multiply that by 3. Every term gets multiplied by 3! Try it.”

“Merde, I got 2x again.”

“Let’s try it again, but without getting annoyed, okay? And stop eating the cake! You’ve already polished off half of it!”

“What can I do? I need energy.”

“Now solve your 3 minus 2x.”

“Mine? It’s mine now?”

“Yours, yours, I’m done with school.”

“I just want you to know that my brain is rotting, and it’s your fault.”

“Ofer, listen to me. There’s no reason why you can’t do this exercise.”

“Yes there is.”

“Well?”

“I’m stupid.”

“No you’re not.”

“I just don’t have the part of the brain that solves equations.”

“Come on now, shut up, honestly, talking with you is like talking with a lawyer! It’s only a few exercises in—”

“A few? All the way to page one sixty-one …”

“You’ve done far more complicated ones before. Remember what we had last week?”

“But in the end I did it!”

“Of course you did. When you want to, you can do anything. Now come on, let’s finish this up nicely, and then we’ll do the problems.”

“Oh, we’ll do the problems, great!”

They laugh together. His head rubs against her shoulder and he purrs like a cat, and she responds.

“By the way, has anyone fed Nicotine and rinsed out his bowl today?”

“Yes, I did. Scratch!”

She scratches his head again. “Now do the exercise.”

“That’s my thanks?”

“Pay attention. You’re going too fast again, you’re not checking it.”

“Stop, Mom, I can’t do it anymore! Where’s the phone?”

“What do you need the phone for now?”

“I’m calling Child Protective Services—”

“Very funny. Now concentrate: once you get the principle of coefficients and simplifying terms—what are you laughing at?”

“I don’t know, it’s just that I don’t see anything efficient or simple about this!”

They both crack up. Ofer lies down on the floor and waves his legs around.

“Come on, pull yourself together. We’re not making any progress.”

“Have pity on me, Mom, I’m a poor, innocent, wretched waif.”

“Will you shut up already?”

“Okay, okay, what did I say?”

“Now work quietly. I don’t want to hear another word out of you. Follow the sequence.”

“And then you’ll make me an artichoke?”

“I’d love to. It’s done now, I think.”

“With mayonnaise dipping sauce?”

“Yes.”

“And also—Oops, sorry, I let one out. I made a mistake, a horrible mistake …”

“A fart isn’t a mistake.”

“So x equals a fart?”

They roll around laughing.

“I think we’re both losing it. Come on, let’s move on to the problems.”

“I don’t want problems! I want an easy life!”

“Is that you whistling?”

“It’s not me, it’s Dad from the living room.”

“Ilan, do me a favor, stop whistling. As it is I’m—”

“Yes, it’s breaking our concentration, Dad.”

“Go on, do your work.”

“I bet you now he’ll come in here and do a dance to make us laugh …”

“You wish!”

“He has the ears of a wildcat. You married a wildcat.”

“Enough, stop babbling. How do you approach this problem?”

“With the face of a murderer.”

“Be careful, it’s still hot. Dip it in this, and don’t get your book dirty.”

“ ‘If we multiply a number by 4, and add 2 to the result, we get 30.’ How am I supposed to know how to do this?”

“Think: x times 4 plus 2 is 30.”

“Then I know! 4x plus 2 equals 30.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning 4x equals 28. Meaning x equals 7! Hallelujah! Genius, genius!”

“Excellent. Always remember to carry. You always want x on one side and the numbers on the other.”

“I’m starting to enjoy this.”

“Now let’s go on to this exercise. This also has one variable.”

“Why is this guy so variable, I’d like to know.”

“Will you be quiet and do the work?”

“Do you want some of the heart?”

“Don’t you want the heart? It’s the best part.”

“Take it. A good, warm Jewish heart.”

“Okay, now concentrate. You’re almost done.”

“Will you help me with Bible Studies, too?”

“Bible is Dad.”

“Yeah, that’s what he thinks, too.”

A few days later Ilan told her that while he was lying on the couch reading the paper and their voices drifted in from the kitchen, he stopped paying attention to his article and listened to them. At first, he said, he could hardly resist getting up and going into the kitchen to put an end to Ofer’s whining and acting up. He was angry at Ora’s indulgence and lenience, and her excessive collaboration with Ofer’s spoiled ways. With me, he thought, the whole thing would last for ten minutes, tops, and Ofer would have had all his equations solved long ago. But he felt that if he interfered he would make both of them angry at him, and he also sensed that they might not want to be stopped at all, even though they were arguing and teasing each other. So he just lay there and listened, and felt—in body and soul—the thousands of actions and words and thoughts and moments and mistakes and deeds, the slow, patient, stalactite accumulation of Ofer’s being in her hands. And he knew that he could never do that. He could not sit with Ofer for so long, absorbing his frustration and defeatism, and his jabs, nor would he know how to divert them and lead him slowly to the solution.

Ora listened. It was late in the evening, the boys were in their room, and she and Ilan were lying together on the couch. His fingers played with the fine hair on the back of her neck, and her face cuddled against his. She said, “But you’re so much a part of bringing them up. I don’t know many fathers who are so involved in their kids’ lives.”

“Yes, but when I heard you in the kitchen, I don’t know—”

“I mean, the whole way they think, their sense of humor, all the things they know, and their sharp wit, it’s so you.”

“Maybe so, I don’t know, I’m sure it’s both of us. I guess it’s the combination of us.” He felt for her hand and his fingers grasped hers. “Because I always feel that whatever I give them, they would have somehow gotten it anyway, from life, from other people. But what you give them”—the fingers of his other hand made an uncharacteristic movement, like the kneading of dough.

Avram looks at her fingers as they replay Ilan’s kneading motion, and he is grateful to her for allowing him to be with them there, and to touch the soft, maternal dough of their day to day.

Ora wrapped Ilan in her arms and thrust her knee between his legs to make him feel good, and they lay entwined for several minutes. Then Ilan smiled over her head. “Still, I would have stopped his acting up a lot sooner.”

Ora laughed into his neck. “I’m sure you would have, my love.”