AT FIVE-THIRTY in the morning, at the point where Mount Carmel begins to rise, Ora and Avram disentangle from each other. He folds the tents and the sleeping bags and packs up their two backpacks, and Ora goes to buy some food at a nearby grocery store.
“We haven’t been apart for a long time,” she says, coming back to wrap herself around him.
“Should I come with you?”
“No, stay here with the stuff. I’ll only be a few minutes.”
“I’ll wait.”
“And I’ll be back,” she adds, sounding uncertain. “I don’t know what I’m suddenly afraid of,” she murmurs into his embrace.
“Maybe that you’ll see what civilization is like and you’ll want to stay.”
She is uneasy. An obstinate embolus moves inside her body like the undigested remnants of a dream. She stretches her arms and holds Avram back to look at him, engraving him in her memory. “Now I can see that I didn’t give you a good haircut. I’ll snip that straggler off today.”
He fingers the stray lock.
“And maybe you’ll let me shave you, too?”
“Yes?”
“I don’t know, it’s annoying to see you with a beard.”
“Oh, that.”
“Yes, that.”
“Okay.”
“Maybe just a trim. We’ll see. We’ll just take a little off.”
“Don’t you think I’m off enough as it is?”
They look at each other. The spark of a smile in their pupils.
“Buy some salt and pepper. And we’re almost out of oil.”
“And we need batteries for the flashlight, right?”
“And bring some chocolate, I could go for something sweet.”
“Anything else, my dear?”
A soft hand travels inside them on its fingertips. Avram shrugs. “I’ve gotten used to you.”
“Watch out, you’ll get addicted.”
“What’s going to happen, Ora?”
She puts a finger to his lips. “First let’s finish the trail, and then we’ll see what works for us.” She kisses him on each eye and turns to leave. The dog looks from Ora to Avram, unsure whether to join her or stay with him.
“Wait, Ora, hold up.”
She stops.
“It’s good for me to be with you,” he says quickly and lowers his gaze to his hands. “I want you to know that.”
“Then say it. I need to be told.”
“The way you let me be with you like this, and with Ofer, and with all of you.” His eyes redden. “You don’t know what you’re giving me, Ora.”
“Well, I’m just giving you back what belongs to you.”
They cling to each other again—since she’s taller than he, she has to hold her feet slightly apart; it’s always been that way—and for some reason she remembers how every time she was about to go and see him in Tel Aviv, during those years when he agreed to meet, Ofer always sensed it. He used to grow restless and gloomy and sometimes run a high fever, as though trying to sabotage their meeting. When she got back he would sniff her out like an animal, demanding to know exactly what she’d been doing. And he always asked, with transparent slyness, whether Ilan knew where she’d been.
Avram holds her to his body, cups her buttocks with both hands, and mumbles that there’s nothing like her gluteus maximus and her gluteus medius. “Take care of yourself there, in the store,” he says into her hair, and they both hear what he has not said: Don’t talk with anyone too much. If the radio is on, ask them to turn it off. Do not under any circumstances look at the papers. Avoid the headlines.
She walks away and pauses a few times to turn around and give him a movie star’s long, lingering wave and blow him a kiss. He smiles, his hands on his waist, the white sharwals flapping around his body, and the dog sits erect beside him. He looks good, Ora thinks. The new haircut and Ofer’s clothes are good for him, and there’s something refreshing in the open way he stands and in his smile. “He’s coming back to life,” she tells herself out loud. This walk is bringing him back to life. What does that say about me? What place will I have in his life when the journey is over, if I have any place at all?
Wait, she thinks, suddenly troubled—why isn’t the dog coming with me? But even before she can finish the thought, Avram leans down and pats the dog on her butt, urging her to run along.
An hour later Ora silently unloads her purchases from the Kfar Hasidim supermarket’s plastic bags—labeled “Strictly Glatt Kosher”—and divvies them up between the two backpacks: biscuits, crackers, canned goods, packets of bouillon. Her movements are quick and sharp.
“Did something happen, Ora’leh?”
“No, what happened?”
“I don’t know. You seem …”
“I’m fine.”
Avram licks his upper lip. “Okay, okay.” And after a moment, “Ora—”
“What is it?”
“Did you hear the radio down there? Did you see a newspaper?”
“There’s no radio there, and I didn’t look at the paper. Come on, let’s go. I’m sick of this place.”
They hoist up their backpacks, pass the playground at Kibbutz Yagur, and choose a path with red markers. They soon replace it with a blue one that leads to the Snake River, recently renamed Ma’apilim River, and start climbing up the mountain. The day is still swathed in morning mist, indulging itself and lazily putting off its brightening. The climb soon grows steep, and the two of them and the dog are all breathing heavily.
“Wait a minute,” he calls after her, “did someone tell you something there?”
“No one told me anything.”
She practically runs up the incline. Stones spark from her heels. Avram gives in and stops to wipe the sweat off. At the same moment, without looking at him, Ora also stops and stands like an angular exclamation point one rocky step above him. Through oak trees and the milky morning vapors, they can see the Zevulun Valley, the suburbs of Haifa, and the Yagur Junction as it comes to life. The pair of towers at the oil refinery in the bay emit plumes of white steam that slowly curl and mingle with the mist. Avram wants to give her something, to quell the sudden irritation bristling around her. If only he knew what to give. Glimmering cars fly by on the roads leading to the junction. A distant train sends out rhythmic sparks of metal and light. But here on the mountain the silence is broken only by the occasional truck horn or the stubborn wail of an ambulance.
“Here, this is how I live,” he finally says quietly, perhaps honestly, perhaps as a modest bribe of candor.
“How?” Her voice above him is grating, scratching.
“Like this. I watch.”
“Then maybe it’s time you went in,” she hisses and starts walking again.
“What? Wait—”
“Listen, Ofer’s fine,” she cuts him off, and Avram rushes after her excitedly. “What? How do you know?”
“I called home from the grocery store to pick up my messages.”
“You can do that?”
“Of course you can.” Then she mutters to herself, “You can do a lot more than that.”
“And? Did he leave a message?”
“Twelve.”
She lurches forward again, cutting like a razor. Fine strands of a morning spiderweb graze her face, and she brushes them away angrily. The ghost of an adolescent, grumbling girl flashes in her movements.
“At least until last night he was fine,” she reports. “The last message was from eleven-fifteen.” She glances at her watch. Avram looks to see how high the sun is. They both know: eleven-fifteen is good, but meaningless now, like yesterday’s newspaper. As soon as he was finished leaving the message, an hourglass turned over somewhere, and the timer started from zero again, with no advantage to hope over fear.
“Wait, why didn’t you just call him on his cell phone?”
“Him?” She shakes her head, giggles nervously. “No, no way.” She half turns her head to him, like a doe to a hunter, and asks wordlessly, with her desperate eyes: Do you really not understand? Do you still not get it, that I can’t, I absolutely can’t, until he’s home?
The path grows difficult and stubborn, and Avram is anxious. Ofer is suddenly so close, his voice still echoing in Ora’s ears. Even his clothes, which swathe Avram, rustle as though Ofer’s spirit blows through them.
“But what did he say?”
“He said all kinds of things. Joking around. Ofer, you know.”
“Yes,” Avram says, smiling to himself.
“What do you mean ‘yes’?” she spits. “What do you even know about him?”
“Whatever you tell me,” Avram replies in bewilderment.
“Yes, stories. Stories we have plenty.”
He sinks into himself as he walks. Something happened, that’s obvious. Something bad.
As far as the eye can see, stalks of sage soar in purple and white, campions glow in a rosy hue, and buttercups take over the red shift from aged, shedding poppies. Pine needles are dotted with beads of dew. The sound of bells tinkling: a herd passes nearby, lambs tremble on spindly legs, the bellies of pregnant sheep dangle, almost touching the ground. Ora glares at Avram as he gazes at the udders and bellies, and for a moment he is embarrassed, as though caught red-handed at something.
They walk on, panting and groaning up the vertical path. Avram is restless, almost frightened. They’d shared a night of total love, and it seemed their bodies had finally been able to trust again and to believe they would not be separated for many years to come. All night they’d made love and slept and talked and dozed and made love and laughed and made love. Neta had come and gone, leaned in and faded away, and with his body he had told Ora about her. A rare tranquillity had engulfed him, and as if in a dream he had imagined them swinging him between them, very slowly, from one to the other. When he lay by her side afterward he felt happiness return to him with slow steps, like blood to a deadened limb.
“One thing I know, which I never imagined,” he said during one of those hours, with her head resting on his chest.
“Hmmm?”
“You can live an entire life without purpose.”
“Is that what this is?” She lifted up on her elbows and looked at him. “Without any purpose at all?”
“Once, when I was still the dearly departed me, if you’d told me this was what I could expect, a whole life of this, I’d have done myself in on the spot. Today I know it’s not that terrible. That you certainly can. I’m living proof.”
“But what does that mean? Explain it to me. What do you mean, a life without purpose?”
He pondered. “I mean that nothing really hurts you and nothing really makes you happy. You live because you live. Because you happen not to be dead.”
She managed to resist asking what he would feel if something happened to Ofer.
“Everything passes in front of you,” he said. “It’s been that way for ages.”
“Everything?”
“There’s no desire.”
“And when you’re with me like this?” She moved her hips against him.
He smiled. “Well, there are moments.”
She turned over and lay on him. They moved slowly against each other. She arched her back a little and opened to him, and he did not enter. He was happy this way, and he wanted to talk.
“And lots of times I thought—”
She stopped moving abruptly: something in his face, in his voice.
“If you have a child, say,” he mumbled quickly, “that’s a purpose in life, isn’t it? That’s something worth getting up for in the morning, no?”
“What? Yes, usually. Yes.”
“Usually? Not always? Not all the time?”
Ora thought back to some of the mornings this past year. “Not always. Not all the time.”
“Really?” Avram asked wonderingly. “But I thought …”
They lay silently again, moving over each other’s bodies carefully. His foot curled over her shin, his hand caressed the back of her neck.
“Can I tell you something weird?”
“Tell me something weird,” she hummed and held her whole body against his.
“When I got back from there, right? When I started to understand what had happened to me, you know, all that”—he waved his hand dismissively—“I suddenly realized that even when I’d had it, I mean the desire, and a purpose in life, I somehow, in some recess, always knew it was only borrowed. Only for a limited time.” He paused. “Only till the truth emerged.”
“And what is the truth?” she asked, and thought: the two rows of hitters. The cruel decree.
“That it’s not really mine,” said Avram stiffly. He propped himself up on his arms and gazed at her intently. “Or that I don’t even deserve to have it,” he added, like someone deciding to confess to a horrible crime at the end of a trivial questioning.
A notion flitted through her mind: And if he has a child?
“What happened?” Avram asked.
“Hold me.”
If he has a child, she thought feverishly, his own child, whom he’ll raise. How did I never think of that? Of the possibility that he will be a father one day—
“Ora, what’s up?”
She breathed into his neck. “Hold me, don’t leave me. You’ll walk with me all the way home, right?”
“Of course. We’re walking together, what are you—”
“And we’ll always, always be together?” She tossed him the fragment of a sentence that had suddenly floated to the surface of her memory, a promise he’d sent her by telegram on her twentieth birthday.
“Until death us do join,” he completed the sentence without hesitation.
And then, at that moment, Avram felt that Ofer was in danger. He had never known the sensation before: something dark and cool slashed his heart. The pain was intolerable. He held Ora hard. They both froze.
“Did you feel it?” she whispered in his ear. “You felt it, didn’t you?”
Avram breathed into her hair, mute. His body was bathed in cold sweat.
“Think about him,” she whispered and clung to him with her whole body until she put him inside her. “Think of him inside me.”
They moved slowly, gripping each other as in the eye of a storm.
“Think about him, think about him!” she cried out.
“Listen,” she says angrily a few hours later, on the path from Yagur up to the Carmel. “He left me a message yesterday. Ofer. ‘I’m okay, the bad guys not so okay.’ ”
“Didn’t he ask where you were, where you’d disappeared to, how you were doing?”
“Yes, of course, several times. He’s a terrible worrier. The biggest worrier of all of us. And he always has to know”—she doesn’t feel like telling him anything now, but it tumbles out of her anyway, so that he’ll know this too, so that he’ll remember—“he has this need, it’s really compulsive, ever since he was a child, to know exactly where each of us is, so no one will disappear on him for too long. He needs to hold us all together—”
She stops talking and remembers how, as a child, Ofer used to get scared every time an argument broke out, even a tiny one, between her and Ilan. He would dance around and push them at each other, force them to be close. How, then, did he end up being the reason we broke up? she wonders. She lurches forward again in a sudden surge, butting the air with her forehead, and Avram wonders if Ilan left her a message, too. Or perhaps it was Adam who called and said something that hurt her.
The dog rubs up against him as though to strengthen him and to seek refuge from Ora’s fury. Her tail droops and her smile is gone.
“What was it you said? ‘I’m okay, the bad guys—’ ”
“The bad guys not so okay.”
Avram repeats the words silently. Tasting the arrogance of youth, he thinks—
But Ora is already muttering out loud what he was thinking: “ ‘Back in Pruszkow, they didn’t say things like that.’ ”
Avram throws up his hands: “I can’t win with you! You know it all.”
His attempt at flattery falls flat. She sticks her chin out and lopes ahead.
In the shift logs kept by the translators at Bavel, he had written a regular column entitled “Our Town of Pruszkow,” in which he logged his reports using the trembling, suspicious grumblings of the shtetl-dwellers Tzeske, Chomek, and Fishl-Parech. An Egyptian MiG-21 transferred from Zakazik to Luxor, a Tupolev grounded due to rudder problems, battle rations issued to commando fighters—all these were adorned with churlish, defeatist, and bitter commentary from the three elderly Pruszkowites invented by Avram. He constantly expanded and enriched their characters, until the base commander uncovered “the Jewish underground,” as Avram called it, and sentenced him to a week of night-guard duty next to the flag in the parade courtyard, to strengthen his nationalist convictions.
“But Ora,” he says, to exploit quickly the sweetness of memory that might be softening her heart toward him.
“Well, what is it?”
With a stifled grunt, almost sobbing. Without even turning her face to him. Are her shoulders trembling or is it just his imagination?
“Were there any other messages?”
“A few, nothing important.”
“From Ilan, too?”
“Yes, he deigned to call, your friend. Finally heard what was going on here, and all of a sudden he’s terribly worried about the situation in Israel, and even about my disappearance. Imagine.”
“But how did he know you—”
“Ofer told him.”
Avram waits. He knows there’s more.
“And he’s coming back to Israel with Adam. But it’ll take them a few days, he’s not sure when they’ll get on a flight. They’re in Bolivia now, on some salt flats.” She sniffs angrily: There’s enough there for all my wounds.
“And Adam?”
“What about Adam?”
“Did he also leave you a message?”
She stops, amazed, and realizes: I can’t believe it.
“Ora?”
Because only now does she remember that Ilan said Adam sent his regards. She was so caught up with herself, with what she was doing, that she almost forgot. He specifically said, “Adam says hi.” And she’d forgotten that. Adam is right, he really is. An unnatural mother.
“Never mind, forget it.” She’s almost running again. “There weren’t any important messages at my place.”
“Your place?”
“Leave me alone, okay? What’s with the interrogations? Just leave me alone!”
“I’m leaving,” he murmurs, with a sinking feeling in his gut.
A cloud of gnats accompanies them, forcing them to breathe through their noses and keep quiet for a long time. Avram notices exposed tree roots surrounded by mounds of damp earth: there were wild boars here last night.
Later, they come across a big dark rock with letters carved deep: Nadav. A stone next to it reads: A grove in memory of Captain Nadav Klein. Fell in the War of Attrition in the Jordan Valley. 27 Sivan 5729. July 12, 1969. Across the way, among pine needles and pinecones, a monument and a plaque: In memory of Staff Sergeant Menachem Hollander, son of Chana and Moshe, Haifa, Kfar Hasidim. Fell in the Yom Kippur War in the battle for Taoz on 13 Tishrei 5734, at the age of 23.
A short while later there is a huge concrete relief depicting the entire Canal region in 1973, marked with Our Forces’ Positions—Magma is there too, so tiny—and through the long, serrated leaves of a group of cactuses, they see gilded statues of a doe and a lion, and a monument bearing the names of eight soldiers who fell in the battle for the Suez Canal on May 23, 1970. Ora looks out of the corner of her eye to make sure Avram is able to cross these hurdles of memory in one piece, but he seems to be troubled only by her now, and she wonders how to tell him, where to start.
She walks too fast for him to keep up. The dog stops every so often, pants, and looks questioningly at Avram. He shrugs his shoulders: I don’t get it, either. From the main road of Usafia, opposite the Shuk Yussuf greengrocers, they turn to follow the marker down a path that leads through a sparse grove of pine trees. The earth is covered with mounds of trash and filth, tires, furniture, old newspapers, shattered televisions, dozens of empty plastic bottles.
“They throw this stuff here on purpose,” she hisses. “I’m telling you, it’s their twisted revenge on us.”
“Whose?”
“Theirs.” She sweeps her arm broadly. “You know exactly who.”
“But then they’re just making their own place dirty! This is their village.”
“No, no, inside their houses it’s all sparkling, glimmering, I know them. But everything on the outside belongs to the state, to the Jews, and it’s a commandment to junk that up. That’s probably part of their jihad, too. Look here—look at this!” She kicks an empty bottle, misses, and almost falls on her rear end.
Avram cautiously reminds her that Usafia is a Druze village, and they’re not obligated by the jihad commandment. “And anyway, when we came down from Arbel, and also near the Kinneret, and at the Amud River, we saw piles of trash, totally Jewish trash.”
“No, no, it’s their protest. Don’t you understand? Because they don’t have the guts to really revolt. I honestly would respect them a lot more if they just came out against us openly.”
She’s feeling bad, Avram senses, and she’s taking it out on them. He looks at her and sees her face turn ugly.
“Aren’t you angry at them? Don’t you have any anger or hatred about what they did to you there?”
Avram thinks. The old man from the meat locker comes to his mind, lying naked on the sidewalk, banging his head against it, twitching in front of the soldiers.
“What do you have to think about for so long? Me, if someone did to me a quarter of what they did to you, I’d run them down to the corners of the earth. I’d hire mercenaries to take revenge, even now.”
“No,” he says, and runs a vision of his tormentors in front of his eyes: the chief interrogator, Lieutenant Colonel Doctor Ashraf, with his sly little eyes and his sickeningly flowery Hebrew, and the hands that tore Avram to shreds. And the jailors in Abbasiya, who beat him whenever they could, who were drawn to torture him more than the others, as though something about him drove them crazy. And the two who buried him alive, and the guy who stood on the side and took photographs, and the two men they brought in from outside—Ashraf told him they were trucked in especially for him, two guys from death row, rapists from a civilian prison in Alexandria—even them he doesn’t hate anymore. All he feels when he thinks of them is insipid despair, and sometimes simple, raw sadness at having had the misfortune to end up there and see the things he saw.
The path seems to be trying to shake off the filth, curving sharply to the left and spitting them out into the Cheik riverbed, then descending and plunging into the belly of the earth. They have to watch their steps because the rocks are slippery from the morning dew and the path is crisscrossed with sinewy tree roots. The sun dances through the foliage in tiny pieces of light.
How come Adam said hi to me? she wonders. What happened that made him do that? What is he feeling?
Oak trees and terebinths and pine trees, grandfathers and grandmothers by the looks of them, lean in from both banks of the riverbed, and ivy tumbles down their branches. Here and there is an arbutus, and then a massive pine tree on the ground, hewn, its pinecones dead and its trunk turning white across the path. In unison, Avram and Ora look away.
Next to a dried-up reservoir filled with giant, blighted reeds, two tall boys with unkempt hair come toward them. One has thick, dark dreadlocks, while golden curls tumble from the other’s head, and they both wear tiny yarmulkes. Their faces are welcoming, and they carry large backpacks with sleeping bags rolled on top. Ora and Avram are experts at these encounters by now. They almost always say a quick “hello,” lower their eyes, and let the other hikers pass. But this time Ora greets the boys with a broad grin and takes off her backpack. “Where are you from, guys?” she asks.
The boys exchange somewhat surprised looks, but her smile is warm and inviting.
“Feel like a little coffee break? I just bought some fresh biscuits. Kosher,” she adds piously with a glance at their yarmulkes. She chatters and giggles with them, abounding with motherly warmth and a certain flirtatiousness. They accept her invitation, even though only an hour ago, on Mount Shokef, they’d had coffee with a doctor from Jerusalem who’d asked them all sorts of funny questions and written their answers in a notebook. Ora tenses up.
At her request, after a moment’s hesitation, they tell her what the doctor had told them when they sat down for coffee with him—“amazing coffee the guy makes,” the dark one notes. It turns out that he and his wife had planned for years to make this journey together as a couple, all along the trail, from the north down to Taba, almost a thousand kilometers. But his wife got sick and died three years ago—the boys interrupt each other, excited by the story, and perhaps by Ora’s transfixed look—and before she died she made him swear that he’d still do the hike, even on his own. “And she was always looking for something else for him to do along the way,” the golden-curled boy adds with a laugh. “In the end she had this idea”—the dark one snatches the story from his friend’s mouth—“that every time he met someone, he’d ask them two questions.” It seems as though only now, recounting the story, the boys allow its true meaning to penetrate them.
Ora smiles but she is hardly listening. Deep inside, she tries to picture the woman. She must have been very lovely, with a ripe, glowing beauty, spiritual yet corporeal, with flowing, honey-colored hair. For a moment she forgets her troubles and clings to this stranger—Tammi, Tamar, he’d called her, Tamyusha—who had tried, on her deathbed, to find that “something else” for her man. Or someone else, she thinks, and smiles with affection and subtle appreciation for this woman who knew her husband so well (that shirt of his, honestly, it looked like a tablecloth in an Italian trattoria) and equipped him with two questions that no woman could resist.
The two boys gather branches and straw. They light a fire and place a charred finjan on the embers and offer their collection of tea leaves. Ora takes more and more food out of her backpack. “Like a magician’s hat,” she laughs, delighting in her horn of plenty. Avram watches with some concern as she spreads out everything she bought that morning in the supermarket. Cans of hummus and labaneh, cracked green olives, a few pitas, still warm and soft. She urges them to taste everything, and they gladly comply. They haven’t had a meal this good for ages, they say with their mouths full. They boast of their frugality on the trip, of how industriously they are managing their little household, and she watches affectionately as they gobble down the food. Only Avram feels slightly out of place.
They compare notes on the long route from the south and from the north. Helpful advice and important information flow back and forth about surprises and obstacles waiting for both parties on the way. Ora thinks it was good that she left her phone number on the note for that man. If he calls, she can deliver the pages he’d written in her notebook.
Eventually Avram warms up. After all, the trail is like a home for him too, and to his surprise he even senses a hikers’ camaraderie that he’s never known before. And perhaps he, like Ora, enjoys the boys’ healthy appetites, and the fact that they are dining at his table, so to speak, and it seems completely natural to them. This is the way of the world: impoverished youngsters, frugal and ascetic by necessity, should occasionally enjoy the generosity of affluent adults they meet on their paths, and in this case, of a friendly, decent-looking couple—despite Avram’s flapping white sharwals and his ponytail tied with a rubber band—a man and a woman who are no longer young but not yet old, and are surely parents to grown children, perhaps even grandparents to one or two little ones, who have taken a little vacation from their full lives and set off on a short adventure. Avram is excited to tell them about the steep climb to the peak of Tabor, and the rock steps and the iron pegs on the ascent to Arbel, and he has some advice and a few warnings. But almost every time he wants to say something, Ora beats him to it and insists on telling the story herself, embellishing slightly, and suddenly it seems to him that she wants to prove at any cost how good she is at animating young people and speaking their language. He dwindles as he watches her, all bustling chumminess, as clumsy as an elbow in a rib, her conduct foreign and grating, until it occurs to him that she is doing this to spite him, that she is still angry at him about something and that she is defiantly pushing him, step by step, out of the little circle she has woven around herself and the two boys.
And he does retreat. He extinguishes his light and sits inside himself in the dark.
The young boys, who live on the settlement of Tekoa, sense nothing of the silent battle being fought so close to them. They talk about the wonders of the road from Eilat—the Tzin River at sundown, the daffodils in the cisterns of the Ashkelon River, the ibex at Ein Avdat—and Ora explains that she and Avram are only planning to go as far as Jerusalem. “Maybe one day,” she says, and her gaze wanders off, “we’ll do the southern part of the trail too, all the way to Eilat and Taba.” The boys grumble about the military practice zones in the Negev, which push the trail away from the wadis and mountains to plain old roadsides. They warn Ora and Avram about the Bedouins’ feral dogs—“they have tons of dogs, those people, make sure you protect yours,” and the conversation circles around, and suddenly Avram feels something hovering over his face, and when he looks up he sees that it is Ora’s gaze, a tortured, disconnected stare, as though she is suddenly seeing something new and extremely painful in him. He reaches up distractedly to brush a crumb from his face.
As they talk, they discover that Jerusalem is about ten days’ walk away. “It might take you a bit longer,” the boys say.
“It’ll zoom by at the end,” laughs the curly-haired one. “From Sha’ar HaGay you’ll start to feel the pull of home.”
Ora and Avram flash each other a look of alarm: Only ten days? What then? What after that?
“Ora, wait, you’re running.”
“This is how I walk.”
It’s been this way for a few hours. She’s been walking wildly, gritting her teeth. Avram and the dog trail behind, not daring to come close. She stops only when she can no longer walk, when she is literally falling off her feet.
They had passed the Alon Valley, Mount Shokef, chives, cyclamens, poppies. Then suddenly they saw the sea. Ora had been waiting for this moment since the beginning of the trip, but now she didn’t stop, didn’t even point to the sea, her love. She kept on walking, lips pursed, grunting with the effort, and Avram straggled behind her. The walk up the Carmel was harder than the Galilee mountains. The paths were rockier, strewn with felled trees and invaded by thorny bushes. Titmice and jays hovered above them, calling to one another excitedly. They accompanied the walkers for a long way, passing them off to each other. When evening fell, they both stopped for a moment in front of a giant pine tree that lay in the middle of the path with a gaping crack. It was flooded with rays of dying sunlight, and a peculiar purple radiance glowed from between its thin leaves.
They stood looking at it. A glowing ember.
They started walking again. Avram began to feel that he too was seized with disquiet whenever they lingered even for a moment. The fear had started to nag at him. A new fear. When we get to the road, he thought, maybe we’ll take a bus. Or even a taxi.
The Rakit ruins, the Yeshach caves, and a cliff looming brazenly above. They walked down among huge rocks, grasping on to tree roots, grottoes. Over and over again, Avram had to climb back up and carry the dog, who whimpered at the rocky channels. They kept walking when it got dark, as long as they could see the path and the markers. Then they slept, briefly and nervously, and woke in the middle of the night, just as on the first nights of the trip, because the earth was humming and rustling constantly under their bodies. They sat by the fire that Avram lit and drank the tea he made. So terrible was the silence and what filled it. Ora closed her eyes and saw the little street leading to her home in Beit Zayit. She saw the gate to the yard, the steps up to the front door. Again she heard Ilan saying that Adam said hi. In Ilan’s voice she could hear Adam’s concern. His compassion. Why was he worried about her all of a sudden? Why did he feel sorry for her? She leaped to her feet and started packing the dishes, shoving them haphazardly into her backpack.
They kept walking in the dark, with only the light of the moon, and then the sky began to brighten. For a few hours they had not said a word. Avram felt that they were running to reach Ofer in time, the way you dash to rescue someone from the ruins of a building: every second counts. It’s not good that she’s quiet, he thought. She isn’t talking about Ofer. Now is when we have to talk about him, when she has to talk about him. We have to talk about him.
And then he started talking to himself, silently. He repeated stories about Ofer, things Ora had told him, trivia, little moments, word for word.
“Just tell me he’s okay,” he growls into the blinding sun. With a sudden lurch, he overtakes her and blocks her path. “Tell me nothing happened to him, that you’re not hiding something from me. Look at me!” he yells. They both breathe heavily.
“I only know up to the night before last. As of then he was fine.” The sharpness is gone from her face. He senses that something has happened to her in the last hour, somewhere between the tea and sunrise. She looks tattered and stooped, as though finally defeated after a prolonged battle.
“Then what’s wrong? Why have you been like this since yesterday? What did I do?”
“Your girlfriend,” Ora says heavily.
“Neta?” The blood rushes out of his face. “What happened to her?”
Ora gives him a long, miserable look.
“Is she all right? What happened to her?”
“She’s fine. Your girlfriend is fine.”
“Then what?”
“She sounds nice, actually. Funny.”
“You talked to her?”
“No.”
“Then how?”
Ora trudges off the trail and into a tangled thicket. Dragging past thistles and shrubs, she trips as she walks, and Avram follows her. She climbs up a little crag of tall, gray rocks, and he follows. And suddenly they’re inside a small crater, where the light is dull and shadowy; the sun seems to have gathered up its rays from this place.
Ora plunges onto a rock ledge and buries her face in her hands. “Listen, I did something … It was wrong, I know that, but I called your apartment. I picked up your messages.”
He straightens up. “My apartment? Wait, you can do that, too?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“There’s a code, a general one, the manufacturer’s default option before you set it yourself. It’s really not that complicated.”
“But why?”
“Don’t ask me.”
“I don’t understand. Wait—”
“Avram, I did it, and that’s that. I had no control over it. I dialed home first, and then my fingers just jumped to the numbers.”
The dog comes over and nestles between them, offering Ora her warm, padded body, and Ora puts her arms on the dog. “I don’t know what came over me. Listen, I’m really … I’m so ashamed.”
“But what happened? What did she do? Did she do something to herself?”
“I just wanted to hear her, to hear who she is. I didn’t even think—”
“Ora!” he practically bellows. “What did she say?”
“You had a few messages. Ten, and nine are from her. There’s one from your boss at the restaurant. They’re finishing the renovations next week, and he wants you to go back to work. He really likes you, Avram, you can feel it in his voice. And there’ll be a housewarming party that they—”
“But Neta, what about Neta?”
“Sit down, I can’t do this while you’re standing over me like that.”
Avram doesn’t appear to hear her. He stares at the gray rocks protruding all around him. Something in this place is closing in on him.
Ora rests her cheek on the dog’s body. “Listen, she called about a week and a half ago, maybe more, and asked you to call her back immediately. Then she called a few more times and asked … No, she just said your name. ‘Avram?’ ‘Avram, are you there?’ ‘Avram, answer me.’ That kind of thing.”
Avram kneels down in front of her. His head is suddenly too heavy to bear. The dog, with Ora hunched over her, turns to him with her dark, soft eyes.
“Then there was one message where she said”—Ora swallows, and her face takes on a childish, startled expression—“that she had something important to tell you, and then … Let’s see, yes, the last message is from the evening before last.” She laughs nervously. “That’s exactly the same time Ofer left his last message for me.”
Avram is hunched, rounded into himself, ready for the blow—he won’t be taken by surprise.
“ ‘Avram, it’s Neta,’ ” Ora says in a hollow voice, her eyes fixed on a spot beyond him. “ ‘I’m in Nuweiba and you haven’t been home for ages and you won’t call back your loving ones—’ ”
Avram nods, recognizing Neta through Ora’s voice.
Ora continues lifelessly, as though her entire being is operated by a ventriloquist. “ ‘A little while ago I thought I might be slightly pregnant, and I didn’t have the courage to tell you, and I came down here to think about what to do, and organize my thoughts, and of course in the end I’m not, as usual, it was a false alarm, so you have nothing to worry about, my love.’ And then there was a beep.”
He stares at her. “What? I don’t understand. What did you say?”
“What’s not to understand?” Ora rouses from her trance and sharpens her knives at him again. “What exactly don’t you understand? Did I say anything not in Hebrew? Do you understand the word ‘pregnant’? Do you understand ‘false alarm’? Do you understand ‘my love’?”
His mouth drops. His face stiffens with immeasurable wonderment.
Ora abruptly turns away from him and the dog. She hugs herself and rocks back and forth. Stop this, she orders herself. Why are you attacking him? What did he do to you? But she cannot stop. Back and forth she rocks, finding pleasure in pulling this molten thread farther and farther out of her innards and unspooling herself until she disappears completely—if only. And poor Neta—and of course in the end I’m not, as usual, it was a false alarm—and suddenly Ora knows how Avram and Neta sound when they talk to each other, she knows their music, and the soft playfulness, exactly the way he used to fence with Ilan, and the way Ilan still does with the boys, with that same lightning-fast wit that Ora herself is no longer capable of and in fact never was. False alarm, Neta had giggled. But does he even realize how much she loves him, and how much she is suffering?
He grunts. “I still don’t understand what you’re angry about.”
“Angry?” She flings her head back and lets out a toxic spray of ridicule. “Why would I be angry? What do I have to be angry about? On the contrary, I should be happy, right?”
“About what?”
“About the mere possibility,” she explains with a serious face and a dizzy sort of matter-of-factness, “that you may have a child one day.”
“But I don’t have a child,” he says sternly. “Other than Ofer I have no child.”
“But maybe you will. Why not? Men your age can still do it, after all.” She regains her senses for a moment and almost falls into his arms to apologize for the madness that took hold of her, for the narrow-mindedness, for the smallness of her soul. Because more than anything she wants to say how good it would be for him to have a child and what a wonderful father he would be, a full-time dad. But then another flaming sword turns every which way inside her, and she jumps up with an astonished realization: “Maybe you’ll even have a girl. Avram, you’ll have a girl.”
“What are you talking about?” He gets up quickly and stands facing her. “Neta said she wasn’t, that she just thought she was.” He reaches out to embrace her and Ora flows through his arms and crumples into a large pit in the rock. Her hands cover her mouth as though she is sucking a finger or trying to stifle a scream.
“Come on, let’s keep walking.” He kneels beside her and speaks rhythmically, confidently. “We’ll walk all the way to your house, as far as you want me to walk with you. Nothing’s changed, Ora, get up.”
“What for?” she whispers helplessly.
“What do you mean what for?”
She looks at him with tearful eyes. “But you’ll have a girl.”
“There’s no girl,” he says tersely. “What’s the matter with you?”
“I suddenly get it, it’s suddenly tangible for me.”
“I only have Ofer,” Avram repeats insistently. “Listen: you and I, together, have Ofer.”
“How do you have Ofer?” she says, snorting into her hands. Her eyes flit emptily through the air. “You don’t know him, you didn’t even want to see him. Who is Ofer to you? Ofer is just words to you.”
“No, no.” In his distress he shakes her, hard, and her head bobs forward and back. “No. You know that’s not true anymore.”
“But all I’ve told you is words.”
“Ora, don’t you happen to have …”
“What?”
“A picture of him?”
She looks at him for a long time, as though failing to grasp the meaning of his words. Then she digs through her backpack and pulls out a small brown wallet. She opens it without looking and holds it out to Avram. In a small plastic window is a picture of two boys with their arms around each other. It was taken the morning Adam joined the army. They both have long hair, and Ofer, young and skinny, hangs on his older brother, enveloping him with his arms and his gaze. As Avram looks at the picture, Ora thinks she can see every feature in his face begin to stir uncontrollably. “Avram,” she says softly. She puts her hand on his as he holds the picture. She steadies it.
“What a beautiful boy,” Avram whispers.
Ora shuts her eyes. She sees people standing on either side of the street that leads to her house. Some of them have already gone into the yard, others are standing on the steps to the door. They wait for her silently, eyes lowered. They wait for her to pass them and walk into her house.
So that it can begin.
“Talk to me. Tell me about him,” she murmurs.
“Tell you what?”
“What is he for you?”
She takes the wallet and puts it back into the backpack. For some reason she cannot bear to have the picture so exposed to light. He does not dare resist, even though he would like to sit there and look at it more and more.
“Ora—”
Avram feels a burning need to get up and leave this place, get out of the shadows of this strange little crater with the craggy gray rocks. Across the way, a sun-kissed strip of green stretches out between two jagged cliffs, and here they are in the shade, too much shade.
“I can’t hear you,” she whispers.
“First of all … First of all, he is your child. That’s the first thing I know about him, that’s the first thing I think about him.”
“Yes.”
“That’s what I always think about him: that he’s yours, with your light and your goodness, and the things you’ve always given him, his whole life, the way you know how to give. Your abundance, your love, and your generosity, always. And that is what will protect him everywhere, there, too.”
“It will?”
“Yes, yes.” Avram looks beyond her and presses her limp body to him. She feels cold, and her breath is shallow.
“Tell me more, I need you to tell me.”
“And you let me hold him together with you. That’s what it is. That’s what I see. Yes.”
Her face grows distant and weak. She seems to be falling asleep with her eyes open, in his arms, and he wants to wake her, to breathe life into her. But something about her, something in her vacant gaze, her gaping mouth …
“And it’s like,” Avram struggles, “like you’re trying to take him with you somewhere, alone, but he’s too heavy for you. And he’s asleep the whole time, right?”
Ora nods, understanding yet not understanding. Her fingers move, weak and blind on his forearm, distractedly feeling the edge of his sleeve.
“It’s like he’s been anesthetized,” Avram murmurs. “I don’t know why, I don’t fully understand it. And then you come to me and ask me to help you.”
“Yes,” she whispers.
“The two of us have to take him somewhere, I don’t know where, I don’t understand why. And we hold him together, between us, all the time. It’s like he needs both of us to take him there, that’s it.”
“Yes.”
“Only the two of us can take him there.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it good?” Ora rustles desperately. “Is it a good place there?”
“I don’t know.”
“What is this, what are you telling me? Is this a dream you had? Did you dream about him?”
“It’s what I see,” Avram replies helplessly.
“But what is it?”
“We’re both holding him.”
“Yes?”
“He’s walking between us.”
“Yes, that’s good.”
“But he’s asleep, his eyes are closed, one of his arms is on you and the other on me.”
“I don’t understand.”
Suddenly Avram shakes himself off. “Let’s get out of here, Ora.”
She moans. “This isn’t good. He has to be awake the whole time. Why is he sleeping?”
“No, he’s asleep. His head is on your shoulder.”
“But why is he asleep?” Ora shouts and her voice cracks.
Avram shuts his eyes to wipe the scene away. When he opens them, Ora is staring at him in horror.
“Maybe we were wrong,” she says, and her face is strained. “Maybe we got it all wrong, from the beginning. This whole path, all the walking we did—”
“That’s not true! Don’t say that, we’ll walk, and we’ll talk about him—”
“Maybe the whole thing was the opposite of what I thought.”
“Opposite how?”
She slowly turns her palms out. “Because I thought that if we both talked about him, if we kept talking about him, we’d protect him, together, right?”
“Yes, yes, that’s true, Ora, you’ll see—”
“But maybe it’s the exact opposite?”
“What? What’s the opposite?” he whispers.
Her body flutters at him. She grips his arm: “I want you to promise me.”
“Yes, whatever you want.”
“That you’ll remember everything.”
“Yes, you know I will.”
“From the beginning, from when we met, when we were kids, and that war, and how we met in isolation, and the second war, and what happened to you, and Ilan, and me, and everything that happened, yes?”
“Yes, yes.”
“And Adam and Ofer. Promise me, look me in the eye.” She holds his face in both hands. “You’ll remember, right?”
“Everything.”
“And if Ofer …” Ora slows down and her eyes glaze over, and a new wrinkle, vertical and deep and black, suddenly runs down between her eyes. “If he—”
“Don’t even think that way!” Avram grabs her shoulder and rocks her wildly.
She keeps talking, but he does not hear. He holds her to him and kisses her face, and she does not surrender to him and his kisses, all she gives him is the shell of her face.
“You’ll remember,” she murmurs through his shaking. “You’ll remember Ofer, his life, his whole life, right?”
They sit for a long time, hidden away in the small crater. Holding each other like refugees from a storm. The sounds slowly return. The hum of a bee, the thin chirp of a bird, the voices of workers building a house somewhere in the valley.
Then Ora detaches her body from his and lies down on her side on the rock ledge. She pulls her knees into her stomach and rests her cheek on her open palm. Her eyes are open yet she sees nothing. Avram sits beside her, his fingers hovering over her body, barely touching. A light breeze fills the air with the scents of za’atar and poterium and a sweet whiff of honeysuckle. Beneath her body are the cool stone and the whole mountain, enormous and solid and infinite. She thinks: How thin is the crust of Earth.
DECEMBER 2007