He is somewhere else, somewhere new, a sprawling flatland at the foot of shadowy masses, bordered by desert and mountains. He is surrounded by people, dozens, perhaps hundreds of volunteers come to search for his Elisheva. Every year they come, every year when Elisheva goes off. He tries to follow one of them, but it's like tracking a single ant in an ants' nest, and he persists and catches sight of a well-built young man wearing blue overalls and sticks with him. This man looks slightly familiar, a bit like the guy who once helped Elisheva and him when their car got stuck on the way up north; he had smiled as he swiftly maneuvered and explained, and as an afterthought had also helped them dislodge a jammed cassette from the tape deck and fixed a crooked windshield wiper, and only after they said goodbye had they discovered that he'd left them in a bit of a jam because he'd slid the driver's seat back to accommodate his long legs, and they couldn't get it forward again, and then Shaul had to drive all the way as if he were standing on tiptoe. The guy in the blue overalls rushes over to one of the parked trucks, climbs up on its back, and a moment later jumps down with a big, stuffed kit bag and runs over to a little water reservoir next to an acacia tree, his head thrust forward so he looks as if he is already in the midst of a furious search, lacking only his tongue sticking out of his mouth. He runs past another man, thicker and slower, and something about him vaguely recalls the Arab guy from the deli at the supermarket-Elisheva likes to quote the ambiguous idioms he produces as he tempts the customers to taste the goods, particularly the women, of course, but even with Shaul he jokes in amazing Hebrew about the salami and the quail eggs-he is also running here, carrying a kit bag; strange that even Arabs would come on this kind of search. He stops by another truck, and some-
one from inside it hands him a rifle, which is somewhat surprising-after all, he is an Arab-but this search must be beyond any national conflict, a clear humanitarian issue that unites all peoples, although it's unclear to Shaul why they even need weapons here. Who are they all going to fight, and over what, or whom? Not far from him a few men are quickly uncoiling huge rolls of barbed wire, setting up a fence and turning the site into a small, protected camp-but from whom? Two men who walk past him carry a large, sharpened wooden post. They shout to each other from either end, Where are you from? Netanya. I'm from Metulla, I was fast asleep, the first says. And me, I was in the middle of dinner, an omelet, and just the way I was, I got up and left. It just gets hold of you suddenly, the first one growls, just drops on you. They slow down and stop for a minute as if they've forgotten where they are headed; they lower their heads and a strange quiet surrounds them, a gloomy, intimate silence like the one that takes hold of your heart when twilight descends and the night becomes at once inevitable.
As he watches, a slight, feathery sense of worry emerges in him, and he brushes it off: they're here to help, to find her. Although of course, he concedes, ultimately it will be one, one of all these hundreds of men, who will find her, who will get to her first, who will stand in front of her alone and absorb her abundant gratefulness, the image of her chest swelling at him with excitement. And what will happen then? What will we do with that one? But it's too early to worry, he thinks. Before we can get to that one, we need the many, the multitudes. We need to filter them out slowly, propel them in their souls like a thousand grains of sand in a fine sieve to finally find within them the one golden grain for which Elisheva will sparkle, almost despite herself
There was a contradiction, she felt. There were facts that grated on one another. And in the days that followed she did not stop thinking of how she had wanted to be pulled after him into the story, and that was probably why she did not ask him how the two could be reconciled, Elisheva's explicit desire to be alone and his rushing toward her. Shaul opened his murky red eyes and seemed immediately to sense the doubt that had resurfaced in her, and he mumbled that it was something between himself and Elisheva. She asked if Elisheva knew about his visit, and he said no, and she cautiously remarked that Elisheva might be scared to death by his arrival in the middle of the night. He scratched around the edge of his cast and said very slowly, Please don't put pressure on me. Then he spat out, Well, it's really getting ridiculous that you don't even know where we're going. But at that very moment she almost interrupted him to ask him not to tell her yet, so she could keep going like this a little, driving with no borders and no purpose. He said, Have you heard of a place called Orcha, near the Ramon Crater? She breathed deeply, bade farewell to sweet ignorance, and told him she used to dream of going there alone to spend a few days in a cabin, to cleanse herself of all human contact. She always comes up with these godforsaken places, he said, and in his voice she heard something that reminded her that he was, after all, a Kraus-a vengeful tone, petty and calculating, and she thought of Elisheva, who was now in her own cabin in the heart of the desert, far and isolated from the other cabins, and she became concerned again. What would happen when he went into her cabin? What might he find there? And what was he intending to do? Shaul seemed unable to resist her thoughts, and immediately shrank and turned his face away like an escapee and moaned into the upholstery. Tell me, she said quickly, before he slipped away from her again. What is there to tell? he sighed. Tell me. Tell you what? About them, she ventured, surprised by the force that pushed her toward him unhindered. He must have sensed the slight tremor in her voice, and the tremor was familiar to him, because he smiled at it wearily and unhappily, the smile of a man who is lost, impure, who has corrupted a child.
Their most beautiful moments are when they are both calm, he thinks. His heart twinges and he longs to portray them for her as they are during those times, in all their beauty, to describe them in such a way that she will not be able to resist them-because they are irresistible, he repeats to himself-but how can he tell her?
During those moments of calm, he knows, they can imagine that they have time, that they do not have to give in at once to their urge, that urge which is so human and so understandable, he thinks with pursed lips, the urge to throw their bodies against and inside one another, to dig and burrow into each other, breathlessly rising and falling as they have done almost every day for ten years, with desperate dizziness, needing to squeeze every last drop out of their precious moments of closeness, every cell in their bodies an open mouth to kiss and suck and lick and bite.
He shuts his eyes, and as if he were pulling a book from a crowded shelf, he chooses one such day, when they are completely at ease. He holds the day in his hands and opens it up. He thinks of them relaxed, demilitarized. They are so different when they have time, when they're not tense and disappointed before they've even begun, because they know they'll have to rush. Their movements are different, their breaths, even their expressions. How can he tell her? How can he sneak across the border to the outside?
His hand lies softly on her bare stomach. For Shaul, this stomach represents the furnace of her femininity; he has no idea what it means to the other man. He sees the hand, the fingers, the ring, the stomach. He needs the picture to be slow and precise. And he wants to see it through Elisheva's eyes, from within her and using her words. "Lingering," for example, is a word of hers that fits here. She once knew how to linger, she often laments. She had great patience and the stillness to observe. Then she too became loaded with burdens and nuisances, and now she is like Shaul, like everyone, scampering around, constantly robbed. But when she is there, everything within her relaxes and protracts. Time-those fifty-something minutes- unfolds more and more hidden creases, the very same time which then freezes in Shaul's veins.