Esti slowed down. Little lights flickered far down the road. A roadblock. A tall, thin Ethiopian soldier with shiny eyes leaned in and asked for papers. He peered through the back window and noticed the figure lying there, huddled, covered with a blanket.
It's all right, Esti said, he's with me.
Have to see his face, the soldier said. Esti didn't understand. She looked back and saw that Shaul's hand was covering his face as he slept.
Leave him alone, she said angrily, he's sleeping. But she was surprised that Shaul had fallen asleep again, and that the flashlight and the strange voice hadn't woken him.
Have to see his face, the soldier insisted.
Shaul, she whispered softly.
He opened one eye and blinked at the light. There was a long silence. Esti tapped the wheel with her finger.
Oh, the soldier said, you came again today?
He handed the papers back to her, lightly patted the side of the car, and went back to his sandbag post. Esti closed the window slowly. Placed both hands on the wheel. They drove on.
And on and on.
Her left hand dropped to her thigh and pressed down hard. She felt her flesh being crushed. She pressed harder, then let go and concentrated entirely on the pain. But the pain passed and she remained. She stared at the dashboard. She would need to fill the car soon. The thought of the drive back troubled her. She was afraid she wouldn't be able to drive home alone after dropping him off. It takes two, she thought, to bear this weight. And again she saw how he had hidden his face with his hand, how he had blinked at the light. The hardest thing, she thought, is waking up someone who is pretending to be asleep.
When I got back-he finally ripped through the silence, unloading his confession impatiently, indifferently even-yesterday, you know, I was knocked out, it must have been 3 a.m. I drove into a telephone pole. We passed it earlier, just past Sde Boker-didn't you see? I took half a transformer with me.
She nodded. Some things took a while to sink in. And the day before yesterday you also went, she determined later, thoughtfully and very quietly.
He crossed his arms over his chest. Closed his eyes.
And every day Elisheva has been there, she thought, and every year when she goes to be alone. She could hear his breaths. She jostled her knees against each other a few times. Tell me, she said.
He opened a cloudy eye. Yes, she said with sudden eagerness. But I'm crazy, he mumbled, I'm a piece of shit. You could say so, she said, but I want to hear. Why?
Why? What could she say, where could she start? You ask as if there's only one reason. Give me one.
When you talk about it, she said, I suddenly breathe differently. Okay, that's a reason. He smiled pathetically.
I haven't told you about the wedding yet-he was barely audible, and she glanced in the mirror and saw him sinking further and further into himself, choking down his bleeding self-their wedding, which of course has no significance from a legal standpoint, but they did it anyway. The symbolic aspect, you see, was very important to them, it seems.
She shifted in her seat. Massaged her aching back against the seat. It was hard for her now, almost unbearable to go back there with him.
I think about it a lot, he said. I sometimes wonder when exactly they decided on it. Maybe it was the day Tom graduated from high school. That evening we were at the graduation with all the other students and their parents, and it was important to Elisheva to celebrate something meaningful with Paul too, at lunchtime. She listened. His voice, as usual, became stronger by the minute and filled with the blood of the story. Or did it happen after her mother died? Maybe she realized life was short and decided she wanted to finally take a real, uncompromising step.
His lips thickened as he pondered again, for the thousandth time, how and at what moment in life a person makes such a fateful decision. How one manages to hide from one's partner the difficulty of the decision making, the sighs of unease, the expansion of the heart when one suddenly feels it's the right thing to do and that one is in a place where laws and norms do not reign. Sometimes I think, he added, that perhaps I noticed a new expression on her face that day, the day she made the decision, but I didn't realize what it was. Or I try to remember a period of time, let's say a few days or a week, when she was unusually elated-a burst of happiness or something wild, irrational, maybe even a sense of vengeful glee toward me, over her finally being completely free of me, on a symbolic level, of course.
Then they deliberated over whether or not they should invite any friends, he went on, and even though they both knew right away that they didn't want any strangers at the ceremony-and for them, he snickered, a "stranger" is any human being at all-they still couldn't overcome the pleasure of amusing themselves with the thought that their close friends would be with them, you see, that for once they would be looked at lovingly from the outside too.
She nodded, eyes glazed over, trapped again and again in the burgeoning conversation that spread out for her within those two "hel-los," in the silence, in the sigh. She thought: How can he still pull me out of my life like a hair from a ball of dough? Sighing, almost begging him to let her go, to release-
And just think, Shaul said from somewhere far away, how many of their days-I mean, their few hours-they wasted on planning the wedding. Although it's certainly possible that they didn't see it as a waste. He shrugged. Maybe dealing with it actually made them feel they were more, I don't know, real? Tangible? They definitely made lists. Or rather, Elisheva did. You know how fond she is of lists. He smiled, and Esti smiled dully with him, remembering the little yellow notes that always floated around Elisheva. And they wrote down for themselves all the pros and cons, whom to invite and whom not to, whom they could trust and who might blab, and tried to guess each person's reaction to the invitation, and I have to ask you-
She didn't even have to stop and think: Yes, I would have come.
He contemplated a little. She could tell he liked her answer. I don't blame you, he said.
Look, he sighed, this whole thing isn't easy for me. Sometimes I'm really enraged inside. I think, for example, of the wanderings my job has imposed on both of them. Over the past ten years we've been on two sabbaticals, one in Washington and one in Boston, and each time the sabbatical came up she didn't even try to protest, didn't look for excuses to get out of it, but just accepted it simply and even managed to seem happy. I remember how it amazed me then: she said it wouldn't be a bad thing for us to breathe some fresh air, for both of us to refresh ourselves a little together. She was really excited about it, even though I knew that such a long trip, for them, meant a huge, complicated, and completely unnecessary organizational effort. And think about him, about her Paul, who had to uproot himself from here and become an immigrant again in a strange country. He had to rent an apartment to be close to us, somewhere she could reach within her almost-hour of swimming, which she didn't give up anywhere, in any country on any day-his voice trembled-because she couldn't give it up, because without it she probably would die. It's as simple as that. Esti looked at him and for a moment he seemed even more exposed, almost naked in his clothes. And you have to understand, it's not easy for me to think that the second I announced the move she agreed immediately, and took it upon herself to get this whole trip off the ground, all the uprooting. Maybe she felt as if that way she was cleansing her sins somehow, I don't know. But sometimes the thought of her huge efforts, theirs, around those two trips, illuminates me in a rather unpleasant light, he said, as if they know something about me that I prefer not to know, not to think of. What? she asked feebly. What do you mean? As if I'm a person-he hesitated, his bottom lip trembling-whose grasp on life is tenuous, pathetic, like that of someone with a chronic illness, terminal even, or like one of those children who have to be kept in a sterile bubble their whole life.