“Look at them,” Avram had said to her once, in one of their drives around the streets of Tel Aviv after he got back. “Look at them. They walk down the street, they talk, they shout, read newspapers, go to the grocery store, sit in cafés”—he went on for several minutes describing everything they saw through the car window—“but why do I keep thinking it’s all one big act? That it’s all to convince themselves that this place is truly real?”
“You’re exaggerating,” Ora had said.
“I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think the Americans or the French have to believe so hard all the time just to make America exist. Or France, or England.”
“I don’t understand what you mean.”
“Those are countries that exist even without having to always want them to exist. And here—”
“I’m looking around,” she said, her voice slightly hoarse and high-pitched, “and everything looks completely natural and normal to me. A little crazy, that’s true, but in a normal way.”
Because I’ve looked at it from a different place, Avram thought, and sank silently into himself.
The next day, Ora told him now, Ofer woke up with a conclusion and a solution: from now on he would be English, and everyone had to call him John, and he would not answer to the name Ofer. “ ’Cause no one kills them,” he explained simply, “and they don’t have any enemies. I asked in class, and Adam says so too, everyone’s friends with the English.” He started speaking English, or rather, what he thought was English, a gibberish version of Hebrew with an English accent. And just to be on the safe side, he buttressed his bed with protective layers of books and toys, trenches of furry stuffed animals. And every night he insisted on sleeping with a heavy monkey wrench next to his head.
“I happened to look in his notebook one day, and I saw that he kept writing ‘Arobs.’ When I told him it was spelled with an ‘a’ he was amazed: ‘I thought it was A-robs, ’cause they keep robbing us.’
“Then one day he found out that some Israelis were Arabs. Well, by that time I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, you know? He discovered that all his calculations were wrong, and he had to deduct the Israeli Arabs from the number of Israelis.”
She remembers how furious he was when he found out. He stomped his feet and shouted and turned red and hurled himself on the floor and screamed: “Make them go away! Back to their own homes! Why did they even come here? Don’t they have their own places?”
“And then he had an attack, a bit like the one he had at age four, with the vegetarianism. He ran a high fever, and for almost a week I was in total despair. And there was one night when he was convinced there was an Arab with him.”
“In his body?” Avram asks in horror, and his eyes dart to the sides. She has the feeling that he has lied to her about something.
“In his room,” she corrects him softly. “It was just feverish nonsense, hallucinations.”
The hair on her skin stands on end, telling her she has to be careful, but she’s not sure of what. Avram seems to have ossified right in front of her. His eyes harden with the look of a captive.
“Are you okay?”
There is shame and terror and guilt in his eyes. For a moment Ora thinks she knows exactly what she is seeing, and the next moment she flings herself away. An Arab in his body, she thinks. What did they do to him there? Why doesn’t he ever talk?
“I’ll never forget that night,” she says, trying to abate the horror on Avram’s face. “Ilan was on reserve duty in Lebanon, in the eastern sector. He was gone for four weeks. I put Adam to sleep in our bed so Ofer wouldn’t disturb him. Adam didn’t have a lot of patience for Ofer through that whole episode. It was like he couldn’t see that Ofer was afraid of something. And just imagine: Ofer was — I don’t know, six? And Adam was already nine and a half, and it was like he couldn’t forgive Ofer for breaking down like that.
“I sat with Ofer all night, and he was burning up and confused, and he kept seeing the Arab in the room, sitting on Adam’s bed, on the closet, under the bed, peering at him from the window. Madness.
“I tried to calm him, and I turned on the light, and I brought a flashlight to prove to him there was no one there. I also tried to explain some of the facts to him, to put things in perspective — me, the big expert, right? There I was in the middle of the night, giving him a seminar on the history of the conflict.”
“And then what?” Avram asks very quietly, his face fallen.
“Nothing. You couldn’t even talk to him. He was so miserable — you’ll laugh — that I almost thought of calling Sami, our driver, you know, the one who—”
“Yes.”
“To explain to him, or something like that. To show him that he was an Arab too, and that he wasn’t Ofer’s enemy and didn’t hate him and didn’t want his room.” She falls quiet and swallows a bitter lump: the memory of her last drive with Sami.
“At nine the next morning, Ofer had an appointment with our family doctor. At eight, after I sent Adam to school, I bundled up Ofer in a coat, sat him in the car, and drove to Latrun.”
“Latrun?”
“I’m a practical girl.”
With a stern and determined look, she had climbed up the steps, walked down the gravel path, put Ofer down in the center of the huge courtyard at the Armored Corps site, and told him to look.
He had blinked hazily, blinded by the winter sun. Around him were dozens of tanks, both ancient and new. Tank barrels and machine guns were aimed at him. She held his hand and walked him to one of the larger ones, a Soviet T-55. Ofer stood facing the tank, excited. She asked if he was strong enough to climb on it. He replied in amazement: “Am I allowed?” She helped him climb up the turret, then clambered up after him. He stood there, swaying, looked fearfully around, and asked, “Is this ours?”
“Yes.”
“You mean, all this?”
“Yes, and there’s lots more, we have loads of these.”
Ofer waved his arm in the air over the semicircle of tanks in front of him. Some of them had been discontinued as long ago as the Second World War, metal toads and iron tortoises, antiquated booty tanks from at least three wars. He asked to climb on another tank, and another, and another. He ran his fingers in awe over tracks, firing platforms, equipment chambers, and transmissions and rode like a cavalier on the barrels. At ten-thirty they both sat down in the restaurant at the Latrun gas station, where Ofer devoured a huge Greek salad and a three-egg omelet.
“Maybe it was a little primitive, my instant treatment, but it was definitely effective.” Then she adds drily, “Besides, at the time I thought that what was good enough for a whole country was good enough for my child.”
In the heart of a pasture, at the foot of a giant lone oak tree, a man is lying on the ground. His head rests on a large rock, a backpack sits beside him, and Ora’s blue notebook peeks out of one of its pockets.