They stand awkwardly by his side, afraid to wake him, yet drawn to the notebook. Ora snatches her glasses off her face and hides them in her fanny pack. She quickly runs her fingers through her disheveled hair to tidy it. She and Avram try to understand — exchanging looks and furrowed brows — how the man has managed to get here ahead of them. Ora, slightly envious, admires the tranquillity and confidence with which he has abandoned himself in this open, invadable space. His dark, masculine face is so exposed. Those glasses lie on his chest like a large butterfly, tied to a string around his neck.
Avram signals to her that if she has no objection, he will take the notebook. She hesitates. The notebook is nestled comfortably in his backpack pocket.
But Avram is already approaching, and with a pickpocket’s expertise he fishes the notebook out of the bag and signals to Ora that they should move away quickly if they don’t want to get embroiled in explanations, especially with someone who, at their first encounter, had made the mistake of mentioning the news.
She hugs the notebook to her heart, soaking up its warmth. The man goes on sleeping. With his mouth half open, he snores, making soft, woolly sounds. His arms and legs are clumsily splayed out. A rug of silver hair rises out of his shirt collar and awakens in Ora a vague longing to put her head there, to give herself over to a deep, infectious slumber, like his own. In a moment’s impulse, she tears out the last page of the notebook and writes, “I took back my notebook. Bye, Ora.” She hesitates, and quickly adds her phone number, in case he wants a more detailed explanation. When she leans over to put the note in his backpack, she notices them again: two identical wedding rings, one on his ring finger, the other on his pinky.
They slip away quickly, bubbling sweetly with the success of their plot, their eyes glimmering with childlike mischief. As they walk, she leafs through the notebook, amazed to see how much she had written that night by the river. She scans her lines with his eyes.
The path appears again, bending and twisting cheerfully, and the dog circles around them, sometimes runs alongside them and at other times sprints ahead quickly, then suddenly stops for no reason. She sits on her behind, turns her head back to Ora, the black arches above her eyes slightly raised, and Ora makes a similar gesture.
“She’s a happy dog, see? She’s smiling at us.”
But as they walk down the mountain, over heaps of shattered fallen rocks, a bothersome thought nags at her. She could not have written so many pages in one night. A few steps later, next to a huge rock with a mysterious oblong shape, she has to stop. She pulls the notebook out of her backpack, puts her glasses back on, and quickly leafs through the pages. She lets out a little shriek: “Look!” She shows Avram. “Look, it’s his handwriting!”
Avram studies the pages and his face wrinkles. “Are you sure? Because it looks like—”
She holds the page close to her face. It looks like her handwriting, or a masculine version of it: straight, neat characters, all at the same angle. “It really does look like mine,” she mumbles awkwardly, feeling naked. “Even I was confused.”
She turns the pages back, looking for the place where the writers switched. Twice, then three times, she flips past the right point before recognizing her final lines: Aren’t we like a little underground cell in the heart of the ‘situation’? And that really is what we were. For twenty years. Twenty good years. Until we got trapped. Immediately after those words — even without turning the page: such chutzpah! Even without a separating line! — she reads: Next to Dishon River I meet Gilead, 34, an electrician and djembe drummer, who used to be from a moshav in the north. Now lives in Haifa. What does he miss: “Dad was a farmer (pecans), and in slow years he did all kinds of jobs. There was a time when he gathered construction planks from dumps and sold them to an Arab in the village nearby.”
“What is this?” She thrusts the notebook at Avram’s chest. “What is this supposed to be?” She pulls it back and reads with a choked-up voice:
“Wood, you see — you have to know how to treat it. You can’t just throw it in the basement. You have to carefully stack big ones on big ones, and small ones on small ones, and put bricks on top of it all, otherwise it warps. But first of all you have to take out the nails. So I would stand with Dad at night in the sheltered area where he kept the wood—
“What on earth is this? What is all this stuff?” She raises her eyebrows at Avram, but his eyes are closed, and he signals: Keep reading.
“Dad had a blue undershirt, with holes here. And we had a crowbar that we connected to an extension handle, and we would take an iron chisel and separate, say, two planks nailed together. Dad on this end, me on that end, bracing, and after we separated them, we’d work together on the plank, pulling out nails with the other end of the hammer. It went on for hours, with a little bulb hanging above from a string, and that’s something I still miss to this day, the way I worked with him like that, together.
“There’s more. Listen, that’s not all. There’s more.
“Now about the regret. Well, that’s a harder one. I regret lots of things (laughs). I mean, do people just come out and tell you? Look, at some point I had a ticket to Australia, to work on a cotton farm. I had a visa and everything, and then I met a girl here and I canceled my trip. But she was worth it, so it’s just a partial regret.”
Ora frantically turns the page and her eyes run over the lines. She reads silently: Tamar, my darling, someone lost a notebook with her life story. I’m almost positive I met her earlier, when I walked down to the river. She looked like she was in a bad state. In danger even (she wasn’t alone). Ever since I saw her, I’ve been asking you what to do but you haven’t answered. I’m not used to not getting answers from you, Tammi. It’s all a little confusing. But I am asking the questions you posed at the end: What do we miss most? What do we regret?
Ora slaps the notebook shut. “What is he? Who is this?”
Avram’s face is gloomy and distant.
“Maybe a journalist, interviewing people along his way? But he doesn’t look like one at all.” A doctor, she remembers. He said he was a pediatrician.
She glances at the pages again: Near Moshav Alma I meet Edna, 39, divorced, a kindergarten teacher, Haifa: “What I miss most is my childhood days in Zichron Yaakov. Originally I’m a Zamarin, that was my maiden name, and I miss the days of innocence, the simplicity we had then. Everything was less complicated. Less, kind of, ‘psychological.’ You wouldn’t believe it to look at me, but I have three grown sons (laughs). It doesn’t show, does it? I married early and divorced even earlier…”
Ora is sucked in. She turns the pages rapidly and sees, on every page, longings and regrets. “I don’t understand,” she murmurs, feeling deceived. “He looked like such a”—she searches for the right word—“solid man? Simple? Private? Not a man who … who would just walk around asking people these kinds of questions.”
Avram says nothing. He digs the tip of his shoe into the gravel.
“And why in my notebook?” Ora asks loudly. “Aren’t there any other notebooks?”
She spins around and starts to walk away, head held high, pressing the notebook close to her. Avram shrugs his shoulders, looks back for a moment — there’s no one there, the guy must still be asleep — and follows her. He does not see the thin smile of surprise on her lips.
“Ora—”
“What?”
“Didn’t Ofer want to go on a big trip somewhere, after the army?”
“Let him finish the army first,” she says curtly.