“They think it’s Tai Chi,” Ilan hissed, and Ora whispered that it was starting to drive her mad. He put a hand on her arm. “Wait. He’ll get sick of it. How long can he keep this up?”
“Look at how totally indifferent he is to people watching him.”
“Yes, that’s what worries me a little.”
“A little? Adam? In front of everyone?”
She thought about Ilan’s father, who during his final days in the hospital had lost all shame and would undress in front of everyone to show yet another place on his body where the growth had spread.
“And look how Ofer keeps peeking at him, all the time,” Ilan said.
“Think about what it must do to him, to see Adam like that.”
“Has he talked to you about it?”
“Ofer? Nothing. I tried to ask him this morning, when we were alone on the beach. Nothing.” She forced a smile. “Well, he’s not going to collaborate against Adam.”
Adam kissed his fingertips and showered light touches on his waist, thighs, knees, and ankles in the water. He straightened up, spun around in a circle, and blew in all four directions.
“What’s going to happen when school starts in September, I want to know.”
“Wait. There are almost two months to go. It’ll pass by then.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“It will, it will.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“How could it not?”
Now she pulls her knees in to her chest, holds her breath, and looks at Avram for a long time. Avram feels that he can’t sit still for much longer. Ants are crawling all through his body.
Adam seemed to grow more distant day by day. Bad thoughts congregated, and Ora sensed that they had been lying in wait for some time. During the day they hovered like shadows in her head. At night, she sleepily banished them until she was exhausted, and then they descended. Ilan woke her and caressed her face and held her close to him and told her to breathe with him, slowly, until she calmed down.
“I had a nightmare,” she said. Her face was buried in his chest. She would not let him turn on the light, afraid he might read in her eyes what she had seen: Avram walked past her on the street, dressed in white and looking very pale, and when he came close he murmured that she should buy the newspaper today. She tried to stop him, to ask how he was and why he insisted on being estranged from her, but he pulled his arm away from her grip in disgust and left. The newspaper headline said that Avram was planning to go on a hunger strike outside her house until she gave in and delivered one of her sons to him.
Adam needed new gym shoes for the school year, and she kept putting off the shopping expedition. He asked her repeatedly to take him to the mall so he could choose a gift for Ofer, and while only two weeks earlier she would have been filled with excitement by such a request—“And after we finish shopping, can I take you out to a café?”—she now avoided him with such feeble excuses that he seemed to understand, and he stopped asking.
Every day brought new symptoms. He quickly pulled his arms away from his shoulders and to the sides before talking. He pulsed his fists open and closed before he said “me.” The washing and rinsing became more and more frequent. In the course of a single meal he was capable of getting up to wash his hands and mouth five or ten times.
After a Shabbat spent at home, during which Ilan saw Adam for a whole day, including three meals, he told Ora, “Let’s call someone.”
As predicted, Adam refused even to hear about it. He hurled himself on the floor and screamed that he wasn’t crazy and they should leave him alone. When they tried to persuade him, he locked himself in his room and pounded on the door for a long time.
“We’ll wait a bit,” said Ilan, as they both tossed and turned in bed. “Let him get used to the idea.”
“How long? How long can you wait with this?”
“Let’s say, a week?”
“No, that’s too long. A day. Maybe two, but no more.”
There was something paralyzing about watching Adam in the days that followed. Her child was turning into a process. During the hours she spent at home with him — when she could not find an excuse to go out for some fresh air, to absorb the smooth, harmonious movements of other people like an elixir, and to suck up some bitter jealousy at the sight of Adam’s peers having fun on their summer vacations — in those hours with him she witnessed his entire existence being chopped up into separate parts, whose connection was growing more and more tenuous. At times it seemed that the gestures — the “phenomena,” as she and Ilan called them — were themselves the tendons and nerves that now sustained the affinity between the parts of the child he used to be.
“It all happened so close,” she says, whether to Avram or to herself. “It happened inside our home. You could reach out and touch it, but there was nothing to hold on to. Your hand closed in on emptiness.”
“Aha,” says Avram faintly.
“Tell me if you don’t feel like hearing this.”
He gives her another look that says, Stop talking nonsense.
She shrugs as if to say, How am I supposed to know? I’ve spent so many years getting used to being silent with you.
They set up their little camp at the spring of Ein Yakim in the Amud River wadi, next to a Mandate-era pumping station. Ora spreads the cloth on the ground and lays out food and dinnerware. Avram gathers wood, makes a circle of stones, and builds a fire. The dog crosses the skinny river back and forth, shaking her wet fur off in thousands of sprays, and looks at them playfully. Before sitting down to eat, they wash socks, underwear, and shirts in the spring water and lay them on bushes to dry when the sun rises. Avram digs through his backpack and finds a large, white Indian shirt and fresh sharwal pants. He changes his clothes behind a shrub.
The next day, when she was alone at home with Adam, he told her about something in his favorite computer game, and he seemed happy and full of excitement. She tried to focus on what he was saying and share his happiness, but it was hard: now he marked the ends of his sentences with exhalations, too. And after certain letters — she thought it was the sibilant consonants, but this rule may have had exceptions that demanded their own penalties — he sucked in his cheeks. Sentences that ended with question marks incurred a new tic: he folded back his upper lip toward his nose.
She stood in the kitchen with him and fought a malicious urge to stick her lips out at him in a crude imitation. So at least he’d know how he looked. So he’d understand what people saw when they looked at him, and how hard it was to tolerate. She managed to stop herself only when she realized that was exactly what her mother had done to her after Ada. She’d had her own little physical quirks, though far less severe than these.
But when she saw Adam’s piercing, knowing look, she had a sudden impulse to wrap her arms around him. It had been weeks since she’d hugged him. He wouldn’t let anyone touch him, and she’d stopped trying, averse to touching his alien body. Perhaps she had the vague feeling that her touch would not find warm skin but a hardened shell. Now she kissed his cheek and forehead. She’d been so foolish to avoid it, to collaborate with his aversion, when perhaps all he needed was a simple, strong hug. And indeed, in one large wave, he suddenly emerged from captivity, leaned his whole body into her, and put his little head on her chest. She responded fervently and felt her own power again, her vivacity. How could she have agreed to give up on all that? How had she even considered letting her child be treated by a stranger before she herself had given him this simple, natural thing? She swore that from this moment on she would give him everything she had, empty her healing powers into him, her vast experience of treating bodies and giving calming massages. How had she withheld all this from him?