She sat down in the dark next to Ilan, who quickly wrapped her in his arms and clung to her with strange fervor and, she thought, a hint of awe.
“What?” Ilan asked in a whisper. “What did you feel?”
She did not answer. Afraid to wake up, afraid it would disappear, afraid that the place in which she had known Adam would melt away like a dream.
• • •
Ora yawns and enjoys seeing Avram unwittingly repeat her yawn. “Let’s continue tomorrow,” she says. Although he would like to hear more, Avram gets up and clears away their dinner, picks up the trash, and rinses the dishes, then rolls out his sleeping bag near hers. He does all this in silence, and she sees the thoughts and the questions darting around his forehead and tells herself: Tomorrow, tomorrow. She goes behind some bushes to do her business and thinks of Scheherazade, and then they both undress, back to back, and zip themselves up in their sleeping bags, and lie with their eyes open by the glowing embers of the fire. Avram, restless, gets up and fills two bottles at the river, douses the embers, and lies down again.
As soon as the fire goes out, all the creatures around the river awake and a chorus of toads, night birds, jackals, foxes, and crickets erupts into a deafening commotion. They wail, screech, snort, caw, yowl, and chirp. Ora and Avram lie there feeling the entire riverbed rustle and stir around them. Small and large animals pass next to them and over them, running or flying, and Ora whispers, “What’s going on?” Avram whispers back, “They’ve all gone mad.” The dog stands up restlessly, her eyes aglimmer in the dark. Ora needs Avram to come and lie next to her, even just hold her hand and calm her with a caress, with long, quiet breaths, the way Ilan does — did — but she doesn’t say a word. She won’t push him, and he does not offer, but the dog moves closer, step by cautious step, until finally she is standing beside her. Ora reaches out and strokes her fur in the dark, and the fur trembles with tension because of the sounds all around, or because of the human touch, her first contact in such a long time. Ora strokes and strokes, rubbing delightedly, feeling the warmth of this new body, but the dog suddenly recoils, unable to bear it any longer, and goes off to lounge not far away and watches Ora.
The three of them lie quiet and slightly afraid, and the commotion gradually dies down and gives way to the hum of mosquitoes. Meaty and impudent, they hack at every exposed inch of flesh. Ora hears Avram slap himself and curse, and she curls up in her sleeping bag and zips it around her head, leaving only a tiny opening for air, and she sinks down into herself, sleepily arranges her head so it nestles in her favorite place, in the round of Ilan’s shoulder, and then, subtly, like the gushing of a small spring, a longing awakens in her for the house in Ein Karem. She yearns for their house, for the scents embedded in it and the textures woven through the window lattices at different times of day, and for Ilan’s and the boys’ voices rolling through the hallways. She walks through the house, room by room.
When Ofer surfaces in her, she gently moves him away, tells him it’s okay, not to worry, she’s doing what needs to be done. He shouldn’t think about her right now. He should look after himself there, and she’ll look after him here.
A few months after she and Ilan separated, she had gone back for one last time to the empty house. She opened the blinds and the windows in all the rooms, turned on all the faucets, watered the neglected garden, rolled up the rugs, dusted, swept the floor, and washed it thoroughly. She spent almost a whole morning there, without sitting down or drinking a glass of water. When she was finished cleaning, she drew the blinds and closed the windows and turned off the power and walked out.
It should at least be clean, she thought. It’s not the house’s fault we broke up.
Avram’s voice came through: “Ora, are they similar?”
She has almost fallen asleep, and his question shocks her awake. “Who?”
“The boys. Today. Are they similar?”
“To who?”
“No, I mean … to each other. Their personalities.”
She sits up and rubs her eyes. He is sitting up bundled in his sleeping bag.
“Sorry, I woke you up,” he mumbles.
“It’s okay, I was barely asleep. But what’s the sudden …” Her tongue steals a circle of delight around his “boys.” As though he has finally accepted her own vision of them, even her tone of voice when she thinks about them. She watches him affectionately. For a moment it seems possible: Uncle Avram. “Maybe we should make some tea?”
“Do you want some?” He jumps up and runs to gather branches in the dark. She hears him walk into a bush, curse, slip on the wet stones, grow farther away and then closer. She holds in her laughter.
“Yes and no,” she says afterward, with a cup of tea warming her hands and face. “They’re completely different in the way they look, I told you. On the other hand, you couldn’t have any doubt about them being brothers. Although Adam is more—”
“More what?”
She stops. Afraid that now, in her state, in the state of her relationship with Adam, she may get carried away into all sorts of unnecessary and unfair comparisons between Adam and Ofer. How could she—
She sighs deeply, and the dog looks up and comes to sit next to her.
“What?” Avram asks tenderly. “What did you remember?”
“Wait.”
She, whose mother always had compared her to others, even in front of total strangers, and almost always to her detriment. She, who had sworn at a very young age that when she had her own children she would never, ever …
“Ora?” Avram asks carefully. “Listen, we don’t have to …”
“No, it’s okay. Just give me a minute.”
Of course she and Ilan had often compared the boys to each other. How could they not?
“At first, what was difficult in the first few years with Ilan, what I found really intolerable, was the way he looked at the boys. You know how he is, with his exact, objective definitions.”
“Oh yeah, I know that. I know all about Ilan and his onslaughts of rationalism.”
“Yes, that’s exactly it.” She laughs and scratches the dog’s head.
Ilan’s definitions, in which he summarized Adam’s and Ofer’s personalities, their virtues and their shortcomings, seemed to determine their fate for all eternity without any possibility of appeal or even the change and development that come with age. Only years later — she finds that she can talk about this now with Avram; she thinks he understands — only years later had she learned that she could contradict those definitions of his with statements that were no less thoughtful and lucid, with a sober and different perspective that always illuminated the boys in a brighter, more generous light. When she did so, she found how relieved and even happy Ilan was to agree and adopt her position. It sometimes even appeared as though she had redeemed him from something in himself.
“Why is he like that, can you tell me?” she asks Avram. “You knew him so well”—she almost says, You knew him better than I did—“so you tell me, why does he always fight himself? His softness, his gentleness. Why must he always be such a clenched fist?”
Avram shrugs his shoulders. “With me, he wasn’t like that.”
“I know. He really wasn’t.”
They sit quietly as the cicadas around them go berserk. Ora wonders if she is doomed to keep trying to understand Ilan and his illusions for the rest of her life, or whether the day will come when she can simply be herself, with none of his echoes inside her. But the idea offers no relief or gladness, and her yearnings descend in full force.