She thinks back to the way she and Ilan used to talk about the boys. The talking was such an enjoyable part of the labor of family, and they did so much of it. And she often thought it might be thanks to Avram that she and Ilan had been able to talk like that. Had they not met him, had he not tutored them when they were still teenagers, they might have remained far quieter and more shy. So thank you, she tells him silently. Thank you for that, too.
More than anything, they liked to talk about the boys on their evening walks, after the bedtime ritual. Without asking Avram whether he wants her to, she takes him straight there, to the boys’ messy bedroom, roiling with the tumultuous preparations for the difficult, complicated sail into the night, with its shadows and foreignness, and the exile it imposes upon every child in his little, separate bed. After giving them one last hug, another cup of water, pee-pee again, and one more nightlight, and another kiss for the teddy bear or the monkey, and after Adam and Ofer had finished chattering and finally fallen asleep …
At first, when they still lived in Tzur Hadassah, they would walk the path to Ein Yoel. They passed by the plum and peach orchards of Mevo Beitar, and the remnants of quince, walnut, lemon, almond, and olive groves in the Arab villages that had ceased to exist — every so often Ora told herself she had to at least find out their names — and sometimes they walked to the Ma’ayanot River, down in a wadi full of gushing water and little gardens where the villagers of Hussan and Battir planted eggplants, peppers, beans, and zucchini. When the first intifada started and they were afraid to walk in that part, they chose a wooded area near a fork in the road—“in autumn, there are crisscrossing meadows of crocuses and cyclamens; maybe I’ll take you there one day; remind me”—and when they moved to Ein Karem, even before locating the nearest grocery store, they sought out a walking path that was not too capricious but not boring either, not remote but not too popular, a path where a couple could walk and talk calmly and sometimes hold hands or kiss. Over the years they found other paths, less open ones, in wadis and among olive groves, near sheikhs’ tombs and the ruins of houses and ancient watchmen’s huts. They walked these paths whenever they had time, which was sometimes early in the morning, but that was only when the kids were older and more independent, and Ofer could make fancy omelets and sandwiches for school, for both himself and Adam. Even during Ilan’s busiest times, he never gave up their daily walk: “Our walk.”
Avram listens and sees Ora and Ilan. A couple. Ilan’s sideburns might be gray by now, and Ora is almost entirely silver-haired, wearing glasses. Perhaps Ilan has glasses, too. They walk along their hidden path, at the same pace, very close to each other. Every so often her head turns to him. Sometimes their hands find each other and link. They talk in soft voices. Ora laughs. Ilan smiles his three-wrinkled smile. Suddenly Avram misses Ilan. Suddenly he is horrified to realize that he has not seen Ilan for twenty-one years.
“We have this way of talking, where I almost always know what he’s going to tell me. From the way he breathes before he starts a sentence, I know the direction he’ll take and which words he’ll use. And I’m so happy it’s that way, that we can guess what the other is thinking.”
But apparently Ilan found it annoying, she tells Avram. “It bored him that he could guess my mind by the way I breathed before I spoke or laughed or before I told a joke. Or maybe he just needed a break from me. That’s what he said. I guess I’m hard work.” She shrugs her shoulders. “But I started telling you something else — what was it? I’m so scattered. It’s wrong, and it’s not true either, it’s really not the whole truth, he doesn’t deserve it.”
She and Ilan on the path, in the evening, breaking the day into pieces and then tasting them together, holding them in their mouths, comparing impressions, adding more and more details to the big picture of their life, laughing at this and that, embracing, separating, arguing, consulting each other about work. Ilan didn’t understand much about her business, she tells Avram, and she didn’t expect him to. After all, how exciting can it be to hear about rubbing a sprained ankle or resetting a dislocated shoulder? But she was disappointed that he didn’t get as excited as she did over the little dramas she heard while releasing a bad back or a face whose musculature had gone wrong. She, on the other hand, had become his confidential advisor over the years, his secret jury, his final adjudicator. In his office it was an open joke: “Ora hasn’t confirmed it yet”; “Ilan is waiting for the supreme court decision.” She blushes — it’s a good thing it’s dark — and notes that he really did have complete confidence in her, utterly amazing confidence in her instincts, her intuitions, her wise heart (“Ilan said that,” she adds apologetically), even though she wasn’t really interested in the convoluted legal aspects of intellectual property, confidentiality agreements, non-compete contracts, trademarks for an irrigation system or a generic drug, or the question of when exactly an idea contained that slippery, mysterious thing that Ilan liked to call, with glimmering eyes, the inventional spark. And truth be told, she had never been attracted to the complex process of patent registration in Israel, or in the United States or Europe, nor in all of Ilan’s persuasive tricks that were meant to cause wealthy people to invest in a young doctor from Karmiel who had developed a medical camera that disintegrated in the bloodstream after use, or in a biochemist from Kiryat Gat who had discovered a cheap way to produce diesel from oil. “And Ilan, being Ilan …” She laughs. “That man, I’m telling you, he should have been a chess champion, or a politician, or a Mafia consigliere. You never knew that side of him, it only started developing after you.”
On their path, in the evening, Ora and Ilan easily and generously divvied up the next day’s chores. “We never fought over who would do what, you know? We were such a good team.” They quickly settled household affairs, bills, repairs, shuttling the kids, finances, and a few burning foreign and domestic topics, like finding an old-age home for her mother, or what to do about their lazy, lying, manipulative cleaning lady, whom neither of them had the courage to fire for years — even Ilan was afraid. Only their separation had put an end to her regime.
And more than anything else, they would circle above and around their children, constantly amazed at the two joyous young people sprouting up between them day by day. They quoted to each other things Adam had said and replayed things Ofer had done, and watched in astonishment, and compared them to who they had been years ago, or even weeks ago, amazed at how much they could change in such a short time—“Oh God, they’re growing up so fast!” They delighted in fragments of memories and inconsequential moments that grew between him and her, to be mighty and shining, because only to the two of them were they so precious, the riches of their lives.
“Ofer, too?” Avram asks softly. “Was Ofer also … I mean, for Ilan — Ofer, too?”
She smiles at him, her eyes full of light. Avram can see it even in the dark, and he takes a big sip of his boiling tea, burning his tongue and the roof of his mouth, and he holds the burn in his mouth with strange pleasure.
When she and Ilan walked and talked, they could feel the flowing force of life itself, the glory of life that lifted up their two little boys and carried them to their futures. Time after time they marveled at the strong bond between the boys—“they have some kind of secret; to this day there’s a secret between them”—and without ever saying it out loud, they both sensed that this connection between Adam and Ofer might be the central axis of their home and was probably the strongest and most solid and alive of all the currents — hidden and visible — that held the four of them together.