“All the time.”
“Are you sure, Ofer?”
“I never missed any till now. Come on, let’s go to the room.”
She practically runs to her post behind the closed door. Her body, she notes to Avram, remembers that station very well from childhood, when she used to eavesdrop on her parents from behind the closed door of her own room, trying to pick up hints, voices, giggles. Human traces. Forty years have gone by — declares the tight-lipped judge in her mind — and what has madam done in those four decades? I’ve changed sides at the door, your honor.
“The cop’s name will be Speed,” Ofer says.
“And the thief?”
“Let’s call him Typhoon.”
“Okay.”
“Speed rides a motorbike and he has a hovercraft.”
“And the thief?” Adam asks weakly.
“The thief will have long hair, and on his shirt there’s a black star, and he has a bazooka and a laser drill.”
“Okay,” Adam says.
Ora puts her hand to her neck. This is an ancient game. They used to play it — how long ago? Two years? Three? They would lie on the rug and make up pairs of cops and robbers, or orcs and halflings. Except that back then Adam was the creator and Ofer the nodding pupil.
“Don’t,” Ofer says casually. “I’m doing the fingers today.”
“Did I do the fingers?”
“You didn’t notice.”
“Then do it already.”
“Wait. You have to pay a fine, ’cause you did mine.”
“What’s the fine?”
“The fine,” Ofer answers thoughtfully, “is that I’m taking the eye thing from you too, where you blink hard and open them.”
“But I have to do that one,” Adam whispers.
“Well, I took it.”
“I don’t have anything left.”
“You have the hands and feet left, and the one where you blow.”
There is a long silence. Then Ofer picks up as if nothing has happened. “Now I’m bringing in a cop with an iron fist. He’s called Mac Boom Boom, and he can open his shirt—”
“How many days are you taking mine for?”
“Three days not counting today.”
“So today I can still do it?”
“No, today neither of us can.”
“Neither of us? Then who’s going to do it?”
“No one. It doesn’t get done today.”
“Is that allowed?” Adam whispers sadly.
“Whatever we decide,” says Ofer in a Dungeon Master’s voice.
Ora tells Avram she will probably never know what really went on behind Adam and Ofer’s closed door during that whole period. Because what, in fact, did happen? Two kids, one almost thirteen, the other just over nine, spent every day together, usually just the two of them, for three or four weeks during summer vacation. They played computer games and foosball, chattered for hours, made up characters, and every so often they cooked shakshuka or pasta together. “And while they did all that — don’t ask me exactly how it happened — one of them saved the other.”
“You were asking if they’re alike?” His question from the night before suddenly pops into her head.
“Yes, that’s what I asked.”
“Ofer, I think, is a little more … Actually, a little less, um …”
“What?”
“Oh, it’s complicated. Look, let me put it this way: Adam is kind of … Kind of what? What am I trying to say?” She pouts. “It’s funny how hard it suddenly is to describe them. Almost everything I want to say about them sounds so inaccurate.” She shakes herself off and gathers her thoughts. “Adam — I’m only talking about outward appearances now, right? Well, he’s less, say, he draws less attention at first glance. You know? But on the other hand, when you really get to know him, he’s a very charismatic young man. The most charismatic. He’s the kind of guy who can—”
“What does he look like?”
“You mean, you want me to describe him?”
“You know me — I like details.”
The detaileater: a distant relative of the anteater, a virtually extinct subspecies of the order Pilosa, survives exclusively on details. That was how Avram had defined himself in a booklet he put together in his senior year at high school, “The Class of ’69 Encyclopedia of Human Fauna.” It contained his descriptions of the students and teachers, with precise illustrations, arranged by their zoological categorizations.
“He’s a little bit short, relatively speaking. I told you that. And he has very black hair, like Ilan’s, but he parts it in the middle and it comes down in a kind of wave over his left ear.” Ora illustrates. Her face sparkles at Avram.
“What?”
“Nothing at all,” she answers and shrugs one shoulder provocatively. But the more Avram comes back to life — quiet and heavy and lacking as he is — the more he magnetizes her to an internal precision, a private nuance that spreads the kind of warm ripples through her body she hasn’t felt in years.
Two young couples pass by. The women nod hello and look at them curiously. The men are immersed in a loud conversation. “We’re mostly into biometric identification smart cards,” the taller one says. “We’re working on a card called BDA, and what it does is that a Palestinian who wants to get in just has to hold his hand and face under the biometric reader. Get it? No contact with soldiers, no talking, no nothing. Clean as a whistle. CWC — communication without contact.”
“So what’s ‘BDA’ stand for?” asks the second man.
The first one snickers. “Actually, it’s an acronym for biometric access device, but we realized that that came out BAD, so we changed it.”
“And his left ear,” Ora says when the people have gone, “is always exposed. It’s cute, like a little pearl.”
She shuts her eyes: Adam. His cheeks still look a little red beneath his shadow of stubble, a childhood souvenir. And he has long sideburns. And big, bitter eyes.
“His eyes are what stand out most. They’re big, like Ofer’s, but completely different, more sunken and black. All in all we’re a family of eyes. And his lips—” She stops suddenly.
“What about them?”
“No, I think they’re beautiful.” She concentrates on her hands. “Yes.”
“But?”
“But … but here, on the top one, he has a sort of tic, a permanent one. Not a tic, but an expression—”
“What sort of expression?”
“Well …” She takes a deep breath, girding her face. The time has come.
“You see what I have here?”
He nods without looking.
“So it’s this. Except his is turned upward.”
“Yes.”
They skip from stone to stone across a shallow creek, holding on to each other every so often.
“Tons of flies today,” Avram says.
“It must be the heat.”
“Yes. This evening it will be more—”
“Can I ask you something?”
“What?”
“Does it really stand out?”
“No, no.”
“Because you didn’t say anything about it.”
“I hardly noticed.”
“I had this thing, it was nothing, something in the nerves on my face, about a month after Ilan left. It happened in the middle of the night. I was alone at home. I was terrified. Does it look awful?”
“I’m telling you, you can hardly see it.”
“But I can feel it.” She touches the right corner of her upper lip, pushes it slightly up. “I keep thinking my face is falling to one side.”
“But you really can’t see anything, Ora’leh.”
“It’s just a couple of millimeters that I can’t feel. The sensation in the rest of my lips is totally normal.”
“Yes.”
“It should go away at some point. It won’t always be like this.”
“Of course.”
They walk down a narrow path among orchards of strawberry and walnut trees.