“Avram, tell me something.”
“What?”
“Stop for a minute.”
He stands waiting. His shoulders hunch up.
“Would you mind giving me a little kiss?”
He comes up close to her, rigid and bearish. Without looking at her, he hugs her, and plants a decisive kiss on her lips.
And lingers, and lingers.
“Ahhh.” She breathes softly.
“A-ah.” He sighs in surprise.
“Avram.”
“What?”
“Did you feel anything?”
“No, everything’s normal.”
She laughs. “ ‘Normal’!”
“I mean, like you used to be.”
“You still remember?”
“I remember everything.”
“Remember how I get dazed from kissing?”
“I remember.”
“And that sometimes I almost pass out from kissing?”
“Yes.”
“You be careful when you kiss me.”
“Yes.”
“How you loved me, Avram.”
He kisses her again. His lips are as soft as she remembered. She smiles as they kiss, and his lips move with hers.
“One more thing—”
“Hmmmmm …”
“Do you think we’ll ever sleep together?”
He presses her against his body and she feels his force. She thinks again of how much good this journey is doing him, and her.
They walk on, at first hand in hand, then they let go. Threads of new awkwardness stretch out between them, and nature itself winks behind their backs and plays nasty tricks on them, scattering yellow clods of asters and groundsel, blanketing purple clover and pink flax, erecting stalks of huge — but smelly — purple arum flowers, sprinkling red buttercups, and hanging baby oranges and lemons on the trees around them.
“Very arousing,” Ora says. “This walk, and the air. Isn’t it? Don’t you feel it?”
He laughs, embarrassed, and Ora — even her eyebrows suddenly feel warm.
He’s known Neta for thirteen years. She claims that she sat several evenings in the pub where he worked, on HaYarkon Street, and he did not take his eyes off her. He says he didn’t even notice her until she threw up and passed out on the bar one night. She was nineteen and weighed eighty-two pounds, and he carried her in his arms, against her will, on a stormy winter night — not a single cabdriver would take them — to a doctor friend in Jaffa. She squirmed in his arms the whole way, her gaunt limbs swirled around him and hit him mercilessly, and she hurled vile curses at him. When she ran out of those, she worked her way through the insults showered upon Sholem Aleichem by his stepmother, in the alphabetical order in which he had recorded them, calling him “carbuncle,” “forefather of all impurities,” “leper,” and “purloiner.” Avram himself mumbled the occasional choice curse to fill in what she omitted. When these ran out too, she started to pinch him painfully, and as she did so she laid out in detail the various uses one could make of his flesh, his fat, and his bones. Here Avram raised an eyebrow, and when she told him about the strips of wax she would be glad to produce from him, Avram — who never forgot a line he read — mumbled into her ear, “It was the idea also, that this same spermaceti was that quickening humor of the Greenland Whale.” This was a sentence he and Ilan had loved to quote in their youth, when Moby-Dick served as a particularly fertile ground for quotations. The tangle of vipers in his arms fell silent at once, gave a cross-eyed glance at the heavy monster exhaling condensation into the downpour, and noted, “There are some similarities between you and the book.”
“She was nineteen?” Ora asks. And thinks: I was sixteen when we met.
Avram shrugs. “She left home at sixteen and wandered around Israel and the whole world. The gypsy from next door. About two months ago was the first time she ever rented a real apartment. It was in Jaffa. Yuppified, you know.”
Ora doesn’t feel like talking about Neta now.
Reluctantly, she learns that Neta always looks starved—“not necessarily for food, but a general, existential starvation,” Avram explains with a laugh — and that her fingers almost always shake, maybe from drugs or maybe because, Avram quotes with a smile, “life zaps her at high voltage.” For years, she spent every summer living in an ancient Simca that a friend had left her. She also had a small tent, which she pitched whenever she found a place she wasn’t asked to leave. As he talks, the name “Neta” begins to etch a circle of frost in Ora’s gut, even though the sun is shining. What is this flood of speech suddenly coming out of him? What is he doing sticking Neta between us now?
“How does she make a living?” (Be generous, she commands.)
“This and that. It’s not really clear. She needs very little. You wouldn’t believe how little she needs. And she paints.”
Ora’s heart sinks a little lower. Of course she paints.
“Maybe you saw in my apartment, on the walls? That’s her.”
The huge, stirring charcoal drawings — how had she not asked him about them before? Perhaps because she had guessed the answer — prophets breast-feeding goats and lambs, an old man bending over a girl turning into a crane, a maiden being born from a wound in the chest of a godlike deer. She thinks about the drawing of a woman with a mohawk, and asks if that’s how Neta looks.
Avram chuckles. “Once, a long time ago. I didn’t like it, and now she has long hair, all the way down to here.”
“Yes. And the empty albums I saw at your place, the ones without any photos — are those hers, too?”
“No, those are mine.”
“Do you collect them?”
“I collect, I search, I aggregate. Things people throw out.”
“Aggregate?”
“You know, I put together all sorts of alte zachen.”
They are walking down the side of a cliff. The river, far below, is invisible. The dog leads, Ora walks behind her, and Avram brings up the rear as he tells her about his little projects. “It’s nothing, just something to pass the time. Like photo albums that people throw away, or albums that belonged to people who died.” He takes the photos out and puts in ones of other people, other families. He copies some of the photos onto tin boxes, right on the rust, or on the sides of ancient, rusty engines. “I’m very interested in rust lately. That place, or that moment, when iron turns to rust.”
It’s a good thing you found me, then, Ora thinks.
The path descends into the channel again, and suddenly Avram is alert and bright. He excitedly describes an atlas he found in the trash, printed in England in 1943. “If you looked at it, you wouldn’t understand anything about what happened in the world back then, because all the countries are still in their old borders, there’s no annihilation of the Jews, no occupation of Europe, no war, and I can sit looking at it for hours. So on the corners of the maps, I stuck pieces of a Russian newspaper I found in the dump, The Stalinist, also from ’forty-three, and there the war is described in detail, with battle maps and vast numbers of casualties. When I put those two objects together, I can really — Ora … I can feel electricity going through my body.”
She discovers that he and Neta do joint projects sometimes, too. “It’s this thing we have going together,” he says, blushing. They look for old objects and junk on the street, then they fantasize about what they could do with the things. “I’m always a little more practical,” he says with an apologetic snort, “and she’s much bolder.” He inadvertently drops himself from the story and describes some of what Neta has done in her brief life, her trials and tribulations, the skills she’s learned, her hospitalizations and adventures, and the men who have passed through her life. Ora thinks he is describing the life of a seventy-year-old. “She’s so brave,” he says admiringly, “much braver than I am. She may be the bravest person I’ve ever met.” He laughs softly when he remembers that Neta says she’s composed mainly of fears. Fears and cellulite.