“And they lead this one person slowly, gently, between the rows, and everyone strokes him, touches him, hugs him, whispers in his ear: ‘You are so beautiful, you are perfect, you are an angel.’ It goes on that way right to the end, and then someone is waiting for him with a big, pampering hug, and then he steps back into the rows of givers.”
“Did she get hugged like that?”
“Wait. First she was in the rows, and for a few hours she stroked and hugged and whispered all those lines, which usually make her giggle. Those kinds of words really don’t work for her.” He perks up. “Listen, you have to meet her.”
“Okay, when we have a chance. And then what happened?”
“When her turn came to receive, to walk through the lines, she didn’t go in.”
Ora nods. Even before he said it, she knew.
“She ran away to the forest and sat there until morning. She couldn’t do it. She felt that it wasn’t her time to receive yet.”
Ora suddenly knows what Avram and Neta share: they have both found that those who stroke can also hit. She hugs herself tightly as she walks. This girl Neta arouses conflicting emotions in her, because suddenly, in the last few moments, she feels affection toward her, and a maternal tenderness. And Neta knows about Ofer. Avram told her about Ofer. “Does she know anything about me?”
“She knows you exist.”
Ora swallows heavily, then finally manages to cough the pit out of her throat. “And do you love her?”
“Love? What do I know? I like being with her. She knows how to be with me. She gives me space.”
Not like me. Ora thinks about the boys and their complaints.
Too much space, Avram thinks fearfully. Where are you, Nettush?
After they’d finished painting her little apartment, they took the ladders out onto the roof and she taught him how to ladder-walk. “In her wanderings, when she travels sometimes, she makes a living as a street performer. She swallows fire and swords, she juggles, and joins street circuses.” Like two drunken grasshoppers, they’d walked toward each other under the evening sky, between the water tank and the antenna. Then she leaped up off the ladder onto the roof ledge and Avram’s blood froze.
“So what do you say?” she asked with her sweet, sad smile. “It’s not going to get any better than this. Should we get it over with now?”
He leaned over and gripped his ladder. Neta crab-walked along the edge of the roof. Behind her he could see rooftops and a bloodred sunset and a mosque dome. “You’re a tough nut, Avram,” said Neta, almost to herself. “You’ve never, for example, told me that you love me. Not that I ever asked you, as far as I can remember, but still, a girl needs to hear it from her man once in her life, or something like it, even a paraphrase. But you’re cheap. At most you’ll give me an ‘I love your body’ or ‘I love being with you’ or ‘I love your ass.’ That kind of witty sidestep. So maybe I should get the message already?”
The ladder’s legs clicked against the stone lip of the roof. Avram decided in a flash that if something happened to her, he would, without thinking, throw himself after her.
“Go into my room,” she murmured. “On the table, next to the ashtray, there’s a small brown book. Go and get it.”
Avram shook his head.
“Go, I won’t do anything until you get back. Scout’s honor.”
He got off his ladder and went into the room. He was there for a second or two, and every vein in his body yelled out that she was jumping. He grabbed the book and went back to the roof.
“Now read where I marked it.”
His fingers trembled. He opened the book and read: “ ‘ … for I had my life support in Vienna. I use this expression to describe the one person who has meant more to me than any other since the death of my grandfather, the woman who shares my life and to whom I have owed not just a great deal but, frankly, more or less everything, since the moment when she first appeared at my side over thirty years ago.’ ” He turned over the book: Wittgenstein’s Nephew by Thomas Bernhard.
“Keep going, but with more feeling.”
“ ‘Without her I would not be alive at all, or at any rate I would certainly not be the person I am today, so mad and so unhappy, yet at the same time happy.’ ”
“Yes,” she said to herself, her eyes closed in deep concentration.
“ ‘The initiated will understand what I mean when I use this expression to describe the person from whom I draw all my strength — for I truly have no other source of strength — and to whom I have repeatedly owed my survival.’ ”
“Thank you,” said Neta, still swaying on the ladder as if in a dream.
Avram said nothing. He seemed loathsome and despicable in his own eyes.
“Do you understand what the problem is?”
He moved his head to indicate something between yes and no.
“It’s very simple. You are my life support, but I’m not your life support.”
“Neta, you’re—”
“Your life support is her, that woman who had a child with you, whose name you won’t even tell me.”
He buried his head between his shoulders and did not answer.
“But look.” She smiled and brushed the hair away from her eyes. “It’s not such an original tragedy, what we have here. And not such a big problem, either. The world is just a very unfocused picture. I can live with that — how about you?”
He did not answer. She asked for so little, but he could not give her even that. “Come on, Neta.” He held out his hand.
“But think about it?” Her soft eyes lingered on him, full of hope.
“Okay. Now come on.”
A flock of starlings soared by with a flutter of wings. Avram and Neta stood there, both immersed in themselves.
“Not yet?” she murmured to herself after a while, as though responding to an unheard voice. “It’s not time yet?”
With two swift strokes she landed the ladder on the rooftop floor. “Look at you,” she said, sounding surprised. “You’re shaking all over. Are you cold inside? In your no-heart?”
Ora tells him more about Adam the next day. She would prefer to talk again about the old Adam, baby Adam, about the three years when he was hers alone. But he asks about today’s Adam, and without holding anything back, she describes her older son, whose eyes are always red and bloodshot, whose body is slender and a little stooped, hunched forward with troubling languor, his hands and fingers drooping to the ground, his lip pulled up with a slightly contemptuous expression of subtle, nihilistic scorn.
She is struck by the things she says about him and by the fact that she is capable of looking at Adam this way. Ilan’s objective view of the boys is now hers, too. She is learning to speak a foreign language.
Note by note, she depicts a young man of twenty-four who looks both weak and tough at the same time, conveying a quiet strength beyond his age. “I don’t quite understand it,” she says hesitantly, “this strength he has. It’s something elusive, even a bit”—she swallows—“dark.” There, I’ve said it.
“His face isn’t anything special, at least not at first sight — he’s pale, with cheeks darkened by stubble, sunken black eyes, and a very prominent Adam’s apple — still, to me he looks exceptional. I find him really beautiful from certain angles. And he has this combination of features that looks as though several of his ages are all there at the same time. I find it so interesting sometimes just to look at him.”