“I couldn’t be with you,” she says simply.
The sun sets slowly, and the earth gives off a fresh, steaming scent of insides. Ora and Avram lie motionless in their nest on the field. Above them the sky mingles with the various evening blues. Take a hat and put two slips of paper in it. No, you don’t have to know what you’re drawing lots for. You’re allowed to guess, but do it silently. And quickly. Ora, they’re waiting for us, there’s a command car outside. Now pick one out. Did you do it? Which one? Are you sure?
Her face grows long in the shadows. She shuts her eyes. Which one did you pick? And which one did you want to pick? And which one did you really pick? Are you sure? Are you really sure?
“Listen, I just couldn’t breathe. You were too much for me.”
“How could it be too much?” Avram asks quietly. “What is too much when you love someone?”
“Adam and Ofer were so lazy, it took them forever to find girlfriends,” she tells Avram the next day, walking through Switzerland Forest. “They spent almost all their time with each other, always shared a room. They refused to be separated until finally, when Adam was about sixteen, we gave them separate rooms. We thought it was time.”
“Where did you put the rooms?”
Ora hears the flicker in his voice and tenses. “In … you know, downstairs, where the storage room was. That basement? Where your mother’s Singer sewing machine was?”
“So you partitioned the basement?”
“With drywall, yes. Nothing major.”
“Wasn’t it too crowded?”
“No, it came out nicely. Two rooms, kind of nooks. It was great for teenagers.”
“And a bathroom?”
“A small one, you know, with a tiny sink.”
“What about air?”
“We put two windows in. More like peepholes. Symbolic.”
“Yes,” he says thoughtfully. “Sure.”
When he’d finished all his treatments and surgeries and hospitalizations, Avram had decided he didn’t want to go back to his mother’s house in Tzur Hadassah. Not even to visit. Ilan and Ora, with help from Ora’s parents, and loans and a mortgage, bought the house from Avram. They made a point of buying it at a higher price than its real value — much higher, Ilan liked to stress whenever the topic came up — and they followed all the rules and carried out the transaction through a lawyer who had been a friend of Avram’s from before. But Ora — and perhaps Ilan too, although he always denied it — never forgave herself for that heartless act, for their prolonged torment of him (there, she’s finally said it to herself), which ended only when she and Ilan moved to Ein Karem. Now, faced with his pained look, as though blinded by the attempt to follow the innovations and changes in the home that was once his, she can hardly resist giving him the list of rationales that are always on the tip of her tongue, ready for use: everything was done with the best of intentions, thinking only of his needs; they wanted to save him from having to deal with buyers and agents; they really thought he’d feel better if he knew that in some way the house was staying in the family. But they purchased his house from him (at full price, yes, at an excellent price), and they lived their lives in it, she and Ilan and Adam and Ofer.
Sometimes, when no one was looking, she would touch a wall as she walked by, in the rooms or in the hallway, slowly sliding her fingers over it. Sometimes she would sit and read, as he had, at the top of the steps to the yard, or on the windowsill facing the wadi. There were the window handles, which she would linger on every time she opened them, as if in a secret handshake. There were the bath and the toilet, the cracked ceilings, the cabinets with their dense smell. There were the sunken tiles and the ones that stuck out. There were the rays of sun that came from the east in the morning, and she would stand and bathe in them for long moments, sometimes with little Ofer in her arms, quietly watching her. There was the evening breeze, which came from the wadi, which she would sway in, letting it float over her skin and breathing it deep inside.
“Surprisingly, Ofer had a girlfriend before Adam did.” Ora hopes this information will make Avram happy. But he darkens a little and asks what she means by “surprisingly.” She explains: “After all, he’s younger. But I guess Adam needed Ofer to pave the way in that realm, too. Even when they were grown up, they were both at home with us all the time until Adam’s military service, until the army separated them, and then everything changed. Suddenly Adam had friends, lots of friends, and so did Ofer, and then Ofer found Talia. All at once they both opened up and went out into the world — so the army did them some good after all. But until Adam turned eighteen, until his enlistment, most of the time it was just him and Ofer. I mean, him and Ofer and us, the four of us together”—she mimes stuffing something tightly into a suitcase or backpack. “Even though they always had lots of things going on, school, and Adam’s band, we still felt, Ilan and I, that they were mostly directed inward, to the house, and even more, to their own relationship. I told you, they had this secret.” Her hands grip the backpack straps and her head tilts slightly. She hardly sees what is in front of her: cliffs, raspberry hedges, blinding sunlight. It suddenly occurs to her that within the longer, cumbersome secret, Ofer and Adam had made their own little secret, a kind of igloo in the ice.
“It was fun, that togetherness. They were always with us, they went everywhere with us—‘like bodyguards,’ Ilan used to joke, or maybe complain — and we went on trips together, and sometimes to movies, and they even came with us to our friends’ sometimes, which is really hard to believe.” She gives a meager laugh. “They would come with us and sit on the side and talk as if they hadn’t seen each other in a year. It was wonderful, I’m telling you, it was such a rare thing. But still, Ilan and I always have — always had—the feeling that it was a bit, how can I put it—”
For an instant, in the wandering beam of her gaze, Avram sees the four of them moving through the rooms of the familiar house. Four bright, elongated human spots, with a dim light around their edges, like figures seen through night goggles, foggy shadows surrounded by a greenish, downy halo, stuck to one another, moving clumsily together. And when they briefly come apart, they each leave in the other strands of sticky, glowing fibers. To his surprise, he senses a constant effort emanating from them. There is tension and caution. He is even more astounded to discover that there is no ease or pleasure in the four of them. They do not evince the joy of living together, which he had always pictured when he thought of them, when he had given in to thoughts of them, when he had drizzled into his veins, drop by drop, the poison of thinking about them.