“And when Ofer had a girlfriend,” he asks hesitantly, “wasn’t Adam jealous?”
“At first it wasn’t easy. Yes, Adam had a hard time with Ofer finding a new soul mate, and with the fact that he had no part in this very close connection they shared. Just think — it was the first time that had happened since Ofer was born. But they were a nice couple, Ofer and Talia. There was a tenderness between them.” She finds it hard to talk. “Later, later.”
She picks up after a while. “When Talia left Ofer, he crawled into his bed and barely left for a week. He stopped eating, completely lost his appetite. He just drank, mostly beer, and friends came to see him. All of a sudden we saw how many friends he had, and even though it wasn’t planned, they basically began to sit shiva in our house.”
“Shiva?!”
“Because they sat around his bed and consoled him, and when they left others came, and the door was open all week long, morning, noon, and night, and he kept asking his friends to tell him about Talia, to tell him everything they remembered about her, in great detail. And by the way, he wouldn’t let them say anything bad about her, only good things. He’s such a kind soul.” She giggles. “I haven’t even told you anything about him, you haven’t begun to know him …” Suddenly she is flooded with nostalgia. Simple, hungry, incautious longing. She hasn’t seen him for a long time, or talked to him. This may be the longest she has gone without speaking to him since he was born. “And the guys played him songs Talia liked, and watched one of her favorite movies, My Dinner with André, in an endless loop. And they gobbled down bags and bags of Bamba and Tuv Taam, which she was addicted to. And this went on for a whole week. And of course I had to feed and water the whole tribe. You wouldn’t believe the quantities of beer those guys could down in one evening. Well, you probably could, because of the pub.”
Maybe, she thinks, Ofer or Adam, or even both of them together, on one of their pub crawls in Tel Aviv one evening, when they were on leave from the army, had turned up at his pub. Could he have somehow recognized them? Known without knowing?
“Ora?”
“Yes.” She smiles to herself. “Look, I guess it turned into this thing around town”—like everything Ofer touched, she intimates—“and people started turning up who didn’t really know Ofer but had heard that something was going on, this kind of love shiva. They came and sat there telling stories about their own soured loves, and about affairs that had ended, and all sorts of heartbreaks they’d experienced.”
An afternoon ray of sun smooths her forehead, and Ora distractedly turns her cheek to pamper herself in the warmth. Her face is young and lovely now, as though nothing bad has ever happened to her. She can get up now and go out into life, whole and innocent and pure.
“And by the way, that’s how Adam met Libby, who became his girlfriend. She’s like an overgrown puppy, a homeless puppy, a bear cub, although she’s a head taller than he is. During the first days of the shiva she just sat in a corner and cried nonstop, and then she pulled herself together and started to help me with the food and the drinks and the dishes, emptying ashtrays and taking out empty bottles. But she was so exhausted from something that she would fall asleep in any available bed around the house. Just collapse into a slumber. And somehow, without us noticing, in our sleep, she came into our lives, and now they’re together, she and Adam. I think they’re happy, because even though Libby is a puppy, she’s also very maternal toward him.” A tinge of sorrow trails behind Ora’s voice. “I think he’s really happy with her. At least I hope so.”
She surrenders to a deep, pent-up sigh, a sigh of total bankruptcy. “Look, I wasn’t exaggerating when I told you a few days ago that I know nothing about his life now.”
The dog stops and comes up to Ora when she hears her sigh. Ora leans down to the damp, sharp snout nuzzling between her thighs. She speaks to Avram over the dog’s head. “Sometimes, when I say a certain word, or if I say something in a slightly different tune—”
“Or when you laugh suddenly—”
“Or cry—”
“She responds immediately.”
“Yesterday, when you were chasing the flies around with a towel and shouting, did you see how upset she was? What did that remind you of, sweetie?” Ora tenderly rubs the dog’s head as she leans into her. “Where did you come to us from?” She kneels on one knee, holds the dog’s face between her hands, and rubs noses with her. “What happened to you? What did they do to you?”
Avram watches them. The light turns Ora’s hair even more silver and glows in the dog’s fur.
“So you don’t have any contact with him, with Adam?” he asks when they start walking again.
“He totally cut me off.”
Avram does not reply.
“There was this thing,” she mutters. “Not with him. It was with Ofer, actually, in the army. We had this whole story with him, some screwup that happened in his unit in Hebron. No one died, and Ofer wasn’t to blame — he certainly wasn’t the only one. There were twenty soldiers there, so why would it be his fault? Never mind, not now. I made a mistake, I know that, and Adam was very angry at me for not supporting Ofer”—she takes a deep breath and portions out, one by one, the words that have been tormenting her ever since—“for not being able to support Ofer wholeheartedly. Do you understand? Do you understand the absurdity? Because with Ofer I’ve already made up long ago. Everything’s fine between us”—but her eyes shift a little, this way and that—“but Adam, because of his lousy principles, won’t forgive me to this day.”
Avram doesn’t ask anything. Her heart pounds in her throat. Did she do the right thing by telling him? She should have told him long ago. She’s afraid of his judgment. Maybe he’ll also think, like Adam, that she’s an unnatural mother.
“Do they hug?” Avram asks.
“What did you say?” Ora jolts out of a fleeting daydream.
“No, nothing.” He sounds startled.
“No, you asked if they—”
“Hug. Sometimes, yes. Ofer and Adam.”
She looks at him gratefully. “Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know, I’m just trying to imagine them together, that’s all.”
That’s all? She rejoices inside: That’s all?
They’ve walked far. At the village of Kinneret they had stocked up on food and visited the nearby cemetery, where they leafed through the book of Rahel’s poems chained to the ground next to her grave. They crossed the Tiberias-Tzemach highway, strolled through orchards of date trees, and paid their respects to a mule named Booba, buried near the Jordan River, who had Loyally Plowed, Tilled, and Furrowed the Kinneret Soil in the 1920s and 1930s. They saw pilgrims from Peru and Japan sing and dance as they dipped in the river. They walked a ways between the clear river and a foul-smelling sewage channel, until the path led them away from the Jordan and toward the Yavne’el. At Ein Petel they enjoyed a feast fit for kings in the shade of eucalyptus and oleander trees. They could see Mount Tabor and knew without a doubt that they would reach it.
The day is extremely hot and, feeling toasted, they dip in the occasional spring or run through giant sprinklers on the fields. They get scratched by raspberry bushes, and every so often they doze in a spot of shade, then get up and walk for a while longer. They slather themselves repeatedly with sunscreen; he spreads it on the back of her neck and she does his nose, and they sigh at how unsuitable their skin is for this climate. As he walks, Avram carves “the stick of the day” for Ora with Ofer’s penknife, and today it’s a thin oak branch, slightly crooked and partially gnawed, perhaps by a goat. “Not the most convenient thing,” she announces after trying it, “but it’s full of personality, so it can stay.”