She knows everything will be fine soon, even good. They always enjoy themselves at restaurants, and the boys like going out with her and Ilan. All in all the four of them are a great team. Soon the jokes will come, and the giggles and the waves of affection. In just a short while she’ll be able to splash around in the warm, sweet latency that commingles—“for such rare moments; far rarer than you might imagine”—complete happiness and family. But there’s always that lousy, unavoidable moment before, a sort of transit toll they charge her, the three of them, on her way to that sweetness. It is a regular torture ritual that she perceives as cunningly, conspiratorially, aimed solely at her, which she alone provokes in them, and it is precisely because they sense how much she yearns for that sweetness that they tighten ranks to withhold it from her and make her path to it a little harder. “Why? Don’t ask me, ask them.” They sit there in front of her, the three of them and their fingertips, the three of them in their eagerness for a little scheming against her, unable to resist the temptation, not even Ilan. “He didn’t used to be like that,” she says, letting out what she never meant to tell. She and Ilan used to be … well, of one mind — she almost said “of one flesh”—and when they had to, they presented a united front against the boys. He was a full partner. But the last few years—“I really don’t understand it,” she says, seething with overdue anger — since the boys started growing up, something went wrong, as though he had decided it was time for him to be an adolescent, too.
When she thinks about it now, it seems to her that recently, particularly since the time of their separation, around a year ago, she keeps finding herself faced with three rebellious adolescents who act angrily and impudently — the toilet seats were always left up in bold defiance — and she wishes she knew what it was about her that aroused this idiotic, infantile compulsion, and what turned them instantly into three ravenous kittens when a ball of conspiracy against her rolled at their feet, and why on earth it was her responsibility to rescue them from the silence at a restaurant. What if one day she partook in the grave pondering of the fingertips? What if she hummed an intricate song to herself all the way to the end, until one of them broke down — and it would probably be Ofer; his sense of justice would step up, his natural compassion, his urge to protect her would eventually overcome even the pleasure of belonging to the other two. But her heart quickly fills with tenderness for him — why would she trip him up on their men’s games? It was better for her to break down rather than him.
Again the same old thought: if only she’d had a girl. A girl would have stitched everyone back together with her cheerfulness, her simplicity, her ease. With everything Ora used to have and lost. Because Ora was a girl once, let that be clear. Maybe not as happy and lighthearted as she would have liked to be, but she certainly had wanted and tried to be that kind of girl, a joyful, carefree girl just like the daughter she never had was supposed to have been. And she remembers only too well, she tells Avram, the sudden hostile silences that often came between her parents. Silences with which her mother punished her father for sins he could not even conceive of. Back then, Ora was the magic needle that quickly scurried between her father and mother to stitch up the unraveled moment through which the three of them had almost plunged to the depths.
That silence in the restaurant lasts no more than a minute, Avram understands from Ora’s stammered description and her lowered eyes, but it feels like a cursed eternity. Everyone knows that someone has to talk and melt away the silence, but who will start? Who will step up? Who will proclaim that he is the most spineless, the doormat, the softy? Who will break down first and say something, even something silly? Hey, silly is what we do best, Ora knows. Even a snide remark will play well. Like her story about the plump Russian lady who had shared Ora’s umbrella earlier that week in a rainstorm. She hadn’t asked, hadn’t apologized, just said to Ora with a smile, “We walk together now awhile.” Or she could tell them about the elderly spinster who came to her clinic with a sprained ankle and laughingly told Ora her trick for making dough rise: she takes it into bed, lies down for forty winks with the dough under the blanket, and that’s how it gets its first rise! Yes, Ora would prattle on, and they’d all laugh warmly and wonder how the Russian woman had picked out Ora as a sucker even in the middle of a storm. They’d make fun of the old lady with the dough and tease her about her other patients and her job in general, which they found slightly odd: “You just come up to a total stranger and start prodding them?” And the little flame she lit would start curling and burning, and they would be warm and happy. “Do you understand what I’m getting at? Do you see the picture, or am I just …”
He nods, fascinated. Maybe he did see a thing or two in his pub after all, she thinks, or at the Indian restaurant. Or just walking the streets, or on the beach. Maybe he didn’t give up those eyes of his after all. Maybe he noticed and watched, and peeked and eavesdropped, and collected it all inside. Yes, that’s just like him, a detective gathering evidence for a crime of extraordinary scale — the human race.
“And after that everything’s all right, we’re all totally there, and we laugh and jab and talk. The three of them are sharp, witty, cynical, and horribly macabre, just like you and Ilan were.” This fills Avram with sadness, perhaps because he can also sense what she is not disclosing: she always has the feeling that something in the conversation is beyond her grasp, that a subliminal lightning bolt has flashed between them but she hears only the thunder that follows. When the food arrives, the buzz of commerce begins, and that’s what she likes most. Plates and bowls and spoonfuls are passed from hand to hand, forks peck at one another’s dishes, the four of them compare, savor tastes, criticize, and offer to share. A canopy of generosity and delight spreads above them, and this, finally, is the quiet, honeyed moment, her portion of happiness. She follows the conversation only superficially now. The conversation is not the main point — it’s even a distraction. She thinks they’re poking fun at themselves, at the dishes soaring back and forth like flying saucers, and at what the people at the other tables must think of them. Or else they’re discussing the army, or some new CD. What difference does it make? The point is this moment: embraced.
“That sucks,” she heard Ofer say to Adam. “We spent the whole summer killing flies in Nebi Musa, and it turns out we killed the weak ones, so we created a generation of resistant flies, and now their genetics are much stronger.” They laughed. They both have lovely teeth, Ora thought. Adam described the rats that run freely around the kitchen at his reserve duty unit. Ofer struck back with a winning card: a fox, maybe even a rabid one, had infiltrated his crew’s room while people were dozing and stolen a whole cake out of someone’s backpack. They spoke in loud, deep voices, as they always do when they talk about the army. “But that might also be because Ofer’s ears are always full of dust and grease,” she explains to Avram. Ora and Ilan laughed and laughed, delighted, and gobbled down pieces of herb bread. Their role here was clear: they represented the sufficiently blurry background, the sounding board against which their children repeatedly declared their maturity and independence, and from which their declaration echoed back to the children themselves, at every age, so that they could finally believe in it. The boys changed the topic to accidents, big and small. There was practically a permanent order to these conversations, Ora realizes now, an organized, gradual escalation. Adam told them about how when he started his service in the Armored Corps, one of the commanders had demonstrated what could happen to a tank driver who got stuck in the gun’s side traverse. He set a wooden crate on the hull, rotated the gun sideways, and showed how the barrel shattered the crate, “which is exactly what could happen to anyone who steps out of a tank without coordinating,” Adam cautioned his younger brother, and Ora felt a chill.