A long time ago, at the beginning of Ofer’s service in the Territories (“This is parenthetical,” she tells Avram. “It has nothing to do with that evening in the restaurant”), they were living in Ein Karem, and she heard a strange sound from the steps that led from the back of the house down to the garden. She followed the sound to the edge of the garden and saw Ofer sitting there, wearing shorts and an army shirt — he was on leave — carving a beautiful stick with his penknife. She asked what it was, and he looked up at her with his ironic, arched eyebrows and said, “What does it look like?”
“Like a rounded stick.”
He smiled. “It’s a club. Club, meet Mom. Mom, meet club.”
“What do you need a club for?”
Ofer laughed and said, “To beat up little foxes.” Ora asked if the army didn’t give him weapons to protect himself with, and he said, “Not clubs, and clubs are what we need most, they’re the most efficient weapon in our situation.” She said that scared her, and he said, “But what’s wrong with a club, Mom? It’s minimal use of force.”
Ora, with uncharacteristic cynicism, asked if they had an acronym for that, “MUF, or something.”
“But clubs prevent violence, Mom! They don’t create it.”
“Even so, allow me to feel bad when I see my son sitting here making himself a club.”
Ofer said nothing. “He usually avoids getting into these arguments with me,” she tells Avram. “He could never be bothered with that kind of talk, always said politics just didn’t interest him.” He was doing his job and that’s that, and when he got out, when everything was done, he promised her he would think over exactly what had happened.
He kept on smoothing the stick until it was completely round. Ora stood over him, at the top of the steps, and hypnotically watched his skilled hands at work. “He had wonderful hands. You should see some of the things he’s made. A round dining table. And the bed he made for us.”
Ofer wrapped elastic webbing around the head of the stick. Ora went down and asked to touch it. For some reason it was important to her to touch it, to feel what it’s like when it strikes you—“a black, rigid, unpleasant sort of fabric,” she reports to Avram, and he swallows and looks out into the distance — and Ofer added more brown binding around the stick itself, and then the club was ready, and that’s when he made the move. She shows Avram how Ofer hit his open palm with the club three times to assess its strength, to appraise its hidden force. And he played around with it, like someone would with a dangerous animal whose training has only just begun. “That was a bad moment, when I saw Ofer sitting there whittling a club. And it was important to me that you know about that.”
Avram nods to confirm that he has accepted this too from her.
“Where was I?”
“Hugs,” he reminds her, “and that restaurant.” He likes the way she asks “Where was I?” every so often. A sloppy, dreamy, distracted young girl peers out of her face when she does.
Ora sighs. “Yes. We were celebrating Adam’s birthday, and the truth is we didn’t even think they’d both be home that Shabbat until the last minute. Adam was on reserve duty in the Bik’ah, and Ofer was in Hebron and wasn’t supposed to get out for the weekend, but they let him go at the last minute, there was a vehicle leaving for Jerusalem, and he got home late and was exhausted. He even nodded off during dinner a couple of times. He’d had a hard week, we later learned, and he was so tired he barely knew where he was.”
Avram looks at her expectantly.
“It was a lovely evening,” she says, skipping tactfully over the sudden indigestion that meant she ate almost nothing the whole meal. “And then I wanted us all to toast Adam,” she continues in the same tense voice, hoping she has managed to establish for Avram the fact of Ofer’s abysmal exhaustion, his main line of defense in the inquiries and questionings held afterward, and in his endless arguments with her. “We always have a little toasting ritual when we’re celebrating something …”
She hesitates again: All these family affairs of ours, all our little rituals, do they pain you? His eyes signal back to her: Go on, go on already.
“Normally, Adam never let us toast him. We weren’t allowed to do that in public, where strangers could hear. He’s so much like Ilan that way.”
Avram smiles. “God forbid you might be overheard by all those people who booked tables months in advance so they could eavesdrop on you?”
“Exactly. But that evening Adam said yes, though only if Ofer would do it. Ilan and I quickly said, ‘Fine,’ we were so surprised he’d agreed at all. And I thought I’d give him my toast later, when I was alone with him, or I’d write it for him. I always used to write birthday wishes for him, to all of them actually, because I think, I thought, that these occasions were an opportunity to sum things up, or to summarize a period, and I knew he kept my cards — Hey, have you noticed we’re really talking now?”
“So I hear.”
“We’ll have to hike the whole country three times to fit everything in.”
“That’s not a bad idea.”
She says nothing.
“Where was I?” Avram says a while later instead of her, and replies, “The restaurant. Ofer’s toast.”