“But how did he know you—”
“Ofer told him.”
Avram waits. He knows there’s more.
“And he’s coming back to Israel with Adam. But it’ll take them a few days, he’s not sure when they’ll get on a flight. They’re in Bolivia now, on some salt flats.” She sniffs angrily: There’s enough there for all my wounds.
“And Adam?”
“What about Adam?”
“Did he also leave you a message?”
She stops, amazed, and realizes: I can’t believe it.
“Ora?”
Because only now does she remember that Ilan said Adam sent his regards. She was so caught up with herself, with what she was doing, that she almost forgot. He specifically said, “Adam says hi.” And she’d forgotten that. Adam is right, he really is. An unnatural mother.
“Ora, what happened?”
“Never mind, forget it.” She’s almost running again. “There weren’t any important messages at my place.”
“Your place?”
“Leave me alone, okay? What’s with the interrogations? Just leave me alone!”
“I’m leaving,” he murmurs, with a sinking feeling in his gut.
A cloud of gnats accompanies them, forcing them to breathe through their noses and keep quiet for a long time. Avram notices exposed tree roots surrounded by mounds of damp earth: there were wild boars here last night.
Later, they come across a big dark rock with letters carved deep: Nadav. A stone next to it reads: A grove in memory of Captain Nadav Klein. Fell in the War of Attrition in the Jordan Valley. 27 Sivan 5729. July 12, 1969. Across the way, among pine needles and pinecones, a monument and a plaque: In memory of Staff Sergeant Menachem Hollander, son of Chana and Moshe, Haifa, Kfar Hasidim. Fell in the Yom Kippur War in the battle for Taoz on 13 Tishrei 5734, at the age of 23.
A short while later there is a huge concrete relief depicting the entire Canal region in 1973, marked with Our Forces’ Positions—Magma is there too, so tiny — and through the long, serrated leaves of a group of cactuses, they see gilded statues of a doe and a lion, and a monument bearing the names of eight soldiers who fell in the battle for the Suez Canal on May 23, 1970. Ora looks out of the corner of her eye to make sure Avram is able to cross these hurdles of memory in one piece, but he seems to be troubled only by her now, and she wonders how to tell him, where to start.
She walks too fast for him to keep up. The dog stops every so often, pants, and looks questioningly at Avram. He shrugs his shoulders: I don’t get it, either. From the main road of Usafia, opposite the Shuk Yussuf greengrocers, they turn to follow the marker down a path that leads through a sparse grove of pine trees. The earth is covered with mounds of trash and filth, tires, furniture, old newspapers, shattered televisions, dozens of empty plastic bottles.
“They throw this stuff here on purpose,” she hisses. “I’m telling you, it’s their twisted revenge on us.”
“Whose?”
“Theirs.” She sweeps her arm broadly. “You know exactly who.”
“But then they’re just making their own place dirty! This is their village.”
“No, no, inside their houses it’s all sparkling, glimmering, I know them. But everything on the outside belongs to the state, to the Jews, and it’s a commandment to junk that up. That’s probably part of their jihad, too. Look here — look at this!” She kicks an empty bottle, misses, and almost falls on her rear end.
Avram cautiously reminds her that Usafia is a Druze village, and they’re not obligated by the jihad commandment. “And anyway, when we came down from Arbel, and also near the Kinneret, and at the Amud River, we saw piles of trash, totally Jewish trash.”
“No, no, it’s their protest. Don’t you understand? Because they don’t have the guts to really revolt. I honestly would respect them a lot more if they just came out against us openly.”
She’s feeling bad, Avram senses, and she’s taking it out on them. He looks at her and sees her face turn ugly.
“Aren’t you angry at them? Don’t you have any anger or hatred about what they did to you there?”
Avram thinks. The old man from the meat locker comes to his mind, lying naked on the sidewalk, banging his head against it, twitching in front of the soldiers.
“What do you have to think about for so long? Me, if someone did to me a quarter of what they did to you, I’d run them down to the corners of the earth. I’d hire mercenaries to take revenge, even now.”
“No,” he says, and runs a vision of his tormentors in front of his eyes: the chief interrogator, Lieutenant Colonel Doctor Ashraf, with his sly little eyes and his sickeningly flowery Hebrew, and the hands that tore Avram to shreds. And the jailors in Abbasiya, who beat him whenever they could, who were drawn to torture him more than the others, as though something about him drove them crazy. And the two who buried him alive, and the guy who stood on the side and took photographs, and the two men they brought in from outside — Ashraf told him they were trucked in especially for him, two guys from death row, rapists from a civilian prison in Alexandria — even them he doesn’t hate anymore. All he feels when he thinks of them is insipid despair, and sometimes simple, raw sadness at having had the misfortune to end up there and see the things he saw.
The path seems to be trying to shake off the filth, curving sharply to the left and spitting them out into the Cheik riverbed, then descending and plunging into the belly of the earth. They have to watch their steps because the rocks are slippery from the morning dew and the path is crisscrossed with sinewy tree roots. The sun dances through the foliage in tiny pieces of light.
How come Adam said hi to me? she wonders. What happened that made him do that? What is he feeling?
Oak trees and terebinths and pine trees, grandfathers and grandmothers by the looks of them, lean in from both banks of the riverbed, and ivy tumbles down their branches. Here and there is an arbutus, and then a massive pine tree on the ground, hewn, its pinecones dead and its trunk turning white across the path. In unison, Avram and Ora look away.
Next to a dried-up reservoir filled with giant, blighted reeds, two tall boys with unkempt hair come toward them. One has thick, dark dreadlocks, while golden curls tumble from the other’s head, and they both wear tiny yarmulkes. Their faces are welcoming, and they carry large backpacks with sleeping bags rolled on top. Ora and Avram are experts at these encounters by now. They almost always say a quick “hello,” lower their eyes, and let the other hikers pass. But this time Ora greets the boys with a broad grin and takes off her backpack. “Where are you from, guys?” she asks.
The boys exchange somewhat surprised looks, but her smile is warm and inviting.
“Feel like a little coffee break? I just bought some fresh biscuits. Kosher,” she adds piously with a glance at their yarmulkes. She chatters and giggles with them, abounding with motherly warmth and a certain flirtatiousness. They accept her invitation, even though only an hour ago, on Mount Shokef, they’d had coffee with a doctor from Jerusalem who’d asked them all sorts of funny questions and written their answers in a notebook. Ora tenses up.
At her request, after a moment’s hesitation, they tell her what the doctor had told them when they sat down for coffee with him—“amazing coffee the guy makes,” the dark one notes. It turns out that he and his wife had planned for years to make this journey together as a couple, all along the trail, from the north down to Taba, almost a thousand kilometers. But his wife got sick and died three years ago — the boys interrupt each other, excited by the story, and perhaps by Ora’s transfixed look — and before she died she made him swear that he’d still do the hike, even on his own. “And she was always looking for something else for him to do along the way,” the golden-curled boy adds with a laugh. “In the end she had this idea”—the dark one snatches the story from his friend’s mouth—“that every time he met someone, he’d ask them two questions.” It seems as though only now, recounting the story, the boys allow its true meaning to penetrate them.