“Come on, let’s keep walking.” He kneels beside her and speaks rhythmically, confidently. “We’ll walk all the way to your house, as far as you want me to walk with you. Nothing’s changed, Ora, get up.”
“What for?” she whispers helplessly.
“What do you mean what for?”
She looks at him with tearful eyes. “But you’ll have a girl.”
“There’s no girl,” he says tersely. “What’s the matter with you?”
“I suddenly get it, it’s suddenly tangible for me.”
“I only have Ofer,” Avram repeats insistently. “Listen: you and I, together, have Ofer.”
“How do you have Ofer?” she says, snorting into her hands. Her eyes flit emptily through the air. “You don’t know him, you didn’t even want to see him. Who is Ofer to you? Ofer is just words to you.”
“No, no.” In his distress he shakes her, hard, and her head bobs forward and back. “No. You know that’s not true anymore.”
“But all I’ve told you is words.”
“Ora, don’t you happen to have …”
“What?”
“A picture of him?”
She looks at him for a long time, as though failing to grasp the meaning of his words. Then she digs through her backpack and pulls out a small brown wallet. She opens it without looking and holds it out to Avram. In a small plastic window is a picture of two boys with their arms around each other. It was taken the morning Adam joined the army. They both have long hair, and Ofer, young and skinny, hangs on his older brother, enveloping him with his arms and his gaze. As Avram looks at the picture, Ora thinks she can see every feature in his face begin to stir uncontrollably. “Avram,” she says softly. She puts her hand on his as he holds the picture. She steadies it.
“What a beautiful boy,” Avram whispers.
Ora shuts her eyes. She sees people standing on either side of the street that leads to her house. Some of them have already gone into the yard, others are standing on the steps to the door. They wait for her silently, eyes lowered. They wait for her to pass them and walk into her house.
So that it can begin.
“Talk to me. Tell me about him,” she murmurs.
“Tell you what?”
“What is he for you?”
She takes the wallet and puts it back into the backpack. For some reason she cannot bear to have the picture so exposed to light. He does not dare resist, even though he would like to sit there and look at it more and more.
“Ora—”
“Tell me what he is for you.”
Avram feels a burning need to get up and leave this place, get out of the shadows of this strange little crater with the craggy gray rocks. Across the way, a sun-kissed strip of green stretches out between two jagged cliffs, and here they are in the shade, too much shade.
“I can’t hear you,” she whispers.
“First of all … First of all, he is your child. That’s the first thing I know about him, that’s the first thing I think about him.”
“Yes.”
“That’s what I always think about him: that he’s yours, with your light and your goodness, and the things you’ve always given him, his whole life, the way you know how to give. Your abundance, your love, and your generosity, always. And that is what will protect him everywhere, there, too.”
“It will?”
“Yes, yes.” Avram looks beyond her and presses her limp body to him. She feels cold, and her breath is shallow.
“Tell me more, I need you to tell me.”
“And you let me hold him together with you. That’s what it is. That’s what I see. Yes.”
Her face grows distant and weak. She seems to be falling asleep with her eyes open, in his arms, and he wants to wake her, to breathe life into her. But something about her, something in her vacant gaze, her gaping mouth …
“And it’s like,” Avram struggles, “like you’re trying to take him with you somewhere, alone, but he’s too heavy for you. And he’s asleep the whole time, right?”
Ora nods, understanding yet not understanding. Her fingers move, weak and blind on his forearm, distractedly feeling the edge of his sleeve.
“It’s like he’s been anesthetized,” Avram murmurs. “I don’t know why, I don’t fully understand it. And then you come to me and ask me to help you.”
“Yes,” she whispers.
“The two of us have to take him somewhere, I don’t know where, I don’t understand why. And we hold him together, between us, all the time. It’s like he needs both of us to take him there, that’s it.”
“Yes.”
“Only the two of us can take him there.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it good?” Ora rustles desperately. “Is it a good place there?”
“I don’t know.”
“What is this, what are you telling me? Is this a dream you had? Did you dream about him?”
“It’s what I see,” Avram replies helplessly.
“But what is it?”
“We’re both holding him.”
“Yes?”
“He’s walking between us.”
“Yes, that’s good.”
“But he’s asleep, his eyes are closed, one of his arms is on you and the other on me.”
“I don’t understand.”
Suddenly Avram shakes himself off. “Let’s get out of here, Ora.”
She moans. “This isn’t good. He has to be awake the whole time. Why is he sleeping?”
“No, he’s asleep. His head is on your shoulder.”
“But why is he asleep?” Ora shouts and her voice cracks.
Avram shuts his eyes to wipe the scene away. When he opens them, Ora is staring at him in horror.
“Maybe we were wrong,” she says, and her face is strained. “Maybe we got it all wrong, from the beginning. This whole path, all the walking we did—”
“That’s not true! Don’t say that, we’ll walk, and we’ll talk about him—”
“Maybe the whole thing was the opposite of what I thought.”
“Opposite how?”
She slowly turns her palms out. “Because I thought that if we both talked about him, if we kept talking about him, we’d protect him, together, right?”
“Yes, yes, that’s true, Ora, you’ll see—”
“But maybe it’s the exact opposite?”
“What? What’s the opposite?” he whispers.
Her body flutters at him. She grips his arm: “I want you to promise me.”
“Yes, whatever you want.”
“That you’ll remember everything.”
“Yes, you know I will.”
“From the beginning, from when we met, when we were kids, and that war, and how we met in isolation, and the second war, and what happened to you, and Ilan, and me, and everything that happened, yes?”
“Yes, yes.”
“And Adam and Ofer. Promise me, look me in the eye.” She holds his face in both hands. “You’ll remember, right?”
“Everything.”
“And if Ofer …” Ora slows down and her eyes glaze over, and a new wrinkle, vertical and deep and black, suddenly runs down between her eyes. “If he—”
“Don’t even think that way!” Avram grabs her shoulder and rocks her wildly.
She keeps talking, but he does not hear. He holds her to him and kisses her face, and she does not surrender to him and his kisses, all she gives him is the shell of her face.
“You’ll remember,” she murmurs through his shaking. “You’ll remember Ofer, his life, his whole life, right?”
They sit for a long time, hidden away in the small crater. Holding each other like refugees from a storm. The sounds slowly return. The hum of a bee, the thin chirp of a bird, the voices of workers building a house somewhere in the valley.
Then Ora detaches her body from his and lies down on her side on the rock ledge. She pulls her knees into her stomach and rests her cheek on her open palm. Her eyes are open yet she sees nothing. Avram sits beside her, his fingers hovering over her body, barely touching. A light breeze fills the air with the scents of za’atar and poterium and a sweet whiff of honeysuckle. Beneath her body are the cool stone and the whole mountain, enormous and solid and infinite. She thinks: How thin is the crust of Earth.