By evening the pain of him became so strong that she shut herself up in her tent and sobbed quietly, secretly, trying to muffle the noise. The contractions — that was how she felt: they were like labor contractions — came frequently and sharply and grew into a constant, blinding pain, and she thought that if this continued she would somehow have to get to an emergency room. But what would she say when she got there? And besides, a doctor might persuade her to go home immediately and wait for them.
Avram, in his tent, heard her and decided not to take a sleeping pill, not even his girlfriend Neta’s pills, because Ora might need him during the night. But how could he help her? He lay awake, motionless, his arms crossed over his chest and his hands in his armpits. He could have lain that way for hours, almost without moving. He heard her sobbing to herself, a long, monotonous wail. In Egypt, in Abbasiya Prison, there was a short, thin reservist from Jerusalem who came from a family of Cochin Jews. He used to cry for hours every night, even if they hadn’t been tortured that day. The guys almost lost their minds because of him, even the Egyptian wardens couldn’t stand it, but the Cochin guy wouldn’t stop. One day when he and Avram were standing in the corridor waiting to be taken to an interrogation, Avram managed to communicate with the man through the sacks over their faces, and the Cochin guy said he was crying out of jealousy for his girlfriend, because he could sense that she was being unfaithful. She had always loved his older brother, and his imaginings of what she was doing now were eating him alive. Avram had felt a strange reverence for this gaunt man, who within the hell of captivity could find such dedication to his own private pain, which had nothing to do with the Egyptians and their tortures.
Avram stepped quietly out of the tent and walked away until he could barely hear her, then sat down under a terebinth to try to focus. During the day, with Ora next to him, he could not think at all. Now he wrote the indictment of his pathetic and cowardly conduct. He dug his fingers into his face, his forehead and cheeks, and groaned softly: “Help her, you shit, you traitor.” But he knew that he wouldn’t, and his mouth twisted with loathing.
As he did whenever he thought about himself honestly, he simply found it difficult to comprehend why he was still alive. What made life hold on to him and preserve him? What was there in him, still, that justified such persistent effort on life’s part, such stubbornness, or perhaps just vengefulness?
He closed his eyes and tried to conjure up the figure of a boy. Any boy. Recently, as Ofer’s discharge date had grown closer, he would sometimes pick out a boy at the right age in the restaurant where he worked, or on the street, and observe him stealthily, even follow him for a block or two, and try to imagine how he saw things. He allowed himself more and more of these hallucinations, these Ofer-guesses, these shadows.
A thick nocturnal silence enveloped him. Soft breezes passed silently over him, plowing furrows through all of space. From time to time a large bird called out, sounding very close. Ora, in her tent, felt it, too. She listened as something seemed to flitter over her skin. Thousands of cranes made their way through the night sky heading north, and neither of them saw or knew. For a long time there was a huge invisible rustle, like the sighing of waves on a beach full of shells. Avram leaned against the tree with his eyes closed and saw the shadow of Ofer’s back slip away in the image of young Ilan — for some reason it was Ilan who popped up, walking half a step in front of him and leading him through the paths of the despised army base where he’d had to live with his father, winking at the whitewashed graffiti on the walls of the stone huts. Then Avram tried to imagine a male version of the young Ora, but all he could see was Ora herself, long and fair, with red curls that bounced on her shoulders. He wondered if Ofer was also a redhead, like she used to be — she did not have even a drop of red left now — and he was surprised that this was the first time he’d ever entertained the utterly logical possibility that Ofer was a redhead. He was even more surprised that he was daring to indulge in such fantasies, more than he ever had before. Then, in a flash, he saw an image of Ofer that looked like him, like the twenty-one-year-old Avram, and the seventeen-year-old, and the fourteen-year-old. In a heartbeat he skipped among his various ages — for her, he thought feverishly, with prayer-like devotion; only for her — and saw the twinkle of a round, red-cheeked face that was always alert and eager. He felt a springy, agile dwarfishness that he hadn’t felt for years, and the heat of a constant blaze coming from the tangled head of hair, and the glimmer of a sluttish wink, and then he was repelled, thrown from the spectacle, from his own self, as if tossed out by a rough bouncer. He sat panting, bathed in sweat, and for a few more moments his heart beat wildly and he was as excited as a young boy, a boy wallowing in forbidden fantasies.
He listened: total silence. Perhaps she’d finally fallen asleep, her torments lifted. He tried to understand what exactly had happened between her and Ilan. She hadn’t explicitly said it was Ilan’s fault. In fact she’d denied that. Perhaps she was the one who had fallen in love with someone else? Did she have another man? If so, why was she here alone, and why had she chosen to take him along?
She’d said that the children, the boys, were grown up now, and that they would decide who they wanted to live with. But he’d seen her lips tremble, and he knew that she was lying and could not figure out why. “Families are like calculus for me,” he sometimes told Neta. Too many variables, too many parentheses and multiplications of products by powers, and just the whole complication of it — this is what he grumbled whenever she raised the topic — and the constant need to be in a relationship with every other member of the family, at every moment, day and night, even in dreams. When she turned gloomy and withdrew, he would try to appease her: “It’s like being subjected to a permanent electrical shock, or like living in an eternal lightning storm. Is that what you want?”
For thirteen years he had not tired of telling Neta that she was wasting her youth, her future, and her beauty on him and that he was only holding her back, blocking her view. She was seventeen years younger than he. “My young girl,” he called her, sometimes affectionately and sometimes sorrowfully. “When you were ten,” he liked to remind her with strange glee, “I’d already been dead for five years.” And she would say, “Let’s bring the dead back to life, let’s rebel against time.”
He avoided her again and again with the age excuse. “You’re much more mature than I am,” he would say. She wanted children, and he laughed in terror: “Isn’t one enough? You have to have multiple children?” Her narrow devilish eyes glimmered: “Then one child, okay, like Ibsen and Ionesco and Jean Cocteau were the same child.”
Lately it seemed he had gotten through to her, because she hadn’t been around or even called for a few weeks. Where was she? he wondered half silently, and stood up.
Sometimes, when she made some money from her strange jobs, she just up and left. Avram could sense it approaching even before she could: a murky hunger started to surround her irises, a shadowy negotiation in which she apparently lost, and so had to travel. Even the names of the countries she chose scared him: Georgia, Mongolia, Tajikistan. She would call him from Marrakesh or Monrovia, nighttime for him, for her still day—“So now,” he’d point out, “on top of everything else you’re another three hours younger than me”—and with strange, dreamlike lightness she would recount experiences that made his hair stand on end.