I’m talking, she marvels again, and he’s not stopping me.
There’s this guy, a person, who is Ofer, Avram thinks strenuously, as if struggling with both hands to stick a label that says “Ofer” onto a vague and elusive picture that constantly squirms in his soul as Ora speaks. And she is telling me a story about him now. I’m hearing Ora’s story about Ofer. All I have to do is hear it. No more. She will tell the story, and then it will be over. A story can’t go on forever. I can think about all sorts of things in the meantime. She will talk. It’s only a story. One word followed by another.
Ora tries to pick and choose what to tell Avram. She wonders why she even slammed him with this stuff about Talia — why start with that? Why did she depict Ofer in his weakest state? She has to take him quickly to more uplifting places. Maybe she’ll tell him about the birth, everyone likes hearing about births. But on the other hand — she gives him a sideways glance — what interest could he have in births? A birth would terrify him, push him even farther away, and to be honest, it’s too early for her to lie naked and unraveled before him. And she certainly won’t tell him about what preceded the birth, that dawn, the one she erased from her book of life, and every time she thinks about it she can’t believe the way she and Ilan were seized by some kind of madness, and for years that memory was mingled with fear and bitter guilt — how could she have been tempted? How could she not have protected Ofer in her belly? How could she not have had the instinct that must exist — is supposed to exist — in every normal, natural mother? For all she knows it might have caused some damage to Ofer. Maybe his childhood asthma started with that? Maybe the attack of claustrophobia in the elevator was because of that? Her mind pulls back from the memory, but the pictures maddeningly resurface, the strange fire in Ilan’s eyes, the grip that locked them into each other, the growls that escaped from them, and her belly, her earth-belly that trembled and bumped as two skinned beasts struggled and mated over it.
“Let’s sit down, I’m a little dizzy.” She leans her head back on the rock face and takes quick sips of water, then passes him the canteen. She has to find something light and amusing, quickly, something that will make him laugh and fill him with affection and warmth for Ofer. And here it is, she’s found it: Ofer, at age three, used to insist on going to day care in his cowboy costume, which included twenty-one items of clothing and weaponry (they counted them once), and for one entire year they were not allowed to forgo even a single accessory. Her eyes brighten and the commotion in her head quiets down a little. This is exactly the sort of thing she should tell him: sweet slices of life, trivial Ofer episodes, nothing complicated or heavy, just calmly describe the mornings of that year, when Ilan and she darted around Ofer with guns and ammunition belts, and Ilan crawled under the bed to look for a sheriff’s star or a red bandana. The meticulous daily construction of a brave fighter, erected on the fragile scaffolding of little Ofer.
But that won’t really interest him, she retorts, all the minutiae, the thousands of moments and acts from which you raise a child, gather him into a person. He won’t have the patience for it, and ultimately these details are fairly boring and dreary, especially for men, but really for anyone who doesn’t know the child in question, although there are of course some stories that are, one might say, unusual, that might draw Avram to Ofer—
But why, for God’s sake, do I need to draw him in at all? she wonders angrily, and the headache that had subsided lunges back boldly and digs its claws into the familiar spot behind her left ear. Am I supposed to be marketing Ofer to him now? Tempting him with Ofer? She sighs, stands up at once, and starts walking briskly, almost running. How do you tell an entire life? A whole decade would not be enough. Where do you start? Especially she, who is incapable of telling one story from beginning to end without scattering in every direction and ruining the punch line — how will she be able to tell his story the right way? And what if she discovers that she doesn’t have that much to tell?
There are an infinite number of things she can say about him, yet she suddenly panics at the thought that if she talks about him for two or three hours straight, or five hours or ten, she might cover most of the important things she has to say about him, about his life. She might sum him up—exhaust him. And perhaps this is the fear that is pressuring her brain, the discomfort that has been eating away at her for some time: she doesn’t really know him. She doesn’t really know her son, Ofer.
The pulse in her neck beats to the point of pain. How quickly her tiny joy has faded. And what, really, will she say about him? How can you even describe and revive a whole person, flesh and blood, with only words — oh God, with only words?
She roots around inside herself, as though if she continues to be silent for even one more minute Avram may think she really has nothing to tell. But everything she feverishly digs up seems banal and marginal — agreeable anecdotes, like the time when Ofer rehabilitated a small well that had dried up near Har Adar. He opened the aqueduct and renewed the spring and planted an orchard nearby. Or perhaps she will tell him about the amazing bed that Ofer built with his own hands for her and Ilan. All right, so she’ll tell him that, so what? A well, a bed, stories that ultimately fit a thousand boys just like him, no less clever and sweet and lovely. It occurs to her that although there are lots of things about Ofer that are good and special, there may not be one truly extraordinary thing, something unique that puts him head and shoulders above everyone else. And with all her might Ora resists this loathsome thought that clings to her, this thought that is so foreign to her — how did she even arrive at such an idea? But wait, what about the movie he made for his cinema class in the tenth grade? There was definitely something there, Avram would like the idea. She glances at his head thrust deep between his slouching shoulders and thinks: Maybe not.
There was something troubling about that film, and to this day, five years later, it nags at her. Eleven minutes shot on their home video camera, documenting an ordinary day in the life of an ordinary young boy: family, school, friends, girlfriend, basketball, parties. But the film did not show a single flesh-and-blood figure, only the shadows of the characters — shadows walking, alone or in pairs, even in groups, shadows sitting in class, shadows eating lunch, kissing, making out, drumming, drinking beer. When she asked Ofer what the idea behind the film was, or what his intention was when he made it (just as she had asked him about the empty plaster molds he cast in his own image, which he displayed at the school’s year-end exhibition, or the menacing series of photographs of his own face with a vulture’s beak sketched in charcoal over each photo), he shrugged his shoulders and said, “I don’t know, I just thought it would be nice to do.” Or, “I just wanted to photograph someone, and I was the only person in the room.” And if she insisted—“You overwhelmed him again,” Ilan told her afterward — he would impatiently shrug her off: “Does there have to be an explanation? Can’t something just happen? Does every little thing have to be analyzed to the bone?”
Ora accompanied the film shoots for three weeks as driver, caterer, and water girl, and not infrequently as the furious sheepdog who ran around after the unruly actors, Ofer’s peers, who constantly ditched rehearsals and shoots. And when they finally deigned to appear, they would argue with Ofer with an arrogance and rudeness that drove her mad. She would leave as soon as an argument broke out. He was still smaller and shorter than most of his classmates and slightly excluded and hesitant, and Ora could not stand the sight of his bowed head and his downcast look and the tremble in his lower lip. Still, he stood his ground: making his presence known, his shoulders stretched almost to his ears, his face an uncontrollable assemblage of pain and insult, but not giving an inch.