“It’s too bad you didn’t take some weed from my place when you kidnapped me. You’d have seen what good stuff is.”
“So you keep it around at home?” She struggles to maintain a measured, enlightened voice and feels like a social worker interviewing a homeless guy.
“For personal use, what do you think? I grow it in a flower box. With the petunias.”
“Do you miss it now?”
“Let’s just say, it would have set me right, especially in the first few days.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m okay.” He sounds astonished. “Don’t need anything.”
“Really?” Her face lights up, her glasses glisten with happiness.
“But if there were any”—he quickly cools her excitement and puts her in her place; for a moment she looked as though she’d pulled off a rapid intervention plan straight out of a kids’ comic book—“if there were any, I wouldn’t say no.”
How far apart we’ve grown, she thinks. A whole life separates us. She imagines him in his restaurant again, circling among the low tables, clearing leftovers, joking with the customers, taking their banter with good spirits. She hopes they don’t mock him. She hopes he doesn’t seem pathetic to those young people. She tries to picture herself there.
“You take your shoes off before you go in,” he notes, as though guiding her.
She sits down on a cushion. She’s uncomfortable. Too upright, doesn’t know what to do with her hands. She smiles in all directions. Her fakery rustles all around her. She wonders if she could have lived with Avram, in his apartment, in the meager neglect of his life. For some reason her thoughts adopt the guttural Mizrahi speech of the man they met in the riverbed. She thinks about his red checkered shirt. He looked like someone had dressed him up nicely this morning and sent him off on a hike. She sees the colorful woman’s glasses that dangled on his chest. Maybe they were not tasteless foppishness or a defiant pose, as she had thought, but a small private gesture? A gesture to a woman? She sighs softly and wonders if Avram had picked up on anything back there.
And without even noticing it, they’re having a conversation. Two people conversing as they walk on one path.
“On the army base in Sinai, there was an Ofer,” Avram muses. “Ofer Havkin. He was a special guy. Used to wander around the desert on his own, playing the violin for the birds, sleeping in caves. He wasn’t afraid of anything. A free spirit. And so all these years I thought Ilan had that Ofer in mind when you chose the name.”
Ora delights in the words that came out of his lips—“free spirit”—then says, “No, I was the one who chose it, because of the verse in Song of Songs: ‘My love is like a young hart’—Domeh dodi le’Ofer ayalim. And I liked the way it sounds, too: o-fer. It’s soft.”
Avram silently repeats the name in Ora’s music, and then says quietly, reverently, “I could never give someone a name.”
“When it’s your own child, you’ll be able to,” she says — it just slips out, and they both fall silent.
The path is wide and comfortable. So many colors, she thinks, when all I saw at first was black and white and gray.
“I’m just curious, did you think of any names other than Ofer?”
“We thought of girls’ names too, because we didn’t know what we were having. I was convinced halfway through the pregnancy that it was a girl.”
A flock of birds alights inside Avram, noisily beating their wings: He had never thought of that possibility — a daughter!
“And what … Which names did you think of for a girl?”
“We thought of Dafna, and Ya’ara, or Ruti.”
“Just imagine …” He turns to face her. The bags under his eyes glow, and now he is entirely here, shining with life, and the pillar of fire he used to be is visible through his skin. Ofer is protected now, she senses, protected in the palms of two hands.
“A girl,” she says softly. “That would have made everything simpler, wouldn’t it?”
Avram expands his chest and takes a deep breath. “A girl” rocks him even more than “a daughter.”
They walk, each lost in thought, the path crunching beneath their feet. She thinks: Even the path suddenly has voices. How did I not hear anything all those days? Where was I?
“Didn’t you want to try again?” he asks bravely.
Ora replies simply that Ilan didn’t want to, because as it was, he said, with all the complications, we already had an excess of kids.
And parents, Avram thinks. “And you? Did you want to?”
Ora lets out a little bray of pain. “Me? Are you asking seriously? My whole life I’ve felt that I missed out terribly by not having a daughter.” After a moment’s hesitation she adds, “Because I always think a girl would have made us into a family.”
“But you … I mean, you already are …”
“Yes,” she says, “we were, absolutely, but still, that’s how I felt all these years. That if I had a daughter, if Adam and Ofer had a sister, it would give them so much, it would change them”—she outlines a circle with both hands—“and also, if I’d had a daughter, I think it would have strengthened me against them, the three of them, and maybe it would also have softened them a little toward me.”
Avram hears the words and does not understand their meaning. What is she giving him here?
“Because I’m alone,” she explains. “I wasn’t enough to soften them, and they turned so hard over time, especially toward me, and even more so recently. Hard and tough, the three of them. Ofer, too,” she adds with some effort. “Listen, it’s really difficult to explain.”
“Difficult to explain to me, or in general?”
“In general, but especially to you.”
“Try.”
The insult in his voice is good, it’s a sign of life, but she can’t explain it, not yet. She’ll bring him in slowly. It’s painful to admit to him that even Ofer wasn’t tender with her. Instead of answering, she says, “I always thought that if I’d had a daughter, maybe I would have remembered what it was like to be me. The me from before everything that happened.”
Avram turns to face her. “I remember how you were.”
Every time he touches the thought of a daughter, he feels a caress of light on his face. “Listen,” he probes, “if it had been a girl, I mean—”
“I know.”
“What do you know?”
“I know.”
“Go on, say it.”
“If it had been a girl, you would have come to see her, right?”
“I don’t know.”
“But I do.” Ora sighs. “You think I never thought about that? You think I didn’t pray for a girl the whole pregnancy? That I didn’t go to a seer — like Saul, who came to the woman by night—in the Bukharian neighborhood, so she could give me a blessing for a girl?”
“You did?”
“Of course I did.”
“But you were already pregnant! What could she have—”
“So what? You can always barter. And by the way, Ilan also wanted a girl.”
“Ilan, too?”
“Yes, I’m sure of it.”
“But he didn’t tell you?”
“You wouldn’t believe how quiet we kept around that pregnancy. We only talked when Adam asked us something. Through Adam we talked about what was in my belly, and what would happen when the new baby was born.”
Avram swallows and recalls how that whole time he lay in bed, paralyzed by the terror of the growing pregnancy.
And praying it would fail.
And planning in great detail how he would nullify his life as soon as he heard the baby was born.
And counting the days he had left.
And in the end he did nothing.
Because even when he was a POW, and increasingly after he came home, he always latched on, at the last minute, to Thales, the Greek philosopher he had admired as a youth, who said there was no difference between life and death. When asked why, in that case, he did not choose death, Thales replied, Precisely because there is no difference.