They stand up and linger. Avram thinks about the story he wrote when he was serving in Sinai and up until he was taken hostage. It had a subplot whose power he discovered only when he was a POW, and he used to dive into it over and over again to revive himself a little. It was about two seven-year-old orphans who find an abandoned baby in a junkyard. Lots of people were getting rid of their children and babies at the time, and the two kids, a boy and a girl, find the baby, crying and hungry, and decide that he is a God-baby, the afterthought child born to an elderly God, who also apparently wanted to get rid of his child and so he threw the baby into this world. The two children vow to raise the baby themselves and bring him up to be completely different from his cruel, bitter father, so that he will fundamentally change what Avram called simply, long before he was taken hostage, the ill fate. And so in between tortures and interrogations, every time he found a drop of energy within himself, Avram delved into the lives of the two children and the baby. Sometimes, mostly at night, he would manage for several minutes to merge completely with the little baby. His broken, tortured body would melt into the innocent, whole creature, and he would remember, or imagine, how he himself was once a baby, and then a little boy, and how the world was one clear circle, until his father got up one evening from the dinner table, overturned the pot of soup on the stove top, and started beating Avram’s mother and Avram himself with an outpouring of fury, almost tearing them to shreds, and then walked out and vanished as though he’d never existed.
Avram touches her arm gently. “Come on, Ora. Let’s keep going, so we’ll find it before—”
“Find what?”
“The notebook, no?”
“Before what?”
“I don’t know, before people get there, you don’t want anyone—”
She follows him, weak and parched. That whole era pushes its way up inside her. The nightmarish mornings, the decontaminated, censored sandwiches she made — only after, of course, dressing him meticulously as an armed cowboy — the vegetarianism on the one hand, and that murderousness on the other, she now realizes in astonishment. And the suspicious way he checked his sandwich several times, the sour expression of a customs official that came over his little face, the haggling over what time she would pick him up from the preschool of carnivores, and his desperate clinging to her back — she rode him there on a bike — as they got closer to the preschool and heard the children shouting happily. And his wild delusions — that’s how she had preferred to think of them at the time — that the children kept touching him on purpose, spitting hot-dog spit on him.
Day after day she abandoned him, left him stuck to the chain-link fence with iron diamonds imprinted on his cheeks, his face smeared with tears and snot as he sobbed loudly. She would turn her back on him, slip away and keep hearing him bawl for many more hours, and as she got farther away from the preschool, she heard him shout louder and louder. And if when he was four she did not know how to help him — powerless against what she felt raging inside him — what good can she do for him now, on this silly, pathetic journey? What good are her chattering with Avram and her baseless bargain with fate? She walks on, and her heavy feet barely obey her. It’s good to get away from the news, that man said, especially after yesterday. What happened yesterday. How many. Who. Have they informed the families yet. Run home, run, they’re on their way.
She walks almost without looking. Falls through the expanses of an infinite space. She is one human crumb. Ofer is also one human crumb. She can’t slow his fall by even one second. And though she gave birth to him, though she is his mother and he came out of her body, now, at this moment, they are merely two specks floating, falling, through infinite, massive, empty space. What it all comes down to, Ora senses, is randomness in everything.
Something makes her zigzag, a slight arrhythmia of the feet, and then comes a painful spasm where her thigh meets her groin.
“Wait, don’t run.”
Avram seems to be enjoying the quick descent down the hill, the wind slapping his face, cooling it down, but she stops to lean against a pine tree and holds on to the trunk.
“What’s up, Ora’leh?”
Ora’leh, he called her. It just slipped out. They both glance quickly at each other.
“I don’t know, maybe we should slow down.”
She takes small, cautious steps, avoiding as best she can the tormented iliacus muscle. Avram walks beside her, as Ora’leh skips between them like a cheerful kid goat.
“Sometimes I used to fantasize that you came in disguise, or sat in a cab by the playground when I was there with him, and watched us. Did you ever do anything like that?”
“No.”
“Not even once?”
“No.”
“No temptation to know what he looked like, what he was?”
“No.”
“You just cut him out of your life.”
“Stop, Ora. We’ve run our course with this.”
She swallows a double dose of bile over the “run our course” that somehow rolled from Ilan to him. “Sometimes I would get this feeling in my back, something between a tickle and a prick, here”—she points—“and I wouldn’t turn around, I would force myself not to turn around. I would just say to myself quietly, with an insane sort of calmness, that you were there, around me, looking at us, watching us. Come on, let’s stop for a minute.”
“Again?”
“I don’t know. Look, it’s not right. To go back down, to go back, it’s not good for me.”
“The downhill is hard for you?”
“Going back is hard for me, retracing our steps — in my body. I feel all crooked, I don’t know.”
His arms hang by his sides. He stands waiting for her instructions. At such moments, she feels, he annuls his own volition. In the blink of an eye he steps out of his own being and covers himself with an impenetrable coating: nothing to do with life.
“Listen, I think — I can’t go back.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Me neither.”
“But the notebook—”
“Avram, going back is not good for me.”
As soon as she says it, the knowledge is as strong and clear as a compulsion. She reverses direction and starts going up the mountain, and it’s the right thing, she has no doubt. Avram stands there for a moment, sighs, then uproots himself and follows her, grumbling to himself, “What difference does it make?”
She walks, suddenly light-footed against the incline and against the weight of the man who is probably sitting on her rock right now, at the bottom of the valley, reading her notebook. The man she will probably never see again, who begged her with his eyes to let him help her — his lips like a ripe, cleaved plum — and from whom she now parts with a slight twinge of sorrow. She could do with his cup of coffee, but she has felt the bite of home, and she cannot go backward.
“Even before Ofer was born, ever since the war, since you came back, I’ve lived with the feeling that I’m always being watched by you.”
There. She’d told him what for years had embittered and sweetened her life at the same time.
“Watched how?”
“In your thoughts, in your eyes, I don’t know. Watched.”