There were days — but of course she will not tell him this, not now — when she felt that at each and every moment, from the second she opened her eyes in the morning, through every motion she made, every laugh she laughed, when she walked and when she lay in bed with Ilan, she was acting a part in his play, in some mad sketch he was writing. And that she was acting for him perhaps more than for herself.
“What is there to understand here?” She stops and suddenly turns around and unwillingly hurls at him: “It’s something Ilan and I felt all the time, all those years — that we were acting out a play on your stage.”
“I never asked you to be my play,” Avram mutters angrily.
“But how could we feel otherwise?”
They both get sucked back, absorbed into one moment, two boys and a girl, almost children: Take a hat, put two pieces of paper in it. But what am I drawing for? You’ll find out only afterward.
“And don’t get me wrong. Our lives were completely real and full, with the kids and our work, and the hiking and nights out and trips abroad and our friends”—the fullness of life, she thinks again in Ilan’s voice—“and there were long periods of time, years, when that look of yours in our back, we hardly felt it. Well, maybe not years. Weeks. Okay, maybe a day here and there. Overseas, for example, when we went on vacation, it was easier to be free of you. Although that’s not accurate either, because in the most beautiful places, the most tranquil spots, I would suddenly feel the jab in my back — no, in my stomach, here, and Ilan would feel it too, at the same second, always. Well, it wasn’t that hard to feel, because the minute we said anything that sounded like you, or one of your jokes, or just a sentence that begged to be said in your voice, you know. Or when Ofer folded his shirt collar with your exact movement, or when he made the spaghetti sauce you taught me how to make, or a thousand and one other things. And then we’d look each other in the eye and wonder where you were at that moment, how you were doing.”
“Ora, don’t run,” Avram groans behind her, but she doesn’t hear.
And that was part of life too, she thinks with some surprise. Part of the fullness of our lives: the void of you, which filled us.
For one moment her entire being is the look she used to give Ofer sometimes, when she gazed deep inside him as if through a one-way mirror, into the place where she saw in him what he himself did not know.
And maybe that’s exactly why he stopped looking you in the eye? Maybe that’s why he didn’t come to the Galilee with you?
She can no longer contain what wells up inside her. She has reached some sort of peak, and something inside her crumbles and melts and relaxes and loosens with an internal surprise mingled with warm sweetness. Tall, strong, and Amazonian she stands on a rock above Avram, hands on her hips, and scans him with a penetrating look. Then she laughs. “Isn’t this nuts? Isn’t it crazy?”
“What?” he asks breathlessly. “What, out of all that?”
“That first I run away to the edge of the world, and now I suddenly can’t take half a step farther from home?”
“So that’s what this is? You’re running home?”
“I was aching before, my whole body, when I started getting farther away.”
“Oh.” He massages his hip, which hurts from the last few minutes’ sprint.
“You must be thinking, This madwoman has kidnapped me.”
He looks up at her with a large, sweaty face and smiles. “I’m still waiting to hear what to offer as ransom.”
“That’s easy.” She leans down to him with her hands on her knees, and her breasts round into the opening of her shirt. “The ransom is Ofer.”
They set off — she likes feeling the words pulse: setting off, two friends set off on their way, off we go — and the path is effortless, and they are too, and for the first time since starting the walk, their heads seem less bowed and their eyes are not simply staring at the path and the tips of their shoes. They go uphill and downhill with the path, which becomes a broad gravel road, then they climb over a security fence and lose the markers in a thicket of growth. A field of tall green thistles covers everything, so they decide to trust their nascent travelers’ intuition and walk bravely and quietly for another few hundred meters through the thistles, without a clue which way to go, without a grasp — like a baby’s first steps, Ora thinks — and her anxiety for Ofer rouses in her, and she feels that she is not helping him now, that the thread she is tying around him is suddenly loosening. Still there is no sign of the path, and their steps grow heavy, and they stop every so often to look around while other pairs of eyes watch them: a lizard pauses to scan them suspiciously, another darts by with a grasshopper in its mouth, and a swallowtail hesitates briefly before laying a pale yellow egg on a fennel stalk. All these creatures seem to sense that something in the general rhythm has gone awry, someone has lost his way. But then they spot an orange-blue-and-white marker glimmering on a rock, and they both point at it, delighting in the sweetness of their small victory. Avram runs over and scuffs his sole on the rock, a male marking his territory, and they both confess to their worry and praise themselves for having managed to keep it to themselves and not burden each other. The markers become frequent again now, as though the path is seeking to compensate its walkers for having tested them.
“I remembered something,” Ora says. “When Ofer was born, when we brought him home from the hospital, I stood over his crib and looked at him. He was sleeping, tiny, but with that big head, and the scrunched-up red face with capillaries visible on his cheeks, from the effort of being born, and his fist was clenched next to his face. He looked like a little boxer, tiny and furious, as if he was focused on an anger he had somehow dragged into this world. But mainly, he looked lonely. As though he had fallen from a planet and the only thing he knew was that he had to defend himself.
“And then Ilan came and stood next to me and hugged my shoulders and looked at him with me, and it was so different from when we brought Adam home.”
Avram watches the three of them, then quickly looks away and quotes the sign Ilan had stuck on the door to Adam’s room: “The hotel management expects guests to leave when they reach the age of 18!”
“And Ilan said that when he was in the army and they used to send him to a new base where he didn’t know anyone and didn’t want to, the first thing he would do was find himself a bed in the farthest corner, and spend his first few hours napping, just to allow himself to adjust to the place unconsciously, in his sleep.”
Avram smiles distractedly. “That’s right. Once they spent half a day looking for him on the base at Tassa. They thought he’d flipped out on the way.”
Ora remembers how she’d elbowed Ilan next to Ofer’s crib as he slept with his fist clenched and said emphatically, “Here you are, my darling, I’ve made another solider for the IDF.” Ilan had quickly given the requisite reply that by the time Ofer grew up there would be peace.
So, she thinks, which one of us was right?
They walk side by side, each within himself, yet woven together. Capillary channels burst through Avram constantly as Ora speaks. Where was I when they stood over Ofer’s crib? What was I doing at that moment? Sometimes, when he tries out a new medication, he wakes up with an unfamiliar pain and lies awake, his face flushed with cold sweat, listening inside as a stream of infected blood makes its way into an internal organ whose existence he has never been aware of. That’s how he feels now, except the fear is completely different, both concealed and alarming, and the channels seem to be drawing a new map as they emerge.
Ora’s backpack suddenly feels almost weightless, as though someone has quietly come up to support her from behind. She feels like singing, shouting in joy, dancing through the field. The things she is telling him! The things they’re saying to each other!