And the moments — the chasms — between Ofer’s cries of hunger and the second her nipple disappeared into his lips. When he screamed, his body seemed to utterly collapse, like a body that knows it will die. The fear of death flowed into him quickly, and she filled the spaces that were void of food. He screamed and wailed until the rhythmic stream of her life stuff slowly filled him up, and a glow of relief illuminated his little face: he was saved, she had saved him, she had the power to.
She, who every single time she shifted from fourth to third gear had a morbid fear that she was shifting into reverse — she was giving life to a person!
Sometimes, when he was in her arms, she would run her hand quickly over his face and body, and when she did so, she always thought of the transparent threads, a web that tied Ofer to Avram, wherever he was. She knew it made no sense, but she could not stop her hand from making that motion.
Nighttime. The two of them alone in the world, darkness all around, and warm milk gurgles secretly from her innards to his. His tiny hand on her breast, the pinky finger extended like an antenna, the others moving rhythmically with his sucking, and his other hand crushing the fabric of her robe, or a tuft of his hair, or his ear. He opens his eyes and looks at her, and she dives in, imprinted in his gaze. That is how she feels: her face is now being imprinted on his tender, still foggy brain. She experiences a thrilling moment of eternity. In his eyes she sees her own image, and she is more beautiful than she has ever been. She vows to make him a good person, at least better than she is. She will repair everything her own mother ruined in her. Her zeal gushes into a milky spurt that spills on Ofer’s mouth and nose: surprised, he chokes and bursts into tears.
As she walks now, she hugs her body while a storm washes over it in waves. Forgotten sensations: fullness and hardness, dribbles that leaked through her shirt in the middle of the street, at work, or in a café, at the mere thought of Ofer—“Just thinking of him made me drip,” she laughs, and Avram, his face bathed in her light, wonders if she let Ilan taste her milk.
• • •
A shadow falls on them at midday. They are walking through the Tsivon streambed, a deep, strange channel that silences them. The path meanders among large, broken rocks, and they must climb and take calculated steps. The oak trees around them are forced to grow tall, stretch higher and higher to reach the sunlight. Pale ivy and long ferns cascade down from the treetops. They walk over a bed of crumbling dry leaves among bloodless cyclamens and albino fungi. It’s almost dark here. Touch, she says, and puts his hand on a rock covered with green moss. It feels soft and furry. They are surrounded by silence. Not a single bird chirps. “Like a fairy-tale forest,” Ora whispers. Avram looks around him. His shoulders are slightly hunched. His fingers dart, counting each other constantly. “Don’t worry,” she says, “I’ll find the way out.” Avram points: “Look over there.” A single ray of light has penetrated the foliage and shines on a rock.
When we get back, he thinks, I’m going to read a book about the Galilee, or even just look at a map. I want to see where I’ve been. What would it be like for her to be hiking here with Ofer instead of me? he wonders. What would she talk about with him? What is it like to be completely alone with your child in a place like this? Must be terribly awkward. Then again, Ora wouldn’t let him keep quiet. He smiles. They wouldn’t stop talking and laughing at the people they met on the way. Maybe they’d laugh at me if they happened to run into me.
They climb up a narrow path where thick tree roots crawl all over the earth. The backpacks weigh them down. She thinks: What would it be like if Avram and Ofer were walking here in the forest, alone? A journey of men.
Suddenly, as if a hand has passed in front of their faces, they walk out of the shade into the sunlight. Another few moments and a meadow is revealed, and a hillside, and orchards blossoming in white. “So beautiful,” she whispers so as not to shock the silence.
The path flows softly. A broad, well-trodden walking path, with an avenue of weeds down the center. Like a horse’s mane, Avram thinks.
She tells him about Ofer’s journeys of discovery through the house, his insistent examinations of every single book on the bottom shelves, the plant leaves, the pots and lids in the lower kitchen drawers. She gives him every memory chip of his babyhood that pops into her mind. When he fell off a chair and had to get seven stitches in his chin at Magen David; when a cat scratched his face at the playground—“there’s no scar,” she says reassuringly, and Avram snatches a fluttering touch of some of his own scars, on his arms, shoulder, chest, and back, and a surprising ripple of joy runs through him because Ofer is whole; his body is whole.
Avram seems to be growing more and more awake: he wants to know when Ofer started talking and what his first word was. “Abba,” Ora says. Daddy. But Avram mishears and responds incredulously: “Avram?” Then he realizes his error, and they both laugh. And of course he asks immediately what Adam’s first word was. (“Or,” she replies. Light. She feels him swallow back the obvious question: Not ima? But instead Avram says, “Or is almost ‘Ora,’ ” and she hadn’t even thought of that; she remembers that Ofer always claimed his first words were: “Take me to your leader.”) She reminds Avram of his mother’s heavy bureau, which became a changing table for the boys, and the black bookshelf, which held all their childhood books. She manages to remember quite a lot from the books she used to read to them and recites by heart: “Pluto was a dog from Kibbutz Megiddo …” Then she explains to the ignorant Avram about the charms of every child’s favorite rabbit, Mitz Petel, and his animal friends. She smiles to herself: the two of us are a bit like the giraffe and the lion in the book.
She tries to imagine little Ofer, bathed and clean and ready for bed, resting his head on Avram’s shoulder while he tells a story. Ofer is wearing his green pajamas with the half-moons, but she can’t see what Avram is wearing. She can’t even see Avram himself, but she feels his broad physical presence and the way Ofer leans on it. She thinks Avram would have probably made up a new story for Ofer every night and put on plays and shows for him. She has no doubt he would have been bored reading the same story every evening for weeks, as Ofer used to insist. She can hear the special, mysterious, soft, stomach-trembling voice that Ilan used when he read bedtime stories to the boys. She does not tell Avram, but remembers for herself and for Ofer how much Ilan loved bedtime. Even when the office was terribly busy, he would come home to help put the boys to bed, and she loved to cuddle with them in bed, and listen to him read.
The path is easy and fluid. Avram spreads his arms out, surprised at how comfortable the sharwals feel on his body — Ora had folded the cuffs up three times until they fit his “peanut stature,” as he’d joked. She tells him about Ofer’s day care and his first friend, Yoel, who moved to the States with his parents and broke Ofer’s heart. “Such little stories,” she apologizes, but from one story to the next, from one word to the next, baby Ofer becomes clearer in her own mind, slowly sculpted into a boy: the tiny baby draws out into the toddler, his clothes change, his toys, his haircut, his eyes. She shows him Ofer playing alone, concentrating, absorbed in a game. She tells him about Ofer’s affection for minuscule toys with lots of detailed accessories. She was amazed at his ability to collect them with infinite patience, match them up, put them together, and take them apart again.