“That’s not something he got from me.” Avram laughs, and Ora is moved: In what he negates, she hears what he is affirming.
When he was eighteen months old, they went on vacation to Dor Beach. Early in the morning he woke up while Ora, Ilan, and Adam were still asleep, climbed down from his bed, and walked out of the cabin alone. Barefoot, wearing a T-shirt and a diaper, he padded onto the big lawn adjacent to the beach and saw, probably for the first time in his life, a huge sprinkler spraying water. He stood watching in amazement, giggling and murmuring to himself, and then he started playing with the sprinkler. He crept up to the giant spurts of water and ran away before they could lick his feet. Ora, now awake and watching from behind the cabin wall, could see his happiness right before her eyes: she could see happiness itself, sunny and golden, refracted in the sprays of water.
Then the sprinkler caught Ofer and doused his body and head. Shocked, he stood paralyzed in the stream, trembling all over, his face scrunched up and turned to the sky, shaking his tight fists. She shows him to Avram, standing with her eyes closed and her lips in a trembling pout. A tiny, lonely human among the lashes of water that spun all around him, accepting a sentence he did not understand. She hurried over to rescue him, but something stopped her and sent her back to her hiding place. Perhaps, she tells Avram, it was a desire to see Ofer all alone like that just once. To see him as a person out in the world.
Ofer finally uprooted his feet and went to stand at a safe distance from the sprinkler, which he now watched with wounded pride, soundlessly whimpering and trembling through all his limbs. But he quickly forgot his insult when he spotted a wonderful new creature: a limping old horse with a straw hat on its head and its ears sticking through holes torn out of the hat. The horse was drawing a cart on which sat a man, also elderly, also wearing a straw hat. The old man came every day at dawn to pick up the garbage from the beach, and now he was taking it to the dump. Ofer stood in a state of excitement, still dripping with water, and a circular sense of wonder lit up his eyes. As the horse and cart drove by, the man noticed the baby, gave him a toothless smile, and charmingly removed his fraying straw hat with a flourish that stretched from his old age to Ofer’s childhood.
Ora was afraid Ofer would be scared of the man, but he only patted his little stomach, laughed a rolling laugh, and slapped his head a few times with both hands, perhaps mimicking the doff of the hat.
Then he followed the horse.
He walked without looking back, and Ora followed him. “He was full of power and without a hint of fear. Just a little thing of eighteen months.”
A tiny leaf ripples inside Avram’s soul and floats on ahead of him. Behind his tightly shut eyelids, a small boy walks on an empty beach, his body leaning forward, wearing nothing but a diaper and a T-shirt, all of him moving toward and onward and ahead.
The cart bore piles of garbage, cardboard boxes, torn fishing nets, and large trash bags. Flies hovered above it, and a trail of stench lingered behind it. Every so often the old man wearily yelled at the horse and waved a long whip. Ofer walked behind them, along the water’s edge, and Ora behind him, seeing through his eyes the wonder of the large, emaciated beast, and perhaps — she is guessing now, as she recounts the story for Avram — perhaps he even thought that everything moving up there in front of him was one single wonderfully complex creature, with two heads and four legs, large wheels, leather harnesses and straw hats, and a buzzing cloud above. As she talks, she distractedly quickens her pace, pulled along by the living memory — Ofer on the beach, a bold puppy bristling with the future, she behind him, hiding at times, although there was no need because he never turned to look back. She wondered how far he would go, and he answered her with his steps: forever. She saw — and this she does not have to say, even Avram understands — how the day would come when he would leave her, just get up and go, as they always do, and she guessed a little of what she would feel on that day, a little of what now, without any warning, digs its predatory teeth into her.
When he could no longer keep up with the horse and the old man, Ofer stopped, waved at them for a moment longer, his fist opening and closing, then turned around with a sweet, mischievous smile, and spread his arms out to her happily, as if he’d known all along that she was there, as if anything else were not possible. He ran to her arms shouting: “Nommy, Nommy, bunny!”
“You see, in his books, in the pictures, a creature with a long head and long ears was a bunny.”
“That’s a horse,” she told him and hugged him tightly to her chest. “Say ‘horse.’ ”
“That was one of Ilan’s things,” she tells him on their next coffee break, in a purple field of clover dotted with the occasional unruly stalk of yellow asphodel humming with honeybees. “Every time he taught Ofer or Adam a new word, he would ask them to repeat it out loud. To tell you the truth, it got on my nerves sometimes, because I thought, Why does he have to do it that way — he’s not their trainer. But now I think he was right, and I even envy him, retroactively, because that way he was always the first one to hear every new word they said.”
“That is from me,” Avram says with awkward hesitation. “You know that, right? That’s me.”
“What is?”
He stammers, blushing. “I was the one who told Ilan in the army that if I ever had a kid, I would hand him every new word, present it to him, and it would be like, you know, like a covenant between us.”
“So it’s from you?”
“He … he didn’t tell you?”
“Not that I remember.”
“He probably forgot.”
“Yeah, maybe. Or maybe he didn’t want to tell me, not to pour salt on your wound with me. I don’t know. We both had all sorts of rituals about you, and moments to be with you, but it was mainly the words, and the way they spoke, the boys.” She sighs, and her droopy upper lip seems to droop a little more. “Well, you know, I mean he had that whole thing with you—”
“With me?” Avram sounds alarmed.
“Come on, it’s obvious. The two of you were so verbal, such chatterboxes, I swear, and with Ilan … Hey, what’s that sound?”
Something disturbs the thistles nearby. They hear short, rapid thrashings coming from several directions, and then the rustle of a living creature, something that runs and stops, with panting breaths. Avram jumps up and pokes around, and then comes the barking, in different voices, and Avram shouts at her to get up, and she spills her coffee and tries to stand up and trips on something and falls, and Avram stands over her, frozen, his eyes and mouth gaping in a transparent shout, and dogs — dogs come from all around them.
When Ora finally manages to get up, she counts three, four, five. He jerks his head to the left, and there are at least four more there, of different breeds, large and small, dirty and wild, standing there barking furiously at them. Avram pulls Ora to him, grabs her wrist, but she still doesn’t get it. How painfully slowly her brain processes the joints and connectors of every new situation, always. And on top of that, instead of kicking into self-defense mode, she has a foolish tendency — a completely un-survivor-like tendency, as Ilan once pointed out — to linger on the minor details (beads of sweat are spreading quickly under Avram’s armpits; one of the dog’s legs is broken and folded beneath its body; Ilan’s eyelid had jerked wildly when he told her, nine months ago, that he was leaving her; the man they met at the Kedesh River had been wearing, on top of everything else, two identical wedding rings on two fingers).