She whistles. Ilan always distractedly whistled their song in the shower, and she, lying in bed, would put down her book to listen. Once he whistled it in a low key, standing at one end of the bustling lobby of the Jerusalem Theater. She, at the other end, picked it up and started walking toward him, whistling softly until they met and embraced.
Avram looks at her questioningly. She whistles after the pack of dogs as they recede into the distance. She rounds her lips and whistles to the golden bitch, who grudgingly turns her head and slows down. Ora leans forward with her hands on her knees. “Come,” she whispers.
The other dogs sprint away, barking, chasing one another, engaging in momentary fights, galloping across the field with floppy or perked-up ears, re-forming themselves into a pack. The golden one looks at them and back at Ora. Then, hesitantly, with a trembling paw, she starts to walk in Ora’s direction. Without moving, Ora whistles softly, almost imperceptibly, guiding the bitch. Avram lets the branch drop. The bitch walks through a patch of stubbly growth that clings to her broad chest.
Ora slowly crouches down on one knee. The bitch stops abruptly, one paw suspended, her black nostrils open wide. Ora finds a slice of bread on their cloth, and carefully tosses it near the dog. She pulls back and growls.
“Eat it, it’s good.”
The bitch cocks her head. Her eyes are large and dirty. Ora talks to her: “You lived in a house once, you had a home, people took care of you and loved you. You had a bowl for food and a bowl for water.”
With cautious, hunched steps, the bitch walks over to the bread. Growling, her brows arched, she does not take her eyes off Avram and Ora.
“Don’t look at her,” Ora whispers.
“I was looking at you,” Avram says awkwardly, and turns away.
The bitch grabs the bread and devours it. Ora throws her a piece of cheese. She sniffs it and eats. Then a few pieces of salami. Some biscuits. “Come here, you’re a good dog, good, good dog.” The dog sits down and licks her chops. Ora pours water from a bottle into a plastic dish and sets it down on the ground between her and the dog, then goes back to her place. The dog sniffs at it from a distance. Reluctant to approach, attracted yet repelled. A slight whimper escapes her lips. “Drink, you’re thirsty.” The bitch approaches the dish without taking her eyes off Ora and Avram. Her leg muscles shake and she looks as though she might collapse. She laps up the water quickly and retreats. Ora moves closer and the bitch bares her teeth and her fur stands on end. Ora talks to her and pours some more water. She does this two more times, until the bottle is empty. The bitch sits next to the dish. Then she sprawls out and starts gnawing at a ball of fur and thistles stuck to her paw.
And now they can no longer avoid looking at each other.
Ora and Avram stand there, spent, their sweat heavy with the stench of fear, ashamed. A flicker of embarrassment crosses their faces. They have not yet had time to robe themselves in their former skins. Avram stares at her and shakes his head slowly, wonderingly, gratefully, and his blue eyes fill with an undulating stir, and her body suddenly remembers his embrace, and for a moment she wonders stupidly if she should whistle for him to come. But he comes anyway, a mere three steps, and hugs her, grasps her tightly, as he used to, and whispers, “Ora, Ora’leh.” The bitch looks up at them.
A moment later Ora pulls away and stands staring at him as though she has not seen him for years. Then she falls on him again and starts to pound him with both hands and hit his face and scratch it, without saying anything, panting drily. Taken aback, he shields his face, then tries to hold her, to encircle her in his arms so that she cannot hurt him or harm herself, because she has started to scratch herself too and hit her own face with her hands. “Ora, stop, stop,” he shouts, he begs, until he is able to trap her in his arms and hold her tightly to his body to stop her wildness. She struggles and grunts and kicks him, and every time she feels a space of nothing between them she tries to fill it with a punch or a kick or an angry breath, and the wilder she gets, the closer he has to hold her, until they are practically molded into one, intertwined, and she grits her teeth and yells, “You piece of shit, all these years … punishing us … who is to blame here …” Her voice grows weaker and weaker until she flops against his chest, her head in the round of his shoulder, amazed at herself, at what came out of her — why now, why, this was not at all what she wanted to say to him. He does not move, only holds her to him and runs his hand up and down her back, over her sweat-soaked shirt, and she breathes deeply and whispers into his body just as she spoke a few days earlier into the pit she dug in the earth. Avram somehow senses that she is praying, but not to him, rather to someone inside him, asking him to open up and let her in. His hands and body constantly knead her body, and she kneads his, fingers tightening over limbs, wondering, remembering. For one moment — no more — there is a sudden abandonment, like a fleeting moment of disorderly conduct, and Ora’s legs almost fail her, but she remains standing with the last of her strength. What is this? she wonders. What’s happening here? She holds her head back, wanting to look in his eyes and ask, but he pulls her to him with new-old fervor, imprinting himself on her again. That’s exactly how he used to be, and she suddenly remembers how the whole time they were screwing—nut-and-bolting, he called it — it was as though he were hallucinating inside her, growing intermittently harder and softer, moving in a slow somnambulism, a sort of continuous sleepwalking in which his mind and body were unshackled, so different from his usual rhythm when he was outside of her, different from his huntsman-like alertness. He once told her that from the moment he entered her, it was though a circle closed inside him and he immediately sank into a dream. “It’s like an underwater maze,” he said, when she asked him to try to describe it. “No, no, forget that. It’s like a dream that you can’t tell anyone or re-create when you wake up. That’s what’s fun about it: that I can’t find the words. That I can’t find the words.”
Of course she felt, in those distant years, the other women and girls he saw through the canopy of his closed eyelids. She felt the rhythmic, salacious alternating of his passions and fantasies as he made love to her. And every time she felt a twinge of jealousy, she told herself that you could not love Avram without loving his imagination, his parallel dimensions, his thousands of hallucinatory women. But she would quickly search for his mouth so that she could give it her kiss — deep, demanding, vigorous — or even just touch the tip of his tongue with hers, to bring him back to the source that gave rise to all that in him, and he would instantly realize what she was doing and smile with his swollen eyelids and make a movement with his body that said: Here, I’m back.
All that time, in all those years, with all the talk and the chatter, intrigues lodged between his foot and her ankle, between his eyelashes and her navel. And she was so young, she didn’t even know you were allowed to laugh like that in the midst of lovemaking. She hadn’t realized that her body was so lighthearted and mischievous and cheerful. And it all somehow comes back to her now, barely able to stand, almost falling into his body. It’s been years since she’s allowed herself to remember how interwoven they used to be, and how all of his limbs climbed over all of her limbs—“Is that why they call it climaxing?” he joked once. “We mustn’t waste even one-thousandth of a touch,” he would murmur, “not a finger or a hip or an eyelid, certainly not two thighs or an earlobe.” And when she was with him she was inexhaustible, climaxing and laughing, laughing and climaxing in short, quick spurts, while he held back like a Tibetan yogi, gathering it in from all the corners of himself, as he explained with a conspiratorial smile. From the farthest regions, from the tips of his toes, his elbows, eyelashes, neck, starting from a distance, until she felt his signals, and she would smile in her heart, here it is, here, the sharpening of all his flesh, the filling up, the high tide, and the quick departure of humor from his body — suddenly serious, determined, fateful, with his muscles weaving around her, and the grasping, like a giant clamp, and then his essence, the beat of his imprint deep inside her. She remembers.