“Everything’s going to be okay,” she said. “They want to finish with the big, urgent things first”—she pulled out a crooked, apologetic smile—“and then they’ll do the cosmetic stuff, and they’ll take care of your mouth. That’s nothing, easy as pie.”
She thought he wasn’t hearing her at all. That he no longer cared what they did with him. She kept chattering, unable to stop herself, because the thoughts of what he might have lost and what might have been lost with him — things she had not dared to contemplate while she sat by his side these past weeks — now erupted from within her. And to think that Avram himself may still not understand, that comprehension itself was still ahead of him.
“What month is it?”
“It’s January.”
“January …”
“Seventy-four.”
“Winter.”
“Yes, winter.”
He sank down into himself. Thinking or sleeping, she wasn’t sure. From one of the rooms, perhaps the burn ward, came whimpers of pain.
“Ora, how did I get back?”
“In an airplane. You don’t remember?”
“Yeah?”
“You flew back from there.” I can’t take this, she thought, this talk is tearing me apart.
“Ora—”
“Yes, what?” She noticed that he was opening his eyes wide. A cold, strange spark shone out of them.
“Is there … Is there an Israel?”
“Is there a what?”
“Never mind.”
She didn’t understand. Then she felt the saliva drying in her mouth. “Yes. There is. Of course. Everything. Everything’s just as it was, Avram. Did you think we were—”
His chest rose and fell quickly under the blankets. The heater that had turned off kicked on again. She stared at his fingertips, their flesh devoid of fingernails, and thought that from the place he had come from now, they would never really meet again. He was lost to her forever.
He fell asleep, and rocked and shouted in pain. It was hard to tolerate. He was fighting someone invisible, then he started to cry softly and plead. She jumped up and snatched a piece of paper from the box and read out loud, persistently, like a prayer: “Yesterday I went with my mother to buy her a dress. I always give her advice about these things, and I saw a beautiful dress for you at Schwartz Department Store. It was green, sleeveless, really slim, the kind that would hug your slender figure. Most importantly, it had a large gold zipper from top to … bottom!” Avram moaned and writhed on the bed, and Ora quickly, almost without breathing, read the silly, wonderful lines that came from so far away, like the light of a dying planet. “At the top there’s a big ring that you pull the zipper open with, and even more thought-provoking is that it opens in the front (!!!) like in this movie I saw with Elke Sommer, where she opens her dress slowly, all the way down to her belly button, and there’s a lovely full-frontal (the audience moaned and groaned!). Anyway, 49.75 liras and the dress is yours.”
• • •
Hours went by.
“The war,” Avram murmured during one of those hours.
“Yes, it’s okay,” said Ora, waking from an elusive dream. She drank some water and ran her hands over her face.
“What?” Avram’s breath was shallow.
“The war is over.” She somehow felt that in saying these words she had joined an ancient dynasty of women. Climbed up a rung. But then she felt foolish: perhaps he had wanted to ask how the war had ended and who had won. But when she looked at him she could not bring herself to say that they had.
“How long was I—”
“There? Six weeks. A bit longer.”
He groaned in bewilderment.
“Did you think it was less?”
“More.”
“You slept a lot when you got back. And they had you sedated for part of the time.”
“Sedated …”
“You’re on all kinds of medications now. They’ll taper them off later.”
“Medications?”
The effort of conversing overcame him and he fell asleep again, sometimes coughing and moving restlessly. He looked as though he were fighting someone who kept trying to strangle him.
The hostages had come down the ramp from the plane. Some walked on their own, others needed help. The airport was chaos. Soldiers, journalists, and photographers from all over the world, airport workers who gathered to cheer the returning hostages, ministers and Knesset members who tried to reach them and shake their hands in front of the cameras. Only the families were explicitly told not to come to the airport but to wait for their loved ones at home. Since Ora and Ilan were not Avram’s relatives, they didn’t know they were not supposed to come. And they didn’t know Avram was wounded. They waited, but he did not come off the plane. The hostages walked past with their shaved heads, wearing rubber shoes without socks, and looked at them with dim surprise. A field-security officer walked a hostage whose eye was bandaged and read to him out loud from a piece of paper: “Anyone delivering information to the enemy is subject to penalty …” A tall hostage who limped with a crutch asked one of the journalists loudly whether it was true there’d been a war with Syria, too. Ilan suddenly discovered that soldiers were carrying stretchers down the back of the plane. He grabbed Ora’s hand and they ran over there. No one stopped them. They rushed around among the wounded soldiers but could not find Avram, and they stood looking at each other, terrified. One last stretcher was carried off the plane. A team of doctors and medics walked down with it, carrying a pole swinging with an IV and other tubes. Ora took one look and her mind grew weak. She saw a large, round head, undoubtedly Avram’s, rocking this way and that, covered with an oxygen mask. He was bald, and the top of his head was shaved and partly bandaged, but the bandage had come loose, exposing glistening wounds like gaping mouths. She noticed that the men rolling the stretcher had turned their heads aside and were breathing through their mouths. Ilan was already running alongside the stretcher, glancing at its occupant every so often. Ora followed his expression and knew it was bad. Ilan helped lift the stretcher into an ambulance and tried to get in, but he was pushed away. He shouted and protested and waved his arms, but the soldiers removed him. Ora walked up and, quietly but firmly, told an elderly medical officer: “I’m the girlfriend.” She climbed into the ambulance and sat by the stretcher with the doctor and nurse. The doctor suggested that she sit next to the driver, but she refused. The ambulance driver turned on the siren and Ora watched the highway, the cars, and the people sitting in them, alone or in pairs, sometimes whole families, and she knew that her previous life was ending. And she still hadn’t looked straight at Avram.
The nurse handed her a fabric face mask to protect her from the smell. The doctor and nurse started to undress Avram. His chest, stomach, and shoulders were covered with open, infected ulcers, deep gashes, bruises, and strange, thin-lipped cuts. The right nipple was misplaced. The doctor touched a gloved finger to each wound and dictated to the nurse in a toneless voice: “Open fracture, dry blow, cut, edema, whipping, electrical, compression, burn, rope, infection. Check for malaria, check for schistosomiasis. Look at this — the plastic surgeons will have a field day.”
He and the nurse turned Avram over and exposed his back. Ora stole a look and saw a lump of raw flesh bubbling in red, yellow, and purple. She felt her stomach turn. The stench from his body was unbearable. The doctor held his breath and his glasses fogged over. He bared Avram’s buttocks and took a deep breath: “Animals,” he murmured. Ora looked out the window and wept silently and tearlessly. The doctor covered Avram’s behind and cut open his pants. His legs were broken in three places. Around the ankles were bloody bracelets of puffy, raw flesh that looked as though it was seething with live creatures. The doctor mimed a noose to the nurse, and Ora saw Avram in some dark cell, hanging by his feet with his head rocking, and she suddenly grasped that the entire time he had been a POW, she had hardly dared to imagine what they were really doing to him. He was in the Intelligence Corps and knew so much. She had pushed away every scene or thought — at the moments right before she fell asleep they would lunge at her, but the sleeping pills were effective against nightmares — and now she wondered how it was possible that she and Ilan had not discussed the torture and what happens to people who are tortured, even once.