“Or maybe we could go out and walk around a little. What do you think?”
“Whatever you say.”
“I’ll wait for you downstairs, and we’ll walk around a bit, okay?”
“On the street?”
“There’s this pub down the road.”
“I’ll come and then we’ll decide.”
“Do you know my address?”
“Yes.”
“But I have nothing to give you. The place is empty.”
“I don’t need anything.”
“I’ve been on my own for almost a month.”
“You have?”
“And I think the store’s closed.”
“I don’t need food.” As she talks she darts around the apartment, punted from one wall to the next. She has to organize, finish packing, leave notes. She’ll go. She’ll flee. And she’ll take him with her.
“We can … there’s a kiosk around here—”
“Avram, I couldn’t eat a crumb. I just want to see you.”
“Me?”
“Yes.”
“And then you’ll go back home?”
“Yes. No. Maybe I’ll go on to the Galilee.”
“The Galilee?”
“Never mind that now.”
“How long will it take you?”
“To get there or to get out of there?”
No response. Perhaps he didn’t get her little joke.
“It’ll take me about an hour to close up everything here and get to Tel Aviv.” A cab! she remembers and her heart sinks. I need a cab again. And how exactly was I planning to get to the Galilee? She shuts her eyes hard. A distant headache is signaling, probing. Ilan was right. With her, five-year plans last at most five seconds.
“It’s a dump here, I’m telling you.”
“I’m coming.”
She hangs up before he can change his mind and proceeds to charge around in a frenzy. She writes a note for Ofer, sitting down at first, but soon finds herself standing up, hunched over. She explains to him again what she herself has trouble understanding and asks him to forgive her, and promises again that they’ll go hiking together when he finishes and asks him to please not go looking for her, she’ll be back in a month, mother’s word. She puts the note in a sealed envelope on the table and leaves a sheet of instructions for Bronya, the maid, written in simple Hebrew with large letters. She says she is going on an unexpected vacation, asks her to bring in the mail and take care of Ofer if he comes home on leave—laundry, ironing, cooking—and leaves her a check with a larger payment than usual for the month. Then she sends a few quick e-mails and makes some phone calls, mainly to girlfriends, to whom she explains the situation without exactly lying but without telling the whole truth—above all, without mentioning that Ofer went back today, of his own free will, to the army—and almost rudely intercepts puzzled questions. They all know about the planned trip with Ofer, and have been looking forward to it excitedly with her. They realize something has gone wrong and that a different idea, no less exciting and bold, a temptation that is hard to resist, has come up at the last minute. They think she sounds strange, dizzy, as if she has taken something. She keeps apologizing for being mysterious: “It’s still a secret,” she says with a smile and leaves a trail of worried friends behind her, who immediately call one another to analyze the situation and try to figure out what is going on with Ora. There are some colorful guesses and a few conjectures of passionate pleasure, probably abroad, and perhaps the occasional lick of jealousy at this newfound bird-of-freedom who is their friend.
She phones the Character—phones him at home, despite the time and the explicit prohibition. She does not ask if he can talk, ignores his huffs of anger and alarm, informs him that she’ll be gone for a month and that they’ll see what happens when she gets back. Then she hangs up, delighted with his muffled whispers. She records a message on the answering machine: “Hi, this is Ora. I’m going away probably until the end of April. Don’t leave a message ’cause I won’t be able to pick it up. Thanks and goodbye.” Her voice sounds tense and too serious, not the voice of someone leaving on an exciting and mysterious vacation, so she records a new message, this time with the cheerful tone of a skier or a bungee-jumper, and hopes that Ilan will hear it when he finally gets wind of the situation in Israel and wants to find out how Ofer is, and that he will be filled with jealousy and amazement at the wild time she must be having. But then she realizes Ofer might call home too, and that sort of tone might rag him, so she records a third message, using the most toneless, formal pitch she can muster, although she is betrayed by her exposed and always slightly wondrous voice. She grows angry at herself for being preoccupied with such things, and in a state of distraction she dials Sami’s number.
After leaving Ofer at the meeting point, she had sat down next to Sami in the taxi and apologized for the shameful mistake she had made by calling him. With utter simplicity she explained what state she had been in that morning and, in fact, for the rest of the day as well. Sami drove while she spoke at length, until she had completely unburdened herself. He said nothing and did not turn to face her. She was a little surprised by his silence and said, “What I’d like most now is to just scream about the fact that you and I have even reached this point.” Expressionless, Sami opened her window with the button on his side and said, “Go ahead, scream.” She was embarrassed at first, but then she put her head out the window and screamed until she was dizzy. She leaned back against the headrest and started laughing with relief. She looked at him with eyes tearing from the wind and a flushed neck. “Don’t you want to yell?” she asked. And he said, “Trust me, it’s better if I don’t.”
The whole way back he sat hunched forward, focused on driving, and said nothing. She decided not to pester him anymore, and was so tired that she dozed off and slept until they got home. She has replayed their conversation countless times since then—if it could be called a conversation; he had barely spoken—and concluded that she did the right thing, because even though he didn’t say anything, she was really talking on his behalf too, loyally representing his side in the little incident without letting herself off easy. When Sami finally pulled up in front of her building she had said, without looking at him, that now, after today, she owed him a favor beyond any of their ongoing scores. In her fluttering heart she thought: a Righteous Gentile’s favor. He listened gravely, his lips slightly parted and moving, as if he were memorizing her words, and when he drove away and she walked slowly up the steps, she had the feeling that despite everything that had happened, despite his strange silence the whole way back, their friendship had actually deepened today, having been tempered by a more genuine fire: the fire of reality.
BUT WHEN SHE CALLS, even before explaining that she has to make a very urgent trip to Tel Aviv, Sami answers with crushing coldness that he isn’t feeling well. He threw his back out right after getting home from their trip and he has to lie down for a few hours. Ora senses the lie in his voice and her heart sinks. The thing she has kept pushing away since they parted, which has tormented her with regular bites of mockery and doubt, now solidifies and slams her, revealing her own naïveté, her own stupidity. She wants to say that she understands and will call another taxi, but she hears herself trying to persuade him to come.
“Mrs. Ora, I need to rest now. I’ve had a rough day, and I can’t do two big trips in one day.”
She is deeply hurt by his “Mrs. Ora” and almost hangs up. But she doesn’t, because she feels that until she clears up what happened between them today, she will have no peace. Patiently, without losing her temper, she says that she too, as he well knows, has had a difficult day, but Sami cuts her off and offers to send one of his drivers. At this point she pulls herself together and remembers that she has her dignity too, if only a little. She says haughtily that there is no need, thank you, she’ll manage. The coldness in her voice must have alarmed him, and he asks her please not to take it personally, and then he pauses. Hearing the new
acquiescence in his voice, she cracks and says, “But what can I do, Sami? I always take you personally.” He sighs. She waits quietly. She can hear someone, a man, talking loudly and excitedly in Sami’s house. Sami wearily tells the man to be quiet. And because of the fatigue in his voice, or perhaps because of a shadow of desperation that accompanies it, she suddenly feels a great urgency to see him again, immediately. She has the feeling that if she can just spend a little more time with him, even a few moments, she can straighten out everything that went wrong. What I did before wasn’t really mending, she thinks. This time I’ll talk with him about completely different things, things we’ve never talked about, the roots of my mistake today, the fears and the hatred we both drank with our mothers’ milk. Maybe we haven’t even started talking, she thinks oddly: maybe in all those hours that we drove and talked so much, and argued and jabbed each other and laughed, we never really started talking.
The yelling in Sami’s house grows louder. There is a heated argument among three or four people, and a woman is shouting. It might be Inaam, Sami’s wife, although Ora does not recognize the voice. She begins to wonder if it has something to do with her and what happened between them today, and if it is possible—a crazy thought, but on a day like this, in a country like this, anything is possible—that someone has informed on Sami for driving a soldier to the operation.
“Wait a minute,” says Sami, and addresses the young man in sharp, quick Arabic. He shouts with a violence that Ora has never imagined in him, but instead of getting riled up, the man replies in an accusatory tone full of contempt, grunting his words in a way that sounds to Ora like a spray of poison. She hears the sobs of a small child, much smaller than Sami’s youngest, and then there is a thud. Perhaps someone kicked a table or even threw a chair. She increasingly feels that the incident is connected to their trip and wants to end the call and disappear from his life without doing any more damage. He slams the receiver down on the table, and she hears his footsteps receding and almost hangs up, yet continues to listen, transfixed: the fabric of their privacy has been ripped open, providing a rare porthole, and she is drawn to it. This is what they’re like when they’re alone, she thinks, without us, if it really is without us, if they even have a without us. Then she hears a bitter, wild yell, and she cannot tell if it came from Sami or from the other man, and then there are two loud smacks, like hands clapping or cheeks being slapped, and then silence, broken only by the thin, desperate wail of the boy.
Ora leans weakly against the kitchen table. Why did I have to call him again? she thinks. How stupid. What was I even thinking—that after driving me to the Gilboa and back he’d be able to drive me to Tel Aviv? I just keep making mistakes. Whatever I touch goes wrong.
His voice comes back to her, frightened and cracked. Now he speaks rapidly, almost whispering. He wants to know where exactly she needs to go in Tel Aviv and asks if she minds making a stop in the south of the city, where he has to take care of something. Ora is confused. She was about to tell him to forget the whole thing, but she senses that he must need her very much, and his neediness presents an opening for mending, and she swears to herself she will only go as far as Tel Aviv with him and then take a different cab to the Galilee, no matter the cost. He asks urgently, “Is that okay, Ora? Can I come? Are you ready to leave?” The commotion in the background has started up again, and now it is no longer an argument. The other man is shouting, but he seems to be shouting at himself, and a woman laments in a desperate sort of prayer—Ora now thinks it probably is Inaam—a prolonged, defeated wail. For a moment the sound is suffused with a distant moan that Ora has heard once before. It has been decades since she’s recalled the sobbing of the Arab nurse from the isolation ward, in the small Jerusalem hospital where she stayed with Avram and Ilan.
Ora asks Sami if they’ll be delayed in South Tel Aviv for long. “Five minutes,” Sami says, and when he senses her hesitation he implores her explicitly, which he seldom does: “I need this from you as a big favor.” She remembers the promise she gave him only a few hours earlier and feels a twinge of poetic justice—Righteous of the Nations, my ass. “That’s fine,” she says.
She carries her backpack down to the sidewalk and with a sudden impulse goes back and picks up Ofer’s, too, which is packed and ready for the trip and now sits forlorn. She ignores the ringing phone, because she thinks it must be Avram, alarmed at his boldness and calling to beg her not to come. But it might also be Sami, with a change of heart. And quickly, like a fugitive, she goes down the steps, those very same steps up which—in a day or a week, or maybe never, yet she knows they will, she has no doubt—the notifiers will climb, three of them usually, so they say, quietly they’ll climb up those steps. It is impossible to believe that this will happen, but they will, they will climb up the steps, this one and the next, and that one that’s slightly broken, and on their way they will silently recite the information they are bringing her. All those nights she has spent waiting for them, ever since Adam enlisted and through all his stints in the Territories, and then for the three years of Ofer’s service. All those times she has walked to the door when the bell rings and told herself, This is it. But that door will remain shut a day from now, and two, and in a week or so, and that notification will never be given, because notifications always take two, Ora thinks—one to give and one to receive—and there will be no one to receive this notice, and so it will not be delivered, and this is the thing that is suddenly illuminated in her with a light that grows brighter by the minute, with needle-sharp flashes of furious cheer, now that the house is closed up and locked behind her and the phone inside is ringing incessantly and she herself is pacing the sidewalk, waiting for Sami.
The more she thinks about it, the more exciting she finds the strange notion that descends upon her unexpectedly but with a blaze of inspiration—and it’s so unlike me, she laughs, it’s much more like one of Avram’s ideas, or even Ilan’s, not at all mine—until she has no doubt that what she is about to do is right, that it is the right protest, and it delights her to roll that word over her tongue and bite into it: protest, my protest. She likes the way her mouth grips the fresh, squirming little prey, her protest, and the new muscularity spreading through her tired body feels good. It is a meager and pathetic sort of protest, she knows, and in an hour or two it will dissipate and leave an insipid taste, but what else can she do? Sit and wait for them to come and dig their notification into her? “I’m not staying here,” she declaims, trying to embolden herself. “I’m not going to receive it from them.” She lets out a dry, surprised laugh: That’s it, it’s decided, she’ll refuse. She will be the first notification-refusenik. She stretches her arms over her head and fills her lungs with sharp, refreshing evening air. A deferment—she’ll get a deferment, for her and, more important, for Ofer. More than that she cannot hope for right now. Just a short protest deferment. Her mind is flooded with waves of warmth and she marches quickly around the backpacks. Undoubtedly there is a fundamental flaw in her plan, some obvious illogic that will soon be discovered and undo the whole thing and mock her and send her home with her two packs. But until then, she is free of herself, of the cowardice that has stuck to her for the past year, and she repeats softly to herself what she is about to do, and once again reaches the strange conclusion that if she runs away from home, then the deal—this is how she thinks of it now—will be postponed a little, at least for a short while. The deal that the army and the war and the state may try to impose upon her very soon, maybe even tonight. The arbitrary deal that dictates that she, Ora, agrees to receive notification of her son’s death, thereby helping them bring the complicated and burdensome process of his death to its orderly, normative conclusion, and in some way also giving them the pronounced and definitive confirmation of his death, which would make her, just slightly, an accessory to the crime.
With these thoughts her strength suddenly runs out and she collapses onto the sidewalk and sits between the two backpacks, which now seem to crowd in
on her, protecting her like parents. She hugs the stubby, overflowing packs, pulls them to her, and silently explains that she might be a little insane at the moment, but in this wrestling match between her and the notifiers she must go all the way, head to head, for Ofer, so that she won’t feel afterward that she gave in without even a flicker. And therefore, when they come to inform her, she will not be here. The parcel will be returned to sender, the wheel will stop for an instant, and it may even have to reverse a little, a centimeter or two, no more. Of course the notice will be dispatched again immediately—she has no illusions. They won’t give up, they cannot lose this battle, because their surrender, even just to one woman, would mean the collapse of the entire system. Because where would we be if other families adopted the idea and also refused to receive notice of their loved ones’ deaths? She has no chance against them, she knows. No chance at all. But at least for a few days she will fight. Not for long, just twenty-eight days, less than a month. This is possible, it is within her power, and in fact it is the only thing possible for her, the only thing within her power.
She sits down in the back of Sami’s taxi again. Next to her sits a six- or seven-year-old boy—even Sami doesn’t know his exact age—a thin Arab boy, burning with fever. “It’s the kid of one of our guys,” Sami says cryptically. “Just someone’s,” he replies when she presses. Sami was asked to take the boy to Tel Aviv, to a place on the south side of the city, to his family. Sami’s family or the boy’s? That, too, remains unclear, and Ora decides not to bother him with questions for now. Sami looks haggard and frightened, and one of his cheeks is swollen as if he has a toothache. He doesn’t even ask why she’s lugging two backpacks at this time of night. Without the spark of curiosity in his eyes he looks lifeless, almost like a different person, and she realizes there’s no point bringing up the Gilboa trip again. Although the taxi is dark, she can see that the boy is wearing some familiar clothes: a pair of jeans that used to belong to her Adam, with a Bugs Bunny knee patch, and an ancient T-shirt of Ofer’s bearing a Shimon Peres election slogan. The clothes are too big for him, and Ora suspects this is the first time he’s worn them. She leans forward and asks what’s wrong with him. Sami says the boy is sick. She asks his name, and Sami says quickly, “Rami. Call his name Rami.” She asks, “Raami or Rami?” “Rami, Rami,” he replies.