“I asked you to turn it off.”
He drove on, his face impervious, his thick hands stretched across the wheel. Only a tiny muscle in the corner of his mouth quivered. She restrained herself with great effort. She tried to calm herself, to plan her next move …
And she knew, somewhere in the margins of her brain, she remembered, that if she only spoke to him candidly, if she only reminded him with a word, with a smile, of themselves, of the private little culture they had built up over the years, within the roaring and the drumming—
“Turn it off already!” she screamed as loudly as she could and pounded her lap with both hands.
He flinched, swallowed, and did not turn off the radio. She could see his fingers trembling, and she almost gave up. His weakness shocked her, and touched her, and awakened again a dim sense of guilt. She also had the feeling that his innate Eastern gentleness would not withstand this tension and would eventually melt away in face of the determination, the recklessness, even—both so Western—that was suddenly roused in her. And there were always, too, his fear of Ilan and his dependence on Ilan. She licked her burning lips. Her throat pounded and burned with dryness, and the thought that she would eventually win, that she would bend him to her will, was just as painful as the desire to subdue him. She wished she could stop here, right now, and erase it all, everything that had happened today. You’re just going out of your mind, she thought. What has he done to make you torment him like this? What has he done to you, tell me, other than merely exist?
This was all true, Ora retorted to herself, but it made her crazy to see that he could not give in to her even an inch, not even out of basic human courtesy! It’s just not in their culture, she thought. Them and their lousy honor, and their never-ending insults, and their revenge, and their settling of scores over every little word anyone ever said to them since Creation, and all the world always owes them something, and everyone’s always guilty in their eyes!
The music grew louder and louder, waves that bubbled and surfaced and climbed up her throat, and the men with their thundering voices pounded deep inside her, and something in Ora cracked, a distillation of many forms of sorrow and anguish, and perhaps also the affront of their friendship, which had let them down, which had been let down, which had blown up in their faces. Her skin turned red, a blazing shawl wrapped itself around her neck, and she felt that she could murder him. Her hand flew out, hit the radio button, and turned it off.
They glanced sideways at each other, trembling.
“Sami,” Ora sighed, “look what’s become of us.”
They kept on driving in silence, startled by themselves. To the left was Rosh Pina, deep in slumber, and then they passed Hatzor HaGlilit and Ayelet HaShachar and the Hula Reserve and Yesud HaMa’ala and Kiryat Shmonah, which blinked with orange lights, and then they turned onto Route 99 through HaGoshrim and Dafna and She’ar Yashuv. Every so often, when they reached an intersection, he slowed down and turned a cheek to her with a silent question: How much farther? And she jutted her chin out in response: Farther, keep going, until the country ends.
After Kibbutz Dan they heard a groan from the back. Avram woke up and wheezed. Ora turned to him. Lying on the seat, he opened a pair of waifish eyes and looked at her with a kind, dreamy smile. “I have to pee,” he said in a deep, slow voice.
“Oh, we’ll stop soon,” Ora said.
“I need to go now.”
“Stop!” she told Sami in a panic. “Stop as soon as you can.”
He slowed down and drove off the road. Ora sat and stared straight ahead. Sami looked at her. She did not move. “Ora?” asked Avram imploringly, and she was terrified at the thought that in a moment he would be standing outside the car, leaning on her, and judging by his look she would probably have to unzip his pants and hold it for him.
She gave Sami a pleading, begging, almost ingratiating look, and when she encountered his eyes she was trapped in them for a long, bitter moment that quickly branched out into an endless maze, from Joseph Trumpeldor and the riots of 1929 and 1936 all the way to Avram’s dick. She got out of the car and walked to the back door. Avram sat up with great effort. “It’s that pill,” he apologized.
“Give me your hand.” She dug her heels into the ground and readied her back for the blow to come. Her hand hovered unmet. He nodded with his eyes closed. He wrinkled his face a little and smiled with relief, and she watched as a big, dark stain spread slowly over his pants and onto the new leopard-skin upholstery.
A few moments later the two of them were outside with their backpacks tossed nearby, and Sami was charging away madly. As he zigzagged across the white line, he shouted and bellowed bitterly into the night mist, cursing both the Jews and the Arabs, and mainly himself and his own fate. He beat his head and his chest and the wheel of the Mercedes.
NOW THEY ATE PRUNES and Ora buried the pits in the sludge and hoped two trees might grow there one day, trunks intertwined. Then they said goodbye to the lovely spot, loaded up their backpacks, his blue and hers orange, and everything Avram did took forever, and it seemed that each movement he made passed through every joint in his body. But when he finally stood up straight and glanced at the river, a slight vernal brightness ran over his forehead, as though a gleaming coin had shone its golden luster on him from afar, and she entertained a fleeting idea: What if Ofer were here with us? The notion was utterly unfounded. She had only been able to sneak Avram tiny crumbs of information about Ofer, as she’d been forbidden to talk about him or even mention his name all these years. But now, for a brief moment, she saw the two of them here, Ofer and Avram, helping each other cross the water, and her eyes shined at him.
“Come on, let’s go.”
After no more than a hundred steps, beyond a small hill, the path led them into the stream once again.
Avram stood defeated. This turn was too much for him. For me too, Ora thought and sat down angrily. She took off her shoes and socks, tied them and fastened them, rolled up her pants, and walked firmly into the freezing, snow-fed water, unable to stifle a tiny shriek. Avram was still stuck on the bank behind her, confused by the forces that both pulled and pushed him. Desperate as he was, he knew that the bank Ora was moving toward now was the side on which they had begun their trek, and there, it seemed, was some stability, perhaps because that was the side of home. He sat down and went through the motions, tied his shoes to the backpack almost without seeing Ofer’s pair, and waded into the cold water with his lips pursed. This time he took resolute strides, kicking up a big commotion, and then came to sit down beside Ora on the bank. He slapped his feet dry and put his socks and shoes back on. Ora felt that he was at ease, not only because he was back on the familiar side but because he had seen that it was possible to cross over and back. And that is exactly what they did, three or four more times—they lost count—on that first morning of their Upper Galilee journey, which she was still calling a hike, if she was even calling it anything, if they even spoke more than a few words the whole day: “Come on,” “Give me your hand,” “Watch out here,” “Damn cows.” The path and the stream weaved and converged, and by the third crossing they no longer removed their shoes but simply walked through the mud and the water and climbed back up, sloshing around in their shoes until the water seeped out. Finally the path broke away from the Hatzbani River and became easier and earthier, an ordinary trail through the fields, dotted with big puddles of mud, pale cyclamens hovering on either side. Avram stopped glancing behind him every few minutes and did not ask whether Ora would know how to find the way back. He seemed to have realized that she had no intention of going back anywhere and that he was her hostage. He grew introverted, resigned to reducing his vitality to that of a plant, a lichen, or a spore. It must hurt less that way, Ora imagined. Why am I torturing him? she wondered as she watched him walk, frail and downtrodden, serving out a sentence he did not understand at all. He’s no longer part of me or of my life and really hasn’t been for years. She did not feel pained by thi
s thought, merely baffled: How could it be that the person I thought was my own flesh and blood, the root of my soul, would not tug at my heartstrings when he is severed from me in this way? What am I doing with him now? Why did this fixation grab hold of me now, when I need all my strength to rescue one child—why burden myself with another?
“Ofer,” she murmured, “I’m forgetting to think about him.”
Avram turned around suddenly and walked back down the path, aiming himself at her with his faltering steps. “Tell me what you want, I don’t have the strength for these games.”
“I told you.”
“I don’t get it.”
“I’m running away.”
“From what?”
She looked into his eyes and said nothing.
He swallowed. “Where’s Ilan?”
“Ilan and I separated a year ago. A bit less. Nine months.”
He swayed a little, as though she had hit him.
“That’s that,” she said.
“What do you mean separated? From who?”
“From who? From us. From each other. That’s it.”
“Why?”
“People separate. It happens. Come on, let’s go.”
He raised a heavy hand and kept standing there like a dim-witted student. Under his stubble she saw his tortured expression. There were years when she and Ilan used to joke that if they ever split up, they’d have to keep pretending they were a couple, for his sake.
“What reason do you have to separate?” he growled. “I want to know what came over you all of a sudden. All these years you keep going and then you just get sick of it?”
He’s scolding me, Ora realized with some surprise. He’s complaining.
“Who wanted this?” Avram straightened up, suddenly full of power. “It was him, wasn’t it? Did he have another woman?”
Ora almost choked. “Calm down. The two of us decided together. And maybe it’s better this way.” But then she seethed: “Anyway, why are you poking your nose into our lives? What do you even know about us? Where were you for three years? Where were you for thirty years?”
“I’m sorry.” He huddled over, alarmed. “I … Where was I?” He furrowed his brow as though he truly did not know.
“Anyway, that’s the situation.” Ora spoke smoothly now, to compensate for her outburst.
“And you?”
“What about me?”
“You’re alone?”
“I … I’m without him, yes. But I’m not alone.” She looked straight into his eyes. “I really don’t feel alone.” Her attempt at a smile did not work.
Avram wrung his hands nervously. She could feel his body rallying to take in the news. Ora and Ilan are separated. Ilan alone. Ora alone. Ora without Ilan.
“But why? Why?!” He was riled up again, shouting into her face, all but stomping his feet.
“You’re shouting. Don’t shout at me.”
“But how … you were always …” He let his backpack drop and looked up at her like a miserable puppy. “No, explain this to me from the beginning. What happened?”
“What happened?” She put down her backpack, too. “Lots of things happened since Ofer enlisted. Since you decided that you had to, I don’t know, disappear on me.”
His hands crushed each other. His eyes darted around.
“Our lives changed,” Ora said softly, “and I changed. And Ilan, too. And the family. I don’t know where to start telling you.”
“Where is he now?”
“On a trip in South America. Took a vacation from the office and everything. I don’t know how long he’ll be gone. We haven’t really had any contact recently.” She hesitated. She did not tell him that Adam had gone along, too. That in fact she was separated from her older son as well. That from him, from Adam, she might even be divorced. “Give me some time, Avram. My life is a mess right now, it’s not easy for me to talk about this.”
“Okay, okay, we don’t have to talk.”
He stood up looking frightened and stricken, like an ant nest kicked by a crude foot. Once, Ora thought, these sorts of plot twists, new permutations, frenetic changes, used to excite him, stimulate his mind and body, fermentize him—his word. Oh, she sighed silently, all the endlessly possible. Remember? Remember? You invented that, you made those rules for us. Playing blindman’s buff in lower Manhattan and opening our eyes in Harlem. And the way you said the lion should lie down with the lamb—let’s see what happens, you said. Maybe for once in the history of the universe there’ll be a surprise. Maybe this one particular lion and this one particular lamb will make a go of it together, this one time, and maybe they’ll reach—she could not remember the word he’d used—“elevation”? “Salvation”? His words, an entire lexicon, a dictionary and a phrasebook and a glossary, at the age of sixteen and nineteen and twenty-two, but since then: silence, lights out.
They started walking again. Slowly, side by side, bowed under their weights. She could practically feel the news sinking into him, like a solution trickling into a substance and changing its composition. He was slowly grasping that for the first time in thirty-five years he was really with her alone, without Ilan, without even the shadow of Ilan.
Whether or not that was true, she had trouble deciding. For months now she hadn’t been able to make up her mind. One minute she thought this way, and the next she thought the other.
“And the kids?” Avram blurted.
Ora slowed her steps. He wasn’t even willing to say their names. “The kids,” she annunciated, “are grown now, the kids are independent. They can make up their own minds whom to be with and where.”
He shot her a quick sideways glance, and for a moment a screen lifted and his eyes plunged into hers. He looked at her and knew her to the depths of her aggrievedness. Then the screen covered him over again. Within the sorrow and the pain, Ora felt a thrill: there was still someone inside there.
They kept on this way till the evening, walking a little then stopping to rest, avoiding roads and people, eating food from Ora’s backpack, picking the odd grapefruit or orange and finding pecans and walnuts on the ground. They filled and refilled their water bottles from brooks and springs. Avram drank constantly, Ora hardly at all. They walked this way and that like a pendulum, and she wondered if he understood that they were intentionally disorienting themselves so they could not find their way back.
And they barely spoke. She tried to say something a few times about the separation, about Ilan, about herself, but he would put his hand up in supplication, almost pleading—he did not have the strength for it. Maybe later. Tonight or tomorrow. Preferably tomorrow.
He was growing weaker, and she too was unaccustomed to such exertion. Calluses developed on his heels, and jock itch set in. She offered him Band-Aids and talc, and he refused. In the afternoon they napped under the shade of a leafy carob tree, then meandered a little more and stopped to doze again. Her thoughts grew unfocused. She thought it might be because of him: just as he had once awakened her and turned her inside out, his presence was now extinguishing and uninspiring. At dusk, when they sprawled on the edge of a pecan grove on a bed of dry leaves and nutshells, she looked up at the sky—empty apart from two noisy, stationary helicopters that had been hovering for hours, probably watching the border—and thought that she really wouldn’t mind meandering like this for the rest of the twenty-eight days, even a whole month. Just to stupefy herself. But what about Avram?
Perhaps he wouldn’t care, either. Perhaps he also felt like roaming now. What do I know about what he’s going through and what his life is like and who he’s with? she thought. As for me, it’s really not bad this way, it’s less painful. She noted with surprise that even Ofer had somewhat quieted in her over the last few hours. Maybe Avram was right and you didn’t have to talk about everything, or about anything. What was there to say, anyway? At most, if the right moment came along, she would tell him a bit about Ofer, carefully—maybe out here he wouldn’t be so resistant—just a few li
ttle things, maybe the easy things, the funny things. So at least he’d know who Ofer was in general outlines, in chapter headings. So at least he would know this person he had brought into the world.
They pitched their tents in a small wooded area, among terebinth and oak trees. Ofer had drilled her at home on setting up the tent, and to her amazement she did it with almost no difficulty. First she set up her own, then she helped Avram, and the tents did not stealthily attack her or slyly wrap themselves around her and did not pull her inside them like a carnivorous plant, as Ofer had predicted they might. When she had finished there were two round little tents, hers orange and his blue, about three or four yards apart, two bubbles that looked like little spaceships, impervious to water and to each other, and both had tiny windows covered with long nylon foreskins.
Avram still avoided opening Ofer’s backpack. Even the outside pockets. He said he didn’t need to change his clothes, which had been washed several times on his body in the stream that day, and he could lie down just as he was, on the ground, he didn’t need a pad, and anyway he wouldn’t rest for long because Ora hadn’t brought the sleeping pills he usually used, which were kept in a drawer next to his bed. The ones she’d brought, the homeopathic ones she’d found in the bathroom, were not his. “Whose are they, then?” Ora asked without moving her lips. “Um …” Avram dismissed the question. “They don’t have any effect on me.” Ora thought about the woman who used the vanilla-scented deodorant, who had purple hair, and who for a month, apparently, or so she thought he’d told her on the phone, had not lived with him.
At seven, when they could no longer bear the silence, they went to their tents and lay awake for hours, dozing off occasionally. Avram was exhausted from the day’s efforts and almost managed to fall asleep with the help of the ludicrous pills, but eventually he overcame them.
They tossed and turned, sighed and coughed. Too much reality was bustling inside them: the fact that they were out in the open, lying on earth that felt uncomfortably knobby with stones and dimples, and frighteningly new, and the unseen but tense quivering of a large animal, and a nervousness instilled in them by the twinkling stars, and breezes—first warm, then cool, then damp—that kept moving in different directions like soft breaths from an invisible mouth. And the calls of nocturnal birds and the rustling all around and the buzz of mosquitoes. At every moment it seemed as if something was crawling on their cheeks or down their legs, and the sound of light steps came from the nearby thicket, and the jackals called, and once there was the yelp of a creature being preyed upon. Ora must have fallen asleep despite all this, because she was awoken early in the morning by three people in military uniform standing on the stoop outside her front door. They squeezed against the wall to allow the senior member to pass by and knock. The doctor felt in his bag for a tranquilizer, and the young officer readied her arms to catch Ora if she passed out.