Ora saw the three of them straighten up and clear their throats, and the senior one raised his hand and hesitated for an instant. She watched his fist, transfixed, and it occurred to her that this was a moment that would last a lifetime, but then he knocked on the door, knocked firmly three times, and looked at the tips of his shoes, and as he waited for the door to open he silently rehearsed the notification: at such-and-such time in such-and-such place, your son Ofer, who was on an operational mission—
Across the street a series of windows slammed shut and drapes were drawn closed, with only their corners pulled aside for someone to peek out. But her door would remain shut. Ora finally managed to move her feet and tried to pull herself into a seated position in the sleeping bag. She was bathed in cold sweat. Her eyes were closed and her hands felt rigid, unmovable. The senior officer knocked three times again and was so averse to doing it that he knocked too hard, and for a moment he seemed to want to break down the door and burst in with the news. But the door was closed and no one was opening it to receive his notification, and he looked awkwardly at the document in his hand, which stated explicitly that at such-and-such time in such-and-such place, your son Ofer, who was on an operational mission. The female officer walked backward on the stoop to check the house number, and it was the right house, and the doctor tried to peer through the window to see if there was a light on inside, but no light was on. Two more weaker knocks, and the door remained shut, and the senior officer leaned on it with his whole weight as if seriously considering breaking the door down and hurling his notification inside at any cost. He looked at his colleagues with a confused expression, because it was becoming clear to them that something had gone wrong with the rules of this ritual, that their businesslike and professional desire, their essentially logical desire, to deliver the notification, to rid themselves of it, to vomit it out, and above all to embed it quickly into the person it belonged to by law and by destiny, namely, that at such-and-such time in such-and-such place, your son Ofer, who was on an operational mission—this desire of theirs was now encountering a wholly unexpected yet equally powerful force, which was Ora’s absolute unwillingness to receive the notification or accommodate it in any way, or even to acknowledge that it belonged to her at all.
Now the two other members of the team joined in the effort to push down the door, and with rhythmic grunts, wordlessly spurring each other on, they stormed the door again and again, ramming it with their bodies, and Ora still lay somewhere on the outskirts of her dream. Her head jerked from side to side and she wanted to shout but no sound came out. She knew they would never dare to do something so extraordinary unless they sensed the resistance projected onto the door from the inside, and this is what was enraging them, and the unfortunate door heaved and groaned between the willingness and the unwillingness, between their mature military logic and her childish obstinacy, and Ora fluttered and grew entangled in the folds of her sleeping bag until suddenly she froze, opened her eyes, and stared at the little window in her tent. She could see through the edges that it was getting light outside, and she ran her hand through her hair—so wet, as if she’d washed her hair in sweat—and lay down and reassured herself that her heart would stop racing soon, but she had to get out.
Much as she wanted to, she could not sit up. The sleeping bag was twisted and wrapped around her like a huge, tight, damp bandage, and her body was so weak that it did not have the power to resist this shroud, so full of life as it tightened around her. Perhaps she would just lie here a little longer, calm herself and gather strength, close her eyes and try to think about something more cheerful. But she soon felt a hushed grumble erupting from the team of notifiers, because they knew that they had to deliver their notice, if not now then in an hour or two, or in a day or two, and they would have to come all the way out here again and prepare themselves again for the difficult moment. People never think about the notifiers and the emotional burden they must bear; they pity only those receiving the news. But perhaps the notifiers are the ones who are angry, because as sad and sympathetic as they may be, they have, after all, begun to feel a certain tension—not to say excitement—and even a festive air, in anticipation of the moment of notification, which, even after they’ve experienced it dozens of times, is not and cannot be routine, just as there can be no routine execution.
With a stifled yell, Ora tore herself away from the damn sleeping bag and ran, fleeing from the tent. She stood outside with a horrified look in her wild eyes. Only after a few moments did she notice Avram sitting on the ground not far away, leaning against a tree, watching her.
They made coffee and drank silently, he wrapped in his sleeping bag, she in a thin coat. “You were shouting,” he said.
“I had a nightmare.”
He did not ask what it was about.
“What was I shouting?”
He got up and began to tell her about the stars. “This one’s Venus, those are the Big and Little Dipper, and see how the Big Dipper points to the North Star?”
She listened, slightly hurt, slightly amazed at his new enthusiasm and unshackled voice.
“See?” He pointed. “There’s Saturn. Sometimes, in summer, I can see it from my bed, with the rings. And that one’s Sirius, the brightest—”
As he talked and talked, Ora remembered a line she and Ada had loved, from S. Yizhar’s “Midnight Convoy”: “You cannot point out a star to someone without putting your other hand on his shoulder.” But as it turned out, you could.
They folded up their little encampment and set off. She was happy to put some distance between her and the place where the nightmare had come, and the hint of sunrise in the sky—the light ascended as if from a slowly unclasping pair of hands—revived her a little. We’ve been on the road for a whole day and night, she thought, and we’re still together. But her feet soon began to feel very heavy, and a dull pain coursed through her body.
She thought it was the exhaustion. She had barely slept for two days. Or perhaps it was sunstroke—she hadn’t worn a hat the day before or had enough to drink. She hoped it wasn’t an ill-timed bout of spring flu. But it didn’t feel like flu or sunstroke. It was a different, unfamiliar sort of ache, stubborn and persistent and consuming, and at times she even thought it was a flesh-eating bacteria.
They sat down to rest near a ruin. Part of the structure was still standing; the rest had crumbled into a heap of chiseled stones. Ora closed her eyes and tried to calm herself by breathing deeply and massaging her temples, chest, and stomach. The pain and distress grew worse, her heartbeat pounded through her body, and then it occurred to her that her pain was Ofer.
She felt him in her stomach, beneath her heart, a dark and restless spot of emotion. He moved and shifted and turned inside her, and she moaned in surprise, frightened by his violence and desperation. She thought back to the attack of claustrophobia he’d suffered when he was about seven, when the two of them got stuck between floors in the elevator in Ilan’s office building. When Ofer realized they were trapped, he started yelling at the top of his lungs for someone to help them, shouting that he had to get out, he didn’t want to die. She tried to calm him and gather him in her arms, but he slipped away and thrashed against the walls and door, hitting and screaming until his voice cracked, and eventually he attacked her too, beating and kicking. Ora always remembered how his face had changed in those moments, and she remembered the twinge of disappointment when she realized, not for the first time, how thin and fragile his cheerful, vivacious surface was, this child who was the brighter and clearer of her two—that was how she had always thought of him: the brighter and clearer of her two—and she remembered that Ilan said at the time, half joking, that at least they knew Ofer wouldn’t join the Armored Corps when he enlisted; he would never let himself be closed up inside a tank. But that prophecy was disproven, like so many others, and Ofer did join the Armored Corps, and he was closed up inside a tank, and there was never any problem with that—at least not for him. Ora was the one who
felt suffocated almost to the point of passing out when she got inside a tank, at Ofer’s request, after the military display that his battalion put on for the parents at Nebi Musa. And now she felt him, she felt Ofer, just as she had felt him that day in the elevator, terrified and wild with fear, sensing that something was closing in on him, trapping him, and that he had no way out and no air to breathe. Ora jumped up and stood over Avram. “Come on, let’s go.” Avram couldn’t understand—they’d only just sat down—but he didn’t ask anything, and it’s a good thing he didn’t, because what could she have told him?
She walked quickly, not feeling the weight of her backpack, and she kept forgetting about Avram, who had to call out for her to slow down and wait. But it was hard for her, it was intolerable, to walk at his pace. All morning she refused to stop even once, and when he rebelled and lay down in the middle of the path, or under a tree, she kept circling around him to dull herself more and more with continuous walking and sun exposure, and intentionally made herself thirsty. But Ofer would not let up, he raged inside her with rhythmic and painful spasms, and toward noon she started to hear him. It was not speech exactly, just the music of his voice carrying over all the sounds of the valley: the hums and the twitters and the chirping of crickets and her own breath and Avram’s grunts and the hiss of the huge sprinklers in the fields and the distant tractor engines and the small planes that sometimes circled above. His voice came to her with strange clarity, as if he were right here walking beside her, talking to her without words—he had no words, only his voice, he was playing for her with his voice, and every so often she picked up the slight, endearing stammer in his sh sounds, especially when he was excited: sh … sh … She did not know whether to answer him and just start talking or ignore him as much as she could, because from the moment she had shut the door to her house in Beit Zayit behind her, she had been tormented by a very familiar fear, the fear of what she might perceive and what her imagination might show her when she thought of him, and what might slip out of her head and wrap itself around Ofer’s hands and over his eyes precisely at the moment when he needed all his vigilance and strength.
She felt it immediately when he changed his tactic, because he started to simply say Mom, time after time, a hundred times, Mom, Mom, in different tones, at different ages, nagging at her, smiling to her, telling her secrets, tugging at her dress, Mom, Mom, angry at her, ingratiating, flirting, impressed, clinging, jabbing, laughing with her, opening his eyes to her on an eternal morning of childhood: Mom?
Or lying in her arms, the baby he used to be, alert and tiny, his thin waist in a diaper, staring at her with that look he had even back then, embarrassingly tranquil and mature, with a constant speck of irony, almost from birth, perhaps because of the shape of his eyes, which leaned—lean—toward each other at a sharp and skeptical angle.
She tripped and pulled herself forward with outstretched arms, and looked as if she were feeling her way through an invisible swarm of hornets. There was something ominous in the vitality with which he had suddenly emerged inside her, rocking frantically. Why is he doing this? she asked herself feebly. Why is he feeding and sucking on me? Her entire body throbbed and exhaled his name like a bellows, and it was not that she missed him—there was no nostalgia. He was tearing her up from the inside, flailing around and beating his fists against the walls of her body. He claimed her for himself unconditionally, demanded that she vacate her own being and dedicate herself to him eternally, that she think about him all the time and talk about him incessantly, that she tell anyone she meets about him, even the trees and the rocks and the thistles, and that she say his name out loud and silently over and over again, so as not to forget him even for a moment, even for a second, and that she not abandon him, because he needed her now in order to exist—she suddenly knew that this was what his biting meant. How could she not have realized before that he needed her now, in order not to die? She stood with one hand on her aching waist and let out an astonished breath. Was that it? Just as he had once needed her to be born?
“What’s the matter with you?” Avram asked breathlessly when he caught up. “What’s gotten into you?”
She lowered her head and said softly, “Avram, I can’t go on like this.”
“Like what?”
“With you not even willing to … That I can’t even say the name in front of you.” And then a knot came untied in her. “Listen. This silence is killing me and it’s killing him, so make up your mind.”
“About what?”
“About whether you’re really here with me.”
He looked away. Ora waited quietly. Since Ofer’s birth, she had hardly talked with Avram about him. Avram always made a hand gesture that was quick and repellant, like brushing away a bothersome fly, every time Ora couldn’t resist talking about Ofer when they met, or even when she merely mentioned his name. She always had to protect him from Ofer, that was his stipulation, his condition for these pathetic meetings. She had to act as if there were no Ofer in the world and never had been. And Ora had grit her teeth and concluded that she was more or less over the insult and the anger and accepted his refusal and rejection and told herself that over the years she’d even grown a little accustomed to the total and arbitrary demarcation he demanded from her—after all, there was a certain relief in the clear boundaries, the total separation of authorities: Avram on this side, she on the other, and everything else over there. And in recent years she’d discovered, with a slight sense of shame, that the thought of any other option made her more nervous than the idea that this state of affairs would continue. Yet even so, with every rude push he gave, she was insulted to the depths of her soul and had to remind herself again that Avram’s tenuous equilibrium seemed to be based on a total, hermetic self-defense against Ofer, against the fact of Ofer, against what, to him, was undoubtedly the mistake of his lifetime. This too always aroused a fresh wave of anger in her, the thought that Ofer was anyone’s mistake of a lifetime, and worse, that Ofer was Avram’s mistake of a lifetime. But on the other hand—and this is what had confused and maddened her these last two days—there were the etched lines on the wall above his bed, the countdown calendar of Ofer’s army years, three years, more than a thousand lines, one line for every single day, and he must have crossed out the day every evening with a horizontal line, and how could she reconcile these two things—the mistake of a lifetime and the countdown—and which of the two should she believe?
“Listen, I was thinking—”
“Ora, not now.”
“Then when? When?”
He turned away sharply and walked quickly ahead, and she hated him and disdained him and pitied him and realized she must have truly lost her mind to have believed he could help her or be with her in her time of trouble. The whole idea was fundamentally sick, sadistic even—to inflict this sort of trek on him, to expect that suddenly, after twenty-one years of erasure and separation, he would want to start hearing about Ofer. She swore she would put him on the first bus to Tel Aviv in the morning, and from now on she would not say a word about Ofer.
By evening the pain of him became so strong that she shut herself up in her tent and sobbed quietly, secretly, trying to muffle the noise. The contractions—that was how she felt: they were like labor contractions—came frequently and sharply and grew into a constant, blinding pain, and she thought that if this continued she would somehow have to get to an emergency room. But what would she say when she got there? And besides, a doctor might persuade her to go home immediately and wait for them.
Avram, in his tent, heard her and decided not to take a sleeping pill, not even his girlfriend Neta’s pills, because Ora might need him during the night. But how could he help her? He lay awake, motionless, his arms crossed over his chest and his hands in his armpits. He could have lain that way for hours, almost without moving. He heard her sobbing to herself, a long, monotonous wail. In Egypt, in Abbasiya Prison, there was a short, thin reservist from Jerusalem who came from a family of Cochin
Jews. He used to cry for hours every night, even if they hadn’t been tortured that day. The guys almost lost their minds because of him, even the Egyptian wardens couldn’t stand it, but the Cochin guy wouldn’t stop. One day when he and Avram were standing in the corridor waiting to be taken to an interrogation, Avram managed to communicate with the man through the sacks over their faces, and the Cochin guy said he was crying out of jealousy for his girlfriend, because he could sense that she was being unfaithful. She had always loved his older brother, and his imaginings of what she was doing now were eating him alive. Avram had felt a strange reverence for this gaunt man, who within the hell of captivity could find such dedication to his own private pain, which had nothing to do with the Egyptians and their tortures.
Avram stepped quietly out of the tent and walked away until he could barely hear her, then sat down under a terebinth to try to focus. During the day, with Ora next to him, he could not think at all. Now he wrote the indictment of his pathetic and cowardly conduct. He dug his fingers into his face, his forehead and cheeks, and groaned softly: “Help her, you shit, you traitor.” But he knew that he wouldn’t, and his mouth twisted with loathing.