“But as usual I was wrong. He said, ‘It’s him,’ and got on his bike, hit the gas, and sped away, waking up Adam. Only after he was gone did it occur to me that he’d meant something completely different. I pulled back all the blankets covering Adam to look closely at his face, and for the first time, I saw that he looked like you.”
Avram perks up and turns to her in surprise.
“Something in his eyes, something in the general expression. Don’t ask me how it’s possible.” She chuckles. “Maybe I was thinking about you a bit when we made him, I don’t know. And by the way, to this day I can sometimes see a certain similarity to you in him.”
“How?” Avram laughs awkwardly and his feet almost trip over each other.
“There is such a thing as inspiration in nature, isn’t there?”
“That’s in electricity,” he replies quickly. “There’s a phenomenon where a magnet creates an electrical current.”
“Hey, Avram,” she says softly.
“What?”
“Just … Aren’t you hungry?”
“No, not yet.”
“Do you want some coffee?”
“Let’s keep going for a while. This is a good path.”
“Yes, it’s a good path.”
She walks in front of him, spreads her arms out, and inhales the clear air.
“A week later, Ilan called at eleven-thirty at night. I was asleep, and without any introductions he asked if it would be all right with me if he came to live in the hut in the yard.”
“In the hut?” Avram splutters.
“That shed, you know, where all the junk is, where you had your studio.”
“Yes, but what—”
“Without even thinking about it, I told him to come. I remember that I put the phone down and sat up in bed, and I thought about how this game we’d been playing for two years was just like us, this push-pull force that was working on him, and that gravitational force of Adam’s.”
“And yours,” Avram says without looking at her.
“You think so? I don’t know …”
The only sound now is their footsteps on the dirt. Ora tastes the idea: my gravitational force. She giggles. It’s nice to remember. She had never felt it as strongly as she did in those days, when it drove Ilan frantically all over town.
“Oh well.” She sighs. (Now he’s gone all the way to Bolivia and Chile, all light and airy, a traveler without cargo, a bachelor.)
“The next morning I went to the shed and started emptying it out. I threw out piles of two-thousand-year-old junk and crap, I mean it was the scrapyard of everyone who ever lived in that house of yours, from the beginning of the century, it seems. I found crates full of your sketches, texts, and reels of tape. I kept that, I kept all your stuff, I have it, if you ever want—”
“You can throw it out.”
“No no, I’m not throwing it away. If you want, throw it out yourself.”
“But what’s in there?”
“Thousands and thousands of pages full of your handwriting. Maybe ten crates full.” She laughs. “It’s unbelievable, it’s as if your whole life, from the moment you were born, all you did was sit and write.”
Later, after a silence that goes on for an entire hill and half a valley, Avram says, “So you cleared out the shed—”
“I worked there for a good few hours while Adam crawled around near me on the lawn, naked and happy as can be. Maybe he sensed that something was happening. I didn’t explain anything to him, because I couldn’t exactly explain it to myself. And when there was a huge pile on the path outside the shed, I stood and looked at it with a matronly sort of satisfaction, and then I got this zap in my heart—what was the name of that woman in the Cocteau story?”
“I don’t think she had a name.”
“Serves her right.”
Avram laughs deeply, tickling something inside her.
“And I started putting everything back inside. Adam probably thought I’d lost my mind. I shoved it all in and could barely push the door shut with my shoulder, and I locked it, and I felt that I had saved myself from glorious humiliation.
“A few days later, on Sukkoth, when I was at my parents’ in Haifa with Adam, Ilan turned up and cleared out the shed himself. He put his stuff in, brought someone in to build him a little kitchenette and bathroom and hooked up to my power and water. When I got back, it was night and Adam was asleep on me, and from a distance I could see the piles of trash and junk around the Dumpster. I walked down the path through the garden and saw a light on in the shed. I didn’t look right or left. What can I tell you, Avram.
“Then came the days. I don’t even know how to tell you about them. It was like torture. Me here and him there. Maybe ten meters between us. The light goes on his place and I jump into position by the window, behind the curtain, thinking maybe I’ll catch a glimpse of him. His phone rings, and I swear to you, I embodied the expression ‘I’m all ears.’
“Sometimes, in the morning, I would see him slip away just after sunrise, so—God forbid—he wouldn’t run into me with Adam. And he usually came home very late, almost running down the path, in such a hurry, with a student’s satchel under one arm, fleeing for his life. I had no idea what he did all day, if he had a girlfriend, where he hung out after school so as not to be here while Adam and I were awake. All I knew is that he went to see you three or four times a week. That was the only sure thing: he took care of you on the days I didn’t.
“You probably don’t remember, but I used to try anything to get you to talk about him, to steal a little information about him from you. Do you remember that?”
Avram nods.
“You really do?”
“Go on. Afterward I’ll …”
“I told Adam that there was a man living in the shed. He asked if the man was our friend, and I said it was too soon to tell. He asked if he was a good man, and I said yes, although he had his own ways of showing it. Of course Adam wanted us to go and visit him, but I explained that he was a very busy man and we couldn’t visit him because he was never home. Adam was enchanted by this new thing, and perhaps by the idea that there was a man who was never home. Every time we went out or came home, he would pull me to the shed. He drew pictures and wanted to bring them as gifts to the man in the shed. He kept kicking his ball at the shed. He would stand there and stroke Ilan’s motorbike with both hands, and the chain that tied it to the gate.
“Sometimes I played with him in the garden, near the shed, or gave him a bath in a big tub outside, or we would picnic on a blanket on the lawn. About once every minute he would say, ‘Can the man see us?’ ‘Maybe we should invite him?’ ‘What’s the man’s name?’
“When I finally broke down and told him the name, he started calling him. ‘Ilan, Ilan!’ ” She cups her hands over her mouth to illustrate: “Ilan, Ilan.” Avram looks at her.
“You see, up until then he’d had some instinct not to even learn the word ‘daddy.’ But now he started to say ‘Ilan’ with such dedication. He would open his eyes in the morning and ask if Ilan was still there. Come back from day care and check with me whether Ilan was back from work. In the afternoons he would stand on the porch facing the garden, hold on to the railing, rock it as hard as he could, and shout ‘Ilan!’ a hundred times, a thousand times, never giving up, until I took him inside. Sometimes I really had to drag him into the house.
“You know, telling you this, I realize what I did to him.
“I wasn’t thinking about anything then, do you understand?
“Ilan and I were—
“You have to understand.
“There was a kind of circle of madness around us both.
“And all my natural instincts just seemed to—
“Listen, I don’t know where I was.
“It was as though I didn’t exist.”
She picks up only after a long break, during which she wipes her eyes and nose and swallows down the toxic thought that perhaps it is this too that Adam is
now punishing her for. “It wasn’t his usual attraction to men. Not the attraction to every man who happened to come through the house, every postman delivering a package, whom he would flirt with and ask to stay and cling to his leg. There was something in Ilan—you know, his absent presence, and the fact that he was capable of ignoring Adam so completely, when everyone else made such a big deal about how cute he was—something that just drove him mad. And to this day it’s like that.” She sighs. She can see Adam performing on a stage, his eyes rolling back in a very private ecstasy, a mixture of torment and pleading.
“Like what?”
“Like he’s always wanting Ilan to see him.
“And just so you know, at least twice a day I would decide that was it, Ilan had to leave, get out of the shed, just to stop torturing Adam. But on the other hand, I wasn’t able to give up that one-thousandth of a chance that he might still come home. I kept trying to understand what Ilan was going through when he heard Adam wailing on the porch, and how it could not make him crazy. What sort of a person was he, tell me this, that he could withstand that kind of thing?”
“Yes,” Avram says, his voice hardening.
“I also thought maybe that was exactly what he was looking for.”
“What?” Avram grunts.
“Exactly that torture.”
“Which was what? I don’t get it.”
“That right-across-the-way,” she says rhythmically. “For thou shalt see us afar off, but thou shalt not go thither. That sort of thing. And believe me, that kind of torture I don’t—”
His face tenses up and his eyes dart around. His entire expression alters. She stops. Puts a hand on his arm.
“I’m sorry, Avram, I didn’t … Don’t go there now, be with me.”
“I’m with you,” he says after a minute. His voice is thick and strained. He wipes the sweat off his upper lip. “I’m here.”
“I need you.”
“I’m here, Ora.”
They walk silently. A road runs by not too far away, and they can already hear the vehicles. Avram senses them the way a dreamer starts to be aware of sounds in the household that has awoken before he has.
“I looked down on him, and sometimes I pitied him the way you pity a handicapped person. And I hated him, and I missed him, and I knew I had to do something to extract him from it, from the curse he had put on himself and on us. But I didn’t have the strength to do anything. Not to take a single step.
“And all that time, just so you understand, Ilan and I talked on the phone at least twice a week, because we also had you. About once a month you had another little operation, the final touches, cosmetic stuff, and all the never-ending coordination with the Ministry of Defense, and finding you an apartment in Tel Aviv. Twice a week I drove to see you, to be with you, and Ilan did it the other days. And you didn’t know anything about us, or so we thought. You didn’t know that we had a son, or that we’d separated, or about all of Ilan’s roaming back and forth across Jerusalem. Tell me—”
“What?”
“Do you even remember anything from then?”
“Do I remember? Yes.”
“Really?” She is astonished. Stops still.
“Almost everything.”
“But what exactly? The treatments, the operations, the interrogations?” She runs after him.
“Ora, I remember that period almost day by day.”
“I used to sit with you,” she continues immediately—the new information is too much to contain, too frightening: she cannot take it in now; later, later—“sit and tell you stories about me and Ilan, as if nothing had changed. As if we were still twenty-two-year-old kids, like on the day you left. As if we had stayed in exactly the same spot, waiting for you to get back. Freeze tag.”
They walk quickly, almost running for some reason.
“Not that you showed much of an interest. You would sit there in your room, or in the garden, saying almost nothing. You made no contact with the other wounded soldiers, or with the nurses. You didn’t ask anything. I never knew how much of all my chatter you were taking in. I told you about my social work program, which I had stopped right after you got back, because who could be bothered with that. I would babble on about the great campus life, and describe my project with the underprivileged kids, which I had dropped after you came back, of course, but I kept retelling you how I was setting it up, who was helping me and who wasn’t. I described the negotiations with the kibbutzim as though they were really going on right then. Ma’agan Michael agreed to host the kids but wouldn’t let them swim in their pool, and Beit HaShita put them in buildings with holes in the walls, and don’t ask what happened yesterday, all the kibbutzim were demanding that I remove the kids immediately because they had head lice. I would sit with you and just continue my life from where it left off. It was a bit of therapy for me too, what’s wrong with that?”
Yet she remembers: One day, while she was chattering at him, he had suddenly turned to her and grunted: “How is your boy?”
When she stammered, he pressed on: “How old is your boy? What’s your boy’s name?”
She was paralyzed for a moment. Then she pulled her wallet from her purse and took out a picture.
His face trembled. His lips twitched uncontrollably. When she was about to put the picture back in her wallet, he reached out and grasped her wrist, bending it hard, and shivered as he looked at the picture.
“He looks like both of you,” he finally said.
“Avram, I’m so sorry,” she said, trying not to cry. “I didn’t know that you knew.”
“When you look at him you can see how alike you are.”
“Me and him? Really?” Ora had felt happy for a moment. She saw almost no similarity between herself and Adam.
“You and Ilan.”
“Oh.” She released her hand from his grip. “How long have you known?”
He shrugged his shoulders and said nothing. Ora quickly calculated: she’d stopped coming to see him as soon as she’d started showing, and Ilan had taken care of him alone. She suddenly became furious. “Just answer me this—when did he tell you?”
“Ilan? He didn’t tell me.”
“Then how?”
Avram stared at her with expressionless eyes. “I knew. I knew from the start.”
She had a crazy thought: He knew as soon as I found out.
“And Ilan doesn’t … doesn’t know that you know?”
A conspiratorial flicker ran over his face. His old cunning, his love of plot twists.
They’ve been walking for several minutes on a narrow side road, but the surprising amount of traffic makes them both unquiet. It’s been at least two days since they’ve walked on a road, and the cars seem to be zooming by far too close. They see their own reflection in the drivers’ looks: two weathered refugees. For a few hours they forgot that’s what they are—escapees, persecuted. Avram drags his feet again and grumbles incessantly. Ora is troubled by a vague, silly, yet stubborn suspicion that this remote road is ultimately connected, through infinite streets and intersections, to its brothers in faraway Beit Zayit, and that some bad news may trickle back through the asphalt network’s nervous system. They both calm down at once when they spot an orange-blue-and-white marker, which they have started seeing and learned to trust. It directs them to turn left after a small concrete bridge and depart from the road to an inviting field. It does her good, Avram too, to feel the live earth beneath their feet again, and the easily trampled weeds and bushes that respond to their footfalls and add a spring to their steps, and the little pebbles that fly up like sparks from the labor of walking.
Their backs straighten, their senses awake. She can feel her body rousing, like a wild animal. Even the steep incline—a narrow goats’ path through what seems like a massive rockslide—does not frighten them now. Giant oaks erupt from the rocks, their branches slope down to the escarpment, and Ora and Avram walk in silence, concentrating on the difficult descent. They help each other, careful
not to slide on the rocks made slippery by a flow of spring water.
Later—neither of them has a watch, and for days they have had neither minutes nor hours, their time measured only by the light’s refraction on the prism of each day—Avram leans his back and backpack against a tree trunk and slowly sits down with his legs sprawled out in front of him. His head droops a little, and for a moment it looks as though he’s asleep. Ora rests her head on a cool rock and listens to the gently flowing stream somewhere nearby. Without opening his eyes, Avram says, “We’ve walked a lot these past days.”
“I can barely move my feet.”
“It must be thirty years since I’ve walked this much.”
It’s his voice, she thinks. He’s talking to me. When she opens her eyes, he is looking at her. Straight and clear into her.
“What?” she asks.
“Nothing.”
“What are you looking at?”
“At you.”
“What do you see?”
He does not reply. His eyes avoid her. She is certain that her face is no longer beautiful to him. She thinks he sees her face as another broken promise.
“Ora.”
“What?”
“I was thinking today while we were walking. I was thinking—what does he … look like?”
“What does he look like?”
“Yes.”
“What does Ofer look like?”
Avram pouts worriedly. “Isn’t that a good question?”
“No, it is, it’s an excellent question.”
She turns her face this way and that, to dry her eyes.
“I have a little picture of him in my wallet, together with Adam, if you—”
“No, no.” He sounds alarmed. “Tell me.”
“Just with words?” She smiles.
“Yes.”
A bold, joyous chirping sound suddenly fills the crevice. An invisible bird sings from within the thicket, and Ora and Avram lower their heads to absorb the tiny gaiety, a soul full of life and stories. A whole plot is narrated, perhaps the events of the passing day, praise for food, the tale of a wonderful and convoluted rescue from the claws of a predator, and in between, a chorus made entirely of claims and responses, a bitter settling of scores with a petty adversary.