“When I saw you walking,” Ora says after the singing dies down a little and turns to secular chirping, “even today, just a few minutes ago, I thought about how Ofer’s walk has changed over the years.”
Avram leans forward, attentive.
“Because up until he was about four, he walked exactly like you do, with the … you know, rocking to the sides, arms like a penguin, just like you walk.”
“You mean that’s how I walk?” Avram seems hurt.
“You didn’t know?”
“Still today?”
“Listen, why don’t you try those shoes? Try them on, what do you care?”
“No, no, I’m comfortable in these.”
“So you’re just going to carry them the whole time?”
“So you say he walks like me?”
“That’s when he was little. Four or five. Afterward he went through all kinds of periods. You know that kids mimic what they see, too.”
“They do?” He thinks about Ilan’s supple, battle-ready stride.
“And in adolescence—do you really want to hear?”
“I’m hearing,” Avram murmurs.
“He was terribly thin up to then, and small. If you saw him now, you’d never believe it was the same person. But he made this giant leap, at around sixteen and a half, in breadth and height. Until then he was”—she draws a figure in the air, a thin reed or a twig—“he had matchstick legs, it broke your heart to see them. And he always used to walk around—I just remembered this—in huge, heavy hiking boots, a bit like the ones tied to your backpack now. From morning to night he never took them off.”
“But why?”
“Why? Do you really not know why?”
Of course he does, she thinks immediately. Don’t you understand? He just needs to hear it from you, word for word.
“Because they gave him some height, and they probably also gave him the feeling that he was stronger, more solid, masculine.”
“Yes,” Avram murmurs.
“I’m telling you, he was really small.”
“How small?” Avram scoffs in disbelief. “How small?”
She signals to him with her eyes: Very small. Tiny. Avram slowly nods, for the first time digesting with his eyes the Ofer reflected in her gaze. A wee boy. Like Thumbelino. She wonders who he’s been seeing in his mind’s eye all these years.
“Didn’t you think he—”
“I didn’t think anything.” He cuts her off, his face closing up.
“And you never tried to imagine how—”
“No!”
They sit quietly. The bird has also stopped singing. A very small child, Avram muses, and something in him moves, crushed. A weak boy, a passing shadow. I wouldn’t be able to take it, the sorrow of such a child, his envy of other boys. How can he survive at school, on the street. How do you let him out of the house. Cross the street alone. I would never be able to take it.
Love him, Ora asks silently.
“I really didn’t think,” he mumbles, “I just didn’t think anything.”
How could you? she asks with her eyes.
Don’t ask me, he responds in silence and lowers his gaze. His thumbs dart over his fingertips. The tightening muscle in his jaw says, Don’t ask me those kinds of questions.
“But I told you,” she goes on, consoling. “He sprang up all at once after that, in height and in breadth. Today he’s a real …”
But back then, thinks Avram, somehow refusing to part with a strange new pain, like a cruel pinch of the heart that ends with a light caress.
Avram himself, she remembers, was always short, but broad and solid. “Today I look like a dwarf,” he’d explained once, very matter-of-factly, to the boys and girls in his class. And then he’d continued with his boldfaced lie: “And that’s how it is with all the men in my family. But at nineteen, we suddenly start growing and growing and growing, and you can’t stop us, and then we get even!” He’d laughed. At recess, in the locker room, he once stopped Meir’ke Blutreich and announced in front of everyone that from now on Meir’ke’s appointment as the class fatty was annulled, and that he, Avram, now bore the official title and had no intention of sharing it with amateur fatties, posers whose arms and bellies were not sufficiently flabby and flaccid.
“I was thinking,” Avram whispers, “I don’t know if he …”
“What? Ask.”
“Is he also, um, a redhead?”
Ora laughs with relief. “His hair was actually pretty red when he was born, and I was really happy about that, and so was Ilan. But it changed to yellow very quickly in the sun. And now it’s a little darker. Like your beard, more or less.”
“Mine?” Avram said excitedly, smoothing the rough ends of his beard.
“He has wonderful hair, full, abundant, thick, with curls at the ends. It’s a pity he shaves it all off now. He says it’s more comfortable that way in the army, but maybe after his release he’ll start growing it—”
She stops.
Adam is surprised by her onslaught with the camera and flash but cooperates with suspicious enthusiasm. She takes pictures of him playing, drawing, watching television, lying in bed under his blanket. Ora is worried he might get celluloid poisoning. One day, in the middle of a photo shoot, he looks up with a supposedly innocent gaze and asks: “This is for the man in the shed, right?”
Ora splutters, “No, why would you think that? It’s for my friend who’s sick in the hospital in Tel Aviv.”
“Oh,” says Adam, disappointed, “the one you always go to see?”
“Yes, the one I go to see. He very much wants to know what you look like.”
But Adam never wants to know anything about that friend.
Avram recovers from another operation. Ora brings him a little photo album. The pictures have been screened for anything that may cause him pain, like his childhood home in the background, his rooms, his garden. He flips through the album, barely stopping on any photo. He does not smile. His face shows no expression. After a few pages he shuts it.
“Do you want me to leave it with you?”
“No.”
“I’ll just leave it here, why not.”
“Good-looking kid,” he says, and she can feel how heavy his tongue is in his mouth.
“He’s wonderful, you’ll meet him.”
“No, no.”
“Not now. One day. When you want to.”
“No!” He starts shaking his head wildly. “No, no, no!” His whole body sways, the wheelchair starts to rock, and Ora holds him with both hands and shouts, “Calm down, calm down.” A nurse comes running, and then another one, and they take her out of the room. She watches him struggle, all his strength suddenly restored, and he seems to finally comprehend what has really happened to him. She sees them jab him with a needle, and the limpness, and the dazed senses that dull his face again.
She calls Ilan and tells him. He is furious at her for bringing the pictures. For not realizing what that would do to Avram. “It’s like torturing a dead man!” he yells. “You’re going to a cemetery and standing over a grave and showing off your life.”
But when Ilan visits him the next day, Avram asks him to bring the album. Ora puts it outside the shed that night, knocks on the door, and slowly walks back to the house. A few minutes later she watches through the window as Ilan walks out, looks around him, picks up the album, and takes it inside. From her place by the window she leafs through the album with Ilan. Later, through his drawn curtain, she sees him pace back and forth, back and forth.
Avram finishes his rehabilitation and refuses to go back to the house in Tzur Hadassah. Ilan rents a nice apartment for him in Tel Aviv, and they take turns cleaning it and getting it ready for him. On a stormy day in early winter, Ilan brings Avram to the apartment and Avram begins his new life. For the first few weeks he has a live-in caregiver paid for by the Ministry of Defense, but he doesn’t want him. The rehab department tries to interest him in various jobs, but they wear him out and he can?
??t hold any of them down. Ora talks with the case managers repeatedly. She bargains, argues, tries to find a job that will suit his personality and skills. The case managers claim he simply doesn’t want to work, isn’t interested in anything. Ora detects a tone of impatience. They intimate that her expectations for him are unrealistic.
Avram starts to go out on his own. Sometimes she phones him for hours and he doesn’t answer, and then she panics and calls Ilan, who says, “Let him breathe.”
“What if he’s done something to himself?”
“Can you blame him?”
Avram walks on the beach. He goes to the movies. He sits in parks and befriends strangers. He adopts certain mannerisms and a sort of immediate friendliness that is both welcoming and hollow. Ilan is impressed by his pace of recovery. Ora feels that much of it is show. When she comes to see him, twice a week, he looks fresh and clean-shaven; “well maintained,” she reports to Ilan. He smiles often, even when there’s no reason to, and chatters quite a bit. His vocabulary grows rich again, and every time he says something Avram-like, Ora turns pink with joy. But she quickly discovers that the topics of conversation are well defined and delimited: no talk of the distant past, none of the recent past, and certainly none of the future. Only the present exists. The moment itself.
At around the same time, Ilan and Ora meet with the Ministry of Defense psychologist who has treated Avram since he came back from the POW prison. They learn, to their surprise, that Avram is not defined as shell-shocked. The doctors cannot precisely determine the type of damage or the outlook for recovery, but they all agree that he does not have the distinct symptoms of shell shock. “If he’s not shell-shocked, then what is he?” Ilan asks in astonishment, his forehead tipped forward, ready to butt.
The psychologist sighs. “It’s hard to say. His characteristics are on the margin. It’s certainly possible that he’ll be better in a few weeks or months, but it might take longer. Our estimate—our guess, to be more accurate—is that he is somehow controlling it, his rate of recovery, not consciously of course—”
“I don’t understand! Are you telling me he’s pulling our leg? That he’s acting?”
“God forbid.” The psychologist holds his hands up. “I—we, meaning, the system—just think that he probably prefers to return to life with small steps. Very, very small. I would suggest trusting that he probably knows better than all of us what’s best for him.”
“Let me ask you something,” Ora says, placing a restraining hand on Ilan’s arm. “Is it possible that the fact that we had a child, Ilan and I, is somehow connected to … how can I put it …”
“To his unwillingness to live,” Ilan hisses.
“That is a question only he can answer,” says the psychologist without looking at them.
Ilan keeps on living in the shed, and his presence, like his absence, gradually fades. Ora stops believing he’ll ever be able to cross the ocean between the shed and the house. He himself tells her on the phone one night that this seems to be the distance he can tolerate from her and Adam. She no longer asks what he means. Deep inside, she’s already given up on him. He asks again, as he does occasionally, if she wants him to leave. She just has to say the word and he’ll be gone tomorrow. Ora says, “Leave, stay, what difference does it make.”
For a short while she has a new boyfriend, a guy called Motti, a divorced accordion player who leads public sing-alongs, whom her friend Ariela set her up with. She usually meets him out of the house, more because of Adam than Ilan. When Adam goes to stay with her parents in Haifa for three days, she invites Motti to sleep over. She knows that Ilan in his shed can see, or at least hear. She doesn’t try to hide it. Motti sleeps with her ungracefully. He probes his way inside her and keeps asking insistently if he’s “already there.” Ora doesn’t want to be his there. She remembers the times when she was entirely here. Afterward, Motti sings “Where Are You, Beloved?” in the shower, in a ringing tenor voice, and Ora sees Ilan’s shadow in the shed, darting back and forth. She doesn’t invite Motti back again.
One evening, in Avram’s apartment in Tel Aviv, she and Avram are making a salad, and she watches out of the corner of her eye to make sure he’s using the knife properly and not throwing out half the cucumber with its peel. He tells her about a nurse from Tel Hashomer who’s asked him out twice, and he’s said no.
“Why did you say no?”
“Because.”
“Because what?”
“Because, you know.”
“No, I don’t, what am I supposed to know?” But she suddenly feels cold.
“Because after the movie she’ll invite me up to her place.”
“And what’s wrong with that?”
“Don’t you get it?”
“No, I don’t get it,” she almost shouts.
He keeps chopping vegetables silently.
“Is she nice?” Ora asks casually, as she crushes a tomato.
“She’s fine.”
“Is she attractive?” she asks with trembling disinterest.
“She’s pretty good-looking, nice body, barely nineteen years old.”
“Oh. So what’s wrong with going up to her place?”
“I can’t,” he says emphatically, and Ora quickly switches to an onion, to have an excuse for the tears that will come.
“Ever since I got back I’m this way. Can’t do it.” He snickers: “A broken reed.”
She feels chilly and hollow in her stomach. As if only now, after several years of delay, has the final and terrible shock wave of his tragedy settled over him. “Have you even tried?” she whispers, and thinks, How did I not know about this? How did it not occur to me to find out about this? I took care of his whole body, and I forgot about that? About that, with him, I forgot?
“I tried four times. Four times is a representative sample, isn’t it?”
“With who?” she asks, amazed. “Who did you try with?”
He doesn’t seem embarrassed. “Once with the cousin of a soldier who was in the bed next to mine, and once with a Dutch volunteer who works there. Once with a soldier from rehab, once with someone I met on the beach a while ago.” He sees the expression on her face. “What are you looking at me like that for? I didn’t even initiate it! It’s them …” Then he adds helplessly, “Turns out the prisoner fantasy works with POWs too, otherwise I can’t explain it.”
“Has it occurred to you that they like you?” she bursts out, upset by the tinge of jealousy that jabs her. “Maybe your charm wasn’t damaged? Maybe even the Egyptians couldn’t hurt the …”
“I can’t get it up, Ora. The minute I go to bed with them, each one of them. I’m actually not bad at jerking off, but how long can I spend stuck with myself? And anyway, lately I’m having problems masturbating, too. When I’m on Largactyl, I can’t come.”
“But did you really want them?” she asks, and something in her voice seems to split into several directions. “Maybe you didn’t really want it?”
“I wanted it, I wanted it,” he grunts angrily. “I wanted to fuck, what’s the big deal? I’m not talking about immortal love here, I wanted a fuck, Ora, why are you so—”
“But maybe they weren’t right for you,” she whispers and thinks painfully that a woman who is going to be with Avram has to be just right for him, for his subtleties.
“They were fine, don’t look for excuses, they were just right for what …”
“And with me?” she asks with a glazed look. “Could you sleep with me?”
There is a long pause.
“With you?”
She swallows. “Yes, with me.”
“I don’t know,” he mumbles. “Wait, are you serious?”
“It’s not something to joke about.” Her voice trembles.
“But how—”
“We were so good together.”
“I don’t know, I don’t think I’ll ever, with you—”
“Why not?” She jumps into her pain immediately. “Because of the lots we cast?
Because I drew you?”
“No, no.”
“Then because of Ilan?”
“No.”
She grabs another tomato and dices it in tiny pieces. “Then why not?”
“No. I can’t do it with you anymore.”
“You’re so sure.”
They stand by the sink without touching, looking at the wall. Their temples throb.
“And Adam?” Avram asks now.
“What about him?”
Avram hesitates. He isn’t sure what he meant to ask.
“Adam? You want to know about Adam now?” she says.
“Yes, is there something wrong with that, too?”
“There’s nothing wrong with it,” she says, laughing. “Ask anything you want. That’s what we’re here for.”
“Well, just if he was also a kid who … You know what? Tell me whatever you want.”
Here we go, she thinks and stretches her limbs.
They are walking through a thicket of prickly burnet and sage. The oaks are as low as bushes here. Lizards dart under their feet in a panic. Side by side they walk, looking for the path, which has been swallowed up in the abundant growth, and Ora steals a glance at their elastic shadows that hover on the shrubbery. When Avram waves his arms as he walks, it briefly looks as though he is placing his hand on her shoulder, and when she plays with her body in the sun a little, she can make the shadow of his arm hug the shadow of her waist.
“Adam was also a thin boy, just like Ofer, but he stayed thin. A beanpole.”
“Oh.” Avram looks around as if randomly, indifferently, but Ora, as it turns out, still knows all the cards in his deck.
“As a child, he was always taller than Ofer—well, don’t forget he’s three years older. But when Ofer started getting older and growing, it changed and the order was reversed.”
“So now—”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“Ofer is taller. Much.”
Avram is amazed. “Really? Much taller?”
“I told you, he had a growth spurt and just overtook him all at once, almost by a whole head.”