What she wouldn’t give to know whether they talked about puberty, about the changes in their bodies, or about girls, and about masturbation and making out. She guesses they didn’t. Puberty seemed to embarrass them both, as though it were some alien force that had invaded their intimate twosome and expropriated parts they preferred to keep silent about. She often wondered, and asked Ilan repeatedly, where they’d gone wrong in bringing up the boys. Maybe we didn’t hug enough in front of them? We didn’t show them what it’s like when a man and a woman love each other?
“I find it very strange,” she says, trying to sound amused, “how modest and shy my boys are about that kind of stuff. I used to try to get them to be crude, to curse here and there, what’s the big deal? When Ofer was little he gleefully joined in. He’d say rude words and giggle and blush terribly. But when they grew up, especially when they were with the two of us, it almost never happened.”
It’s Ilan with his lousy puritanism, she thinks. Always on guard, making sure not a hint of lining sticks out, God forbid. “Sometimes I had the feeling—you’ll laugh—that they thought they had to preserve our innocence, as if we didn’t know which end was up. Come on, let’s walk, this is getting on my nerves.”
The trail is now a path of cracked, dry clods of earth. Bare stones and narrow cracks, spindly weeds trampled yet resprouting. Here and there some humble white and yellow chamomile earn the pity of their feet, which avoid them. Dry leaves from last spring, crumbled and perforated, translucent, only their spines remaining. A rocky path, yellowing brown, dusty and warty, no form nor comeliness, exactly like a thousand others, scattered with withered twigs and orange-brown pine needles. A line of black ants carries crumbs and shelled sunflower seeds. Here a deep ant-lion pit, there a pattern of gray-green lichen on fractured rocks, a shriveled pinecone, and the occasional glistening black mound of deer droppings or crumbly brown mound of a queen ant returned from her nuptial flight.
“Listen,” Ora says and holds his hand.
“To what?”
“To the path. I’m telling you, paths in Israel have a sound I haven’t heard anywhere else.”
They walk and listen: rrrrsh-rrrsh when their shoes drag in the dirt; rrrhh-rrrhh when their toes hit the path; hhhhs-hhhhs when they stroll; hwassh-hwassh when they trot; a rapidly drumming rrish-chrsh when little stones fly up and hit each other; hrappp-hrappp when their feet step through bushes of poterium. Ora laughs. “It’s a good thing they all have the right sounds in Hebrew. How would you possibly describe these sounds in English or Italian? Maybe they can only be accurately pronounced in Hebrew.”
“Do you mean these paths speak Hebrew? Are you saying language springeth out of the earth?” And he runs with the idea that words had sprouted up from this dirt, crawled out of cracks in the arid, furrowed earth, burst from the wrath of hamsin winds with briars and brambles and thorns, leaped up like locusts and grasshoppers.
Ora listens to his flow of speech. Deep inside, a fossilized minnow stirs its tail and a wavelet tickles at her waist.
“I wonder what it’s like in Arabic,” she says. “After all, it’s their landscape too, and they have rhonchial consonants too, that sound like your throat is choking on the dryness.” She illustrates, and the dog pricks up her ears. “Do you still remember the Arabic words you learned for all those thistles and nettles, or didn’t they teach you that in Intelligence?
Avram laughs. “Mostly they taught us about tanks and planes and munitions; for some reason they didn’t get around to nettles.”
“A grave mistake,” Ora decrees.
He’d asked whether they hug. She remembers going out to a restaurant on Adam’s birthday, not long ago. It was a new place, “a little too froufrou for my taste,” she says, on one of the moshavim in the Jerusalem hills, surrounded by fields and empty chicken coops—it occurs to her that although Avram has worked in a pub and a restaurant and God knows where else, he may not know what it’s like to go out for a family meal, being as socially illiterate as he is. So she explains, before anything else, how they choose a restaurant in her family. Adam has refined, picky taste, so first they have to call and find out if there’s anything for him to eat, course by course. Once they choose a place and get there and sit down—“You can’t imagine what an operation it is just to sit down! We have a whole settlement policy. For a simple family we’re pretty complicated.”
She talks on and on, and Avram can see it.
“First of all, Ilan has to find the perfect table: far from the bathroom and the kitchen, with the right lighting—not too bright, not too dim—and as quiet as possible, and a spot where he can sit facing the door, to be aware of any danger that might threaten his little family—and the evening I’m talking about was at the height of the terrorist attacks.”
“When isn’t it?” Avram grumbles.
“And Adam has to sit as close as possible to a wall, almost hidden, with his back to everyone, but he also has to be able to embarrass his parents with his torn pants, dirty shirts, and the quantities of alcohol he pours down his throat. And Ofer is like me: he doesn’t care about anything, he’ll happily sit anywhere as long as the food is good and there’s lots of it.” Ora herself wants privacy, of course, but also to be able to show off her family a little.
“So after we sit down comes the ordering, with Adam’s performances. The waitress always marks him straightaway as problematic, an obstacle in the rhythmic flow of her execution, because of his pedantic instructions—nothing with cream in it; can it be fried in butter? Do any of the dips, God forbid, contain eggplant or avocado, in any form? And Ilan’s usual wisecracks with the waitress.” Ora is always amazed and amused to see how utterly blind he is to the fact that the poor girl—any poor girl, at any age—goes weak when he floods her with the arctic green of his glowing eyes. And then there’s Ora’s heroic struggle with her own eye, which keeps veering to the prices. Every time anyone orders anything, she conducts a secret negotiation between gluttony and frugality—okay, let’s get all the embarrassing facts out. With her, it’s cheapness, quite explicitly. There, she’s admitted it. Somehow she finds it easy to confess to Avram what she has held back from Ilan all these years. She sighs. “Where was I?”
“Cheapness,” Avram comments with slightly malicious glee.
“Yes, use it against me, go ahead.” A spark flies between her eyes and his.
She is always the one who feebly suggests: “Why don’t we just order three entrées? We never finish everything anyway.” And they argue with her, always, as though her proposal contains a veiled slight of their appetites, perhaps even their masculinity. In the end they order four entrées and never finish even three of them. Adam orders a horribly extravagant aperitif—why does he need to drink so much? She and Ilan exchange glances—leave him alone, let him enjoy it this evening, on me! And when the waitress heads to the kitchen with their orders a sudden silence—freezing, obviating—falls on them all. The three men stare at their fingertips, study a fork, or ponder a philosophical conundrum—“an abstract, even cosmic problem,” Ora hisses.
She knows everything will be fine soon, even good. They always enjoy themselves at restaurants, and the boys like going out with her and Ilan. All in all the four of them are a great team. Soon the jokes will come, and the giggles and the waves of affection. In just a short while she’ll be able to splash around in the warm, sweet latency that commingles—“for such rare moments; far rarer than you might imagine”—complete happiness and family. But there’s always that lousy, unavoidable moment before, a sort of transit toll they charge her, the three of them, on her way to that sweetness. It is a regular torture ritual that she perceives as cunningly, conspiratorially, aimed solely at her, which she alone provokes in them, and it is precisely because they sense how much she yearns for that sweetness that they tighten ranks to withhold it from her and make her path to it a little harder. “Why? Don’t ask me, ask them.” They sit there in front of her, the three of them and their fingertips, t
he three of them in their eagerness for a little scheming against her, unable to resist the temptation, not even Ilan. “He didn’t used to be like that,” she says, letting out what she never meant to tell. She and Ilan used to be … well, of one mind—she almost said “of one flesh”—and when they had to, they presented a united front against the boys. He was a full partner. But the last few years—“I really don’t understand it,” she says, seething with overdue anger—since the boys started growing up, something went wrong, as though he had decided it was time for him to be an adolescent, too.
When she thinks about it now, it seems to her that recently, particularly since the time of their separation, around a year ago, she keeps finding herself faced with three rebellious adolescents who act angrily and impudently—the toilet seats were always left up in bold defiance—and she wishes she knew what it was about her that aroused this idiotic, infantile compulsion, and what turned them instantly into three ravenous kittens when a ball of conspiracy against her rolled at their feet, and why on earth it was her responsibility to rescue them from the silence at a restaurant. What if one day she partook in the grave pondering of the fingertips? What if she hummed an intricate song to herself all the way to the end, until one of them broke down—and it would probably be Ofer; his sense of justice would step up, his natural compassion, his urge to protect her would eventually overcome even the pleasure of belonging to the other two. But her heart quickly fills with tenderness for him—why would she trip him up on their men’s games? It was better for her to break down rather than him.
Again the same old thought: if only she’d had a girl. A girl would have stitched everyone back together with her cheerfulness, her simplicity, her ease. With everything Ora used to have and lost. Because Ora was a girl once, let that be clear. Maybe not as happy and lighthearted as she would have liked to be, but she certainly had wanted and tried to be that kind of girl, a joyful, carefree girl just like the daughter she never had was supposed to have been. And she remembers only too well, she tells Avram, the sudden hostile silences that often came between her parents. Silences with which her mother punished her father for sins he could not even conceive of. Back then, Ora was the magic needle that quickly scurried between her father and mother to stitch up the unraveled moment through which the three of them had almost plunged to the depths.
That silence in the restaurant lasts no more than a minute, Avram understands from Ora’s stammered description and her lowered eyes, but it feels like a cursed eternity. Everyone knows that someone has to talk and melt away the silence, but who will start? Who will step up? Who will proclaim that he is the most spineless, the doormat, the softy? Who will break down first and say something, even something silly? Hey, silly is what we do best, Ora knows. Even a snide remark will play well. Like her story about the plump Russian lady who had shared Ora’s umbrella earlier that week in a rainstorm. She hadn’t asked, hadn’t apologized, just said to Ora with a smile, “We walk together now awhile.” Or she could tell them about the elderly spinster who came to her clinic with a sprained ankle and laughingly told Ora her trick for making dough rise: she takes it into bed, lies down for forty winks with the dough under the blanket, and that’s how it gets its first rise! Yes, Ora would prattle on, and they’d all laugh warmly and wonder how the Russian woman had picked out Ora as a sucker even in the middle of a storm. They’d make fun of the old lady with the dough and tease her about her other patients and her job in general, which they found slightly odd: “You just come up to a total stranger and start prodding them?” And the little flame she lit would start curling and burning, and they would be warm and happy. “Do you understand what I’m getting at? Do you see the picture, or am I just …”
He nods, fascinated. Maybe he did see a thing or two in his pub after all, she thinks, or at the Indian restaurant. Or just walking the streets, or on the beach. Maybe he didn’t give up those eyes of his after all. Maybe he noticed and watched, and peeked and eavesdropped, and collected it all inside. Yes, that’s just like him, a detective gathering evidence for a crime of extraordinary scale—the human race.
“And after that everything’s all right, we’re all totally there, and we laugh and jab and talk. The three of them are sharp, witty, cynical, and horribly macabre, just like you and Ilan were.” This fills Avram with sadness, perhaps because he can also sense what she is not disclosing: she always has the feeling that something in the conversation is beyond her grasp, that a subliminal lightning bolt has flashed between them but she hears only the thunder that follows. When the food arrives, the buzz of commerce begins, and that’s what she likes most. Plates and bowls and spoonfuls are passed from hand to hand, forks peck at one another’s dishes, the four of them compare, savor tastes, criticize, and offer to share. A canopy of generosity and delight spreads above them, and this, finally, is the quiet, honeyed moment, her portion of happiness. She follows the conversation only superficially now. The conversation is not the main point—it’s even a distraction. She thinks they’re poking fun at themselves, at the dishes soaring back and forth like flying saucers, and at what the people at the other tables must think of them. Or else they’re discussing the army, or some new CD. What difference does it make? The point is this moment: embraced.
“That sucks,” she heard Ofer say to Adam. “We spent the whole summer killing flies in Nebi Musa, and it turns out we killed the weak ones, so we created a generation of resistant flies, and now their genetics are much stronger.” They laughed. They both have lovely teeth, Ora thought. Adam described the rats that run freely around the kitchen at his reserve duty unit. Ofer struck back with a winning card: a fox, maybe even a rabid one, had infiltrated his crew’s room while people were dozing and stolen a whole cake out of someone’s backpack. They spoke in loud, deep voices, as they always do when they talk about the army. “But that might also be because Ofer’s ears are always full of dust and grease,” she explains to Avram. Ora and Ilan laughed and laughed, delighted, and gobbled down pieces of herb bread. Their role here was clear: they represented the sufficiently blurry background, the sounding board against which their children repeatedly declared their maturity and independence, and from which their declaration echoed back to the children themselves, at every age, so that they could finally believe in it. The boys changed the topic to accidents, big and small. There was practically a permanent order to these conversations, Ora realizes now, an organized, gradual escalation. Adam told them about how when he started his service in the Armored Corps, one of the commanders had demonstrated what could happen to a tank driver who got stuck in the gun’s side traverse. He set a wooden crate on the hull, rotated the gun sideways, and showed how the barrel shattered the crate, “which is exactly what could happen to anyone who steps out of a tank without coordinating,” Adam cautioned his younger brother, and Ora felt a chill.
“We have this soldier,” Ofer said, “poor guy, a real screwup, he’s the company’s punching bag—everyone who walks past him gives him a punch. About a month ago, in a camouflage drill, he fell off the tank and his arm swelled up. So they sent him to rest in the DT”—the “discipline tent,” he begrudgingly translated when he saw Ora’s look—“and there an antenna fell on his head and cracked it open.” Ilan and Ora exchanged quick glances of horror, but they knew they must not respond to the story with a single word. Anything they said, any concerned expression, would be met with mockery (“skirt on the left,” Adam liked to warn Ofer against Ora), but Adam and Ofer of course picked up on their glances, and everyone got what they wanted, and now, once the foundations were laid, once the parents had been duly enlightened about the many and varied dangers from which they could no longer protect their sons, Ofer told them casually that the suicide bomber who had blown himself up two weeks earlier at the central bus station in Tel Aviv, killing four civilians, had probably passed through his roadblock—meaning, the roadblock his battalion was responsible for.
Ilan asked guardedly if they knew when exactly the terrorist
had gone through, and whether anyone was holding Ofer’s battalion responsible. Ofer explained that there was no way to tell who was on shift when he’d gone through, and that he could have been carrying a new kind of explosive that was impossible to detect at the roadblock. Ora was dumbstruck, unable to speak. Ilan swallowed and said, “You know what? I’m glad he blew himself up in Tel Aviv and not on you at the roadblock.” Ofer was outraged: “But, Dad, that’s my job! I stand there precisely so they’ll blow themselves up on me and not in Tel Aviv.”
And Ora—what was she doing at that moment? Her memory is hazy, she cannot reconstruct it. All she remembers is that she suddenly felt hollow, a shell of herself. There was something stuck in her mouth, probably pine nut–studded rye bread dipped in walnut pesto. Ofer and Adam were already deep in conversation about a soldier they both knew, who on parents’ day at the end of training had come up to a strange couple with his arms outstretched and shouted, “Mom, Dad, don’t you recognize me?” Ofer and Adam, and probably Ilan too, rolled around laughing, and Ora sat with her mouth half open while nymphlike waitresses hovered around the tables and whispered: “How is everything?” And two weeks ago a terrorist packed with explosives had walked right past Ofer, and that was Ofer’s job: he stood there precisely so that terrorists would blow themselves up on him and not in Tel Aviv.
Then Ofer turned very serious, and he told Adam and Ilan about his stint in Hebron during the past week. He wasn’t allowed to talk about it, but he could give them the gist. The battalion was sent there to wage a campaign to eliminate wanted men in the kasbah—Ora was no longer really listening to him; she’d been transported—something they hadn’t done before and which had never been one of their duties. They commandeered a whole building to use as a lookout post, and locked up the residents in one apartment. “We actually treated them really well,” he said and gave her a sideways glance, but she was no longer there. Had she been listening, perhaps she could have changed something. Or perhaps not. And then—how did the conversation end up there? Only in retrospect, through a supreme effort that lasted weeks and months, was she able to piece together the fragments of that conversation into an approximate tapestry of the entire evening. Ofer asked Adam to explain something about the procedure for arresting a suspect, but here too she heard only fragments. You yell three times, in Hebrew and in Arabic, “Stop! Who’s there?” And then three times, “Stop or I’ll shoot” (Adam). “Wakef wa’la batukhak” (Ofer). And then you cock your weapon and aim at sixty degrees through the sight (Ofer again?). And then you shoot (Adam). The music of their voices, Ora dimly noticed, sounded exactly like it did when they used to study for Adam’s grammar exams together, when Adam was the teacher and Ofer the student. “You aim for the legs, yeah, knees-down, static, through the sight, and if he doesn’t stop, you go for the center of the body mass and you shoot to kill.” Ofer sheepishly admits that he doesn’t remember what that “mass” is, exactly. Adam scolds: “Didn’t you learn any physics at school?” Ofer says, “Yes, but where is it on a person?” Adam scoffs: “When I was in the Territories they told us, ‘Shoot between their nipples.’ ” Ofer said, “At my last target practice, I shot the dummy in the stomach, and the P.C. goes, ‘I told you to aim for the knees!’ So I say, ‘But, sir, won’t he go down this way, too?’ ” They both laughed, and Ofer threw Ora a cautious glance. He knew she didn’t like that kind of joke. Adam, who also knew, grinned and said, “Some soldiers are convinced that the Arabs walk around with bull’s-eyes on their faces, just like in practice.”