To The End Of The Land Part 6

So you want to penetrate the profound hidden meaning of the lyrics? She flashed him a deliberate smile. This is something I wrote ages ago, she said. We wrote it together, Ada and I, for the last day of camp at Machanayim. We had a treasure hunt, everyone got lost, don't ask.

I won't, he smiled.

Then do.

What did you tell Ilan?

You'll never know.

Did you kiss him?

What? What did you say? She was horrified.

You heard me.

Maybe he kissed me? me? She raised her eyebrows and wiggled them mischievously, a shameless Ursula Andress. Now be quiet and listen. It's to the tune of "Tadarissa Boom," d'you know it? She raised her eyebrows and wiggled them mischievously, a shameless Ursula Andress. Now be quiet and listen. It's to the tune of "Tadarissa Boom," d'you know it?

Of course I do, said Avram, suspicious and enchanted, squirming with unforeseen delight.

Ora sang, drumming the beat on her thigh: We set off on a treasure hunt, Tadarissa Boom Tadarissa Boom, Our counselor was a real hunk, Tadarissa Boom Tadarissa Boom, He said he'd help us find the way, Tadarissa Boom Tadarissa Boom, And not get lost or go astray- Tadarissa Boom, Avram hummed quietly, and Ora gave him a look, and a new smile, soft and budding, lit her up inside and her face glowed in the dark, and he thought she was a pure and innocent person, incapable of pretending, unlike him. "The most innocent of its creatures," he recalled. I am happy, he thought with wonder. I want her, I want her to be mine, always, forever. His thoughts skipped, as usual, to the brink of possibilities, a lovesick dreamer: She'll be my wife, the love of my life- Second verse, she announced: We solved the clues and found the prize- Tadarissa Boom, Avram sang in a thick voice and drummed on his own thigh, and sometimes, distractedly, on hers.

But no one cared except the guys- Tadarissa Boom.

'Cause when the counselor looked at us- Tadarissa Boom!

He made us swoon and blinded us!

Wait. Avram put his hand on her arm. Quiet, someone's coming.

I can't hear it. It's him.

Coming here? Is he coming here from the room?

I can't understand it. He's barely alive.

What should we do, Avram?

He's crawling! Listen, he's dragging himself along with his arms.

Take him away from here, take him back!

What's the big deal, Ora, let him sit with us for a while.

No, I don't want to, not now.

Wait a minute. Hey, Ilan? Ilan, come on, it's here, a little farther.

I'm telling you, I'll leave.

Ilan, it's Avram, from cla.s.s. I'm here with Ora. Go on, tell him- Tell him what?

Tell him something- Ilan ...? It's me, Ora.

Ora?

Yes.

You mean, you're real?

Of course, Ilan, it's me. Come on in here with us, we'll be together for a while.

The Walk, 2000 THE CONVOY twists along, a stammering band of civilian cars, jeeps, military ambulances, tanks, and huge bulldozers on the backs of transporters. Her taxi driver is quiet and gloomy. His hand rests on the Mercedes's gear s.h.i.+ft and his thick neck does not move. For several long minutes he has looked neither at her nor at Ofer. twists along, a stammering band of civilian cars, jeeps, military ambulances, tanks, and huge bulldozers on the backs of transporters. Her taxi driver is quiet and gloomy. His hand rests on the Mercedes's gear s.h.i.+ft and his thick neck does not move. For several long minutes he has looked neither at her nor at Ofer.

As soon as Ofer sat down in the cab, he let out an angry breath and flashed a look that said: Not the smartest idea, Mom, asking this particular driver to come along on a trip like this. Only then did she realize what she'd done. At seven that morning she had called Sami and asked him to come pick her up for a long drive to the Gilboa region. Now she remembers that for some reason she hadn't given him any details or explained the purpose of the trip, the way she usually did. Sami had asked when she wanted him, and she'd hesitated and then said, "Come at three." "Ora," he'd said, "maybe we should leave earlier, 'cause traffic will be a mess." That was his only acknowledgment of the day's madness, but even then she didn't get it and just said there was no way she could leave before three. She wanted to spend these hours with Ofer, and although Ofer agreed, she could tell how much effort his concession took. Seven or eight hours were all that was left of the weeklong trip she'd planned for the two of them, and now she realizes she hadn't even told Sami on the phone that Ofer was part of the ride. Had she told him, he might have asked her to let him off today, just this one time, or he might have sent one of the Jewish drivers who worked for him-"my Jewish sector," he called them. But when she'd called him she'd been in a state of complete frenzy, and it simply had not occurred to her-the unease slowly rises in her chest-that for this sort of drive, on a day like this, it was better not to call an Arab driver.

Even if he is an Arab from here, one of ours, Ilan prods at her brain as she tries to justify her own behavior. Even if it's Sami, who's almost one of the family, who's been driving everyone-the people who work for Ilan, her estranged husband, and the whole family-for more than twenty years. They are his main livelihood, his regular monthly income, and he, in return, is obliged to be at their service around the clock, whenever they need him. They have been to his home in Abu Ghosh for family celebrations, they know his wife, Inaam, and they helped out with connections and money when his two older sons wanted to emigrate to Argentina. They've racked up hundreds of driving hours together, and she cannot recall his ever being this silent. With him, every drive is a stand-up show. He's witty and sly, a political dodger who shoots in all directions with decoys and double-edged swords, and besides, she cannot imagine calling another driver. Driving herself is out of the question for the next year: she's had three accidents and six moving violations in the past twelve months, an excessive crop even by her standards, and the loathsome judge who revoked her license had hissed that he was doing her a favor and that she really owed him her life. It would have all been so easy if she herself were driving Ofer. At least she'd have had another ninety minutes alone with him, and maybe she'd even have tempted him to stop on the way-there are some good restaurants in Wadi Ara. After all, one hour more, one hour less, what's the rush? Why are you in such a hurry? Tell me, what is it that's waiting for you there?

A trip alone with him will not happen anytime soon, nor alone with herself, and she has to get used to this constraint. She has to let it go, stop grieving every day for her robbed independence. She should be happy that at least she has Sami, who kept driving her even after the separation from Ilan. She hadn't been capable of thinking about those kinds of details at the time, but Ilan had put his foot down. Sami was an explicit clause in their separation agreement, and he himself said he was divvied up between them like the furniture and the rugs and the silverware. "Us Arabs," he would laugh, revealing a mouth full of huge teeth, "ever since the part.i.tion plan we're used to you dividing us up." The memory of his joke makes her cringe with the shame of what has happened today, of having somehow, in the general commotion, completely erased that part of him, his Arabness.

Since seeing Ofer this morning with the phone in his hand and the guilty look on his face, someone had come along and gently but firmly taken the management of her own affairs out of her hands. She had been dismissed, relegated to observer status, a gawking witness. Her thoughts were no more than flashes of emotion. She hovered through the rooms of the house with angular, truncated motions. Later they went to the mall to buy clothes and candy and CDs-there was a new Johnny Cash collection out-and all morning she walked beside him in a daze and giggled like a girl at everything he said. She devoured him with gaping wide looks, stocking up unabashedly for the endless years of hunger to come-of course they would come. From the moment he told her he was going, she had no doubt. Three times that morning she excused herself and went to the public restrooms, where she had diarrhea. Ofer laughed: "What's up with you? What did you eat?" She stared at him and smiled feebly, engraving in her mind the sound of his laughter, the slight tilt of his head when he laughed.

The young cas.h.i.+er at the clothing store blushed as she watched him try on a s.h.i.+rt, and Ora thought proudly, My beloved is like a young hart My beloved is like a young hart. The girl working at the music store was one year behind him at school, and when she heard where he was going in three hours, she went over and hugged him, held him close with her tall, ample body, and insisted that he call her as soon as he got back. Seeing how blind her son was to these displays of emotion, it occurred to Ora that his heart was still bound to Talia. It had been a year since she'd left him, and she was still all he could see. She thought sadly that he was a loyal person, like her, and far more monogamous than she, and who knew how many years would pa.s.s before he got over Talia-if he even had any years left, she thought. She quickly erased the notion, scrubbing it furiously from her brain with both hands, but still a picture slipped through: Talia coming to visit them, to condole, perhaps to seek a sort of retroactive forgiveness from Ora, and she felt her face strain with anger. How could you hurt him like that? she thought, and she must have mumbled something out loud, because Ofer leaned down and asked softly, "What is it, Mom?" For a moment she did not see his face before her eyes-he had no face, her eyes stared into a void, pure terror. "Nothing. I was thinking about Talia. Have you talked to her recently?" Ofer waved his hand and said, "Forget that, it's over."

She kept checking the time. On her watch, on his, on the big clocks in the mall, on the television screens in appliance stores. Time was behaving strangely, sometimes flying, at other times crawling or coming to a complete standstill. It seemed to her that it might not even require much effort to roll it back, not too far, just thirty minutes or an hour at a time would be fine. The big things-time, destiny, G.o.d-could sometimes be worn down by petty haggling. They drove downtown to have lunch at a restaurant in the shuk shuk, where they ordered lots of dishes although neither of them had an appet.i.te. He tried to amuse her with stories from the checkpoint near Tapuach, where he'd served for seven months, and it was the first time she discovered that he would scan the thousands of Palestinians who pa.s.sed through the checkpoint with a simple metal detector, like the one they used when you walked into the mall. "That's all you had?" she whispered. He laughed. "What did you think I had?" "I didn't think," she said. He asked, "But didn't you wonder how it's done there?" There was a note of childish disappointment in his voice. She said, "But you never told me about it." He presented a profile that said, You know exactly why, but before she could say anything he reached out and covered her hand with his-his broad, tanned, rough hand-and that simple rare touch almost stunned her and she fell silent. Ofer seemed to want, at the very last minute, to fill in what he had left out, and he told her hurriedly about the pillbox he'd lived in for four months, facing the northern neighborhood of Jenin, and how every morning at five he used to open the gate in the fence around the pillbox and make sure the Palestinians hadn't b.o.o.by-trapped it overnight. "You just walked over there like that, alone?" she asked. "Usually someone from the pillbox would cover me-I mean, if anyone was awake." She wanted to ask more but her throat was dry, and Ofer shrugged and said in an elderly Palestinian man's voice, "Kulo min Allah" "Kulo min Allah"-it's all from G.o.d. She whispered, "I didn't know," and he laughed without any bitterness, as if he had understood that she could not be expected to know, and he told her about the kasbah in Nablus, which he said was the most interesting of all the kasbahs, the most ancient. "There are houses there from the Roman era and houses built like bridges over alleyways, and underneath the whole city there's an aqueduct that goes from east to west, with ca.n.a.ls and tunnels running in all directions, and the fugitives live there because they know we'll never dare follow them down." He spoke enthusiastically, as if he were telling her about a new video game, and she kept fighting the urge to grasp his head with both hands and look into his eyes so that she could see his soul, which had been slipping away from her for years-although with warmth, with a grin and a wink, as if they were playing a casual game of tag to amuse themselves-but she did not have the courage to do it. Nor could she say to him simply, in a voice that was not drenched in complaint or accusation, "Hey, Ofer, why aren't we friends like we used to be? So what if I'm your mom?"

At three o'clock, Sami would come to take her and Ofer to the meeting point. Three o'clock was the farthest point in her thoughts. She did not have the strength to imagine what would occur after that, and this was further proof of her frequent claim that she had no imagination. But that was no longer true, either. That too had changed. Recently she'd been flooded by imaginings-she had imagination-poisoning. Sami would make the drive easier for her, especially the way back, which would undoubtedly be far more difficult than the way there. They had a domestic routine, she and Sami. She liked to listen to him talk about his family, about the complex relations.h.i.+ps between the different clans in Abu Ghosh, about the intrigues in the town council, and about the woman he had loved when he was fifteen, and perhaps had never stopped loving even after he was married off to Inaam, his cousin. At least once a week, by total coincidence, he claimed, he would see her in the village. She was a teacher, and there were years when she taught his daughters, and then she became a superintendent. She must have been a strong, opinionated woman, judging by his stories, and he always drew the conversation out so that Ora would ask about her. Then he would report her news with a sort of reverence: another child, her first grandson, a prize from the Ministry of Education, her husband's death in a work accident. With touching detail he quoted their chance conversations in the mini-market, the bakery, or on the rare occasions when he drove her in his cab. Ora guessed that she was the only person he allowed himself to talk to about this woman, perhaps because he trusted her never to ask him the one question whose answer was obvious.

Sami was a seasoned man, a quick thinker, and his life wisdom was augmented by his business ac.u.men, which had produced, among other things, his own small fleet of taxis. When he was twelve he had a goat, and every year she birthed two kids. And a year-old kid in good health, he once explained to Ora, can sell for a thousand shekels. "When the kid would get to a thousand shekels, I would sell it and put the money away. I put away, and I put away, until I had eight thousand shekels. At seventeen I got my license and bought a Fiat 127, an old model but it worked. I bought it from my teacher, and I was the one boy in the village who came to school with wheels. Afternoons, I did private drives, errands, take this, bring that, go, fetch, and that way, slowly-slowly ..."

Last year, amid the great upheavals in her life, a friend of Ora's found her a part-time temporary job working for a new museum being built in Nevada, which for some reason was interested in the material culture of Israel. Ora liked the unusual work that had fallen into her lap to distract her from herself a little, and she preferred not to delve too deeply into the museum's ulterior motives or what had led its planners to invest a fortune in the construction of a model of Israel in, of all places, the Nevada desert. She was on the team in charge of the fifties and knew there were another few "gatherers" like her on various other teams. She never met any of them. Every two or three weeks she set off with Sami on delightful buying trips around the country, and out of some vague intuition she avoided discussing the museum and its intentions with him. Sami never asked, and she wondered what he imagined and how he described these trips to Inaam. The two of them spent days roaming the country together. They bought a collection of stainless-steel basins from a kibbutz in the Jordan Valley, an antique milking machine from a moshav in the north, a s.h.i.+ny like-new icebox in a Jerusalem neighborhood, and of course the trivial, forgotten items whose discovery gave her an almost physical joy: an eighth of a bar of Tasbin soap, a tube of Velveta hand cream, a package of sanitary napkins, textured rubber "thimbles" that Egged bus drivers once used, a collection of wildflowers dried between the pages of a notebook, and vast quant.i.ties of textbooks and popular books-one of her tasks was to reconstruct a typical kibbutz household library from the fifties. Time after time she watched as Sami Jubran's warm, earthy charm encircled everyone he met. The elderly kibbutzniks were positive that he was a former kibbutz member (which was true, he told her jokingly: "Half of Kiryat Anavim's lands belong to my family"). In Jerusalem, at a local backgammon club, a few men pounced on him, convinced he had grown up with them in the Nachlaot neighborhood and even claimed to remember him climbing pine trees to watch Hapoel soccer games in the old stadium. And a vibrant Tel Aviv widow with bronzed skin and jangling bracelets determined that he was without a doubt from the Kerem: even though he a was little fat for a Yemenite, it was obvious that he was "with roots," she said when she called Ora the next day for no reason. "And very charmant charmant," she added, "the kind of guy who definitely fought in the Etzel. And by the way, do you think he's available for a moving job?" Ora saw the way people agreed, for Sami, to part with beloved possessions, because they felt that these objects, which their children belittled and would undoubtedly get rid of as soon as the old people pa.s.sed on, if given to him, would in some sense stay in the family. And on every trip, even a ten-minute drive, they always got into politics, keenly confabbing over the latest developments. And even though years ago, after the devastation with Avram, Ora had completely cut herself off from the "situation"-I've paid my price, she a.s.serted with a narrow, distancing smile-she found herself drawn into these talks with Sami over and over again. It was not his arguments or his reasonings that pulled her in, because she'd heard them all before, from him and from others, and she didn't believe anyone had a single unused claim left in this eternal debate. "Who could possibly come up with a new, decisive argument that hasn't yet been heard?" she asked with a sigh when anyone else tried to take it up with her. But when she and Sami discussed the situation, when they argued with little jabs and cautious smiles-and with him, curiously, she frequently veered much further to the right than she intended, further than her real opinions, while with Ilan and the boys she was always, as they said, on the delusional left, and she herself couldn't say exactly what she was and where she stood, "and anyway," she would say with a charming shrug, "only when it's all over, the whole story, will we really know who was right and who was wrong, isn't that so?" Yet still, when Sami used his Arabesque Hebrew to undermine the long-winded, indignant, greedy pretenses of both Jews and Arabs, when he skewered the leaders of both peoples on a sharp Arab saying that often aroused from the depths of her memory the equivalent idiom in her father's Yiddish, she sometimes experienced a subtle latency, as if in the course of talking with him she suddenly discovered that the end, the end of the whole big story, must be good, and good it would be, if only because the clumsy, round-faced man sitting beside her was able to preserve within his fleshy thickness a flame of delicate irony, and mainly because he still managed to be himself within all this this. There were also times when it occurred to her that she was learning from him what she would need to know, one day, if-or when-the situation in Israel was reversed, G.o.d forbid, and she found herself in his position, and he in hers. That was possible, after all. It was always lurking behind the door. And perhaps, she realized, he thought about that too-perhaps she was teaching him something by still being her herself in all this.

Because of all these reasons it was very important that she observe him as much as she could, to learn how he had been able to avoid becoming embittered all these years. As far as she could tell he was not even suppressing a silent yet murderous hatred deep inside, as Ilan had always claimed. She was astonished to see-and wished she could learn from him-how he managed to avoid attributing the daily humiliations, large and small, to some personal defect of his own, as she would undoubtedly do with great fervor were she, G.o.d forbid, in his position-and as she in fact had been doing, truth be told, quite a bit during this lousy year. Somehow, within all the chaos, all the mess, he remained a free person, which she herself only rarely managed to be.

Now it grows and swells and threatens to burst: her stupidity, her failure in the principled and complicated matter of being a gentle human being in this place, in these times. Not just being gentle, or ladylike ladylike-there are some words she still hears only in her mother's voice-merely because you are incapable of being anything else by nature, but being intentionally and defiantly gentle, being a gentle person who dives headfirst into the local vat of acid. Sami was a truly gentle man, even if it was hard to tell from his size and his heaviness and his thick features. Even Ilan had to admit it, although grudgingly and always with a note of suspicion: "Gentle he may be, but just wait till he gets his chance. Then you'll get to see some gentleness a la Allah."

But in all the years she'd known him, and as much as she observed him-and she constantly did-she was unable to lose the childish curiosity about some congenital handicap she sensed in him, in his condition, in his split or double existence here; she was absolutely certain that he had never failed. In gentleness, he had never failed.

He once drove her and the kids to the airport to meet Ilan, who was coming back from a trip. The cops at the airport checkpoint took him away for half an hour, while Ora and the boys waited in the taxi. They were little then, Adam was six and Ofer around three, and it was the first time they discovered that their Sami was Arab. When he came back, pale and sweaty, he refused to tell them what had happened. All he said was, "They kept saying I was a s.h.i.+tty Arab, and I said, 'You may s.h.i.+t all over me, but that doesn't make me s.h.i.+tty.'"

She never forgot that sentence, and lately she recited it to herself ever more firmly, like medication to strengthen her heart whenever they shat all over her, everyone, like the pair of obsequious managers-unctuous, Avram used to call their type-at the clinic where she'd worked until recently, and a few friends who had more or less turned their backs on her after the separation and stuck with Ilan (but I would too, she thinks to herself; if I only could, I would choose Ilan and not get stuck with me), and she could add to the list the son of a b.i.t.c.h judge who took away her freedom of movement, and in fact she could include her kids among those who shat on her, especially Adam, not Ofer, hardly at all, she wasn't sure, she just wasn't sure anymore, and Ilan too, of course, the master of s.h.i.+tters, who once, about thirty years ago, had sworn that his purpose in life was to protect the corners of her mouth so that they would always curl upward. Ha. She absentmindedly touches the edge of her upper lip, the one that droops slightly down, the empty one-even her mouth had eventually joined with those who shat on her. Through all the trips with Sami, all the little unexpected challenges, the suspicious looks people sometimes gave him, the casual comments that were so horrifyingly rude coming from the warmest, most enlightened people they met, through all the tests with identical questions that daily life gave them together, a quiet, mutual confidence had grown between them, the kind you feel with your partner in a complicated dance or a dangerous acrobatic trick: you know he won't disappoint you, you know his hand won't shake, and he knows you'll never ask him for something you are absolutely forbidden to ask for.

And today she had failed, and she was causing him to fail, and by the time she realized this it was too late, when he hurried to open the taxi door for her, as he always did, and suddenly saw Ofer coming down the steps from the house wearing his uniform and carrying his rifle, and this was the Ofer he'd known since he was born. He had driven her and Ilan home from the hospital with Ofer because Ilan was afraid to drive that day, said his hands would shake, and on the way from the hospital Sami told them that for him life really only started when Yousra was born, his oldest daughter. At the time he had just the one; later there were two boys and another two girls-"I've got five demographic problems," he would cheerfully tell anyone who asked-and Ora noticed on that trip that he drove very carefully, smoothly rounding the car over potholes and b.u.mps so as not to disturb Ofer as he slept in her arms. During the years that followed, when the boys went to school downtown, Sami drove the carpool she organized for five kids from Tzur Hada.s.sah and Ein Karem. And whenever Ilan was overseas, Sami helped out with chauffeuring, and there were years when he was an integral part of the family's daily routine. Later, when Adam was older but didn't have his license yet, Sami would drive him home from his Friday night outings downtown, and then Ofer joined in, and the two boys would phone from a pub and Sami would come from Abu Ghosh, at any hour, denying he'd been asleep, even at three a.m., and he would wait for Adam and Ofer and their friends outside the pub until they finally remembered to come out, and he probably listened to their conversations, their army stories-who knows what he heard all those times? she suddenly thinks with horror, and what they said as they kidded around and told alcohol-fueled jokes about their checkpoint experiences-and then he would shuttle the boys to their homes in the various neighborhoods. Now he would shuttle Ofer to an operation in Jenin or Nablus, she thought, and she had forgotten to mention this one little detail when she phoned him, but Sami was quick. Her heart sank when she saw his face darken in a deadly coupling of anger and defeat. He got it all in the blink of an eye: he saw Ofer coming down the steps with his uniform and rifle, and realized that Ora was asking him to add his modest contribution to the Israeli war effort.

An ashen current had spread slowly through the dark skin of his face, the soot from a fire that leaped up and died down inside him in an instant. He stood without moving and looked as though someone had slapped him, as though she herself had come over and stood facing him, smiled broadly with her light-filled joy and warmth, and slapped his face as hard as she could. For one moment they were trapped, the three of them, condemned in a flash: Ofer at the top of the steps, his rifle dangling, a magazine attached with a rubber band; she with the silly purple suede handbag that was far too fancy, grotesque even, for a trip like this; and Sami, who did not budge but nevertheless grew smaller and smaller, slowly emptying out. And then she realized how old he had grown. When she first met him he had looked almost like a boy. Twenty-one years had gone by, and he was three or four years younger than she was but he looked older. People age quickly here-them too, she thought oddly. Even them.

She made things worse by getting into the back of the car, not the pa.s.senger side where he held the door open for her-but she always sat next to Sami, how could it possibly be otherwise?-and Ofer came down and sat next to her in the back, and Sami stood outside the taxi with his arms hanging at his sides and his head slightly tilted. He stood by the open door like a man trying to remember something, or muttering a forgotten sentence to himself that had popped into his mind from some distant place, perhaps a prayer or an ancient saying, or a farewell to something that can never be regained. Or perhaps just like a man taking a moment of absolute privacy to inhale the glorious spring air, which was bursting with sunny yellow blossoms of spiny broom and acacia. And only after this brief pause did he get into the taxi and sit down, upright and rigid, and wait for directions.

"It's going to be kind of a long drive today, Sami, did I tell you on the phone?" Ora said. Sami didn't shake his head or nod, or look at her in the rearview mirror. He only lowered his thick, patient neck a little. "We have to take Ofer to the, you know, that campaign, you probably heard on the radio, the meeting point, up near the Gilboa. Let's start driving and we'll explain on the way." She spoke quickly and tonelessly. "That campaign," she'd said, as if she were telling him about an advertising campaign, and the truth is that she'd almost said "that stupid campaign," or even "your government's campaign." But she had restrained herself with great difficulty, perhaps because she knew she would make Ofer angry, and rightly so: How could she forge subversive alliances on a day like this? Besides, maybe it was true, as Ofer had tried to persuade her over lunch at the restaurant, that they had to come down on them once and for all, even if it obviously would not eliminate them completely or dissuade them from wanting to hurt us-on the contrary, he had insisted, but maybe it would at least give us back a little deterrence. Now Ora bit her tongue and pulled her left knee into her stomach and hugged it, tormented over her rudeness to Sami. To quell the commotion inside her, she kept trying to start a casual conversation with Ofer, or with Sami, and kept coming up against their silence, and decided she wasn't going to give in, and so she found herself, to her complete surprise, telling Sami an old story about her father, who had gone almost completely blind at the age of forty-eight-"just imagine!"-and at first he'd lost his sight in his right eye, because of glaucoma, "and that's probably what I'll get one day," she said, and over the years he'd developed a cataract in his left eye, all of which left him with a field of vision about the size of a pinhead, "and if genetics do their job, that's more or less what I'll have, too." She laughed excessively and reported into the s.p.a.ce of the taxi in a cheerful voice that her father, for years, was afraid to have cataract surgery on his one almost-seeing eye. Sami said nothing, and Ofer looked out the window and puffed his cheeks out and shook his head as if refusing to believe how low she could go to ingratiate herself with Sami, how she was willing to offer such an intimate story as a sacrifice to make up for her crude mistake. She saw all this, and still could not stop herself. The story took on its own force, because after all it was Ofer, he alone, who had managed, with patience and stubbornness and endless conversations, to convince her father to have the surgery, and thanks to Ofer he had gained another few good years before his death. As she talked she realized that Ofer was the one who kept her childhood anecdotes and recollections in his memory, her stories about school and her friends, about her parents and the neighbors in her childhood neighborhood of Haifa. Ofer had lived those little stories with a pleasure that was unexpected in a boy his age, and he always knew how to pull them out at exactly the right moment, and secretly she felt that he was preserving her childhood and youth for her, and that must be why she had deposited the stories with him all these years. Almost without noticing, she had slowly given up on Ilan and Adam as listeners. She sighed and immediately felt it was a different sigh, a new one, carved from a different place inside her, with an ice-cold edge. She was frightened, and for a brief moment she was a child again, fighting with Ada, who insisted on letting go of her hand and jumping off the cliff; she hadn't been there with her for years-why had Ada suddenly come back to hold her hand, only to let go? She kept chattering through Sami and Ofer's silence and found it even more depressing that these two men, despite everything that stood between them now, had still managed to unite against her. There was an alliance, Ora finally realized, an alliance at her expense, and it turned out to be deeper and more effective than everything that divided them.

A nose-blowing interrupted her so violently that she stopped talking. Ofer had a cold. Or allergies. The last few springs his allergies had lasted almost until the end of May. He blew his nose into a tissue pulled from the ornate little olive-wood box that Sami had installed in the back for his pa.s.sengers. He pulled out square after square and blew loudly and scrunched the used tissues into an overflowing ashtray. His Glilon a.s.sault rifle sat between them; its barrel had been pointed at her chest for several minutes, and now she could no longer bear it and motioned for him to turn it away. But when he moved the rifle and placed it between his legs with a sharp, irritated gesture, the front sight scratched the car-ceiling upholstery and pulled out a thread. Ofer said immediately, "Sorry, Sami, I ripped this." Sami looked quickly at the unraveling thread and said hoa.r.s.ely, "Don't worry about it," and Ora said, "No, no, there's no argument, we'll pay for the repair." Sami took a deep breath and said, "Forget it, it's no big deal." Ora whispered to Ofer to fold the b.u.t.t in at least. Ofer hissed in a half whisper that it wasn't standard practice, he only folded it in when he was in the tank, and Ora leaned forward and asked Sami if he had a pair of scissors to cut off the thread, but he didn't, and she held the thread that danced and spun in front of her eyes and looked, for a moment, like a spilled-out gut, and she said maybe it could be sewn back, "if you have a needle and thread here I can sew it right now." Sami said his wife would do it, and then he added, without any color in his voice, "Just be careful with the gun"-he was clearly addressing them both-"so it doesn't scratch the upholstery. I just reupholstered a week ago." Ora said with a crushed smile, "Okay, Sami, no more damages," and she saw him lower his eyelids over a look she did not recognize.

Last week, on a routine drive, Ora had encountered the new upholstery: synthetic leopard skin. Sami had watched her expression closely, and then commented: "You don't like this kind of thing, Ora. This, for you, is not considered a pretty thing, right?" She replied that in general she wasn't crazy about animal-fur upholstery, not even imitation fur, and he laughed: "No, for you this is probably Arab taste, isn't it?" Ora tensed at the unfamiliar bitterness in his voice and said that as far as she could remember, he had never chosen that kind of thing before, either. He replied that he actually found it beautiful, and a man couldn't change his taste. Ora did not respond. She imagined he'd had a rough day, maybe a pa.s.senger had insulted him, maybe they had shat on him at a checkpoint again. They both somehow extricated themselves from the gloom that momentarily drifted through the taxi, but an unease gnawed at her all day, and only that evening, when she was watching television, did it occur to her that his new taste in upholstery might have something to do with the group of settlers who had planned to detonate a car bomb outside a school in East Jerusalem. They had been caught a few days before, and one of them described on television how they had designed the car, inside and out, to match "Arab taste."

Now the silence in the car grew even thicker, and Ora was once again driven to fill it with chatter. She spoke about her father and how she missed him, and about her mother, who no longer knew right from left, and about Ilan and Adam who were off having fun in South America. Sami remained expressionless, but his eyes darted around, examining the convoy in which he'd been crawling for over an hour. Once, on one of their first trips together, he had told her that ever since he was a boy he'd had a habit of counting every truck he saw on the roads in Israel, civilian or military. When she'd looked at him questioningly, he'd explained that they would come in trucks to take him and his family and all the '48 Arabs over the border. "Isn't that what your transferists transferists promise?" he'd asked with a laugh. "Promises should be kept, no? And take it from me, our idiots will line up to drive the trucks if they can get a few bucks out of it." promise?" he'd asked with a laugh. "Promises should be kept, no? And take it from me, our idiots will line up to drive the trucks if they can get a few bucks out of it."

Ofer wipes his nose constantly and blows it with trumpeting sounds she's never heard before, which seem grating and alien to his natural tenderness. He scrunches the tissues and pushes them into the ashtray and immediately pulls another tissue out, and the used tissues fall to the floor and he doesn't pick them up, and she gives up on constantly leaning over to put them into her handbag. A "Storm" Jeep pa.s.ses them, honking repeatedly, and cuts in front. Behind them a Hummer lunges, almost touching them, and Sami keeps running his hand over his large, round bald spot. He presses his huge back against the orthopedic seat cus.h.i.+on and jolts forward every time he feels Ofer's long legs prodding his seatback. His slightly burned masculine scent, always mingled with an expensive aftershave she likes, has been replaced in the last few minutes with a sweet smell of sweat that is worsening, and it bursts through and fills the entire car, overpowering the air-conditioning, and Ora gags and does not dare open the window, so she sits back and breathes through her mouth. Large beads of sweat form on Sami's bald head and run down his face over his puffed cheeks. She wants to offer him a tissue but she is afraid, and she thinks about the way he swiftly dips his fingers in the rose water they bring to the table after meals at his favorite restaurant in Majd el'Krum.

His eyes dart between the Jeep in front of him and the one tailgating him. He reaches up and uses two fingers to pull his s.h.i.+rt collar away from his neck. He is the only Arab in this whole convoy, she thinks, and she too starts to feel a p.r.i.c.kle of sweat: he's simply scared, he's dying of fear, how could I have done this to him? One large drop hangs from the edge of his chin and refuses to fall. A thick, teary drop. How can it not fall? Why doesn't he wipe it off? Is he leaving it like that on purpose? Ora's face is hot and red and her breathing is heavy, and Ofer opens a window and grumbles, "It's hot," and Sami says, "The A/C is weak."

She leans back and takes off her gla.s.ses. Waves of yellow blossoms sway in front of her. Wild mustard, probably, which her deficient eyes crumble and crush into bright smudges. She shuts her eyes and at once feels the pulse of the convoy burst through and rise, as if from her own body, in a tense, menacing growl. She opens her eyes: the dark pounding stops at once and the waves of light return. She covers her eyes again and the growl picks up, with a heavy drumbeat within, a stubborn, dulled, abysmal sound, a medley of engines and pistons, and beneath them the beating of hearts, pulsating arteries, quiet splutters of fear. She turns back to look at the snake of vehicles, and the scene is almost celebratory, excitable, a huge, colorful parade full of life: parents and brothers and girlfriends, even grandparents, bringing their loved ones to the campaign, the event of the season. In every car sits a young boy, the first fruits, a spring festival that ends with a human sacrifice. And you? she asks herself sharply. Look at you, how neatly and calmly you bring your son here, your almost-only-son, the boy you love dearly, with Ishmael as your private driver.

When they get to the meeting point, Sami pulls into the first parking spot he finds, yanks up the emergency brake, folds his arms over his chest, and announces that he will wait for Ora there. And he asks her to be quick, which he has never done before. Ofer gets out of the cab and Sami does not move. He hisses something, but she can't tell what. She hopes he was saying goodbye to Ofer, but who knows what he was muttering. She marches after Ofer, blinking at the dazzling lights: rifle barrels, sungla.s.ses, car mirrors. She doesn't know where he is leading her and is afraid he will get swallowed up among the hundreds of young men and she will never see him again. Meaning-she immediately corrects herself, revising the grim minutes she has been keeping all day-she won't see him again until he comes home. The sun beats down, and the horde becomes a heap of colorful, bustling dots. She focuses on Ofer's long khaki back. His walk is rigid and slightly arrogant. She can see him broaden his shoulders and widen his stance. When he was twelve, she remembers, he used to change his voice when he answered the phone and project a strained "h.e.l.lo" that was supposed to sound deep, and a minute later he would forget and go back to his thin squeak. The air around her buzzes with shouts and whistles and megaphone calls and laughter. "Honey, answer me, it's me, Honey, answer me, it's me," sings a ringtone on a nearby cell phone that seems to follow her wherever she goes. Within the commotion Ora swiftly picks up the distant chatter of a baby somewhere in the large gathering ground, and the voice of his mother answers sweetly. She stands for a moment looking for them but cannot find them, and she imagines the mother changing the baby's diaper, maybe on the hood of a car, bending over and tickling his tummy, and she stands slightly stooped, hugging her suede bag to her body, and laps up the soft double trickle of sounds until it vanishes.

It is all a huge, irredeemable mistake. It seems to her that as the moment of separation approaches, the families and the soldiers fill with arid merriment, as if they have all inhaled a drug meant to dull their comprehension. The air bustles with the hum of a school trip or a big family excursion. Men her age, exempt from reserve duty, meet their friends from the army, the fathers of the young soldiers, and exchange laughter and backslaps. "We've done our part," two stout men tell each other, "now it's their turn." Television crews descend on families saying goodbye to their loved ones. Ora is thirsty, parched. Half running, she trails behind Ofer. Every time her gaze falls on the face of a soldier she unwittingly pulls back, afraid she will remember him: Ofer once told her that when they had their pictures taken sometimes, before they set off on a military campaign, the guys made sure to keep their heads a certain distance from each other, so there'd be room for the red circle that would mark them later, in the newspaper. Screeching loudspeakers direct the soldiers to their battalions' meeting points-a meetery meetery, they call this, and she thinks in her mother's voice: barbarians, language-rapists-and suddenly Ofer stops and she almost walks into him. He turns to her and she feels a deluge. "What's the matter with you?" he whispers into her face. "What if they find an Arab here and think he's come to commit suicide? And didn't you think about how he feels having to drive me here? Do you even get what this means for him?"

She doesn't have the energy to argue or explain. He's right, but she really wasn't in a state to think about anything. How can he not understand her? She just wasn't thinking. A white fog had filled her mind from the moment he told her that instead of going on the trip to the Galilee with her he was going off to some kasbah or mukataa mukataa. That was at six a.m. She had woken to hear his voice whispering into the phone in the other room, and hurried in there. Seeing his guilty look she had tensed and asked, "Did they call?"

"They say I have to go."

"But when?"

"ASAP.".

She asked if it couldn't wait a little while, so they could at least do the trip for two or three days, because she realized immediately that a whole week with him was a dream now. She added with a pathetic smile, "Didn't we say we'd have a few puffs of family-together time?"

He laughed and said, "Mom, it's not a game, it's war," and because of his arrogance-his, and his father's, and his brother's, their patronizing dance around her most sensitive trigger points-she spat back at him that she still wasn't convinced that the male brain could tell the difference between war and games. For a moment she allowed herself some modest satisfaction with the debating skills she'd displayed even before her morning coffee, but Ofer shrugged and went to his room to pack, and precisely because he did not respond with a witty answer, as he usually did, she grew suspicious.

She followed him and asked, "But did they call to let you know?" Because she remembered that she hadn't heard the phone ring.

Ofer took his military s.h.i.+rts from the closet, and pairs of gray socks, and shoved them into his backpack. From behind the door he grumbled, "What difference does it make who called? There's an operation, and there's an emergency call-up, and half the country's reporting for duty."

Ora wouldn't give in-Me? Pa.s.s up getting p.r.i.c.ked with such a perfect thorn? she asked herself later-and she leaned weakly against the doorway, crossed her arms over her chest, and demanded that he tell her exactly how things had progressed to that phone call. She would not let up until he admitted that he had called them them that morning, even before six he had called the battalion and begged them to take him, even though today, at nine-zero-zero, he was supposed to be at the induction center for his discharge, and from there to drive to the Galilee with her. As he lowered his gaze and mumbled on, she discovered, to her horror, that the army hadn't even considered asking him to prolong his service. As far as they were concerned he was a civilian, deep into his discharge leave. It was he, Ofer admitted defiantly, his forehead turning red, who wasn't willing to give up. "No way! After eating s.h.i.+t for three years so I'd be ready for exactly this kind of operation?" Three years of checkpoints and patrols, little kids in Palestinian villages and settlements throwing stones at him, not to mention the fact that he hadn't even been within spitting distance of a tank for six months, and now, at last, with his lousy luck, this kind of kick-a.s.s operation, three armored units together-there were tears in his eyes, and for a moment you might have thought he was haggling with her to be allowed to come back late from a cla.s.s Purim party-how could he sit at home or go hiking in the Galilee when all his guys would be there? In short, she discovered that he, on his own initiative, had convinced them to enlist him on a voluntary basis for another twenty-eight days. that morning, even before six he had called the battalion and begged them to take him, even though today, at nine-zero-zero, he was supposed to be at the induction center for his discharge, and from there to drive to the Galilee with her. As he lowered his gaze and mumbled on, she discovered, to her horror, that the army hadn't even considered asking him to prolong his service. As far as they were concerned he was a civilian, deep into his discharge leave. It was he, Ofer admitted defiantly, his forehead turning red, who wasn't willing to give up. "No way! After eating s.h.i.+t for three years so I'd be ready for exactly this kind of operation?" Three years of checkpoints and patrols, little kids in Palestinian villages and settlements throwing stones at him, not to mention the fact that he hadn't even been within spitting distance of a tank for six months, and now, at last, with his lousy luck, this kind of kick-a.s.s operation, three armored units together-there were tears in his eyes, and for a moment you might have thought he was haggling with her to be allowed to come back late from a cla.s.s Purim party-how could he sit at home or go hiking in the Galilee when all his guys would be there? In short, she discovered that he, on his own initiative, had convinced them to enlist him on a voluntary basis for another twenty-eight days.

"Oh," she said, when he finished his speech, and it was a hollow, m.u.f.fled Oh. And I dragged my corpse into the kitchen And I dragged my corpse into the kitchen, she thought to herself. It was an expression of Ilan's, her ex, the man who had shared her life and, in their good years, enriched the goodness. The fullness of life The fullness of life, the old Ilan used to say and blush with grat.i.tude, with reserved, awkward enthusiasm, which propelled Ora toward him on a wave of love. She always thought that deep in his heart he was amazed at having been granted this fullness of life at all. She remembers when the kids were little and they lived in Tzur Hada.s.sah, in the house they bought from Avram, how they liked to hang the laundry out to dry at night, together, one last domestic ch.o.r.e at the end of a long, exhausting day. Together they would carry the large tub out to the garden facing the dark fields and the valley, and the Arab village of Hussan. The great fig tree and the grevillea rustled softly with their own mysterious, rich lives, and the laundry lines filled up with dozens of tiny articles of clothing like miniature hieroglyphics: little socks and unders.h.i.+rts and cloth shoes and pants with suspenders and colorful OshKosh overalls. Was there someone from Hussan who had gone out in the last light of day and was watching them now? Aiming a gun at them? Ora wondered sometimes, and a chill would flutter down her spine. Or was there a general, human immunity for people hanging laundry-especially this kind of laundry?

Her thoughts flit as she remembers how Ofer presented her and Ilan with his new "tankist" overalls. They had already sold the Tzur Hada.s.sah house by then and moved north to Ein Karem, closer to the city. Ofer came out of his room wrapped in the big, fireproof overalls, approached them with little hops and skips, swayed this way and that, flapped his arms, and shouted sweetly: "Mommy! Daddy! Teletubbies!" Two decades earlier, in the garden at night, in the middle of hanging up the boys' clothes, Ilan had walked through the crowded lines and hugged her, and they had both rocked together, entangled in the damp laundry, laughing softly, sighing lovingly, and Ilan had whispered in her ear, "Isn't it, Orinkah? Isn't it the fullness of life?" She had hugged him as hard as she could, with a salty happiness pulsing in her throat, and had felt that for one fleeting moment she had caught it as it rushed through her, the secret of the fruitful years, their tidal motion, and their blessing in her body and his, and in their two little children and in the house they had built for themselves, and in their love, which finally, after years of wandering and hesitating, and after the blow of Avram's tragedy, was now, it seemed, standing up on its own two feet.

Ofer finished packing in his room, and she stood motionless, dropsical, in the kitchen, and thought that Ilan had won again without any effort: she would not go on the trip with Ofer, she would not have even one week with him. Ofer must have sensed what she was going through, as he always did, even if he sometimes denied it, and he came and stood behind her and said, "Come on, Mom, it's okay ..." He said it tenderly, in a voice that only he knew how to use. But she hardened her heart and did not turn to him. They had planned the Galilee trip for a whole month. It was her gift to him for finis.h.i.+ng the army, and it was a gift for herself too, of course, for her her release from his army. Together they'd gone out and bought two little tents that folded up into small squares and elaborate backpacks and sleeping bags and hiking boots, but only for her: Ofer wouldn't give up his dingy pair. In her spare time she'd bought thermal underwear and hats and f.a.n.n.y packs and Band-Aids for blisters and canteens and waterproof matches and a camping stove and dried fruit and crackers and canned food. Every so often, Ofer would pick up the swelling backpacks in her bedroom, gauge their weight in astonishment, and comment, "They're coming along well, really growing nicely." He joked that she'd have to find a Galilean Sherpa to carry all the gear she was packing. She laughed heartily, responding to his good spirits, to the light in his face. In the last few weeks, as his discharge date approached, she could feel the tastes and smells slowly returning from exile. Even the sounds sharpened, as they do when you get your ears flushed. Little surprises awaited her, wild crossbreeds of sensations: she would open a water bill and feel as if she had unwrapped a package of fresh parsley. Sometimes she would say to herself out loud, so she could believe it: "One week alone, the two of us, in the Galilee." And mostly she proclaimed to no one: "Ofer is being released from the army. Ofer is getting out. He's getting out of it in one piece." release from his army. Together they'd gone out and bought two little tents that folded up into small squares and elaborate backpacks and sleeping bags and hiking boots, but only for her: Ofer wouldn't give up his dingy pair. In her spare time she'd bought thermal underwear and hats and f.a.n.n.y packs and Band-Aids for blisters and canteens and waterproof matches and a camping stove and dried fruit and crackers and canned food. Every so often, Ofer would pick up the swelling backpacks in her bedroom, gauge their weight in astonishment, and comment, "They're coming along well, really growing nicely." He joked that she'd have to find a Galilean Sherpa to carry all the gear she was packing. She laughed heartily, responding to his good spirits, to the light in his face. In the last few weeks, as his discharge date approached, she could feel the tastes and smells slowly returning from exile. Even the sounds sharpened, as they do when you get your ears flushed. Little surprises awaited her, wild crossbreeds of sensations: she would open a water bill and feel as if she had unwrapped a package of fresh parsley. Sometimes she would say to herself out loud, so she could believe it: "One week alone, the two of us, in the Galilee." And mostly she proclaimed to no one: "Ofer is being released from the army. Ofer is getting out. He's getting out of it in one piece."

During the last week she played the words over and over again to the walls of the house, growing bolder and bolder. "The nightmare is over," she would say. "No more nights of sleeping pills," she whispered defiantly, and knew she was tempting fate. But Ofer had been on his discharge leave for two weeks by then, and there was no immediate threat. The general, almost eternal conflict from which she had disconnected herself years ago kept on making its dark circles, here a terrorist attack, there a targeted a.s.sa.s.sination, hurdles that the soul leaped over with an expressionless face and without ever looking back. And perhaps she was emboldened to hope because she felt that Ofer himself was starting to believe that this was it, that it was over. A few days earlier, when he stopped sleeping for eighteen hours straight every day, she noticed the change in him, the slight civilianness that diluted his military speak, and his expressions, which softened day by day, and even the way he moved around the house once he allowed himself to grasp that he had apparently escaped his three years of lousy military service unharmed. "My boy is coming back," she reported cautiously to the fridge and the dishwasher, to the computer mouse and the flower arrangement she put out in a vase. She knew full well from her experience with Adam, who had been out of the army for three years, that they don't really come back. Not like they were before. And that the boy he used to be had been lost to her forever the moment he was nationalized-lost to himself, too. But who said that what happened to Adam would happen to Ofer? They were so different, and what mattered now was that Ofer was coming out of the Armored Corps-and out of his armor, she thought, waxing poetic. These were the sweet drops she had been pouring into herself just the night before, when she took the remote control out of his hand and covered him with a thin blanket, and sat watching him sleep. His full, wide lips were slightly parted in a hint of an ironic smile, as if he knew she was watching him. His rounded forehead gave him, even in his sleep, a slightly severe expression, and his open face, with the bronzed crown shaved down to a stubble, looked, more than ever before, strong and ready for life. A man, she thought in amazement. A total man. Everything in him looked possible and open and propelled. The future itself lit up his face, from inside and out. And now this operation suddenly comes along, and I could really do without it, Ora sighed the next morning as she stood in the kitchen and made herself a particularly noxious cup of coffee. Had she been able to, she would have turned around and gone back to bed and slept until the whole thing was over. How many days could a campaign like this last? A week? Two? A lifetime? But she didn't even have the strength to go back to bed, incapable of taking a single step, and from one moment to the next everything became decided, inevitable. Her body already knew, and her stomach, and her gut, which was melting away.

At seven-thirty that evening she stands cooking in the kitchen, wearing jeans and a T-s.h.i.+rt, and, for lyric effect, the floral ap.r.o.n of a real, hardworking, eager housewife: a chef. Piping-hot pots and pans dance on the stove top, steam curls up to the ceiling and thickens into aromatic clouds, and Ora suddenly knows that everything will work out.

As befitting the adversary she faces, she plunges into battle with her winning combination: Ariela's Chinese chicken strips with vegetables, Ariela's mother-in-law's Persian rice with raisins and pine nuts, her own variation on her mother's sweet eggplant with garlic and tomatoes, and mushroom and onion pies. If she only had a proper oven in this house she could make at least one more pie, but Ofer would be licking his fingers anyway. She moves between the oven and the stove top with unexpected gaiety, and for the first time since Ilan left, since they locked up their house in Ein Karem and dispersed to separate rental houses, she feels a sense of affection and belonging toward a kitchen, toward the whole idea of a kitchen, even this old-fas.h.i.+oned, grubby kitchen, which now approaches her tentatively and rubs up against her with its damp snouts of serving spoons and ladles. Piled on the table behind her are covered bowls of eggplant salad, cabbage salad, and a large, colorful chopped vegetable salad, into which she snuck slices of apple and mango, which Ofer may or may not notice, if he even gets to eat this meal. Another bowl contains her version of tabbouleh, which Ofer thinks is to die for-that is to say, which he really, really likes, she corrects herself quickly for the record.

She has arrived at the moment when all the dishes have been sent on their way: cooking on the stove top, baking in the oven, bubbling in pans. They don't need her any longer. But she still needs to cook, because surely Ofer will come home at some point and want fresh food. Her fingers flutter restlessly in the air. Where was I? She grabs a knife and a few vegetables that survived her salad a.s.sault, and starts chopping and humming quickly, The tankists set off with screeching chains, / Their bodies painted the color of earth The tankists set off with screeching chains, / Their bodies painted the color of earth-She stops herself. How in the world did she come up with that old song? Perhaps she should make a steak the way he likes it, braised in red wine, in case he gets home tonight? And the people who come to make the announcement, she wonders, are they convening in some office now, at the local army center, undergoing training or a refresher course-but what is there to refresh? When would they have had time to forget their job? When have we had even one single day here without an announcement to a family? It's strange to think that the notifiers were enlisted at the same time as the soldiers who take part in the operation, all orchestrated together. She giggles with a high-pitched squeak, and there is Ada again, with her large eyes, resurfacing, always there to observe how Ora acts, and Ora realizes that for several minutes she's been staring at the semitransparent lower half of the front door. There is a problem there that requires a solution, but she does not understand what it is, and she hurries back to the pots on the stove, stirs and seasons generously-he likes his food spicy-and holds her face over the steam to inhale the pots' thick breath. She doesn't taste the food. She has no appet.i.te tonight-if she puts a crumb in her mouth she'll throw up. She watches her hand move wildly over a pot, showering its contents with paprika. There are particular movements that always make the phone ring. She noticed this odd conjunction a long time ago: when she seasons food, for example, or when she wipes a pot or pan dry after was.h.i.+ng it, the phone almost always rings. Something in these circular motions seems to bring it to life, and also-how interesting-when she adds water to the flowers in the delicate gla.s.s vase. But only that vase! She laughs warmly at the secretive whims of her telephone, empties the pot of rice with raisins and pine nuts into the trash can, and carefully washes and dries the pot slowly, seductively. But nothing happens. The phone is dead (meaning, silent). Ofer is probably terribly busy. It will be hours until anything even starts, and they may not leave until tomorrow or the next day. And when his tank was. .h.i.t with two rockets And when his tank was. .h.i.t with two rockets, she hums, He was inside the burning fire He was inside the burning fire-She cuts herself off. She needs to find something to do tomorrow. But tomorrow is one of those days when she has nothing much to do. Tomorrow she was supposed to be skipping among the Galilee rocks with her young son, but there was a slight hitch in the plans. Maybe she should call the new clinic in Rehavia and offer to start working right away, even as a volunteer, even doing secretarial work if necessary. They could call it her adjustment period. But they have already explained, twice, that they won't need her until the middle of May, when their regular physiotherapist is scheduled to give birth. A new person will come into the world, Ora thinks and swallows bitter saliva. How silly of her not to have made any plans until May. She'd been so preoccupied with planning the trip with Ofer that she'd thought of nothing else, but she'd had the feeling that there would be a turning point in the Galilee. The start of a real, full recovery for her and Ofer. So much for her feelings.

She tosses the eggplant into the trash can, scrubs the pan, wipes it devotedly, and gives a sideways glance at the treacherous phone. What now? Where was I? The door. The lower part of the door. Four short bars over thick frosted gla.s.s. She takes three sheets of A4 paper from the printer and tapes them over the gla.s.s. That way she won't see their military boots. And now what? The fridge is practically empty. In the pantry she finds a few potatoes and onions. Perhaps a quick soup? Tomorrow morning she'll go shopping and fill the house again. It occurs to her that they could arrive in the middle of all sorts of things. Like when she's unpacking the groceries and putting things in the fridge. Or when she sits down and watches television. Or when she sleeps, or when she's in the bathroom, or when she's chopping vegetables for soup.

Her breath pauses for a moment, and she quickly turns on the radio like someone