"Wait," she calls out, chasing after Sami. "Don't the neighbors notice anything?"

He shrugs. "After a week or two, sure they do."

"And then what?"

"Then what? They go somewhere else. Always that way."

They stand outside and Ora looks back. She wonders if one can seek political asylum with refugees, because she feels completely willing to hide out here for the next month. To be the IRs' IR. At least she'd do some good for someone.

Ofer, Ofer, she thinks, where are you? What are you going through now?

For all you know he might be running into the younger brother of that woman, or the son of that guy.

When they reach the taxi, three cheerful little girls jump out holding rags and a little bucket and brushes. They stand aside, giggling and stealing looks at Ora. Sami checks the backseat and sighs deeply. Ora sits down next to him.

Instead of starting the engine, Sami jingles his heavy set of keys. Ora waits. He turns to her, struggling with his potbelly. "Even if you forgive me for before, for hitting, I don't forgive me. I would cut my own hand off for what I did to you."

"Drive," she says wearily. "Someone's waiting for me."

"Wait, I really need this from you."

"What do you want?"

Eyes dart opposite eyes, like dogs chained to either side of a fence. A friendly face, a loved one even, suddenly looks completely foreign. The kind you don't even want to make the effort to decipher, she thinks, to make it yours.

Sami holds his gaze and swallows. "Just that Mr. Ilan won't know anything about this."

A vague stench of vomit still lingers in the taxi, and it occurs to Ora that everything is meshing together, including the "Mr." he suddenly attached to Ilan. Mister Ilan and Missus Ora Mister Ilan and Missus Ora. She pauses. She'd been expecting this request, and had already decided what her price would be. Ilan would be proud of me, she thinks bitterly. "Drive," she tells Sami.

"But what...what do you say ..."

"Drive," she commands, surprised by the trickling sensation of something she has never felt toward him before: the sweetness of power. A slight, tingling burn of her own arbitrary authority. "First drive, then we'll see."

DAYLIGHT BURGEONS as they lie on the edge of a field, bright shades of green unfurl as far as the eye can see, and they wake from a nap, still blanketed with a gossamer of dreams. They are the only two people in the world, there is no one else, and the earth steams with a primeval scent, and the air hums with the rustle of tiny creatures, and the mantle of dawn still hangs overhead, lucent and dewy, and their eyes light up with little smiles of not-yet-fear and not-yet-themselves. as they lie on the edge of a field, bright shades of green unfurl as far as the eye can see, and they wake from a nap, still blanketed with a gossamer of dreams. They are the only two people in the world, there is no one else, and the earth steams with a primeval scent, and the air hums with the rustle of tiny creatures, and the mantle of dawn still hangs overhead, lucent and dewy, and their eyes light up with little smiles of not-yet-fear and not-yet-themselves.

Then Avram's eyes clear. He sees Ora sitting facing him with her back against a huge backpack, beyond which are a field, a grove, and a mountain. With surprising swiftness he jumps up: "What is this place?"

Ora shrugs. "Somewhere in the Galilee. Don't ask me."

"The Galilee?" His face rounds into infinite astonishment. "Where am I?" he whispers.

"Wherever he dumped us last night."

Avram runs a hand over his face. He rubs, scrubs, crushes, and rocks his head back and forth. "Who dumped us, the cabby? The Arab?"

"Yes, the Arab." She reaches out a hand for him to help her up, but he seems not to comprehend the gesture.

"You were yelling," he remembers. "I was asleep. You were shouting at him too, weren't you?"

"Forget about that, it doesn't matter now." She hoists herself up with a groan, encountering hostile joints. And rightly so, she thinks as she scans the list of her sins: lugging Avram's entire weight on her poor back down four flights of steps, then the nightmarish drive, and the two of them walking aimlessly through the fields. She'd fallen a few times on the way, and finally they'd collapsed on the edge of this field and spent a sleepless night on the ground. I'm too old for this, she thinks.

"Those pills knock me out," Avram mumbles. "Prodomol. I'm not used to them. I couldn't do anything."

You did plenty, Ora thinks to herself with a sigh. "What a day I had with him-don't ask."

"But why on earth did he bring us here?" Avram gets worked up again, as if he has only just grasped what has been done to him. "And what now? What do we do, Ora?" More and more fears crowd into him by the minute, and they no longer have s.p.a.ce in his body.

Ora brushes her behind and shakes off some earth and dry leaves. Coffee would help, she thinks, and quietly mumbles, "Coffee, coffee," to silence the questions that dart wildly inside her. What do I do with him now? And what exactly was I thinking when I dragged him here? "We're leaving," she p.r.o.nounces, without daring to look at him.

"What do you mean leaving? Where to? Ora! What do you mean leaving?"

"I suggest," she says, though she cannot believe the words are coming out of her own mouth, "that we pick up our backpacks and explore. Just walk. See where we are."

Avram stares at her. "I have to be at home," he says slowly, like someone explaining a simple fact of life to a mentally handicapped person.

Ora hoists the backpack over her shoulders, sways under its heft, and stands waiting. Avram does not move. The hems of his sleeves tremble. "That's yours," Ora says, pointing to the other backpack, the blue one.

"How could it be mine?" He stumbles away, as though the backpack is a sly beast about to pounce on him. "It's not mine, I don't recognize it," he murmurs.

"It's yours. Let's start walking, we'll talk on the way."

"No," Avram insists, and his unkempt beard bristles a little. "I'm not moving until you explain what-"

"On the way," she interrupts, and starts marching. Her shoulders are hunched and her whole body looks as though an unskilled puppeteer is pulling her strings. "I'll tell you everything on the way; we can't stay here anymore."

"Why not?"

"I mustn't," she replies simply, and as she utters the words she knows she is right, and that this is the law she must now obey: not to stay in one place for too long, not to be a sitting target-for people or thoughts.

Terrified, he watches her walking away toward a path. She'll be back soon, he thinks, she'll be right back. She won't leave me like this. She wouldn't dare. Ora keeps walking without looking back. His lips tremble with anger and insult. Then he stomps his feet and lets out a short, bitter screech that might be her name and might be f.u.c.k-you-you-b.i.t.c.h and who-the-h.e.l.l-do-you-think-you-are and you-psycho and mommy-wait-for-me all in one breath. Ora walks on. Avram weakly lifts up the backpack, slings it over his left shoulder, and starts after her, dragging his feet on the ground.

The path winds through fields and groves. Poplars whiten, and wild mustard towers on both sides of the path in fragrant yellow cl.u.s.ters. It's lovely here, Ora thinks. She keeps walking. She has no idea where she is or where she is going. She can hear his stuttering steps behind her. She peeks over her shoulder: lost and frightened, he feels his way along the open s.p.a.ce. She realizes that he moves in light the way she does in darkness, and she recalls the way he looked last night, a hunched, slow shadow in the depths of a dark apartment.

When he opened the door after she'd knocked and kicked for several minutes, she realized that he was in the habit of not turning any lights on. The bell had been yanked out of its casing. There wasn't a single bulb in the stairwell. She'd felt her way up the four flights of steps along crumbling walls and a greasy stone banister, through various stenches that lingered in the air. When he finally opened the door-she quickly removed her gla.s.ses, which were new to him-she saw a lump. In the darkness he looked hugely broad, so much so that she wasn't sure it was him at first, and she said his name dubiously. He did not answer, and she said, "I'm here," and searched for more words with which to fill the deepening chasm in her stomach. She was frightened by the darkness in the apartment behind him and by the sense that he was coming out to her like a bear from its den. She boldly reached a hand into the apartment, felt along the wall, and found a switch. They were both flooded with murky yellow light, and their eyes immediately exchanged unmerciful information.

She, ultimately, had been better preserved. Her short-cropped curly hair had turned almost entirely silver, but her expression was still open and innocent and it went out to him-he could feel it even in his dim state-and her large brown eyes still held a constant, serious question. Nevertheless, something in her was slightly dried up and dulled, he could see, and there were a few faint lines, footprints of a bird in the sand, around her lips. Something about her posture was diminished, that upright boldness she'd always had, like a foal. And the generous, laughing mouth, Ora's great mouth, now seemed limp and skeptical.

He had lost a lot of hair in the last three years, and his face had swelled and looked less open. Week-old stubble covered his cheeks and chin. His blue eyes, which used to make her feel parched, had darkened and seemed smaller and sunken. He still did not move, almost blocking the doorway with his body, his thick penguin arms held stiffly at his sides. He stood there in a faded T-shirt from which his body was bursting and grunted to himself and sucked his lips with such irritability that she had to demand: "Aren't you going to let me in?" He walked into the apartment, dragging his bare feet, grunting and growling to himself. She shut the door and followed him into a smell that was an ent.i.ty unto itself, as if she were entering the folds of a thick blanket. It was the smell of the inside of suitcases and closed drawers and unaired linen and socks under beds and clumps of dust.

And there they were: the heavy breakfront with the peeling polyurethane lacquer, the bald fraying rug, and the awful red armchairs whose upholstery had been ripped and worn even thirty-five years ago. It was his mother's furniture, his only possessions, which he still moved around as he roamed from one apartment to the next.

"Where were you?" he grumbled. "You said you'd be here in an hour."

She hit him with the offer immediately, in a loud and anxious voice, with the defiance and awkwardness of someone who knows exactly how inappropriate her words are, but must somehow nail down her fancies and see what happens. He seemed not to hear her at all. He did not look at her, either. His head, bowed to his chest, moved right and left in delayed little jerks. "Wait, don't say no yet," she said. "Think about it for a minute."

He looked up at her. All his movements were very slow. In the light of the bare bulb she again saw what the last few years had done to him. He spoke heavily: "Regretably, I can't do it now. Maybe another time."

If it hadn't been so sad, she would have burst out laughing. Regretably Regretably, he said, like a beggar wallowing in trash and sticking his pinky up while drinking tea from a can.

"Avram, I-"

"Ora, no."

Even this monosyllabic speech was beyond his strength. Or maybe it was the taste of her name in his mouth. His eyes suddenly turned red and he looked as though he were sinking even deeper into his flesh.

"Listen to me." She berated him with a new aggression that drew on her confrontation with Sami. "I can't force you to do anything, but hear me out and then make up your mind. I've run away. Do you understand? I cannot sit there and wait for them to come."

"Who?"

"Them." She peered deep into his eyes and saw that he understood.

"But you can't sleep here," he mumbled angrily. "I don't have another bed."

"I don't want to sleep here. I'm going to keep traveling. I came to get you."

He nodded for a long time, even smiled slightly, with the politeness of a tourist in a land whose customs he did not understand. She could see: he wasn't taking in the words at all. "Where's Ilan?" he asked.

"I'm going up north for a few days. Come with me."

"I don't know her, what's the matter with her? Why is she even-"

To her amazement, he spoke his thoughts out loud. Once, years ago, this had been one of his tricks: "Ora doesn't want me anymore, thinks Avram forlorn and wishes he were dead," he would say to her, and grinningly deny that he'd said it, even accuse her of invading his private thoughts. But this was different, troubling, a private, internal conversation that hiccupped from him uncontrollably. He sought out the armchair and collapsed into it, leaning his head all the way back to reveal a thick, red, stubbly throat. "Where's Ilan?" he asked again, half pleadingly.

"There's a cab waiting for me downstairs. I want you to come with me."

"Where?"

"I don't know, we'll go up north. The main thing is not to be here."

One of his fingers moved weakly, as if conducting a tune that played in his mind. "What are you going to do there?"

"I don't know, don't ask me. I have a tent and a backpack and food for the first few days. I have everything for you, too. It's all packed, even a sleeping bag, so come with me."

"For me?" His face reappeared, moonlike and red. "She's mad," he muttered, "totally lost her mind."

Ora was horrified by this exposure of his deepest thoughts and hardened her heart. "I'm not going home until the whole business there is over. Come with me."

He sighed. "What does she think, that I can just pick up and-" He motioned ineffectually across the apartment and at himself, presenting her with evidence and extenuating circ.u.mstances.

"Help me," Ora said softly.

He sat silently. He did not, for example, say that they wouldn't come looking for him. That they had no reason to look for him. That he had nothing to do with them. He did not say that it was her problem. And that silence of his, with the traces of decency she imagined she saw in it, was a glimmer of hope. "But maybe they won't come at all," he tried halfheartedly.

"Avram," she said, almost warning.

He took a deep breath. "Maybe nothing will happen to him."

She leaned down right into his face, stared into his eyes, and the murkiest sliver of darkness darted between them, the covenant of their bitter knowledge, the worst of all possible worlds. "Give me two days. You know what? Give me one day, that's all, twenty-four hours, I promise, and tomorrow night I'll bring you back here." She believed what she was saying. She thought she needed to get through the first day and night, and then, who knows, maybe it would all be over and she and Avram could each go back to their lives. Or perhaps after one day and night she herself would wake up from the fantasy, pull herself together and go home and do what everyone else did-sit and wait for them. "So what do you say?" When he did not answer, she groaned, "Help me, Avram, just to get through the first few hours."

His head swayed, he furrowed his brow, and his face grew stern and focused. He thought about what she had done for him and what she had been to him. "What a piece of s.h.i.t I am," he thought, "I can't even give her one day." She heard him. "I have to buy time. Just another few minutes and I won't be able to ..." Ora kneeled in front of him and placed her hands on the armrests on either side of him. It was becoming intolerable. He turned his head away. "She's hysterical," he thought grumpily, "and there's something wrong with her mouth." Ora nodded and her eyes filled with tears. "I wish she would just leave," Avram thought out loud and squirmed in his seat. "Just go, leave me. What's she doing here anyway?"

Something p.r.i.c.kled on the outskirts of her brain. She demanded to know what he meant when he said in another few minutes he wouldn't be able to ...

He smiled crookedly, his heavy swollen eyelids barely open, exposing red crescents: "I took a pill. A minute from now I'll be knocked out. It'll be morning by the time-"

"But you knew I was coming!"

"If you'd come sooner ..." His voice was thickening. "Why didn't you come sooner?"

She hurried into the little bathroom. The bulb over the mirror was burned out. She moved her fingers over the sink as if trying to pull in threads of light from the living room. There was rust on the taps and the drain and around the screws that held the shelves to the pink porcelain tiles. To her surprise there was virtually no medicine on the shelves. Confused, she thought back to the stash of medication he used to keep around. He liked to give her detailed accounts during their rare meetings, before Ofer enlisted: "Numbon, Zodorm, Bondormin, Hypnodorm," he would mumble, "they give them names that sound like notes on a toy xylophone." All she could find now were packets of antihistamines, probably for his hay fever, and a few a.s.sivals and Stilnoxes scattered around, but it was mostly natural sleeping aids. That's good, she thought, he must have cleaned himself up. Finally one good thing. She crammed the tablets into a plastic bag she found in the laundry closet and left the room. But then she went back: on a separate shelf on one side were a large silver earring in the shape of a spur, a bottle of vanilla-scented deodorant, and a hairbrush covered with short, purple hairs.

Seeing the pantry full of cardboard boxes stuffed with empty beer bottles, she a.s.sumed he made part of his income by returning bottles for their deposits. When she went back to him, she found him in a deep slumber. His arms and legs were splayed out and his mouth was open. She put her hands on her hips. What now? Only then did she notice large charcoal drawings on the walls around her: G.o.dlike figures, or prophets, a woman breast-feeding a crane whose large human eyes had long eyelashes, and babies who looked like floating goats, their fine hair spread like halos around their heads. One of the prophets had Avram's face. The breast-feeding woman was actually a young girl with sweet, gentle features and a mohawk. Along one whole wall was an improvised desk-a wooden door on sawhorses-covered with heaps of junk of all sizes. There were tools, tubes of glue, nails, screws, rusty cans, ancient faucets, clocks in various stages of disrepair, old keys, and piles of tattered books. She opened an old photo alb.u.m that was torn and moldy around the edges, and the odor of trash came at her in a wave. It was empty. All it contained were photo corners stuck on the pages, and slanted captions in unfamiliar handwriting: Father and me, Odessa, Winter '36. Grandma and Mother and Abigail (in utero), 1949. Guess who's Queen Esther this year? Father and me, Odessa, Winter '36. Grandma and Mother and Abigail (in utero), 1949. Guess who's Queen Esther this year?

Avram groaned and opened his eyes and saw her standing there. "You're here," he mumbled, and felt her fingernails digging into his forearms. He couldn't figure out how these things were connected. He shook his head. "Tomorrow, come tomorrow, it'll be fine."

She held her face very close to his again. He started sweating. She yelled into his ear, "Don't run away on me now!" The voice unraveled inside him into empty syllables and sounds. She saw his tongue move around his mouth and leaned over him again. "Come asleep, come unconscious, but come! Don't leave me on my own with this."

He gurgled with his mouth open. What about Ilan, he thought, why hadn't Ilan come with her- Later, he wasn't sure if it was a minute or an hour later, he strained to open his eyes again, but she was gone. For a minute he thought she'd left, let him be, and wished he'd asked her to help him get into bed. His back would ache tomorrow. But then, terrifyingly, he heard her moving around in his bedroom. He tried to get up, to get her out of there, but his arms and legs were like water skins. He heard her feeling around the walls for a light switch, but there was no bulb in there. "I forgot to change it," he mumbled. "I'll put one in tomorrow." Then there were footsteps again. She's coming out, he thought with relief. Then the footsteps stopped and there was a long silence, and he froze in the armchair. He knew what she was looking at. "Get out of there," he groaned silently. She cleared her dry throat a couple of times, went to switch a light on in the hallway, and walked back to the bedroom, probably to get a better look. If he'd been capable, he would have got up and left the apartment.

"Avram, Avram, Avram," her voice again and her warm breath on his face. "You can't stay here alone," she whispered, and there was something new in her voice, even he could sense it. Not the panic from before, but some knowledge that worried him even more. "We have to run away together, you don't have a choice, I'm such an idiot, you don't have a choice." And he knew she was right, but warm threads were already tying themselves slowly around his ankles, he felt them crawling up, wrapping themselves with maternal devotion around his knees and thighs, enveloping him tightly in a soft coc.o.o.n where he could pupate for the night. He hadn't taken Prodomol for a few years now-Neta forbade it-and the effect was stunning. His legs were already melting away. Soon another exhausting shift of awakeness would be over, and he'd be rid of himself for five or six hours.

"You're wearing socks and shoes now," said Ora, straightening up. "Come on, give me your hand and try to stand."

He breathed slowly, heavily, with his eyes closed and his face strained. If only he could concentrate, if only she would be quiet for a minute. He was almost there, just a matter of seconds, and she must have known that too, because she wouldn't give in. She was chasing him all the way there-how could she be allowed in there? Calling his name over and over, shaking him, rocking his shoulders, such strength she had, she'd always been strong, thin and strong, she used to beat him at arm wrestling. But he mustn't think, mustn't remember, because beyond her shouting he could finally feel the blurry dizziness waiting, and there was an indentation in the shape of his body, as soft as a palm, and a cloud would cover everything.

Ora stood facing the man asleep in the armchair. Three years I haven't seen him, she thought, and I didn't even hug him. Sprawled out with his chin pressed to his chest, the patches of stubble protruded around his mouth and made him look like a drunken troll, and it was hard to decide if he was kindly or bitterly cruel. "Look at something weird," he'd said to her once, standing naked before her, when they were twenty-one. "I've just noticed that I have one good eye and one bad eye."

"Stop," she said now to the fallen heap of his flesh. "You have to come. It's not just for me, Avram, it's for you too, isn't it? You understand that, don't you?"

He snored softly, and his face grew calmer. In his bedroom she'd seen weird scribbles in black pencil all over the wall above his bed. At first she thought it was a childish sketch of train tracks or an infinitely long fence that twisted back and forth along the width of the wall and came down from the ceiling in rows, zigzagging all the way down to the bed. The fence poles were joined at their midpoints by short, crooked beams. She c.o.c.ked her head to one side and examined it: the lines also looked like the long teeth of a comb or a rake, or some ancient beast. Then she discovered little numbers scattered here and there and realized they signified dates. The last one, right by the pillow, was the day that had just come to an end, and it had a little exclamation point next to it. Ora stood there and looked back and forth at the lines and could not stop until she had verified that each of the many vertical lines was crossed out with a horizontal one.

A shock of cold water slapped his face, and he opened a pair of stunned eyes. "Get up," she said. His temples started to pound. He licked the water off his lips and strained to lift a hand up to protect his face from her gaze. It scared him to be looked at by her eyes in this way. Her stare turned him into an object, a lump whose size and weight and center of gravity she was examining, planning how to move him from the armchair to a place he did not even dare to imagine. She put the toes of her shoes up against his, placed his limp hands on her shoulders, bent her knees, and pulled him toward her. She let out a moan of pain and astonishment when he fell on her with his full weight. "There goes my back," she announced to herself. She shuffled back with one foot, afraid she would tumble down with him at any moment. "Come on, let's go," she squeaked. He snorted into her neck. One of his arms hung down her hunched back. "Don't fall asleep," she croaked in a stifled voice. "Stay awake!" She felt her way across the room, rocking with him in a drunkard's dance. Then she pulled him through the doorway like a huge cork and slammed the door shut. In the dark stairwell she searched for the edge of the step with her heel. He mumbled again for her to leave him alone and expressed certain opinions about her sanity. Then he went back to snoring and a strand of his saliva dribbled down her arm. In her mouth she held the plastic bag with his sleeping tablets and toothbrush, which she'd grabbed from the top of a bureau, and she was already regretting not having taken some clothes for him. Through the plastic bag, with gritted teeth, she spoke and grunted at him, fighting to awaken him, to pull the edge of him out of the dark mouth that was swallowing him up. She panted like a dog, and her legs shook. She was trying to do it the right way, reciting to herself silently as she did during a particularly complicated treatment: the quadriceps extend, the gluteus contracts, the gastrocnemius and Achilles extend, you're doing it, you're in control of the situation-but nothing was working right, he was too heavy, he was crushing her, and her body could not take it. Finally she gave up and simply tried to hold him up as much as she could, so the two of them wouldn't roll down together. As she did so-and she had no control over this either-she began to emit fragments that had not pa.s.sed her lips for years. She reminded him of long-forgotten things about him and herself and Ilan and told him a pulverized yet complete life story over sixty-four steps, all the way to the building entrance. From there she dragged him down a path of broken tiles and trash and shattered bottles, all the way to the taxi where Sami sat watching her through the windshield with impa.s.sive eyes, and did not come out to help her.

She stops and waits for him, and he comes over and stands one or two steps behind her. She waves her hand over the broad plain glowing in bright green, glistening with beads of dew, and over the distant, mauve mountains. There is a hum, and not just of insects: Ora thinks she can hear the air itself teeming with a vitality it can barely contain.

"Mount Hermon," she says, pointing to a pure white glow in the north. "And look here, did you see the water?"

"Do me a favor," Avram spits out, and walks on with his head hanging.

But there's a stream here, Ora thinks to herself. We're walking alongside a stream. She laughs quietly at his back as he recedes. "You and me by a stream, could you have imagined?"

For years she had tried to get him out of the house, to take him to places that would light up his soul and bathe him in beauty, but at most she'd managed to drag him to dull meetings in cafes he chose, a couple of times a year. It had to be one he chose, and she never argued, even though the places he picked were always noisy, crowded, ma.s.s-produced (his word, the old Avram's), as if he enjoyed seeing her aversion, and as if through these places he was confronting her, for the thousandth time, with his distance from her and from who he used to be. And now, in a completely unexpected way, it's just the two of them and the stream and trees and daylight.

On his body the backpack looks shrunken and smaller than hers, like a child clinging to his father's back. She stands looking at him for a moment longer, with Ofer's pack over his shoulders. Her eyes widen and brighten. She feels the first rays of sun slowly smoothing over her bruised wings.