They started walking again. Slowly, side by side, bowed under their weights. She could practically feel the news sinking into him, like a solution trickling into a substance and changing its composition. He was slowly grasping that for the first time in thirty-five years he was really with her alone, without Ilan, without even the shadow of Ilan.

Whether or not that was true, she had trouble deciding. For months now she hadn't been able to make up her mind. One minute she thought this way, and the next she thought the other.

"And the kids?" Avram blurted.

Ora slowed her steps. He wasn't even willing to say their names. "The kids," "The kids," she annunciated, "are grown now, the kids are independent. They can make up their own minds whom to be with and where." she annunciated, "are grown now, the kids are independent. They can make up their own minds whom to be with and where."

He shot her a quick sideways glance, and for a moment a screen lifted and his eyes plunged into hers. He looked at her and knew her to the depths of her aggrievedness. Then the screen covered him over again. Within the sorrow and the pain, Ora felt a thrill: there was still someone inside there.

They kept on this way till the evening, walking a little then stopping to rest, avoiding roads and people, eating food from Ora's backpack, picking the odd grapefruit or orange and finding pecans and walnuts on the ground. They filled and refilled their water bottles from brooks and springs. Avram drank constantly, Ora hardly at all. They walked this way and that like a pendulum, and she wondered if he understood that they were intentionally disorienting themselves so they could not find their way back.

And they barely spoke. She tried to say something a few times about the separation, about Ilan, about herself, but he would put his hand up in supplication, almost pleading-he did not have the strength for it. Maybe later. Tonight or tomorrow. Preferably tomorrow.

He was growing weaker, and she too was unaccustomed to such exertion. Calluses developed on his heels, and jock itch set in. She offered him Band-Aids and talc, and he refused. In the afternoon they napped under the shade of a leafy carob tree, then meandered a little more and stopped to doze again. Her thoughts grew unfocused. She thought it might be because of him: just as he had once awakened her and turned her inside out, his presence was now extinguishing and uninspiring. At dusk, when they sprawled on the edge of a pecan grove on a bed of dry leaves and nutsh.e.l.ls, she looked up at the sky-empty apart from two noisy, stationary helicopters that had been hovering for hours, probably watching the border-and thought that she really wouldn't mind meandering like this for the rest of the twenty-eight days, even a whole month. Just to stupefy herself. But what about Avram?

Perhaps he wouldn't care, either. Perhaps he also felt like roaming now. What do I know about what he's going through and what his life is like and who he's with? she thought. As for me, it's really not bad this way, it's less painful. She noted with surprise that even Ofer had somewhat quieted in her over the last few hours. Maybe Avram was right and you didn't have to talk about everything, or about anything. What was there to say, anyway? At most, if the right moment came along, she would tell him a bit about Ofer, carefully-maybe out here he wouldn't be so resistant-just a few little things, maybe the easy things, the funny things. So at least he'd know who Ofer was in general outlines, in chapter headings. So at least he would know this person he had brought into the world.

They pitched their tents in a small wooded area, among terebinth and oak trees. Ofer had drilled her at home on setting up the tent, and to her amazement she did it with almost no difficulty. First she set up her own, then she helped Avram, and the tents did not stealthily attack her or slyly wrap themselves around her and did not pull her inside them like a carnivorous plant, as Ofer had predicted they might. When she had finished there were two round little tents, hers orange and his blue, about three or four yards apart, two bubbles that looked like little s.p.a.ceships, impervious to water and to each other, and both had tiny windows covered with long nylon foreskins.

Avram still avoided opening Ofer's backpack. Even the outside pockets. He said he didn't need to change his clothes, which had been washed several times on his body in the stream that day, and he could lie down just as he was, on the ground, he didn't need a pad, and anyway he wouldn't rest for long because Ora hadn't brought the sleeping pills he usually used, which were kept in a drawer next to his bed. The ones she'd brought, the homeopathic ones she'd found in the bathroom, were not his. "Whose are they, then?" Ora asked without moving her lips. "Um ..." Avram dismissed the question. "They don't have any effect on me." Ora thought about the woman who used the vanilla-scented deodorant, who had purple hair, and who for a month, apparently, or so she thought he'd told her on the phone, had not lived with him.

At seven, when they could no longer bear the silence, they went to their tents and lay awake for hours, dozing off occasionally. Avram was exhausted from the day's efforts and almost managed to fall asleep with the help of the ludicrous pills, but eventually he overcame them.

They tossed and turned, sighed and coughed. Too much reality was bustling inside them: the fact that they were out in the open, lying on earth that felt uncomfortably k.n.o.bby with stones and dimples, and frighteningly new, and the unseen but tense quivering of a large animal, and a nervousness instilled in them by the twinkling stars, and breezes-first warm, then cool, then damp-that kept moving in different directions like soft breaths from an invisible mouth. And the calls of nocturnal birds and the rustling all around and the buzz of mosquitoes. At every moment it seemed as if something was crawling on their cheeks or down their legs, and the sound of light steps came from the nearby thicket, and the jackals called, and once there was the yelp of a creature being preyed upon. Ora must have fallen asleep despite all this, because she was awoken early in the morning by three people in military uniform standing on the stoop outside her front door. They squeezed against the wall to allow the senior member to pa.s.s by and knock. The doctor felt in his bag for a tranquilizer, and the young officer readied her arms to catch Ora if she pa.s.sed out.

Ora saw the three of them straighten up and clear their throats, and the senior one raised his hand and hesitated for an instant. She watched his fist, transfixed, and it occurred to her that this was a moment that would last a lifetime, but then he knocked on the door, knocked firmly three times, and looked at the tips of his shoes, and as he waited for the door to open he silently rehea.r.s.ed the notification: at such-and-such time in such-and-such place, your son Ofer, who was on an operational mission- at such-and-such time in such-and-such place, your son Ofer, who was on an operational mission- Across the street a series of windows slammed shut and drapes were drawn closed, with only their corners pulled aside for someone to peek out. But her door would remain shut. Ora finally managed to move her feet and tried to pull herself into a seated position in the sleeping bag. She was bathed in cold sweat. Her eyes were closed and her hands felt rigid, unmovable. The senior officer knocked three times again and was so averse to doing it that he knocked too hard, and for a moment he seemed to want to break down the door and burst in with the news. But the door was closed and no one was opening it to receive his notification, and he looked awkwardly at the doc.u.ment in his hand, which stated explicitly that at such-and-such time in such-and-such place, your son Ofer, who was on an operational mission. The female officer walked backward on the stoop to check the house number, and it was the right house, and the doctor tried to peer through the window to see if there was a light on inside, but no light was on. Two more weaker knocks, and the door remained shut, and the senior officer leaned on it with his whole weight as if seriously considering breaking the door down and hurling his notification inside at any cost. He looked at his colleagues with a confused expression, because it was becoming clear to them that something had gone wrong with the rules of this ritual, that their businesslike and professional desire, their essentially logical desire, to deliver the notification, to rid themselves of it, to vomit it out, and above all to embed it quickly into the person it belonged to by law and by destiny, namely, that at such-and-such time in such-and-such place, your son Ofer, who was on an operational mission-this desire of theirs was now encountering a wholly unexpected yet equally powerful force, which was Ora's absolute unwillingness to receive the notification or accommodate it in any way, or even to acknowledge that it belonged to her at all.

Now the two other members of the team joined in the effort to push down the door, and with rhythmic grunts, wordlessly spurring each other on, they stormed the door again and again, ramming it with their bodies, and Ora still lay somewhere on the outskirts of her dream. Her head jerked from side to side and she wanted to shout but no sound came out. She knew they would never dare to do something so extraordinary unless they sensed the resistance projected onto the door from the inside, and this is what was enraging them, and the unfortunate door heaved and groaned between the willingness and the unwillingness, between their mature military logic and her childish obstinacy, and Ora fluttered and grew entangled in the folds of her sleeping bag until suddenly she froze, opened her eyes, and stared at the little window in her tent. She could see through the edges that it was getting light outside, and she ran her hand through her hair-so wet, as if she'd washed her hair in sweat-and lay down and rea.s.sured herself that her heart would stop racing soon, but she had to get out.

Much as she wanted to, she could not sit up. The sleeping bag was twisted and wrapped around her like a huge, tight, damp bandage, and her body was so weak that it did not have the power to resist this shroud, so full of life as it tightened around her. Perhaps she would just lie here a little longer, calm herself and gather strength, close her eyes and try to think about something more cheerful. But she soon felt a hushed grumble erupting from the team of notifiers, because they knew that they had to deliver their notice, if not now then in an hour or two, or in a day or two, and they would have to come all the way out here again and prepare themselves again for the difficult moment. People never think about the notifiers and the emotional burden they must bear; they pity only those receiving the news. But perhaps the notifiers are the ones who are angry, because as sad and sympathetic as they may be, they have, after all, begun to feel a certain tension-not to say excitement-and even a festive air, in antic.i.p.ation of the moment of notification, which, even after they've experienced it dozens of times, is not and cannot be routine, just as there can be no routine execution.

With a stifled yell, Ora tore herself away from the d.a.m.n sleeping bag and ran, fleeing from the tent. She stood outside with a horrified look in her wild eyes. Only after a few moments did she notice Avram sitting on the ground not far away, leaning against a tree, watching her.

They made coffee and drank silently, he wrapped in his sleeping bag, she in a thin coat. "You were shouting," he said.

"I had a nightmare."

He did not ask what it was about.

"What was I shouting?"

He got up and began to tell her about the stars. "This one's Venus, those are the Big and Little Dipper, and see how the Big Dipper points to the North Star?"

She listened, slightly hurt, slightly amazed at his new enthusiasm and unshackled voice.

"See?" He pointed. "There's Saturn. Sometimes, in summer, I can see it from my bed, with the rings. And that one's Sirius, the brightest-"

As he talked and talked, Ora remembered a line she and Ada had loved, from S. Yizhar's "Midnight Convoy": "You cannot point out a star to someone without putting your other hand on his shoulder." "You cannot point out a star to someone without putting your other hand on his shoulder." But as it turned out, you could. But as it turned out, you could.

They folded up their little encampment and set off. She was happy to put some distance between her and the place where the nightmare had come, and the hint of sunrise in the sky-the light ascended as if from a slowly unclasping pair of hands-revived her a little. We've been on the road for a whole day and night, she thought, and we're still together. But her feet soon began to feel very heavy, and a dull pain coursed through her body.

She thought it was the exhaustion. She had barely slept for two days. Or perhaps it was sunstroke-she hadn't worn a hat the day before or had enough to drink. She hoped it wasn't an ill-timed bout of spring flu. But it didn't feel like flu or sunstroke. It was a different, unfamiliar sort of ache, stubborn and persistent and consuming, and at times she even thought it was a flesh-eating bacteria.

They sat down to rest near a ruin. Part of the structure was still standing; the rest had crumbled into a heap of chiseled stones. Ora closed her eyes and tried to calm herself by breathing deeply and ma.s.saging her temples, chest, and stomach. The pain and distress grew worse, her heartbeat pounded through her body, and then it occurred to her that her pain was Ofer.

She felt him in her stomach, beneath her heart, a dark and restless spot of emotion. He moved and shifted and turned inside her, and she moaned in surprise, frightened by his violence and desperation. She thought back to the attack of claustrophobia he'd suffered when he was about seven, when the two of them got stuck between floors in the elevator in Ilan's office building. When Ofer realized they were trapped, he started yelling at the top of his lungs for someone to help them, shouting that he had to get out, he didn't want to die. She tried to calm him and gather him in her arms, but he slipped away and thrashed against the walls and door, hitting and screaming until his voice cracked, and eventually he attacked her too, beating and kicking. Ora always remembered how his face had changed in those moments, and she remembered the twinge of disappointment when she realized, not for the first time, how thin and fragile his cheerful, vivacious surface was, this child who was the brighter and clearer of her two-that was how she had always thought of him: the brighter and clearer of her two-and she remembered that Ilan said at the time, half joking, that at least they knew Ofer wouldn't join the Armored Corps when he enlisted; he would never let himself be closed up inside a tank. But that prophecy was disproven, like so many others, and Ofer did join the Armored Corps, and he was closed up inside a tank, and there was never any problem with that-at least not for him. Ora was the one who felt suffocated almost to the point of pa.s.sing out when she got inside a tank, at Ofer's request, after the military display that his battalion put on for the parents at Nebi Musa. And now she felt him, she felt Ofer, just as she had felt him that day in the elevator, terrified and wild with fear, sensing that something was closing in on him, trapping him, and that he had no way out and no air to breathe. Ora jumped up and stood over Avram. "Come on, let's go." Avram couldn't understand-they'd only just sat down-but he didn't ask anything, and it's a good thing he didn't, because what could she have told him?

She walked quickly, not feeling the weight of her backpack, and she kept forgetting about Avram, who had to call out for her to slow down and wait. But it was hard for her, it was intolerable, to walk at his pace. All morning she refused to stop even once, and when he rebelled and lay down in the middle of the path, or under a tree, she kept circling around him to dull herself more and more with continuous walking and sun exposure, and intentionally made herself thirsty. But Ofer would not let up, he raged inside her with rhythmic and painful spasms, and toward noon she started to hear him. It was not speech exactly, just the music of his voice carrying over all the sounds of the valley: the hums and the twitters and the chirping of crickets and her own breath and Avram's grunts and the hiss of the huge sprinklers in the fields and the distant tractor engines and the small planes that sometimes circled above. His voice came to her with strange clarity, as if he were right here walking beside her, talking to her without words-he had no words, only his voice, he was playing for her with his voice, and every so often she picked up the slight, endearing stammer in his sh sh sounds, especially when he was excited: sounds, especially when he was excited: sh...sh ... sh...sh ... She did not know whether to answer him and just start talking or ignore him as much as she could, because from the moment she had shut the door to her house in Beit Zayit behind her, she had been tormented by a very familiar fear, the fear of what she might perceive and what her imagination might show her when she thought of him, and what might slip out of her head and wrap itself around Ofer's hands and over his eyes precisely at the moment when he needed all his vigilance and strength. She did not know whether to answer him and just start talking or ignore him as much as she could, because from the moment she had shut the door to her house in Beit Zayit behind her, she had been tormented by a very familiar fear, the fear of what she might perceive and what her imagination might show her when she thought of him, and what might slip out of her head and wrap itself around Ofer's hands and over his eyes precisely at the moment when he needed all his vigilance and strength.

She felt it immediately when he changed his tactic, because he started to simply say Mom Mom, time after time, a hundred times, Mom, Mom Mom, Mom, in different tones, at different ages, nagging at her, smiling to her, telling her secrets, tugging at her dress, Mom, Mom Mom, Mom, angry at her, ingratiating, flirting, impressed, clinging, jabbing, laughing with her, opening his eyes to her on an eternal morning of childhood: Mom? Mom?

Or lying in her arms, the baby he used to be, alert and tiny, his thin waist in a diaper, staring at her with that look he had even back then, embarra.s.singly tranquil and mature, with a constant speck of irony, almost from birth, perhaps because of the shape of his eyes, which leaned-lean-toward each other at a sharp and skeptical angle.

She tripped and pulled herself forward with outstretched arms, and looked as if she were feeling her way through an invisible swarm of hornets. There was something ominous in the vitality with which he had suddenly emerged inside her, rocking frantically. Why is he doing this? she asked herself feebly. Why is he feeding and sucking on me? Her entire body throbbed and exhaled his name like a bellows, and it was not that she missed him-there was no nostalgia. He was tearing her up from the inside, flailing around and beating his fists against the walls of her body. He claimed her for himself unconditionally, demanded that she vacate her own being and dedicate herself to him eternally, that she think about him all the time and talk about him incessantly, that she tell anyone she meets about him, even the trees and the rocks and the thistles, and that she say his name out loud and silently over and over again, so as not to forget him even for a moment, even for a second, and that she not abandon him, because he needed her now in order to exist exist-she suddenly knew that this was what his biting meant. How could she not have realized before that he needed her now, in order not to die? She stood with one hand on her aching waist and let out an astonished breath. Was that it? Just as he had once needed her to be born?

"What's the matter with you?" Avram asked breathlessly when he caught up. "What's gotten into you?"

She lowered her head and said softly, "Avram, I can't go on like this."

"Like what?"

"With you not even willing to...That I can't even say the name in front of you." And then a knot came untied in her. "Listen. This silence is killing me and it's killing him, so make up your mind."

"About what?"

"About whether you're really here with me."

He looked away. Ora waited quietly. Since Ofer's birth, she had hardly talked with Avram about him. Avram always made a hand gesture that was quick and repellant, like brushing away a bothersome fly, every time Ora couldn't resist talking about Ofer when they met, or even when she merely mentioned his name. She always had to protect him from Ofer, that was his stipulation, his condition for these pathetic meetings. She had to act as if there were no Ofer in the world and never had been. And Ora had grit her teeth and concluded that she was more or less over the insult and the anger and accepted his refusal and rejection and told herself that over the years she'd even grown a little accustomed to the total and arbitrary demarcation he demanded from her-after all, there was a certain relief in the clear boundaries, the total separation of authorities: Avram on this side, she on the other, and everything else over there. And in recent years she'd discovered, with a slight sense of shame, that the thought of any other option made her more nervous than the idea that this state of affairs would continue. Yet even so, with every rude push he gave, she was insulted to the depths of her soul and had to remind herself again that Avram's tenuous equilibrium seemed to be based on a total, hermetic self-defense against Ofer, against the fact of Ofer, against what, to him, was undoubtedly the mistake of his lifetime. This too always aroused a fresh wave of anger in her, the thought that Ofer was anyone's mistake of a lifetime, and worse, that Ofer was Avram's mistake of a lifetime. But on the other hand-and this is what had confused and maddened her these last two days-there were the etched lines on the wall above his bed, the countdown calendar of Ofer's army years, three years, more than a thousand lines, one line for every single day, and he must have crossed out the day every evening with a horizontal line, and how could she reconcile these two things-the mistake of a lifetime and the countdown-and which of the two should she believe?

"Listen, I was thinking-"

"Ora, not now."

"Then when? When?"

He turned away sharply and walked quickly ahead, and she hated him and disdained him and pitied him and realized she must have truly lost her mind to have believed he could help her or be with her in her time of trouble. The whole idea was fundamentally sick, s.a.d.i.s.tic even-to inflict this sort of trek on him, to expect that suddenly, after twenty-one years of erasure and separation, he would want to start hearing about Ofer. She swore she would put him on the first bus to Tel Aviv in the morning, and from now on she would not say a word about Ofer.

By evening the pain of him became so strong that she shut herself up in her tent and sobbed quietly, secretly, trying to m.u.f.fle the noise. The contractions-that was how she felt: they were like labor contractions-came frequently and sharply and grew into a constant, blinding pain, and she thought that if this continued she would somehow have to get to an emergency room. But what would she say when she got there? And besides, a doctor might persuade her to go home immediately and wait for them them.

Avram, in his tent, heard her and decided not to take a sleeping pill, not even his girlfriend Neta's pills, because Ora might need him during the night. But how could he help her? He lay awake, motionless, his arms crossed over his chest and his hands in his armpits. He could have lain that way for hours, almost without moving. He heard her sobbing to herself, a long, monotonous wail. In Egypt, in Abbasiya Prison, there was a short, thin reservist from Jerusalem who came from a family of Cochin Jews. He used to cry for hours every night, even if they hadn't been tortured that day. The guys almost lost their minds because of him, even the Egyptian wardens couldn't stand it, but the Cochin guy wouldn't stop. One day when he and Avram were standing in the corridor waiting to be taken to an interrogation, Avram managed to communicate with the man through the sacks over their faces, and the Cochin guy said he was crying out of jealousy for his girlfriend, because he could sense that she was being unfaithful. She had always loved his older brother, and his imaginings of what she was doing now were eating him alive. Avram had felt a strange reverence for this gaunt man, who within the h.e.l.l of captivity could find such dedication to his own private pain, which had nothing to do with the Egyptians and their tortures.

Avram stepped quietly out of the tent and walked away until he could barely hear her, then sat down under a terebinth to try to focus. During the day, with Ora next to him, he could not think at all. Now he wrote the indictment of his pathetic and cowardly conduct. He dug his fingers into his face, his forehead and cheeks, and groaned softly: "Help her, you s.h.i.t, you traitor." But he knew that he wouldn't, and his mouth twisted with loathing.

As he did whenever he thought about himself honestly, he simply found it difficult to comprehend why he was still alive. What made life hold on to him and preserve him? What was there in him, still, that justified such persistent effort on life's part, such stubbornness, or perhaps just vengefulness?

He closed his eyes and tried to conjure up the figure of a boy. Any boy. Recently, as Ofer's discharge date had grown closer, he would sometimes pick out a boy at the right age in the restaurant where he worked, or on the street, and observe him stealthily, even follow him for a block or two, and try to imagine how he saw things. He allowed himself more and more of these hallucinations, these Ofer-guesses, these shadows.

A thick nocturnal silence enveloped him. Soft breezes pa.s.sed silently over him, plowing furrows through all of s.p.a.ce. From time to time a large bird called out, sounding very close. Ora, in her tent, felt it, too. She listened as something seemed to flitter over her skin. Thousands of cranes made their way through the night sky heading north, and neither of them saw or knew. For a long time there was a huge invisible rustle, like the sighing of waves on a beach full of sh.e.l.ls. Avram leaned against the tree with his eyes closed and saw the shadow of Ofer's back slip away in the image of young Ilan-for some reason it was Ilan who popped up, walking half a step in front of him and leading him through the paths of the despised army base where he'd had to live with his father, winking at the whitewashed graffiti on the walls of the stone huts. Then Avram tried to imagine a male version of the young Ora, but all he could see was Ora herself, long and fair, with red curls that bounced on her shoulders. He wondered if Ofer was also a redhead, like she used to be-she did not have even a drop of red left now-and he was surprised that this was the first time he'd ever entertained the utterly logical possibility that Ofer was a redhead. He was even more surprised that he was daring to indulge in such fantasies, more than he ever had before. Then, in a flash, he saw an image of Ofer that looked like him, like the twenty-one-year-old Avram, and the seventeen-year-old, and the fourteen-year-old. In a heartbeat he skipped among his various ages-for her, he thought feverishly, with prayer-like devotion; only for her-and saw the twinkle of a round, red-cheeked face that was always alert and eager. He felt a springy, agile dwarfishness that he hadn't felt for years, and the heat of a constant blaze coming from the tangled head of hair, and the glimmer of a s.l.u.ttish wink, and then he was repelled, thrown from the spectacle, from his own self, as if tossed out by a rough bouncer. He sat panting, bathed in sweat, and for a few more moments his heart beat wildly and he was as excited as a young boy, a boy wallowing in forbidden fantasies.

He listened: total silence. Perhaps she'd finally fallen asleep, her torments lifted. He tried to understand what exactly had happened between her and Ilan. She hadn't explicitly said it was Ilan's fault. In fact she'd denied that. Perhaps she was the one who had fallen in love with someone else? Did she have another man? If so, why was she here alone, and why had she chosen to take him along?

She'd said that the children, the boys, were grown up now, and that they would decide who they wanted to live with. But he'd seen her lips tremble, and he knew that she was lying and could not figure out why. "Families are like calculus for me," he sometimes told Neta. Too many variables, too many parentheses and multiplications of products by powers, and just the whole complication of it-this is what he grumbled whenever she raised the topic-and the constant need to be in a relationship in a relationship with every other member of the family, at every moment, day and night, even in dreams. When she turned gloomy and withdrew, he would try to appease her: "It's like being subjected to a permanent electrical shock, or like living in an eternal lightning storm. Is that what you want?" with every other member of the family, at every moment, day and night, even in dreams. When she turned gloomy and withdrew, he would try to appease her: "It's like being subjected to a permanent electrical shock, or like living in an eternal lightning storm. Is that what you want?"

For thirteen years he had not tired of telling Neta that she was wasting her youth, her future, and her beauty on him and that he was only holding her back, blocking her view. She was seventeen years younger than he. "My young girl," he called her, sometimes affectionately and sometimes sorrowfully. "When you were ten," he liked to remind her with strange glee, "I'd already been dead for five years." And she would say, "Let's bring the dead back to life, let's rebel against time."

He avoided her again and again with the age excuse. "You're much more mature than I am," he would say. She wanted children, and he laughed in terror: "Isn't one enough? You have to have multiple children?" Her narrow devilish eyes glimmered: "Then one child, okay, like Ibsen and Ionesco and Jean Cocteau were the same child." child."

Lately it seemed he had gotten through to her, because she hadn't been around or even called for a few weeks. Where was she? he wondered half silently, and stood up.

Sometimes, when she made some money from her strange jobs, she just up and left. Avram could sense it approaching even before she could: a murky hunger started to surround her irises, a shadowy negotiation in which she apparently lost, and so had to travel. Even the names of the countries she chose scared him: Georgia, Mongolia, Tajikistan. She would call him from Marrakesh or Monrovia, nighttime for him, for her still day-"So now," he'd point out, "on top of everything else you're another three hours younger than me"-and with strange, dreamlike lightness she would recount experiences that made his hair stand on end.

He started walking around the tree. He tried to think, finally to ask himself when exactly he'd last heard from her, and found that it had been at least three weeks. Or more? Maybe it really had been a month since she'd disappeared. And what if she'd done something to herself? He froze and remembered her dancing with a ladder on the railing around the rooftop of her apartment building in Jaffa, and he knew that her potential in this area had been nagging at him for days now, and that his fear for her had existed alongside his profound confidence in her. He finally acknowledged how much the nerve-racking antic.i.p.ation of Ofer's release must have scrambled the rest of his mind and even caused him to forget about her.

He sped up his circles around the tree and calculated again. The restaurant had been closed for renovations for a month now. And it was roughly since then that she hadn't been around. I haven't seen her or heard from her or looked for her since then. What was I doing all that time? He remembered long walks on the beach. Street benches. Beggars. Fishermen. Waves of longing for her that he forcefully repressed by beating his head against the wall. Alcohol in quant.i.ties he was not used to. Bad trips. Double doses of sleeping pills, starting at eight p.m. Bad headaches in the morning. Whole days of one alb.u.m, Miles Davis, Mantovani, Django Reinhardt. Hours of digging through the garbage dumps of Jaffa looking for junk, work tools, rusty engines, old keys. There were a few days of occasional work that had generated some decent income. Twice a week he shelved books in the library of a college in Rishon LeZion. Once in a while he served as an experiment subject for pharmaceutical and cosmetic companies. In the presence of friendly, polite scientists and lab technicians, who measured and weighed him and recorded every detail and gave him various forms to sign and finally handed him a voucher for coffee and a croissant, he swallowed brightly colored pills and slathered himself with creams that may or may not ever be used. In his reports, he invented physical and emotional side effects that the developers had never imagined.

For the past week, as Ofer's release date approached, he had not left the house. He stopped talking to people. Answering the phone. Eating. He felt that he needed to reduce the s.p.a.ce he occupied in the world as much as possible. He hardly moved from his armchair. He sat waiting and diminishing himself. And when he got up and walked around the apartment, he tried not to make any fast movements, so as not to rip, not to disturb the gossamer thread from which Ofer now hung. And on the last day, when he thought Ofer was done, he sat motionless by the phone and waited for Ora to call and tell him it was over. But she didn't call, and he froze up more and more and knew that something bad had happened. The hours went by, evening fell, and he thought that if she did not call right now he would never be able to move again. With his last remaining strength he dialed her number and heard what had happened and felt himself turning to stone.

"But where was I for a whole month?" he moaned, and the sound of his own voice startled him.

He hurried over to Ora, almost running, just at the moment she called out to him.

She was sitting huddled in her coat. "When did you get up?"

"I don't know, a while ago."

"And where did you go?"

"Nowhere, I just walked around a bit."

"Did I disturb you when I cried?"

"No, it's okay. You can cry."

Dawn slowly opened its eyes. They sat quietly and watched the night bleed out its blackness.

"Listen," she said, "and let me finish saying this. I can't go on this way."

"What way?"

"With you not saying anything."

"I'm actually talking a lot." He forced a laugh.

"Yes, you'll get hoa.r.s.e if you keep it up," she said drily. "But I just can't stand that you won't even let me talk about him."

Avram made a not-that-again gesture, and she slowly inhaled and then said, "Listen, I know it's difficult for you to be with me, but I'm losing my mind with this, too. It's worse than if I was on my own. Because then at least I could talk out loud to myself, about him, and now I can't even do that, because of you. I was thinking, what was I thinking"-she stopped and studied her fingertips; she had no choice-"that soon, when we reach the highway, we can try to get a ride to Kiryat Shmonah, and then we'll put you on a bus to Tel Aviv and I'll stay here and go on a bit farther. What do you say? Can you make the trip home on your own?"

"I can do anything. Don't make an invalid out of me."

"I didn't say that."

"I'm not an invalid."

"I know."

"There's nothing I can't do," he said angrily. "There are only things I don't want want to do." to do."

Like help me with Ofer, she thought.

"And how will you manage here?"

"Don't worry, I'll manage. I'll just walk. I don't even need to walk much. I'll be happy just crossing one field, back and forth, like yesterday or the day before. What's important to me is not where I am but where I'm not, do you understand?"

He snorted. "Do I understand?"

"It will be best for both of us," she said dubiously, sadly, and when he did not answer, she continued. "You may think I can stop it, that I can just not talk about him, I mean, but I can't. I'm incapable of holding back now, I have to give him strength, he needs me, I can feel it. I'm not criticizing you."

Avram lowered his head. Don't move, he thought, let her keep talking, don't interrupt.

"And it's not just because of your memory."

He gave her a puzzled look.

"You know, 'cause you'll remember everything, and my mind is like a sieve lately. That's not why I wanted you to come with me."

His head nestled against his chest and his whole body was hunched forward.

"I wanted you to come with me so I could talk about him with you, just tell you about him, so that if something happens to him-"

Avram crossed his arms and dug his hands deep into his sides. Don't move. Don't run away. Let her talk.

"And believe me, I wasn't thinking about all this before." Her nose was stuffed up. "You know me, I didn't plan anything. I wasn't even thinking about you when you called, and the truth is, you'd completely gone out of my thoughts that day, with everything that was going on. But when you phoned, when I heard you, I don't know, I suddenly felt that I had to be with you now, you see? With you, not with anyone else." The more she spoke, the straighter she sat and the sharper her eyes became, as though she had finally begun to decipher a secret code. "And I felt that we had to, both of us together, how can I put this, Avram-" She struggled to keep her voice steady and clean. She did not want her voice to shake. Not even a tremor. She constantly reminded herself of the allergy Ilan and the boys had to her frequent inundations. "Because really, we're his mother and father," she said softly. "And if we, together, I mean, if we don't do what parents-"

She stopped. He had stretched his arms out and up as far as he could, and his body was jerking as though ants were gnawing at his flesh. She scanned him and shook her head heavily a few times.

"All right." She sighed and started to stand up. "What more can I...I'm an idiot, how could I even think you-"

"No," he said quickly and put his hand on her arm, then pulled it away. "I was actually thinking...what do you say...maybe we could stay for another day, one day, no big deal, then we'll see."

"See what?"

"I don't know. Look, it's not like I'm all that, you know, it's not like I'm suffering, is it? It's not like you said"-he swallowed hard-"it's just that when you pressure me with it, with him ..."

"With Ofer. At least say that."

He said nothing.

"You won't even say that?"