"And I thought about how they always warned me about you," she tells Avram, "and how they admired him him, mainly my mother, who in my opinion always wondered what a guy like him saw in me."

Avram smiles, his face hidden in his arms. Hochstapler Hochstapler, her mother used to call him, and Ora had translated: a guy with holes in his pockets who thinks he's a Rothschild.

"And I lay on the couch and tried to figure out how I would manage alone with Adam. And think about it, I was still barely able to move, to go out of the house, to keep my eyes open. And I thought this couldn't be happening, it was just a nightmare and I would wake up any minute. And all the time I also felt that in fact I understood him so well, and I wished I could do that too, run away from myself, and from Adam and from you and from everything, from the whole mess. And I felt sorry for Adam, sleeping calmly without knowing that his life was being screwed up.

"I lay there with my robe open, just the way I was, I didn't care about anything. I heard Ilan moving around the bedroom quickly. You know how he moves when he's decisive"-they smile at each other, a glimmer between them, a tiny thread-"I heard closets opening, doors, drawers. He was packing, and I lay there thinking that for the rest of our lives we would keep on paying for one minute, for a stupid coincidence, for nothing."

She and Avram both look away quickly.

"Take a hat," Ilan and Avram had told her cheerfully over the military phone from the base in Sinai, "and put two slips of paper in it, but identical ones." Then they'd both laughed: "No, no, you don't have to know what you're drawing lots for." That laughter still rings in her ears. They haven't laughed that way since. They were twenty-two, in the last month of their regular army service, and she was already in Jerusalem, a first-year student, studying social work, which was opening up a whole new world for her, and she thought how lucky she was to have found her calling at such a young age. "No, no," Ilan repeated, "it's better if you don't know what the lottery is for, that way you'll be more objective." When she insisted, they softened: "Okay, you're allowed to guess, but do it silently. And quickly. Ora, they're waiting for us, there's a command car outside." (And then she got it: A command car? One of them is going to be allowed home. Who? She quickly ran to get a hat, one of her old military caps, and found a piece of paper and tore it into two equal halves, and inside she was bubbling: Which of the two did she want to come home?) "Two identical slips," Ilan repeated impatiently. "One with my name and one with fatso's name." Then she heard Avram: "Write 'Ilan' on one, and 'Jehovah' on the other. Wait, on second thought, just write 'His armies.'" Ilan interrupted: "Okay. Desist all chatter. Now pick one out. Did you do it? Which one? Are you sure?"

Ora weighs a pointy little stone in her hand, and slowly, methodically cleans the dirt off it. Avram sits hunched over, his hands grasping each other, his knuckles turning white.

"Should I go on?"

"What? Yes, all right."

"Then he stood over me. I couldn't even get up, I was so weak. I felt like an avalanche. I didn't even have the strength to cover myself. He didn't look at me. I felt that I was disgusting him. I was disgusting myself, too." She speaks in a narrow, contracted voice, as if forced to report everything, down to the last detail. "And he said he'd hang around outside for a while that night, go to some all-night cafe, there was one on Queen Helena Street back then, and he'd call the next morning. I asked if he wasn't going to say goodbye to Adam. He said it was better if he didn't. I felt that I had to get up and fight, if not for me, for Adam, because if I didn't do something right then, it would no longer be possible to change anything. Because with Ilan these kinds of decisions spread like lightning, you know him, within seconds there's already a new reality, a fancy settlement with red rooftops and paving stones, and you cannot uproot it.

"And look how wrong I was," she mumbles in astonishment, and for a moment, in her eyes, Ilan and Adam row a little wooden boat up a green river, making perfectly coordinated strokes, through a jungle thicket. "Look how in the end everything turned out differently than I thought. It came out the exact opposite."

"He called in the morning to say he was staying at a hotel and was planning to rent a small apartment. 'Not far from you two,' he said. Do you understand? 'From you two'! It had only been a few hours and already he was not one of us. Not even one of me.

"He rented a studio apartment in Talpiot, as far away as he could get, on the other side of town. He called twice a day, morning and evening, decent, responsible, you know him. Killing me softly. And I would cry to him over the phone to come home. I was so stupid, I really humiliated myself, and I probably made him hate me even more with all that sobbing, but I didn't have a drop of energy to put on heroic shows for him. I was a wreck, body and soul. I don't even know how I made enough milk to breast-feed or how I managed to take care of Adam. My mom came to stay with me, a bundle of good intentions, but after about two days I realized what was going on and what she was doing to me, how she was starting in with the comparisons between Adam and other babies, and he always lost, of course. I asked my dad to come and take her home. I didn't even say why, and the worst thing was that he understood immediately.

"And there were the girlfriends, who came right away, an emergency call-up. They helped and cooked and cleaned, and of course it was all done gently and tactfully, but all of a sudden I was once again surrounded by this cl.u.s.ter of girls, like when I was fourteen, and they all knew exactly what was best for me, and what I really needed, and they reminded me of how much I always, always, except for Ada, got along much better with boys.

"It was mainly their venom toward Ilan that I couldn't stand, because I'm telling you that despite everything, I understood him, and I knew that I was the only one who could understand what was really going on. In all the world, only he and I could understand, and maybe you too, if you even had any understanding at all back then."

Avram nods to himself.

"Ugh." She stretches and rubs her stiff neck. "It's not easy, all this." She stretches and rubs her stiff neck. "It's not easy, all this."

"Yes," he says, and distractedly ma.s.sages his own neck.

She checks in to make sure she can abandon Ofer for this long. An internal ray beams out, probes, touches lightly: womb, heart, nipples, the sensitive spot above the navel, the curve in the neck, upper lip, left eye, right eye. Quickly she weaves the feeling of Ofer inside her like a game of connect the dots, and she finds that things are all right, that in some dim way Ofer is even growing a little stronger while she talks, while Avram listens.

"Adam was on me most of the time," she tells him as they get up and continue walking on the narrow path down the mountainside. "From the minute Ilan left, he simply refused to be alone. He clung to me like a little monkey, day and night, and I didn't have the strength to resist. I would put him down to sleep in our bed-I mean, in mine. I mean ours-mine and Adam's.

"I slept with him for almost two years, and I know, it was against the instructions, but I'm telling you, I didn't have the strength to fight him when he was screaming, and I didn't always have the strength to put him back in his crib after feedings. And the truth is that I kind of liked it when he fell asleep with me after feeding, the two of us melting away together, and it was nice to have another living, warm body in the bed."

She smiles. "It was as though after a short period of separation we went back to our natural state, one body, one organism that more or less supplies all of its own requirements and doesn't need any favors from anyone."

Mom and I were a little bit like that, Avram thinks. In the beginning, for the first few years after he left us.

You and your mom might have been like that, she says with her eyes. I always remembered what you told me. I thought about the two of you a lot then.

"Ilan kept calling every day like clockwork, and I would talk to him, or actually I would mostly listen. Sometimes-I told you, like that Cocteau woman of yours, that lamebrain, except in Hebrew-I would even give him advice about things, like how to get out an ink stain, or whether he could iron this shirt or that one. I would remind him to get his teeth cleaned and listen to him grumble about how difficult it was without me. If someone had listened in on one of our phone calls, they would have thought it was an ordinary conversation between a little wifey and her husband away on a short business trip.

"And sometimes I would just stare with my ears while he told me what he was doing, how his studies were going, how the criminal justice professor already had his eye on him, and the contract law tutor told him that with grades like his he could get a clerkship at the supreme court. I would hear him and think about how I was focused on Adam's p.o.o.p and problems with the diaper service and my cracked nipples, and there he was, floating in a sky of diamonds-"

"But he gave up the filmmaking," Avram says softly.

"As soon as the war was over."

"Yeah?"

"You know, after you came back."

"But he wanted it so badly."

"That's exactly why."

"I was always sure he'd be-"

"No, he cut it off, like only Ilan knows how to cut things off." She slices the air with her hand and feels herself falling on the other side of the knife.

"Because of me? Because of what happened to me?"

"Well, not just that. There were other things." She stops walking and looks at him in despair. "Tell me, Avram, how will we have time for everything?"

The mountain towers above them in a bed of forest, and Avram sees her brown eyes colored green, sees how those eyes still sparkle, still, still.

"And don't forget," she continues after a while, "that during the first months after Adam was born he also took care of you on his own. He would drive to the hospital every single day, and to all the convalescent homes where they sent you, and every day he gave me a detailed report. We had long telephone conferences every evening about your treatments, the medications, the side effects. And those interrogations, don't forget that."

"Aha," Avram says and looks out into the distance.

"And you, you never even once asked him about me. How I was doing. Where I'd suddenly disappeared to."

He breathes deeply, straightens up, widens his steps. She has to work hard to keep up.

"You didn't even know that I'd had Adam. Or at least that's what I thought at the time."

"Ora?"

"What?"

"Did he take any interest in Adam?"

"In Adam?" She lets out a thin laugh.

"I was just asking."

"Well," she stretches, preparing to ma.s.sage an old insult. "At first he definitely asked about Adam. Or rather, made a point of asking. Then he asked a little less, and I could tell that he found it difficult even to say his name. And then one day he started talking about 'the boy.' How does the boy sleep at night, how is his digestion, that sort of thing. And that was when I lost it. Even a sucker like me has some kind of limit, I guess.

"I think it was then, when he started calling him 'the boy,' that I began to feel like myself again. I told him to stop calling me. To get out of my life. I was finally able to tell him what I should have said months before. I'm stupid, you know, what can I say. For maybe three months I kept dragging out that twisted arrangement. Just imagine. When I think about it now-"

They stop in a patch of shade on a vista that looks out onto the entire Hula Valley. All the muscles in their bodies are aching now, and not just from walking. Avram collapses to the ground and doesn't even have the strength to take his backpack off. Ora notices that every time he stops walking and moving, he takes on a sort of heavy, rock-like lumpiness. Secretly, through her teenage girl's eyes, she watches him: he avoids looking fully at the broad valley spread out at the foot of the mountain, at the mountain itself as they walk down it, at the expanse of sky. She remembers that Ilan once said about Avram, "He just turned himself off and he's sitting inside himself in the dark." And here too, on the path, in the sun, his skin is fair and reddens easily, but his body seems impervious to light.

And to beauty. And to Ofer.

She briskly wipes her gla.s.ses off and breathes on them. She wipes them again. Calms herself.

"But as soon as I hung up on him, he called back. He said he could definitely understand me throwing him out of my life. He totally deserves that. But I can't remove him from the joint responsibility we share for our second child."

"What? Oh."

"Yes, well."

So that's how they thought of me, Avram muses. Very soon, in a minute or two, he will ask her to stop talking. There's no room left in him for all this.

"And then we had another conversation. One of the most outlandish ones we've ever had. We figured out how we'd keep taking care of you, and how we'd hide what was happening to us from you, because it was obvious that the last thing you needed was this sort of crisis with us, with the parents, you know." She laughs feebly.

Avram remembers for some reason that when he was about thirteen, years after his father got up one morning and disappeared, he convinced himself to believe that his real father, the secret one, was the poet Alexander Penn. For weeks, every night before bed, he would read Penn's poem "The Abandoned Son" in a whispered voice.

"And we talked like total strangers, Ilan and me. No, like the lawyers of total strangers. With a matter-of-factness that I could not believe I was capable of, with him or at all. We opened our calendars and settled exactly how long Ilan would keep caring for you alone, and when I would start doing shifts again, and we agreed that we'd keep pretending that everything was okay when we were with you, at least until you recovered a little. We knew it wouldn't be much of an effort, because you didn't show any interest in anything anyway. You barely knew what was happening around you-or is that what you wanted everyone to think, so they'd leave you alone? Hey? So they'd give up on you?"

His eyes move sideways under his half-closed lids.

"In the end you got what you wanted," she says drily.

And then, in mid-breath, she freezes, because she is suddenly unable to recall Ofer's face. She jumps up quickly and starts walking, and Avram groans and gets up to follow her. She stares straight ahead without seeing anything, her eyes burning like black chimneys in the daylight, but they cannot see Ofer. As she walks, his face breaks up inside her head into a whirlwind of fragmentary expressions and features. At times they swell and burst, as though someone has shoved a huge fist behind his skin and cleaved him from the inside. She knows she is being punished for something, but she does not know what. Perhaps for continuing her journey instead of going home right away to receive the bad news? Or for not being willing to accept any compromise (a minor injury? A moderate one? One leg? From the knee down? From the ankle? A hand? An eye? Both eyes? The p.e.n.i.s?). Almost every single hour of the day, behind all the things and the words and the acts, these propositions have hummed inside her, dispatched from far away: You can live a pretty good life with one kidney, even with one lung. Think about it, don't be quick to say no, it's not every day you get these kinds of offers, and you'll be sorry one day that you rejected them. Other families took them and now they're happy, relatively speaking. Think about it again, think good and hard: if it's a phosphorus burn, for example, they can do skin grafting. They can even rehabilitate the brain these days. And even if he's a vegetable, he'll still be alive, and you can take care of him yourself, you can use all the experience you gained after Avram was injured. So please, reconsider. He'll have a life, sensations, emotions. It's not the worst bargain you could make in your condition.

And for all those days and nights she has pushed away these buzzing communications. Now too she holds her head up and walks between them, careful to look away from Avram, to protect him from the gorgon face she feels she has taken on. She won't be cutting any deals. And she will not be accepting any bad news of any kind, of any kind whatsoever of any kind whatsoever. Go on, keep going. Talk, tell him about his son.

"A different life started for me then. I didn't have the strength for it at all, but I had a baby who simply forced me to live and came into my life with the determination of a...well, of a baby, who is convinced that everything was created for his benefit, especially me. We were together all the time, he and I, almost twenty-four hours a day. For the first year I didn't have a nanny or much help, just a few girlfriends who came on shifts, twice a week, when I started going to see you again in Tel Aviv. But the rest of the time, days and nights, he and I were alone."

Her look hovers somewhere in the distance. There are some things that are futile to try to explain to him: the murmured conversations between her and Adam while he nursed, before bed, half asleep in the middle of the night, when the whole world was asleep and it was just the two of them, eyes to eyes, learning each other. And the peals of laughter they shared when he got the hiccups. And the way their gazes grasped each other when evening fell and shadows grew long in the room. And his quiet expression of bewilderment when he saw tears in her eyes, and his lips that curled and trembled around questions he did not know how to ask.

Avram walks beside her, nodding to himself, hunched inward like a question mark.

"It was also a wonderful time. Our age of wonders. Mine and Adam's."

And to herself she thinks: The happiest years we had.

"I slowly got to know him." She smiles, remembering his grumpiness when she dared to pull him off one nipple, until his mouth locked in on the other. He would scream b.l.o.o.d.y murder, with furious eyes, and his entire head would turn red with insult. "And the lovely humor in his looks and his games and the way he played around with me. I never knew babies had a sense of humor, no one told me."

Avram keeps nodding to himself, as though reciting an important lesson. Ora realizes: We're practicing together, Avram and I. Practicing on Adam, before we get to Ofer. Exercising vocabulary, boundaries, endurance.

"And with me, there was always turmoil inside. It was like all my systems had gone awry, body and soul. I was very sick too, with endless infections and bleeding, and I was terribly weak. But I also felt a crazy sense of power, lots of power, don't ask me why. I had attacks of sobbing and joy and desperation and euphoria, all within three minutes. I used to wonder how I would get through another hour with him when he was running a high fever and screaming in my ear, and it was two o'clock in the morning and the doctor wouldn't pick up the phone, but at the same time-I could do anything! I could carry him by my teeth to the farthest corners of the earth. Terrible as an army with banners Terrible as an army with banners."

Avram lights up for an instant and smiles to himself. He seems to be tasting the words silently with his lips: Terrible as an army with banners Terrible as an army with banners. Her shoulders relax, opening up to him like a freshly sliced challah-he sometimes used to call her that, but he also called her "malted spirits," or "wool gabardine." These names had no meaning, apart from the endearment with which he enveloped her in the words, the sweet exotic sounds, as though covering her shoulders with a shawl so fine that only she and he could see it. He loved to pepper his speech, sometimes expediently and sometimes not, with dudgeon wood and jasper stones, curtilages and sippets, pedicels and ovules. "That's Avram's," she and Ilan used to say to each other in the years after Avram, when somewhere in the conversation, or on the radio, or in a book, a word that had simply been born for him would pop up-a word that bore his seal.

"And one day he calls to tell me his address and phone number have changed, like I'm his reserve duty office. The apartment in Talpiot is too cold, he says, so he's renting a different one, on Herzl Boulevard in Beit HaKerem. 'Good for you,' I say, and cross out his old number on the note on the fridge.

"Two months later, in the middle of a regular conversation about you, about your condition, he gives me a new number. What happened? Did you get a different phone? No, but they've been doing roadwork outside his place for three months now, digging up the street and paving it over day and night, and there's a terrible racket, and you know how noise makes him crazy. 'So where does your new number live?' 'In Evan Sapir, near Hada.s.sah Hospital. I found a nice little apartment in someone's backyard.' 'Is it quiet there?' I ask. 'Like a graveyard,' he a.s.sures me, and I change the number on the fridge.

"A few weeks later, another call. His landlord's son bought a drum set. He holds the phone out the window, so I can enjoy it, too. Huge drums, apparently. A tom-tom, at the very least. A person can't live this way. I agree with him and walk to the fridge with pen in hand. 'I've already settled on a little place in Bar Giora,' he says in a nasal voice. Bar Giora? That's pretty close, I think, it's right across the valley. I feel my stomach contracting, and I can't tell if it's excitement or alarm at his sudden proximity. But a week goes by, and another week, and I see no change in our relationship. He's over there, we're over here, and there starts to be more and more of an 'us.'

"After a while, another phone call. 'Listen, I had a slight falling-out with the landlord, he has two dogs, murderous rottweilers. I'm moving again, and I thought you'd want to know: it's quite close to you.' He giggles. 'It's more or less in Tzur Hada.s.sah itself, I mean, if that won't bother you.' 'Hey, Ilan, are you playing hot and cold with me?'"

Ilan had laughed. Ora knew him and his systems of laughs, and in this laughter there was something weak and pathetic, and she felt once again how strong she was. "I'm telling you," she says to Avram, "I didn't even know up to then that I was such a lioness. But I'm also a dishrag, as you know, and a doormat, and I missed him almost all the time and everything reminded me of him-Adam's suckling used to make me so h.o.r.n.y for Ilan." She laughs quietly to herself as she remembers. "I would pick up Ilan's smell from Adam at night and it woke me. And all that time I felt as though he were just a couple of meters away."

When she says that, she can hear the music in which Ilan spoke to her on the phone all the years they were together, with a firm sort of sharpness and a rousing "Ora!" Sometimes, when he said her name that way, she had a vague sense of guilt-like a soldier asleep on guard duty whose officer calls him out-but there was almost always something daring in the way he addressed her too, and teasing, and arousing and inviting: Ora! She smiles to herself: Ora! As though he were establishing a decisive, solid fact that she herself often doubted.

"So I pretend to be strong and ask softly, 'What's going on, Ilan? Is this like some kind of Monopoly game for you, renting and selling houses in all sorts of streets around town? Or is my learned friend a little homesick?' And without even blinking, he says yes, that he's had no life since he left home, that he's going crazy. And then I hear myself say, 'Then come back,' and straightaway I think, No! I don't need him and I don't want him here. I don't want any man getting under my feet around here."

She smiles broadly when Avram briefly lifts his heavy eyelids and an ancient spark glimmers slyly in his eyes. "There you are," she says.

"Sometimes at night," Ilan told her back then, "I drive to the house. It's some kind of force...It just gets hold of me, wakes me up at one o'clock in the morning, or two, throws me out of bed, and I get up like a zombie and get on my motorbike and drive to you, and I know I'll be with you in one minute, in your bed, begging you to forgive me, to forget, to erase my madness. And then, when I'm twenty meters from the place, the counter-force kicks in, always at the same point, as if that's where the magnet's poles get reversed. I can actually feel something physically pushing me, and it says: Move away, get out of here, it's no good to be here-"

"Is that really what happens?"

"I'm going crazy, Ora, I have a child and I can't see him?! Am I sane? And I have you, and I'm one thousand percent sure that you're the only person I'm able and willing to live with, the only person who can stand me, and so what? What am I doing? I thought maybe I just needed to escape this place, to get out of Israel, maybe go to England, finish my studies there, get a change of air, but I can't do that either! Because of Avram I can't leave this place! I don't know what to do, tell me what to do."

"And then," Ora tells Avram, "when he said that to me, it occurred to me for the first time that you were definitely the reason for his running away from us, but you may also have been the excuse."

"Excuse for what?"

"For what?" She lets out a thin, unpleasant snicker. "For example, his fear of living with us, with me and Adam. Or of just living."

"I don't understand."

"Oof," she grunts, shaking her head firmly a few times. "You. The two of you." she grunts, shaking her head firmly a few times. "You. The two of you."

"He rented a house next to the children's park, you know, the one that all the parents in Tzur Hada.s.sah built, a hundred meters from our house as the crow flies. And he didn't call for maybe three weeks. I turned into a bundle of nerves again, and of course Adam picked up on it immediately. I would push him around the neighborhood for hours in his stroller, that's the only way he would calm down at all, and no matter which direction I set off in, I always ended up at Ilan's house."

Avram walks next to her with his head bowed, not looking at her or at the view. He sees the young woman, lonely and restless, pacing about with the stroller. He leads her along the paths of the village he grew up in, down the loop road and the side street that splits off past houses and yards he knows.

"Once we met face-to-face. He was just coming out, and we happened to run into each other at the gate. We said cautious h.e.l.los and both got stuck. He looked at me as if he was about to bed me right there on the sidewalk-I knew that hunger of his so well. But I wanted him to look at Adam, too. Adam was a mess that day-he had a cold and he was kvetchy, with sleep and gunk in his eyes, but Ilan threw him such a fleeting glance that I thought he'd barely noticed a thing.

"But as usual I was wrong. He said, 'It's him,' and got on his bike, hit the gas, and sped away, waking up Adam. Only after he was gone did it occur to me that he'd meant something completely different. I pulled back all the blankets covering Adam to look closely at his face, and for the first time, I saw that he looked like you." you."

Avram perks up and turns to her in surprise.

"Something in his eyes, something in the general expression. Don't ask me how it's possible." She chuckles. "Maybe I was thinking about you a bit when we made him, I don't know. And by the way, to this day I can sometimes see a certain similarity to you in him."

"How?" Avram laughs awkwardly and his feet almost trip over each other.

"There is such a thing as inspiration in nature, isn't there?"

"That's in electricity," he replies quickly. "There's a phenomenon where a magnet creates an electrical current."

"Hey, Avram," she says softly.

"What?"