Ora, very carefully, asks, "Hey, have you written anything since then, over the years?"

Avram shakes his head briskly. "I'm done with words."

"I didn't make a baby book for Ofer. I didn't have the patience to sit down and write back then, and I always felt bad for not doing anything"-but what he just said diffuses inside her like poison. If he's done with words, how can she even dare to write anything?-"because if you don't write it down immediately, you don't remember. That's the way I am, and also so many things happen in the first few months. The child changes by the minute."

She's blathering, and they both know it. She is trying to dilute his avowal. Avram stares at the embers. All she can see is one cheek and one glimmering eye. This was exactly the cadence he used when he told Ilan he didn't want anything to do with life.

"For example," she says after a long silence, "I remember that he never gave himself over easily, Ofer. He wouldn't let you hug him. You could only hug him if he really wanted it. And he's still like that today," she adds, thinking about how lately he envelops her gingerly, carefully holding his body away from her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, bending over in a ridiculous arch as if G.o.d knows what! But when she was a girl, and her awkward father hugged her on rare family occasions, she would also arch her body so that he wouldn't really touch her. She longs so badly for one full, simple hug with her father now, but it's too late. Maybe she'll write about that too, in a few words, just so that one memory remains of that physical motion between her and her father.

Oh well, she thinks, and slams the notebook closed. This could go on forever. It's like walking around with a bucket of whitewash.

"When Ofer was a baby, he used to make this strong, sudden movement with his body"-she stops and sucks the tip of the pen-"or if I tried to breast-feed him when he was full, then he'd arch his whole body back and throw his head to one side." She demonstrates Ofer's stance, and unwittingly, her own embrace of him, linking her hands together away from her chest, and Avram stares at the empty s.p.a.ce between her arms.

"He had such sharp movements. Full of character and willpower." Then she laughs. "You know, most of the time I completely idolized him. The way he knew exactly what he needed to know. The way he was perfect as a baby, while I"-she hesitates, her lip curling-"was a lousy mother."

"You?"

"Forget it. I don't want to get into that now. We're talking about Ofer. Listen to something else"-but she keeps it in her heart: "You?" "You?" A real outcry. What should she take from that? "He was a climbing baby. Ilan used to call him 'Ivy.'" She remembers with delight as it all comes back, wave upon wave, filling up with life, filling Ofer with life too, somewhere out there. A real outcry. What should she take from that? "He was a climbing baby. Ilan used to call him 'Ivy.'" She remembers with delight as it all comes back, wave upon wave, filling up with life, filling Ofer with life too, somewhere out there.

"I would hold him on me, and within a second he would start to climb up, slithering through my hands like a fish. He couldn't stay where I wanted him for one second. And always up, climbing, higher up, and it annoyed me sometimes, that motion of his, and the determination, like he was using me to get to something else, or someone else, someone more interesting." She laughs. "A bit like you, when you wanted something. When you had some new idea."

He says nothing.

"The way you would hunt, you know, when I told you about someone interesting I'd met, or a conversation I'd overhead on the bus. I'd see your wheels start to spin, so you could find out if it was right for a story, or a sketch, and in your mind you'd be trying out the different characters you could give the line to, or my laughter, or my b.r.e.a.s.t.s." Why torture him with this talk? she thinks. Yet she cannot stop. It's as though her nostalgia for him has become a strange, infectious aggression. "Or when you asked me to pose for you naked so you could write me, with words, not draw. I remember how I sat-I swear, I can't believe I did that-on the veranda facing the wadi, because it had to be outside, you insisted, remember? You said the light was better there. And I agreed of course, I did everything you asked back then, and I let you draw me with words, on the veranda, and of course G.o.d forbid Ilan should know about it. That was what we played at back then, or that was how you played me, and Ilan, with your parallel dimensions. So there I was, facing the wadi, naked, with the shepherds from Hussan and Wadi f.u.kin who may have been out there, you didn't care, you didn't care about anything when you needed something for your writing, when you were on fire"-Shut up, she thinks. Why are you attacking him? What's gotten into you? There's a statute of limitations on these things, isn't there?-"and me, I swear, I had chills all over from the way you broke me down into words. I wanted it so badly-you must have felt that-but at the same time I felt so exploited, as though you were looting my most private things, my skin and my flesh, and I didn't dare tell you, I mean it was impossible to talk to you when you were in that state." She shakes her head in bewilderment. "I was even a little afraid of you. You looked like a cannibal in those moments, but I loved that about you, the fact that you had no control over yourself, that you had no choice. I loved that so much about you."

"I wanted to write you like that every year," Avram suddenly grunts, and Ora stops, breathless. "I thought it was something I would do with you over the years, many years. Fifty years like that is what I wanted." His voice is dull and weary and seems to be coming from a great distance. "I thought...my plan was, once a year I would describe your body and face, every part of you, every change in you, word by word, throughout our lives together, and even if we weren't together, even if you kept being his. That you'd be my model, but for words."

She folds her legs beneath her body, agitated by the long, surprising monologue.

"I really only had time to do it twice: Ora at twenty, and Ora at twenty-one."

She doesn't remember that being his plan. Maybe she hadn't even known about it. He wasn't always capable of talking about his ideas. Sometimes he didn't want to. And usually, when he was in heat with creativity-that's how he referred to it-he could only let out slivers of thoughts, sentence fragments that did not always cohere outside his mind. When she didn't understand, he would start to dance around her in circles, whether they were in his room, on the street, in bed, in an open field, or on a bus. He would grimace with impatience and anger and gesticulate wildly, like someone gasping for air. She would feel her eyes glaze over: "Explain it again, but slower." Desperation darkened his look, and the loneliness-the exile-into which he felt pushed by her doubts, her caution, her clipped wings. He had such hostility toward her in those moments, perhaps because of his being doomed to fall deeply in love with a woman who could not understand him instantly-"with a hint and a wrinkle," he said, quoting Brenner, but she hadn't read Brenner: "All that breakdown and bereavement stuff is too depressing for me," she said. He loved her anyway, despite Brenner, despite Melville and Camus and Faulkner and Hawthorne. He loved her and l.u.s.ted and longed for her and held on to her as though his life depended on it. And that was another thing she wanted to talk to him about on this journey, tomorrow or the next day. She wanted him to explain finally what he'd seen in her, to remind her of what she had possessed back then, so that perhaps she could take a little of it for herself now.

She grows irritable. Sparks of thought fly through her. She unfolds herself and gets up: "Is there a ladies' room around here?"

He points with his forehead into the darkness. She takes a roll of paper and walks away. She crouches down next to a thick shrub and pees. Drops splash on her shoes and pants. First thing tomorrow I have to take a shower and do some laundry, she thinks. For a moment she dares to contemplate what she lost: the ability to sit facing him, nude, another twenty-eight times, to look into his eyes and see the way he saw her. To see how, year after year, the words that described her slowly changed, different shadows cast on a familiar landscape. Perhaps it would have hurt less to grow old in his words. But no, she has no doubt. It would have hurt more.

After she finishes, she leans against a thin tree trunk in the dark and hugs herself, suddenly lonely. Pictures of herself over the years flutter by. Ora the teenager, Ora the soldier, pregnant Ora, Ora and Ilan, Ora with Ilan and Adam and Ofer, Ora with Ofer, Ora alone. Ora alone with all the years to come. What does he see in her today? Vicious words appear before her eyes: dry, shriveled, veins, moles, fat, lips, that lip of hers, b.r.e.a.s.t.s, limpness, stains, wrinkles, flesh, flesh.

From the darkness she sees him dissolve in the embers' red glow. He gets up and takes out two mugs from her backpack. He wipes them with his shirt. He pours water into the sooty finjan finjan. He's making coffee for her. He pushes the notebook away so it doesn't get wet. His fingers hover on the blue binding, touching its texture. She thinks she can see him secretly a.s.sessing its thickness with his thumb.

Over the days and weeks after she slept with him in his apartment in Tel Aviv, Avram began to decline again, spending hours staring at the window or the wall, neglecting his body, not bathing or shaving, not answering the phone. And he withdrew from Ora. At first he made up excuses, then asked her explicitly not to come. When she came anyway, he tried to get her to leave. He was wary of being alone with her at home. She was frightened. Her thoughts constantly dwelled on him and what had happened that night. For weeks she could barely do anything.

The more he fled, the more she felt compelled to chase him. Time after time she tried to rea.s.sure him, to explain that all she wanted was for them to go back to the way they were. He pushed away, shook her off, and firmly refused to talk about that evening.

Then she discovered she was pregnant. After a month she finally managed to tell Avram. At first he froze. His face fossilized and his little remaining vitality vanished in an instant. Then he asked if she knew where to get an abortion. He would pay for it, he'd get a loan from the Ministry of Defense, no one would have to know. She refused even to hear about it. "It's too late for that anyway," she murmured, hurt and heartbroken, and he said that in that case he wanted nothing to do with her. She argued, tried to remind him of everything they meant to each other. He stood with a face of stone and stared somewhere above her head, so as not to risk looking at her stomach. Her head spun. She could barely stand up. She felt that if he kept this up a moment longer her body would simply spit out the fetus. She tried to grab his hand and put it on her stomach, but he let out a horrible shout. His eyes were mad with fury and raw hatred. Then he opened the door and practically kicked her out and left her standing there-so she felt-for thirteen years. And then, just before Ofer's bar mitzvah, but ostensibly unrelated to that date, he called her one evening without any explanations or apologies and suggested in his gruff voice that they meet in Tel Aviv.

When they met, he adamantly refused to hear about Ofer, or about Adam and Ilan. The photo alb.u.m she'd spent weeks preparing, with carefully selected pictures of Ofer and the family, spanning thirteen years, remained in her bag. Avram told her at length about fishermen and vagrants he met on the beach in Tel Aviv, about the pub where he'd started working, about an action flick he'd seen four times, and the sleeping-pill habit he was trying to kick. He lectured her about the social ramifications and Catholic allusions in various computer games. She sat staring at his mouth, which did not stop gushing with words that seemed to have lost their content long ago. At times she thought he was making a great effort to prove that she could no longer expect anything of him. They sat for almost two hours on either side of a table in a noisy, ugly cafe. She kept drifting outside of herself to observe the two of them. They looked like Winston and Julia in Nineteen-Eighty-Four Nineteen-Eighty-Four, when they met after being brainwashed and forced to betray each other. At a certain moment, for no apparent reason, Avram got up, said a formal goodbye, and walked away. She a.s.sumed she would not see him for another thirteen years, but roughly every six months he would invite her for another insipid, depressing meeting, until Ofer was drafted. That was when he informed her that he could not be in touch with her until Ofer's discharge.

But the day after she told him she was pregnant, the day after he threw her out of his home and his life, Ora put on a flowing white linen dress and went onto the porch outside the house in Tzur Hada.s.sah. She stood there displaying her full glory, of which no one else was aware yet-even her mother hadn't noticed. She didn't know if Ilan was in the shed, but she had the feeling she was being watched from there.

At nine in the evening, after putting Adam to bed, she knocked on the shed door and Ilan opened straightaway. He was wearing the green T-shirt she liked and a pair of faded jeans she had once bought him. His bare, sinewy feet sent sparks through her. Behind his back she saw a remarkably monastic room. A cot, a desk, a chair, and a lamp. Bookshelves lined the walls. Ilan looked into her eyes and down to her still innocent-looking stomach, and the skin on his scalp stretched taut.

"It's from Avram," she said. She thought she sounded as if she were handing him a gift and declaring who had sent it. Then she realized perhaps that was the case. He stood there amazed and confused, and she, by the force of her new power, pushed him aside and walked in.

"When did this happen?" He flopped onto the bed.

"This is how you live?" She ran a finger over the books on a shelf. "Tort Law and General Tort Theory, Collateral Law," "Tort Law and General Tort Theory, Collateral Law," she accentuated, stealing a look at the large spiral-bound notebooks on his table: property law, family law. "Ilan the student," she said, slightly pained, because she had always dreamed they would be students together-well, the three of them-and had hoped to spend hours and days with them on the Givat Ram campus, in lecture halls, in the library, on the lawn, in the cafeteria. But she had quit her studies as soon as Avram came home, and she wondered if she'd ever go back-what would she study now? Not back to social work, she didn't have the strength to spend months or years battling state authorities and officials. She could not tolerate any contact with rigidity, arbitrariness, and cruelty-not now, after the war, after Avram-and she knew from her one-year project how all these would echo through every meeting with the deputy coordinator of welfare in the Katamonim neighborhood. On the other hand, she wasn't drawn to anything academic or abstract. Something with her hands. That's what she wanted to do. Or with her body. Something simple and touching and unequivocal, and without a lot of words-most important, without words. Perhaps she could revive her childhood athletic career, this time as a teacher. Or maybe she could treat people, ease their pain-yes, why not, just as she had done for Avram during his years of hospitalization. But all that would probably be postponed for a while now. "To answer your question," she finally told Ilan with strange cheer, "it's been almost three months." she accentuated, stealing a look at the large spiral-bound notebooks on his table: property law, family law. "Ilan the student," she said, slightly pained, because she had always dreamed they would be students together-well, the three of them-and had hoped to spend hours and days with them on the Givat Ram campus, in lecture halls, in the library, on the lawn, in the cafeteria. But she had quit her studies as soon as Avram came home, and she wondered if she'd ever go back-what would she study now? Not back to social work, she didn't have the strength to spend months or years battling state authorities and officials. She could not tolerate any contact with rigidity, arbitrariness, and cruelty-not now, after the war, after Avram-and she knew from her one-year project how all these would echo through every meeting with the deputy coordinator of welfare in the Katamonim neighborhood. On the other hand, she wasn't drawn to anything academic or abstract. Something with her hands. That's what she wanted to do. Or with her body. Something simple and touching and unequivocal, and without a lot of words-most important, without words. Perhaps she could revive her childhood athletic career, this time as a teacher. Or maybe she could treat people, ease their pain-yes, why not, just as she had done for Avram during his years of hospitalization. But all that would probably be postponed for a while now. "To answer your question," she finally told Ilan with strange cheer, "it's been almost three months."

"Are you sure it's from him?"

"Ilan!"

Ilan buried his face in his hands, digesting. She suddenly felt important. Critical. She could even relax. She studied him, and for the first time she almost thanked him for what he had done to her by leaving. Amused, she observed the deliberations darting around beneath the smooth skin on his forehead. Ilan always had considerations and counter-considerations, she thought. Mainly counter-considerations.

"What does he say?"

"He doesn't want to see me." She pulled over the only chair in the room and sat down, her mind settled, her body settling. Her legs knew just how far apart to spread for a woman in her state. "And he wants me to have an abortion."

"No!" Ilan yelled and jumped off the bed. He held her hand in both of his.

"Hey, Ilan," she said softly, looking into his eyes, alarmed by the cyclone she saw in them: there were no considerations or reasonings, only naked, tortured darkness.

"Keep this child," he whispered urgently. "Please, Ora, don't do anything, don't hurt him."

"I'll have him in April." The simple sentence filled her with unimaginable strength, the seal of a secret partnership forged through those words between her body and the baby and time itself. But maybe it will be a girl, she thinks, daring to entertain the idea for the first time. Of course it will be a girl, she realizes with amazement. She feels a sudden clarity, the pressing intuition of a tiny girl splashing around inside her.

"Ora," Ilan said to his feet, "how would you feel about-"

"What?"

"I was thinking, don't jump up now, hear me out."

"I'm listening."

Ilan says nothing.

"What did you want to say?"

"I want to come home."

"Come home? Now?" She is utterly confused.

"I want us to get back together," he said, though his hardened expression seemed to contradict his words.

"But now?"

"I know it's-"

"With his child-"

"Would you be willing?"

And everything she had somehow held in and held back all those years burst out. She cried and bellowed, and Ilan held her and steadied her with his strong hands, his supple, rapacious body, and she pulled him to her, and they made love on the sagging cot, careful as they writhed not to hurt the little fingerling inside her. And Ilan, with his sweet smell, his large hands, and his unequivocal body: wanting, wanting, wanting her, how she had missed that protruding desire, and she answered him with torrents she did not know a pregnant woman was capable of.

At dawn, they walked arm in arm down the path to the house, and Ora saw the fig tree and the bougainvillea bow to them, and together they walked up the crooked concrete steps, and Ilan went inside. He let go of her arm and walked quietly through the rooms with his quick feline movements, and he peeked into Adam's room and came out, too quickly, and Ora knew there was still a long way to go. Together they made an early breakfast and went out onto the porch wrapped in a blanket to watch the sunrise. The sun lit up the garden and the wadi, shadows and all, and Ora thought that no one in the world could understand what had happened to them, only the two of them could understand, and that in itself was proof that they were right.

In the morning Adam got up and saw Ilan there and asked Ora, "Is that the man from the shed?"

Ilan said, "Yes, and you're Adam," and he held out his hand.

Adam clung to Ora, hid his face in her dressing gown, and from behind her leg he said, "I'm mad at you."

"Why?"

"'Cause you didn't come."

"I was very silly, but now I'm here."

"Will you leave again?"

"No, I'll stay here forever."

Adam thought for a long while and looked at Ora for help. She smiled encouragingly, and he said, "And you'll be my daddy?"

"Yes."

Adam thought some more, his face turning red with the effort to understand, and finally he let out a sigh that tugged at Ora's heart, the sigh of a hopeless old man, and said, "Well, make me some cocoa, then."

That afternoon Ilan went to see Avram in Tel Aviv and came back a whole year later-that's how it felt to Ora-dejected and gray. He hugged her with all his body and mumbled that everything would be all right, maybe, or maybe not. She asked what happened, and he said, "Never mind, everything happened, we went through all possible situations. Bottom line, he doesn't want us in his life. You or me. Our story with him is over."

She asked if there was any chance Avram might be willing to meet with her, even for a few minutes, at least to say goodbye properly. "No chance," Ilan said, with an impatience that she did not like. "He doesn't want anything to do with life, that's what he said."

"What?" Ora whispered. "Is he talking about suicide?"

"I don't think so, he just doesn't want anything to do with life."

"But how can that be?" she shouted. "How can he turn his back like that and erase everything?"

"Do you really not understand him? Because I do. I so understand him." He grunted at Ora as though she were to blame for something or as though he envied Avram for now having an unshakable excuse to cut off his ties with human beings.

"Then why did you come back? Why do you even want to come back?"

He shrugged his shoulders and looked at her belly, and she exploded inside but said nothing, because what could she say?

That night they got into bed, he on his side and she on hers, as though years had not gone by without this routine and their familiar gestures, the shower, the brushing of teeth together, his sounds in the bathroom, the way he sat on the bed with his back to her, naked and glorious, and quickly put on his sweatpants, then lay down and stretched his body out with a pleasure she found jarring. Ora waited for him to quiet down and asked in the calmest voice she could produce whether he was only coming back to her for Avram-she motioned with her chin at her stomach-or because he loved her, too.

"I never stopped loving you even for one day. How is it possible not to love you?" he replied.

"Well, obviously it's possible. Avram doesn't love me anymore, and I don't really love myself."

Ilan wanted to ask, what about him-how did she feel about him? But he said nothing, and she understood, and said she didn't know. She didn't know what she felt. He nodded to himself, as though he enjoyed hurting himself with her words. She saw the color drain from his bronzed temple and from the cheek that faced her, and again, as always, she was amazed to discover how precious and important she was to him, yet how he constantly withheld the simple security of that knowledge from her.

"It's one h.e.l.l of a job, this life," he said.

As if from within a dark mine, she said, "That's how I've felt for years. Since the war, since Avram, I've felt like I was crawling through the dark, digging. But tell me more, what happened with him, what did you talk about?"

"Listen, he literally begged us to leave him alone. To forget that he even existed."

Ora laughed. "Forget Avram. Yeah, sure. Did you talk about this?" this?" She hinted at her belly. She hinted at her belly.

"He almost hit me when I tried to say something. He just goes berserk, physically, it drives him mad to think that he will have a child in the world."

And Ora thought: That he'll have something to hold him here.

Ilan murmured, "It's like he was on his way out, and his sleeve caught on a nail in the door."

Ora briefly felt as though there really was a nail in her womb.

She turned the light off and they lay there quietly, feeling the vapors of the previous night's untamed happiness dissipate. Their mouths filled with the metallic taste of what was and always would be irredeemable.

"I actually thought it would make things easier for him," Ora said, "rescue him even, you know, connect him with life again."

"He doesn't want to hear about it." He was quoting Avram and the hardness in his voice again. "He doesn't want to hear or see or know anything about this kid. Nothing."

"But what do you you want?" want?"

"You."

She had many more questions that she did not dare ask, and she did not know if he understood what he was getting himself into, and whether he might not regret it the next day. But there was something unfamiliar in his determination, a molten thread that suddenly glowed in him, and it occurred to her that perhaps Ilan could tolerate it better this way, with the complications. Perhaps he could only tolerate it this way.

"And I promised him," Ilan said, hinting. "He really begged me-"

"What?" Ora lifted up on one elbow and examined his face in the dark.

"Never to say anything."

"To who?"

"Anyone."

"You mean, not even-"

"No one."

A secret? The thought of raising a child with a secret weighed on her. She lay back, feeling as though someone were trying to erect a transparent, cold part.i.tion between her and the little creature in her stomach. She wanted to cry, and she had no tears. She saw images of those close to her, the people she would have to hide the secret from, the people she would lie to for the rest of her life. With each of them, the lie and the concealment had a different painful taste. She felt the mine branching out into more and more tunnels and caves, and she was suffocating.

"I won't be able to keep a secret like that for even one day, you know what I'm like."