Ilan shut his eyes tight and saw Avram, the pleading in his face, and said, "We owe him this." And Ora heard: Take a hat, put two identical slips of paper in it Take a hat, put two identical slips of paper in it.

Ilan reached out and put his arm around her shoulders, but they did not move closer to each other. They lay on their backs and looked at the ceiling. His arm was under the back of her neck, lifeless, and they both knew that what had happened the night before in the shed would not happen again until after the baby was born. Perhaps not then, either. Adam, in his room, delivered a tempestuous monologue in his sleep, and they listened. Ora felt how much coldness had built up behind her eyes. She could feel that the secret and the hiding were already starting to distort her.

Then Ilan fell asleep and breathed very quietly, leaving not a scratch in the air. She felt some relief. She got up quietly and went into Adam's room and sat down on the floor, leaning against the chest of drawers opposite his bed. As she listened to his restless sleep, she thought about the three years of raising him on her own and about what they had meant to each other in those years. She hugged her body and felt the blood coursing through her veins again. She would have time to figure out everything that was happening, she thought. She didn't have to solve it all tonight. She got up and fixed Adam's blanket and stroked his forehead until he calmed down and slept peacefully. Then she went back to bed, lay there, and thought about the little creature and how she would change everyone's life, would maybe even manage to change Avram's life, just by existing. She felt sleepy. Her last thought was that now Adam and Ilan would have to learn to be father and son again. A moment before she fell asleep, she smiled: Ilan's toes were poking out from the bottom of the blanket.

She comes back from the dark bushes in a hurry, pebbles flying under her feet. Avram looks at her, and she goes straight for the notebook, signaling to him that she's remembered something.

She writes.

A minute after he came out of me, even before they cut the umbilical cord, I closed my eyes and told you in my heart that you had a son. I said, "Mazel tov, Avram, you and I have a son."

I've often wondered where you were at that moment. What exactly were you doing? Did you feel something? Because how could you not feel anything, or not even know, with some seventh or eighth sense, that this this was happening to you? was happening to you?

She bites the pen. Hesitates, then spurts out onto the page: I want to know if it's possible to feel nothing, or know nothing, when your son is, say, getting hurt somewhere? I want to know if it's possible to feel nothing, or know nothing, when your son is, say, getting hurt somewhere?

A cold wave hits the bottom of her gut.

Stop, stop, what am I even doing here? What is this writing? It's better not to think about it.

Automatic writing they call it, I think. Like automatic fire. In all directions. T-t-t-t-t-t-t.

I feel that I haven't told you enough about what happened after the birth.

About two hours after the delivery, when the whole team was gone and everyone had really finally left us alone, and Ilan had gone to tell Adam, I talked with Ofer. I just said everything. I told him who Avram was, and what he meant to me and to Ilan.

The pen flies over the page now as though she's chopping a salad. Her teeth bite her lower lip.

It surprised me how simple the story was when I told it to him. That was the first time (and probably the last) that I was able to think about us that way. The whole complication that was us, Avram and Ilan and me, all of a sudden became one little unequivocal child, and the story was simple.

Avram pours coffee into the mugs and hands her one. She stops writing and smiles a thank-you. He nods, You're welcome. They briefly emit the calm, kettlish hum of a couple. She looks up with distracted confusion, then back to the notebook.

I was alone with him in the room, and I talked into his ear. I didn't want a single word to escape into the open air. I gave him an infusion of his history. He lay in total silence and listened. He already had huge eyes. He listened to me with his eyes open and I spoke into his ear.

She feels the warmth of that virginal touch with her lips. Her mouth on the delicate oyster.

If you had been there, if you had only seen us there, everything would have been different. I'm certain. For you, too. It's silly to think that way, I know, but there was something in that room- I don't even know how to put it. There was such health health there. Within all the complication there was health, and I felt that if you would only come and stand with us for a moment, or sit next to us on the edge of the bed and touch Ofer, even just his toes, you would instantly be healed and finally come back to us there. Within all the complication there was health, and I felt that if you would only come and stand with us for a moment, or sit next to us on the edge of the bed and touch Ofer, even just his toes, you would instantly be healed and finally come back to us.

They flow and flow, the words flow out of her. The sensation is sharp, st.u.r.dy, focused: when she writes, Ofer is safe.

If you had come and sat on the edge of my bed in the hospital, you could have told Ofer exactly what Ilan said to him: "I'm your dad and that's that. No arguments." It wouldn't have confused him. He would simply have been born into it like a child is born into two different languages and doesn't even know he's supposed to adapt to something.

She tastes the coffee, and it's lukewarm. Gone cold. She smiles at Avram with encouragement, with thanks, but he notices the tiny quiver of her mouth, and he takes the mug away and empties it and pours her a new one from the boiling finjan finjan. She drinks. It's good, now it's very good. Her eyes, above the lip of the mug, run over the lines she has written.

And I told him all the things it was important for him to know, everything he had to hear once in his lifetime-even when he dozed I talked to him. I told him how I met Ilan and Avram, and that I was more or less a girlfriend to both of them since we met, Ilan's girlfriend and Avram's friend (although I occasionally got confused with that division). And I told him how I finished my army service while they stayed on for one more year in regular service and another year in the standing army, and I was already living in Jerusalem, on Tiberias Street in Nachlaot, and I was in my first year studying social work, and I really loved my studies and my life. He lay on me and listened with his eyes open.

I also told him about the lots they asked me to draw, forced me to, and what happened afterward in the war, and how Avram came back from there, and about the treatments and the hospitalizations and the interrogations, because for some reason the Shabak was convinced he'd given the Egyptians the most vital state secrets. Of all the people, they picked him to hara.s.s, and maybe they really did know something, you could never tell with Avram, after all, with his parallel-dimension games and plot twists, and the way he had to be loved by everyone, everywhere, and everyone had to know that he was special, that he was the best. So maybe they did know something.

I told him how we took care of Avram, we were the only ones there to take care of him, because his mother had died when he was in basic training and he had no one in the world except the two of us. And I told him how Ilan and I made Adam when Avram was still in the hospital, almost by accident we made him, almost unconsciously, I swear, we were so I-don't-know-what that we clung to each other and made him, we were just two frightened children, and Ilan left me right after the birth, he said it was because of Avram, but I think he was also afraid to be with me and Adam, he was simply afraid of what we could give him, it had nothing to do with Avram.

And I talked a bit about his brother, Adam, so he'd get to know him, so he'd know how to behave with him, because you needed an instruction manual for Adam. And in the end I told him that about two and a half years after Adam, I had made him with Avram, and I even told him it was "the negative of a f.u.c.k," just like Avram had whispered in my ear while we were doing it. So he'd know his father-language right from the start.

She's warming up now. Really, who knew it was so good to write! Tiring, even more exhausting than walking, but when she writes she doesn't have to keep walking and moving. Her whole body knows it: When she writes, when she writes about Ofer, she and Avram don't need to run away from anything.

When I finished telling him everything, I gave him a little tap with my fingertip under the nose, in the indentation of his lip, so he'd forget everything he'd heard and start over fresh and innocent.

And then he burst out crying, for the first time since he was born.

She lets go of the notebook, which falls between her legs, propped open like a little tent on the ground. Ora has the feeling that the words will hurry away from the lines and slip into the cracks of the earth. She turns the notebook up. She cannot believe that all those words came out of her. Almost four pages! And Ilan says she needs a few drafts just to write a grocery list.

"Avram?"

"Hmmmm ..."

"Let's sleep a bit."

"Now? Isn't it early?"

"I'm beat."

"Okay. Whatever you want."

They cover the embers with dirt and stones. Avram rinses the utensils in the stream. Ora gathers up the leftovers and packs them in her backpack. Her motions are slow, contemplative. She thinks she detected some forgotten breeze in his voice, but when she replays his last few lines, she a.s.sumes she was wrong. The night is warm and there's no need to set up the tents. They spread their sleeping bags out on either side of the extinguished fire. Ora is so tired that she falls asleep immediately. Avram stays awake for a long time. He lies on his side looking at the notebook with Ora's hand resting on it. Her beautiful hand, he thinks, her long-fingered hand.

Shortly after midnight she awakes, and her fear for Ofer leaps up inside her like an evil jack-in-the-box. It is a frantic, noisy fear that rattles its limbs, flashes a crazy look, and cackles loudly: Ofer will die! Ofer is already dead! She sits up, stung, and looks with wild eyes at Avram snoring heavily beyond the ashes.

How can he not feel what's happening?

The same way he didn't feel it when Ofer was born.

She can't trust him. She's alone with this.

Their gloom as a pair falls upon her again, and the sadness of their lonely presence here, at the end of the world. What was she really thinking when she dragged him here? What is this foolishness? These sorts of sweeping, dramatic gestures are unlike her. They were right for the old Avram, not for her. She's only an imposter, pretending to be tempestuous and daring. Just go sit at home, bake your pies, wait for the news about your son, and start getting used to life without him.

She jumps up out of the sleeping bag, grabs the notebook, and in the dark writes Ofer Ofer Ofer Ofer Ofer Ofer, line after line, dozens of times, in large, crooked letters, and mumbles his name half out loud and aims and transmits his name in the darkness straight to Avram. So what if he's asleep? This is what needs to be done now, this is the most effective antidote she has to the poison that might be consuming Ofer at this very minute. She shuts her eyes and imagines him, note for note, and wraps him in protective layers of light. She swaddles him in the warmth of her love and plants him, plants him over and over again in the sleeping consciousness beside her. Then, in the dark, guessing her way, without seeing the lines, she writes: I think, for example, about how he discovered his feet when he was a baby. How he enjoyed chewing and sucking them. I just think of the way he must have felt-that he was chewing something that existed in the world, that he could see it right in front of his eyes, but that it was also somehow arousing sensations within him. And maybe while he was sucking his toes, he started to grasp the very very edge of what is "me" and what is "mine."

And that sensation started flowing around the circle he'd drawn between his mouth and his feet.

Me-mine-me-mine-me-mine-me It's such a huge moment, and I hadn't thought about it until now. How? Where was I? I'm trying to imagine where in his body he felt most "me" at that moment, and I think it's exactly in his center, his pee-pee.

I can feel it too now, when I write. Only with me it's also very painful.

So much of mine is no longer me.

I wish I knew how to write more about that moment. There should be a whole story about that moment, when Ofer sucked his toes.

Once, when he was about eighteen months old, he had a fever, maybe after a vaccination (What did they vaccinate against? Was it the triple one? Who can remember? I only remember that the nurse couldn't find a fleshy enough spot on his bottom, and Ilan laughed and said Ofer needed an anti-triple vaccine). Anyway, he woke up in the middle of the night and was burning up, and he was talking to himself and singing in a high-pitched voice. Ilan and I stood there, two o'clock in the morning, dead tired, and we started to laugh. Because all of a sudden we didn't recognize him. He was like a drunk, and we just cracked up, I think because now we saw him from a certain distance, and we both felt (together, I think) that he was still a bit foreign, like every baby that arrives from somewhere out there, from the unknown remember? I only remember that the nurse couldn't find a fleshy enough spot on his bottom, and Ilan laughed and said Ofer needed an anti-triple vaccine). Anyway, he woke up in the middle of the night and was burning up, and he was talking to himself and singing in a high-pitched voice. Ilan and I stood there, two o'clock in the morning, dead tired, and we started to laugh. Because all of a sudden we didn't recognize him. He was like a drunk, and we just cracked up, I think because now we saw him from a certain distance, and we both felt (together, I think) that he was still a bit foreign, like every baby that arrives from somewhere out there, from the unknown.

But he really was a little foreign. He was Avram's. He was at greater risk of foreignness than any other baby.

She stops and tries to read what she's written. She can barely see her writing on the page.

I was so relieved when Ilan picked him up and said, "It's not nice to laugh at you, you poor sick thing, and you're a little inebriated, too." I was so grateful to him for saying "It's not nice to laugh at you," rather than "at him." All at once he cut through that foreignness, which had almost reared its head between us. And it was Ilan who did that.

And just so you know-she looks at the sleeping Avram-so you don't have any doubts, he was a wonderful father, to both boys. I really think fatherhood is the best thing about him.

Then she turns to a new page and writes over its entire width, pressing hard so the pen almost tears through the page: Fatherhood? Not couplehood? Fatherhood? Not couplehood?

She stares at the three words. She turns to the next page.

But Ofer didn't calm down. On the contrary-he started singing at the top of his lungs, really yodeling, and we got the giggles again, but now it was something completely different between us and there was a feeling that we were allowing ourselves to let loose a little, perhaps for the first time since the pregnancy, and also because it was suddenly clear to both of us that this time Ilan was staying. This was it, we were finally starting our life, and from now on we were a regular family.

She breathes deeply, stilling her mind.

You're sleeping, snoring.

What would you do if I came over and lay down next to you?

I've been gone from home for almost a week.

How did I do such a thing? How did I run away at a time like this? I'm insane.

Maybe Adam's right. Unnatural.

No, you know what? I really don't feel that way.

Listen: so many feelings and nuances came to me with the children. I don't know how much of it I understood at the time. If I even had a minute to stop and think. All those years now seem like one big tempest.

That evening, with the fever and the yodeling, we gave Ofer a cold bath to bring his fever down. Ilan didn't have the heart to do it. I put him in the bath. A diabolical invention, but an effective one. You just have to overcome the fear of stopping his breath in the first second. And I was convinced that he was turning blue in front of my eyes. His lips were shaking, and he screamed, and I told him it was for his own good. His fingers were around his tiny chest, and his heart beat almost without any gaps, and he shivered from the shock and probably also from my betrayal.

Another time when I did that, Adam saw it and screamed at me that I was torturing Ofer. "You get into that water yourself!" he shouted. I said, "You know what? You're right!" And I really did get in with him, and then the whole thing instantly turned into a funny game. Adam was the wisest of children.

She holds her head in her hands. Cut by the pain of the wheel that cannot turn back. She sits and rocks herself. A uniform, persistent rustle comes from the bushes behind her, and a few seconds later two hedgehogs, perhaps a couple, march past in single file. The smaller one sniffs at Ora's bare feet as she sits motionless. The hedgehogs pad away and disappear down the channel, and Ora whispers thank you.

Look, Avram, about Ofer. I don't know if I was a good mother to him. But he grew up pretty okay, I think. He is without a doubt the most stable and solid of my children.

I lacked self-confidence when they were little. I made mistakes left and right. What did I know?

Earlier you shouted at me, "You?" when I said I may not have been the best mother in the world. When I dared to destroy your-your what? Your illusion of the ideal family? Of the perfect mother? Is that how you thought about us?

When it comes to the most important things, you're such an illiterate.

She looks up. Avram sleeps peacefully. Curled up in himself, maybe smiling in his sleep.

The bottom line is that I think we were actually a pretty good family. Most of the time we were even, excuse the expression, pretty happy together. Of course we had our problems, the usual miserable troubles, the unavoidable ones. (What did you write to me once when you were in the army? "All happy families are miserable in their own way." How did you know?) But still, I can say without reservation that since Ofer was born and up until the whole episode in the army, in Hebron, about a year ago, we were very happy together (What did you write to me once when you were in the army? "All happy families are miserable in their own way." How did you know?) But still, I can say without reservation that since Ofer was born and up until the whole episode in the army, in Hebron, about a year ago, we were very happy together.

And in a very uncharacteristic way for us, Ilan and I knew that even at the time. Not just in retrospect.

She looks over at him. A lost and irrelevant leaf of joy hovers in her eyes.

We had twenty good years. In our country, that's almost chutzpah, isn't it? "Something the ancient Greeks would be punished for." (You said that once, but I don't remember the context.) Twenty years we had. A long time. And don't forget that six of those years covered the two boys' army service (there was a five-day gap between Adam's discharge and Ofer's enlistment). And they both served in the Territories, in the lousiest places. The fact that we somehow managed to walk between the raindrops without really getting splattered even once, from any war or terrorist attack, from any rocket, grenade, bullet, sh.e.l.l, explosive device, sniper, suicide bomber, metal marbles, slingstone, knife, nails. The fact that we just lived out a quiet, private life.

Do you get it? A small, unheroic life, one that deals as little as possible with the situation, G.o.d d.a.m.n it, because as you know, we already paid our price.

Sometimes, once every few weeks- Once a week or so, I would wake up with a panic attack and say quietly into Ilan's ear: "Look at us. Aren't we like a little underground cell in the heart of the 'situation'?"

And that really is what we were.

For twenty years.

Twenty good years.

Until we got trapped.

AT THE TOP of Keren Naphtali mountain, on a bed of poppies and cyclamens, they lie sweaty and breathless from the steep incline. They agree that this was the hardest climb so far, and gobble down some wafers and biscuits. "We have to get some food soon," they remind each other, and Avram gets up to show her how much weight he's lost over the past few days. He's impressed at having slept through the night for the first time, four hours straight without a sleeping pill-"Do you know what that means?" "This trip is good for you," she says, "dieting and walking and fresh air." Avram agrees, although he sounds surprised: "I really do feel pretty good." Then he says it again, like someone taunting a sleepy predator from a place of safety. of Keren Naphtali mountain, on a bed of poppies and cyclamens, they lie sweaty and breathless from the steep incline. They agree that this was the hardest climb so far, and gobble down some wafers and biscuits. "We have to get some food soon," they remind each other, and Avram gets up to show her how much weight he's lost over the past few days. He's impressed at having slept through the night for the first time, four hours straight without a sleeping pill-"Do you know what that means?" "This trip is good for you," she says, "dieting and walking and fresh air." Avram agrees, although he sounds surprised: "I really do feel pretty good." Then he says it again, like someone taunting a sleepy predator from a place of safety.

Chiseled stone ruins sprawl behind them, remnants of an Arab village or perhaps an ancient temple. Avram-who happened to flip through an article not long ago-believes the stone is from the Roman era, and Ora welcomes his theory. "I can't deal with Arab village ruins now," she says. But a momentary illusion in her mind, composed instantaneously from the ruins, projects a tank roaring down a narrow alleyway, and before it can trample a parked car or ram the wall of a house, she moves her hands in front of her face and moans, "Enough, enough, my hard drive is overloaded with this stuff."

Broad Atlantic terebinths spread their branches and sway meditatively in the breeze. Not far away, antennas protrude from a small fenced-in military post, and a handsomely chiseled Ethiopian-born soldier stands motionless at the top of an observation tower, surveying the Hula Valley below, perhaps stealing a glance at them to spice up his guard duty. Ora stretches her whole body out and lets the breeze cool her skin. Avram sprawls in front of her, leans on one arm, and sifts dirt through his fingers.

"It happened just before he turned four," Ora tells him now. "Two or three months before, while I was making him lunch one day. I was already studying physiotherapy at the time, it was my last year, and Ilan had just opened his law firm, so it was a really crazy period. But at least I had two days a week when I finished school early and I could pick him up from day care and make him lunch. Is this really interesting to you, all this-"

Avram chuckles and his eyelids blush. "I'm...it lets me-"

"What? Tell me."

"I'm peeking into your lives."

"Yeah? Well, don't peek: look. It's all open. Ofer asked me what was for lunch. So I told him this and that, rice, let's say, and meatb.a.l.l.s."

Avram's mouth moves distractedly, as though chewing the words. Ora remembers how he loved to eat, and to talk about food, man's best friend man's best friend, and how she had longed to cook for him all these years. At big family meals, at dinner parties, on holidays, every year at Seder night, she would set aside a big, full plate for him in her heart. Now she has the urge to tempt him with a dish of eggplant in tomato sauce, or lamb with couscous, or maybe one of her rich, comforting soups-he doesn't even know what a good cook she is! Probably all he remembers are burned pots in her student apartment in Nachlaot.

"Ofer asked me what meatb.a.l.l.s are made of, and I mumbled something. I told him they were round b.a.l.l.s, made of meat, and he thought about it and asked, 'Then what's meat?'"

Avram pulls himself up into a seated position and hugs his legs.

"To tell you the truth, Ilan always said he was just waiting for Ofer to ask that question, from the minute he started talking. From the minute we saw what kind of boy he was, really."

"What do you mean, 'what kind of boy he was'?"

"Wait, I'll get there."

Something has been gnawing at her for several minutes, trying to get her attention. Something that was left on-a faucet in the house? A light? Her computer? Or maybe it's Ofer? Is something happening to Ofer now? Is something happening to Ofer now? She listens in, clearing a path through her whispers and conjectures, but no, it's not Ofer. She listens in, clearing a path through her whispers and conjectures, but no, it's not Ofer.

"Ora?"