"I think we're both losing it. Come on, let's move on to the problems."

"I don't want problems! I want an easy life!"

"Is that you whistling?"

"It's not me, it's Dad from the living room."

"Ilan, do me a favor, stop whistling. As it is I'm-"

"Yes, it's breaking our concentration, Dad."

"Go on, do your work."

"I bet you now he'll come in here and do a dance to make us laugh ..."

"You wish!"

"He has the ears of a wildcat. You married a wildcat."

"Enough, stop babbling. How do you approach this problem?"

"With the face of a murderer."

"Be careful, it's still hot. Dip it in this, and don't get your book dirty."

"'If we multiply a number by 4, and add 2 to the result, we get 30.' How am I supposed to know how to do this?"

"Think: x times 4 plus 2 is 30."

"Then I know! 4x plus 2 equals 30."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning 4x equals 28. Meaning x equals 7! Hallelujah! Genius, genius!"

"Excellent. Always remember to carry. You always want x on one side and the numbers on the other."

"I'm starting to enjoy this."

"Now let's go on to this exercise. This also has one variable."

"Why is this guy so variable, I'd like to know."

"Will you be quiet and do the work?"

"Do you want some of the heart?"

"Don't you want the heart? It's the best part."

"Take it. A good, warm Jewish heart."

"Okay, now concentrate. You're almost done."

"Will you help me with Bible Studies, too?"

"Bible is Dad."

"Yeah, that's what he thinks, too."

A few days later Ilan told her that while he was lying on the couch reading the paper and their voices drifted in from the kitchen, he stopped paying attention to his article and listened to them. At first, he said, he could hardly resist getting up and going into the kitchen to put an end to Ofer's whining and acting up. He was angry at Ora's indulgence and lenience, and her excessive collaboration with Ofer's spoiled ways. With me, he thought, the whole thing would last for ten minutes, tops, and Ofer would have had all his equations solved long ago. But he felt that if he interfered he would make both of them angry at him, and he also sensed that they might not want to be stopped at all, even though they were arguing and teasing each other. So he just lay there and listened, and felt-in body and soul-the thousands of actions and words and thoughts and moments and mistakes and deeds, the slow, patient, stalact.i.te acc.u.mulation of Ofer's being in her hands. And he knew that he could never do that. He could not sit with Ofer for so long, absorbing his frustration and defeatism, and his jabs, nor would he know how to divert them and lead him slowly to the solution.

Ora listened. It was late in the evening, the boys were in their room, and she and Ilan were lying together on the couch. His fingers played with the fine hair on the back of her neck, and her face cuddled against his. She said, "But you're so much a part of bringing them up. I don't know many fathers who are so involved in their kids' lives."

"Yes, but when I heard you in the kitchen, I don't know-"

"I mean, the whole way they think, their sense of humor, all the things they know, and their sharp wit, it's so you."

"Maybe so, I don't know, I'm sure it's both of us. I guess it's the combination of us." He felt for her hand and his fingers grasped hers. "Because I always feel that whatever I give them, they would have somehow gotten it anyway, from life, from other people. But what you give them"-the fingers of his other hand made an uncharacteristic movement, like the kneading of dough.

Avram looks at her fingers as they replay Ilan's kneading motion, and he is grateful to her for allowing him to be with them there, and to touch the soft, maternal dough of their day to day.

Ora wrapped Ilan in her arms and thrust her knee between his legs to make him feel good, and they lay entwined for several minutes. Then Ilan smiled over her head. "Still, I would have stopped his acting up a lot sooner."

Ora laughed into his neck. "I'm sure you would have, my love."

HE SIGHED DEEPLY, and she reached her foot out and touched his, to encourage and comfort him. They'd been lying in bed, awake and silent, almost the whole night. Every so often one of them would sigh, and the other's gut would tighten. This time he repaid her with a touch, his toes in the concave of her foot. She moaned softly, he sniffled, she voiced a thin syllable, he softly cleared his throat, and she began the clumsy operation of turning herself over and moving her giant hump of a stomach to the other side. Then she pushed herself closer to him, edging forward like a sea lion on the sand, until she placed her head in the round of his shoulder and asked, "Why aren't you asleep?"

"I can't," Ilan replied.

"You're anxious."

"Yes, a little. Aren't you?"

She did not move from her nest in his body, but she was no longer there. "Just tell me, you're not by any chance planning another little escape, are you?"

"No, of course not!"

"I just want you to know that if you leave this time, you won't have anywhere to come back to. It won't be like last time."

Adam mumbled in his sleep from the next room, and Ilan thought about how her voice always used to be cheerful with him; no one rejoiced at his arrival like that anymore, with the happiness and innocence and trust of a child. When he used to bask in her welcoming expression, he had felt that he was almost the person he wanted to be, and moreover, he'd believed that he could be that person, simply because Ora believed he already was. He murmured, "I'm staying, Ora, I'm not going anywhere. Why would you even think that?"

As if she hadn't heard him, she went on in the same knotted voice. "Because you can pull that same trick on me again, I can take it, but Adam will fall apart. It will finish him, and I won't let you."

Ilan repeated that he was staying, but he stopped caressing her shoulder, and Ora lay still and measured the distance between her skin and his hand, which hung limply above her. Ilan thought: Caress her, touch her. Ora waited some more, then heavily gathered her body and turned over.

Later, in the next wave of fear, they found themselves embracing again, his stomach against her back, his head buried in the back of her neck.

"I'm afraid of him," he murmured into her hair. "Do you understand? I'm afraid of an unborn baby."

"What, tell me, talk to me."

"I don't know, I feel like he already has a fully formed personality. A mature one."

"Yes." Ora smiled inside. "I feel that way, too."

"And that he knows everything."

"About what?"

"About me. About us. About what happened."

Her fingers tightened on his forearm. "You haven't done anything bad to him. All you ever did for Avram was good."

"I'm afraid of him," he whispered and hugged her more tightly. "I'm afraid of what I'll feel when I see him for the first time, and I'm afraid he'll look like him." Or worse-that he'd somehow look like both of them. A mixture of her and him. And that every time he'd look at him, he'd see how alike they actually are.

She thought about little Adam, who didn't resemble her or Ilan. Oddly, there was something of Avram in his face and expressions sometimes.

"Ora," he whispered into her neck, "don't you think we should tell him a bit about his dad? So he'll know where he came from?"

"I tell him all the time."

"How?"

"When I can't fall asleep."

"You talk to him?"

"I think to him."

"About what?"

"About Avram, about us. So he'll know."

His fingers dug through her hair, and she arched her head into the palm of his hand. The sharp smell of her scalp had intensified during the pregnancy. Ilan loved the smell, even though it was slightly unpleasant, or perhaps because of that, because it was unprocessed, peasantlike, the simple aroma of her body. This is home, he thought, with a slight flutter at his root.

She smiled quietly and pressed her b.u.t.tocks against him. "In the eleventh grade, I think, I wrote to him that even if we weren't boyfriend and girlfriend, a couple, like he wanted, I felt we'd still be together forever, no matter how, but we would be. And he sent me a telegram, you know those yellegrams of his"-Ilan laughed into her nape-"saying that ever since he got my letter he was walking around with a rose in his lapel, and when people asked him what the occasion was, he said, 'Yesterday I got married.'"

"I remember, a red rose."

They said nothing. She stroked his fingers gently. Since Avram's return, even fingernails were not something to be taken for granted.

"I want us to live, Ilan."

"Yes."

"Our lives, I mean. Yours and mine."

"Of course, yes."

"I want to get out of this coffin already."

"Yes."

"Both of us."

"Yes."

"You and me, I mean."

"Yes, obviously."

"And for us to start living."

"Ora-"

"You can't spend your whole life paying for one moment."

"Yes."

"And for a crime we didn't commit."

"Yes."

"We didn't commit any crime, Ilan."

"That's right."

"You know we didn't."

"Yes, of course."

"Why don't I believe you?"

"Slowly. It will come, slowly."

"Hold me hard, carefully ..."

She took his hand and placed it on her belly. His hand pulled back at first, but then climbed up the belly and reached higher than it had meant to. Ora lay motionless. She felt that she had sprouted giant b.r.e.a.s.t.s in the last few months, tremendous fruits, hippopotamus-like. She felt uncomfortable with him touching them. Her skin was stretched painfully. If he pressed, the breast would crack open. She moved his hand back to her stomach: "Feel here."

"That?"

"Yes."

"Is that really him?"