His long fingers roamed carefully over her stomach. Since they had slept together in the shed, since he had come back to live with her and Adam, he couldn't make love with her. She hadn't pushed him; she found it comfortable that way, too.

"What's this?"

"A knee, maybe an elbow."

How will I be able to love him? he thought desperately.

"Sometimes I don't know whether I'll have enough love for him," she said. "Adam fills me up so much, I don't know how I'll have room in my heart for another child."

"He's moving ..."

"He always does that. Won't let me sleep."

"He's tough, eh? Full of strength."

"He's full of life."

They talked carefully. Through all the months of the pregnancy they had not said these simple things to each other. Sometimes, through Adam, they talked about the "baby in the belly," and guessed things about him. Privately they said almost nothing, and the due date had come and gone nine days ago.

In fact, Ilan thought-this notion had come to him every night in recent months-there's a concentrated, condensed little Avram in bed with us, and from now on he'll be with us forever. Not just like a shadow, the way we're more or less used to, but a real little Avram, alive, with Avram's moves and his walk, maybe his face, too.

Your father, Ora thought at the fetus floating inside her, and distractedly moved Ilan's hand around and around on her stomach, once told me that at twelve he vowed that every moment in his life would be full of interest and excitement and meaning. I tried to tell him that was impossible, that no life could be only climaxes and peaks all the time, and he said, "Mine will be, you'll see."

We both liked jazz, Ilan remembered and smiled onto Ora's neck. We used to go to Bar-Barim in Tel Aviv, to hear Arale' Kaminsky and Mamelo Gaitanopoulos, and then, on the bus back to Jerusalem, we'd always sit in the back row and scat sing our way through the whole session, and people would get annoyed but we didn't care.

I only knew your dad from the age of sixteen, Ora thought. Now maybe I'll know what he was like as a child.

They lay there for a long time, close to each other, and talked silently to Ofer.

One day, when he was about five-Ora writes in a leftover page of the blue notebook-Ofer stopped calling us "Mom" and "Dad" and started calling us "Ora" and "Ilan." I didn't mind, I even liked it, but I could see that it really bothered Ilan. Ofer said, "How come you're allowed to call me by my name, and I'm not allowed to call you by yours?" And then Ilan said something to him that I remember to this day: "There are only two people in the whole world who can call me 'Dad.' Do you know how great that is for me? And think about it: Are there that many people in the world who you can call 'Dad'? Not really, right? So do you want to give that up?" I could see that Ofer was listening, and that it spoke to him, and ever since then he really did always call him "Dad."

"What are you writing?" Avram asks, propping himself up on one arm.

"You scared me. I thought you were asleep. Have you been watching me for a long time?"

"Thirty, forty years."

"Really? I didn't notice."

"So what were you writing?"

She reads it to him. He listens, his heavy head tilted. Then he looks up: "Does he look like me?"

"What?"

"I'm asking."

"If he looks like you?"

And for the first time, she describes Ofer to him in detail. The open, large, tanned face, the blue eyes that are both tranquil and penetrating, and the eyebrows so fair you can hardly see them, just like she used to have. The wide, lightly freckled cheeks, and the slight, ironic smile that dispels the severity of the rounded forehead. The words tumble out of her, and Avram swallows them up. Sometimes his lips move, and she realizes that he is memorizing her words, trying to make them his, but it occurs to her that they will never really be his until he writes them down himself.

She is embarra.s.sed by her fluent gush of speech, but she cannot stop because this is exactly what she needs to do now: she must describe him in minute detail, especially his body. She must give a name to every eyelash and fingernail, to every pa.s.sing expression, to every movement of his mouth or hands, to the shadows that fall on his face at different times of day, to each of his moods, to every kind of laughter and anger and wonderment. This is it. This is why she brought Avram with her. To give a name to all these things, and to tell him the story of Ofer's life, the story of his body and the story of his soul and the story of the things that happened to him.

She holds up a finger. "Wait. What did I just think of? Umm ..." Her fingers play in the air, trying to birth a vague spark from it. "It was something of yours that I remembered. What was it? Oh, of course!" She laughs. "You once had this idea, you wanted to write a story, in the army, just before you started the one about the end of the world, remember?"

"About my body." He smiles, then snickers, quickly belittling, dismissive.

But Ora won't let him off the hook. "You thought of writing a sort of autobiography, where every chapter is about a different part of your body-"

"Yes, an autobodyography autobodyography. It was silly ..."

"And you let me read the chapter about your tongue, remember?"

He waves both hands in protest. "Leave it, really, such nonsense."

"It was horrible. It was slander, not autobiography. Honestly, Avram, if you ever need a character witness, don't invite yourself."

He laughs an unpleasant, dishonest laugh, as if wanting to appease her without really acquiescing. Something jackal-like flashes in the depths of his eyes, reminding her of how twisted and cruel he could be with himself when the evil spirits tormented him. And she suddenly yearns for him, an unbearable yearning, a sharp, blazing longing for him, for all of him.

He says: "Look at us, we're two old people now."

"Just as long as we don't grow old before we grow up."

He looks at her for a long time, reading her thoughts. His gaze is steady and strange, with no ill intentions. On the contrary. It seems to her that he has only kind, tender thoughts for her now. "Ora."

"What?"

"Can I join you for a bit?"

"Where?"

"No, never mind."

"Wait! You mean ...?"

"No, only if you-"

"But are you...Wait, now?"

"No?"

Her body starts to agitate and flutter in the sleeping bag. "You mean ..."

He nods with his eyes.

"My place or yours?"

Avram wriggles out of his sleeping bag and stands up, and she opens her zipper and spreads her arms out to him: "Come, come, don't say anything, just come here already. I thought you never would." He collapses into her sleeping bag, heavy and dense, and their bodies are stiff and stammering, wrapped in too many layers of clothes and awkwardness. Their hands stutter and b.u.mp and pull back, and it's not working, that much is already clear, it's not right, it's a mistake, they shouldn't even go back to that place, and she's afraid of what will happen if she forgets Ofer for a moment, if he is suddenly abandoned without protection, and she knows exactly what is going through Avram's mind: the criminal returning to the scene of the crime-that's what is in his twisted brain right now. "Don't think," she moans into his ear, "don't think anything." She presses her fingers on his temples, and Avram is on top of her, his heavy bones, his flesh, and he rams his body against hers with immense force, as if fighting to break through himself even before he can break into her, but she isn't ready yet, either. "Wait, wait." She moves her mouth away from his wandering lips. "Wait, you're crushing me."

For several moments they are like two people who have struck up a conversation and are trying to remember-not who the other person is, but who they themselves are. But then, here and there, behind an opened b.u.t.ton, an unhooked clasp, their scents rise, tongues taste, fingers slip between a shirt and pants, and suddenly skin, warm and alive, skin against skin, skin in skin, and here is a mouth, an eager and sucking and sucked-on mouth, and Avram moans: her mouth, her beloved mouth, and only then does he remember, and his tongue touches her lips lightly, probing, testing, wondering. Ora freezes: It's nothing, she reminds him silently, just two millimeters. But something does feel more wilted. He licks and sucks lightly, carefully, gently. Something has fallen asleep there, that's all, but it's warm, and it's hers, it's the pain imprinted on her, and his healing powers rise up. It's her, with everything she now is.

The dog scampers around them and yelps, trying to shove her face in between them, sniffing longingly. Then, shoved away, she sprawls nearby with her back to them, and a shivering furrow of insult plows through her fur. Avram's hand, spread wide, supports Ora's back and tightens and gathers her into him. "Wait, slowly now, give me your hand, give me." A hand on a breast, softer and larger than it was. Yes, they both feel it, she knows through his hand. "Your sweet b.r.e.a.s.t.s," he whispers into her ear, and she interlaces her fingers with his and wanders around her body with him. "Feel it, feel this," and everything is broader and fuller, a woman, "touch, feel how soft," yes. "You're velvet, Ora'leh." "Suckle on me." A long silence. But it is then that they are both transported, and Neta flies through Avram's head: Where are you, Nettush, we have to talk, listen, we have things to talk about; and Ora for an instant is with Ilan, the touch of his hands, the bones of his wrist, their tanned skin, the power contained in them. She used to run her finger over his wrists and feel as though she were touching a heavy iron key, the secret of his masculinity. But then the Character, Eran, also pops up in her mind, with his lips that turn pale with pa.s.sion for her, with his feverish, crazed pleas: Now wear this, now put this on-how dare he show up here? And then, to her surprise, two long thumbs smooth over her body, full lips flutter, dark, plum-like, and where did they even come from, and she tightens her whole body toward Avram, "Come, you, you," and Avram responds immediately, back from his wanderings, she remembers him by the signs, the tight grip, his head burrowing in the round of her neck, his hand softly cupping her head as though she were a baby-Ora whose head must be protected-and his other hand strokes her stomach, clinging to it with excited fingers, and she smiles, his hunger for the belly of a woman, soft, large, full (she always felt it in his fingertips, and could almost guess by the way his fingers touched her stomach, could almost draw the figure of the fantasy woman he truly desired), and now she can finally give him something of that, not just the taut, boyish drum skin she had back then. He is grateful, she senses it immediately, his entire flesh exalts her funny little stomach, which has found a use after all, and his mouth is hungry for hers, and his fervor, it's all familiar and beloved, a huge wave of longing breaks between them. We We, she wails in her head, a she-wolf of many udders and nipples, and Avram sucks on them all. Here we are! she rejoices, squirming beneath him. This is how we are, and always have been, and this is how we put thigh to thigh, and our feet interlace, and our hands, and all the corners of our bodies, even the most remote, elbows, ankles, behind the knees, carnivalesque excitement, and Ora whispers something in his ear, and then reaches the tip of her tongue to the tip of his tongue, a sting of moisture from within her, and they both ignite, and his blacksmith's arms carry her, and her head drops back as though decapitated, and together they thrash the earth beneath her, and he is at her neck, his teeth on the artery, grunting and groaning, and she, "Don't stop, don't stop," let him gallop and bellow and drum her with his loins to the earth, and he is one and he is with her, there is no other woman with them, only he and she now, a man and a woman going about their business-that's what he used to tell her: "Now we're a man and a woman going about our business," and he would tempt her with the madness of his strange, formal language, and the way he turned his back on the whole world, and with one thrust he would release her from the torture of thinking about Ilan, just a man and a woman going about their business. Now too, there is no world outside their body, no breath outside their breath, no Ilan, no Neta, no Ofer, no Ofer, no Ofer, yes, yes there is an Ofer, if Avram and Ora are like this then there is an Ofer, there is, there will be, there will be an Ofer, leave Ofer now, release him for one minute ...

Hours go by, slowly. As though they have been preserved in some distant cellar, in jars of pickled time. They fall asleep and awake and return. They cross expanses, plains, absences, insults, longings, and regrets. And again he slows down, he slows and stops exactly at the moment she wants him to, so they can gather strength together. A quiet circle breathes heavily in the eye of the storm, and they curl up inside it, and Avram is quiet, perhaps asleep, dissipated, contracting inside her, and she remembers his deep, steep dive, now he is a prehistoric ocean creature, a fish with one half fossilized, turning over inside her, diving into her depths, and now he is there, now he will not move for a moment, he will just slowly throb, resting among the corals of her flesh, hallucinating inside her, and she waits, she waits, and he starts to move again, very slowly, and she moves with him, her lips against his shoulder, very focused, she remembers him fat and heavy and clumsy, and the dance that emerges from him, and now slowly his scent will change, she starts to smile, it's a scent that only Avram has, and only in these moments, and you cannot describe it in words.

"One day, not now, one day," she murmurs afterward, playing with the curls on the back of his neck, "you'll write about our walk."

They lie naked under the sky canopy as the wind caresses them with soft brushes.

"I wanted so badly to be filled up with you," she says.

The dog is lying closer to them now, but she does not submit when Ora invites her to come closer, to be stroked by her free hand, and she does not look directly at the two bodies whitening in the moonlight. When her gaze meets them, she runs a tongue of discontent over her lips.

"What?" He wakes from a doze of repletion. "What did you say about the walk?"

"I'll buy you little notebooks, like I used to, whatever you need, and you'll write about us."

He laughs in embarra.s.sment. His fingers tap a light rebuke on her neck.

"About me and you," Ora says gravely, "and about how we walked, and about Ofer. Everything I told you." She takes his right hand and kisses his fingertips, one after the other. "And don't stress about it. For all I care, you can take a year, two, ten, however much you need."

Avram thinks it will be a miracle if he ever writes anything more complex than a restaurant order again.

"You just have to remember everything I'm telling you. What do you have such a big head for? Because I'll forget, I know I will, and you'll remember everything, every word. And in the end, you'll see, we'll give birth to a book." She laughs softly at the twinkling stars.

"Do you know that Ilan went to look for you?" she murmurs into his shoulder.

"When?"

"Then."

"When the war was over?"

"No, at the beginning."

"I don't understand. What ...?"

"He got all the way to the Ca.n.a.l-"

"No way."

"From Bavel. He just walked off the base."

"That can't be, Ora, what are you talking about?"

"I'm telling you."

His back hardens under her hand, and Ora is amazed at her stupidity: all she had in her mouth were the pleasurable murmurs and purrs of afterward, and then this came out.

"On the second day of the war, or the third, I can't remember."

Avram sits up abruptly, his nakedness still soft and anointed in her. "No, that can't be, we'd already lost the Ca.n.a.l." He searches her face for clues. She is still dizzied by the sweetness of her body, still fluttering yet already abandoned. "It was all full of Egyptians. Ora, what are you saying?"

"But we still had a few strongholds, no?"

"Yes, but how could he...There was no way to get to them, the Egyptians were twenty kilometers into our territory. Where did you come up with this?"

She turns her back to him, hunches into a ball, and curses herself. Twenty-one years I waited with this, so why now?

"Hey, Ora?"

"In a minute."

Why now, after they made love? Which demon had spurred her to ruin it? But the fact that we slept together, she tells herself firmly, was so good, and it was the best thing we could do for Ofer. "Just don't regret it!" She turns to him and her heart sinks, because it's there, that same expression she saw in his face after the last time, when they conceived Ofer. His face has fallen, emptied out.

"I don't regret it, it's just that you're suddenly laying this story on me."

"I didn't...I didn't think I was going to tell you. It just came out."

"But what is the story?" he whispers.

"He left Bavel with the water tanker, on the second or third day. Forged a transit order and left. He got all the way to the HQ at Ta.s.sa. And from there he hitched a ride in a jeep, I think, with a Canadian or Australian TV crew. A cameraman and a reporter, two crazy guys in their sixties, and they were high, you know those disaster freaks."

"But what was he thinking?" Avram wonders feverishly, and Ora gestures: I'm getting there.

"The jeep ran out of gas in the middle of the desert, so he set off alone, on foot, at night, no map and almost no water, and all around him-well, you know."

No, Avram says voicelessly, tell me.

What she heard from Ilan one morning twenty-one years ago, she now tells Avram in detail-she remembers quite a bit, in fact-finally bringing the story full circle.

Ilan walked. He was scared of the roads and walked only on the sides, through sand that was sometimes knee-high. Every time he saw a vehicle, he fell flat and hid. All night he walked alone among the charred remains of jeeps and APCs, smoldering tanks and cracked fuel tankers. Egyptian armored vehicles pa.s.sed him twice. Then he heard a wounded Egyptian soldier crying, begging for help, but he was afraid of traps and didn't get close to him. Here and there he saw a charred body with black stumps sticking up and the head bent backward, mouth agape. A burned helicopter with its propeller missing was pinned into the side of a dune; he couldn't tell if it was ours or theirs. Soldiers still sat inside, leaning forward, looking very intent. He walked on.

"He just walked. He didn't even know if he was heading in the right direction. You asked what he was thinking, and he wasn't. He walked because he walked. Because you were there at the end of the road. Because only by chance were you there instead of him. I don't know, I think I would have done the same thing. Maybe you would have too, I don't know."

Because that's exactly the way she's walking here, Avram thinks and tries to stop the mounting tremors in his body. She is walking because she is walking. Because Ofer is there, at the end of the road. Because she's decided that this is how she will save him, and no one will dissuade her from that. "I wouldn't do that," he says angrily, b.u.t.tressing himself against what her story is piling up on top of him, closing in on him from one minute to the next. "I wouldn't have gone out to find him like that, I'd have been scared to death."

"Yes you would have. That's exactly the kind of thing you would have done." An act of greatness, she thinks. A misdeed.

"I'm not so sure," he hisses through gritted teeth.

"And I'll tell you something else. It was exactly because of everything he'd learned from you over the years that he knew it could be done."

What he remembered from that night, Ilan told her only once, at daybreak. He squeezed her suddenly from behind, as if in his sleep, trapped her between his arms and legs, and emptied the story into her spasmodically. Now it was her turn to do the same to Avram. She hadn't meant to tell him, Ilan had made her swear she would never, under any circ.u.mstances, in any situation, tell him. But maybe, she thinks, Ilan didn't know the story would burst out of him him either, a moment before Ofer was born. And besides, it was enough. Enough with the secrets. either, a moment before Ofer was born. And besides, it was enough. Enough with the secrets.

Ilan kept walking. It started to get light. Every so often he had to hide in some bushes, or in the shady folds of sand dunes. His eyes and nose filled with sand. His teeth were gritty with sand. A soldier with a cushy job in Intelligence, armed with an SKS, no bullets, no gear, one water canteen.

He lay down to rest in a ditch and must have fallen asleep, because when he opened his eyes there was a guy in gla.s.ses sitting next to him, gesturing for him to be quiet. He was a tankist from Brigade 401 and his tank had been hit, killing his entire crew. He'd pretended to be dead when the Egyptians had looted the tank. So these two, with one water canteen and a torn map, navigated for several hours-in total silence because they were afraid of Egyptian commando units-until they reached the coast and saw an Israeli flag, shredded and bedraggled but still flying from the broken, sunken roof of the Hamama stronghold.