To The End Of The Land Part 41

"Listen," Ora says and holds his hand.

"To what?"

"To the path. I'm telling you, paths in Israel have a sound I haven't heard anywhere else."

They walk and listen: rrrrsh-rrrsh rrrrsh-rrrsh when their shoes drag in the dirt; when their shoes drag in the dirt; rrrhh-rrrhh rrrhh-rrrhh when their toes. .h.i.t the path; when their toes. .h.i.t the path; hhhhs-hhhhs hhhhs-hhhhs when they stroll; when they stroll; hwa.s.sh-hwa.s.sh hwa.s.sh-hwa.s.sh when they trot; a rapidly drumming when they trot; a rapidly drumming rrish-chrsh rrish-chrsh when little stones fly up and hit each other; when little stones fly up and hit each other; hrappp-hrappp hrappp-hrappp when their feet step through bushes of poterium. Ora laughs. "It's a good thing they all have the right sounds in Hebrew. How would you possibly describe these sounds in English or Italian? Maybe they can only be accurately p.r.o.nounced in Hebrew." when their feet step through bushes of poterium. Ora laughs. "It's a good thing they all have the right sounds in Hebrew. How would you possibly describe these sounds in English or Italian? Maybe they can only be accurately p.r.o.nounced in Hebrew."

"Do you mean these paths speak Hebrew? Are you saying language springeth out of the earth language springeth out of the earth?" And he runs with the idea that words had sprouted up from this dirt, crawled out of cracks in the arid, furrowed earth, burst from the wrath of hamsin hamsin winds with briars and brambles and thorns, leaped up like locusts and gra.s.shoppers. winds with briars and brambles and thorns, leaped up like locusts and gra.s.shoppers.

Ora listens to his flow of speech. Deep inside, a fossilized minnow stirs its tail and a wavelet tickles at her waist.

"I wonder what it's like in Arabic," she says. "After all, it's their landscape too, and they have rhonchial consonants too, that sound like your throat is choking on the dryness." She ill.u.s.trates, and the dog p.r.i.c.ks up her ears. "Do you still remember the Arabic words you learned for all those thistles and nettles, or didn't they teach you that in Intelligence?

Avram laughs. "Mostly they taught us about tanks and planes and munitions; for some reason they didn't get around to nettles."

"A grave mistake," Ora decrees.

He'd asked whether they hug. She remembers going out to a restaurant on Adam's birthday, not long ago. It was a new place, "a little too froufrou for my taste," she says, on one of the moshavim in the Jerusalem hills, surrounded by fields and empty chicken coops-it occurs to her that although Avram has worked in a pub and a restaurant and G.o.d knows where else, he may not know what it's like to go out for a family meal, being as socially illiterate as he is. So she explains, before anything else, how they choose a restaurant in her family. Adam has refined, picky taste, so first they have to call and find out if there's anything for him to eat, course by course. Once they choose a place and get there and sit down-"You can't imagine what an operation it is just to sit down! We have a whole settlement policy. For a simple family we're pretty complicated."

She talks on and on, and Avram can see it.

"First of all, Ilan has to find the perfect table: far from the bathroom and the kitchen, with the right lighting-not too bright, not too dim-and as quiet as possible, and a spot where he can sit facing the door, to be aware of any danger that might threaten his little family-and the evening I'm talking about was at the height of the terrorist attacks."

"When isn't it?" Avram grumbles.

"And Adam has to sit as close as possible to a wall, almost hidden, with his back to everyone, but he also has to be able to embarra.s.s his parents with his torn pants, dirty s.h.i.+rts, and the quant.i.ties of alcohol he pours down his throat. And Ofer is like me: he doesn't care about anything, he'll happily sit anywhere as long as the food is good and there's lots of it." Ora herself wants privacy, of course, but also to be able to show off her family a little.

"So after we sit down comes the ordering, with Adam's performances. The waitress always marks him straightaway as problematic, an obstacle in the rhythmic flow of her execution, because of his pedantic instructions-nothing with cream in it; can it be fried in b.u.t.ter? Do any of the dips, G.o.d forbid, contain eggplant or avocado, in any form? And Ilan's usual wisecracks with the waitress." Ora is always amazed and amused to see how utterly blind he is to the fact that the poor girl-any poor girl, at any age-goes weak when he floods her with the arctic green of his glowing eyes. And then there's Ora's heroic struggle with her own eye, which keeps veering to the prices. Every time anyone orders anything, she conducts a secret negotiation between gluttony and frugality-okay, let's get all the embarra.s.sing facts out. With her, it's cheapness, quite explicitly. There, she's admitted it. Somehow she finds it easy to confess to Avram what she has held back from Ilan all these years. She sighs. "Where was I?"

"Cheapness," Avram comments with slightly malicious glee.

"Yes, use it against me, go ahead." A spark flies between her eyes and his.

She is always the one who feebly suggests: "Why don't we just order three entrees? We never finish everything anyway." And they argue with her, always, as though her proposal contains a veiled slight of their appet.i.tes, perhaps even their masculinity. In the end they order four entrees and never finish even three of them. Adam orders a horribly extravagant aperitif-why does he need to drink so much? She and Ilan exchange glances-leave him alone, let him enjoy it this evening, on me! And when the waitress heads to the kitchen with their orders a sudden silence-freezing, obviating-falls on them all. The three men stare at their fingertips, study a fork, or ponder a philosophical conundrum-"an abstract, even cosmic problem," Ora hisses.

She knows everything will be fine soon, even good. They always enjoy themselves at restaurants, and the boys like going out with her and Ilan. All in all the four of them are a great team. Soon the jokes will come, and the giggles and the waves of affection. In just a short while she'll be able to splash around in the warm, sweet latency that commingles-"for such rare moments; far rarer than you might imagine"-complete happiness and family. But there's always that lousy, unavoidable moment before, a sort of transit toll they charge her, the three of them, on her way to that sweetness. It is a regular torture ritual that she perceives as cunningly, conspiratorially, aimed solely at her, which she alone provokes in them, and it is precisely because they sense how much she yearns for that sweetness that they tighten ranks to withhold it from her and make her path to it a little harder. "Why? Don't ask me, ask them." They sit there in front of her, the three of them and their fingertips, the three of them in their eagerness for a little scheming against her, unable to resist the temptation, not even Ilan. "He didn't used to be like that," she says, letting out what she never meant to tell. She and Ilan used to be...well, of one mind-she almost said "of one flesh"-and when they had to, they presented a united front against the boys. He was a full partner. But the last few years-"I really don't understand it," she says, seething with overdue anger-since the boys started growing up, something went wrong, as though he had decided it was time for him to be an adolescent, too.

When she thinks about it now, it seems to her that recently, particularly since the time of their separation, around a year ago, she keeps finding herself faced with three rebellious adolescents who act angrily and impudently-the toilet seats were always left up in bold defiance-and she wishes she knew what it was about her that aroused this idiotic, infantile compulsion, and what turned them instantly into three ravenous kittens when a ball of conspiracy against her rolled at their feet, and why on earth it was her responsibility to rescue them from the silence at a restaurant. What if one day she partook in the grave pondering of the fingertips? What if she hummed an intricate song to herself all the way to the end, until one of them broke down-and it would probably be Ofer; his sense of justice would step up, his natural compa.s.sion, his urge to protect her would eventually overcome even the pleasure of belonging to the other two. But her heart quickly fills with tenderness for him-why would she trip him up on their men's games? It was better for her her to break down rather than him. to break down rather than him.

Again the same old thought: if only she'd had a girl. A girl would have st.i.tched everyone back together with her cheerfulness, her simplicity, her ease. With everything Ora used to have and lost. Because Ora was a girl once, let that be clear. Maybe not as happy and lighthearted as she would have liked to be, but she certainly had wanted and tried to be that kind of girl, a joyful, carefree girl just like the daughter she never had was supposed to have been. And she remembers only too well, she tells Avram, the sudden hostile silences that often came between her parents. Silences with which her mother punished her father for sins he could not even conceive of. Back then, Ora was the magic needle that quickly scurried between her father and mother to st.i.tch up the unraveled moment through which the three of them had almost plunged to the depths.

That silence in the restaurant lasts no more than a minute, Avram understands from Ora's stammered description and her lowered eyes, but it feels like a cursed eternity. Everyone knows that someone has to talk and melt away the silence, but who will start? Who will step up? Who will proclaim that he is the most spineless, the doormat, the softy? Who will break down first and say something, even something silly? Hey, silly is what we do best, Ora knows. Even a snide remark will play well. Like her story about the plump Russian lady who had shared Ora's umbrella earlier that week in a rainstorm. She hadn't asked, hadn't apologized, just said to Ora with a smile, "We walk together now awhile." Or she could tell them about the elderly spinster who came to her clinic with a sprained ankle and laughingly told Ora her trick for making dough rise: she takes it into bed, lies down for forty winks with the dough under the blanket, and that's how it gets its first rise! Yes, Ora would prattle on, and they'd all laugh warmly and wonder how the Russian woman had picked out Ora as a sucker even in the middle of a storm. They'd make fun of the old lady with the dough and tease her about her other patients and her job in general, which they found slightly odd: "You just come up to a total stranger and start prodding them?" And the little flame she lit would start curling and burning, and they would be warm and happy. "Do you understand what I'm getting at? Do you see the picture, or am I just ..."

He nods, fascinated. Maybe he did see a thing or two in his pub after all, she thinks, or at the Indian restaurant. Or just walking the streets, or on the beach. Maybe he didn't give up those eyes of his after all. Maybe he noticed and watched, and peeked and eavesdropped, and collected it all inside. Yes, that's just like him, a detective gathering evidence for a crime of extraordinary scale-the human race.

"And after that everything's all right, we're all totally there, and we laugh and jab and talk. The three of them are sharp, witty, cynical, and horribly macabre, just like you and Ilan were." This fills Avram with sadness, perhaps because he can also sense what she is not disclosing: she always has the feeling that something in the conversation is beyond her grasp, that a subliminal lightning bolt has flashed between them but she hears only the thunder that follows. When the food arrives, the buzz of commerce begins, and that's what she likes most. Plates and bowls and spoonfuls are pa.s.sed from hand to hand, forks peck at one another's dishes, the four of them compare, savor tastes, criticize, and offer to share. A canopy of generosity and delight spreads above them, and this, finally, is the quiet, honeyed moment, her portion of happiness. She follows the conversation only superficially now. The conversation is not the main point-it's even a distraction. She thinks they're poking fun at themselves, at the dishes soaring back and forth like flying saucers, and at what the people at the other tables must think of them. Or else they're discussing the army, or some new CD. What difference does it make? The point is this moment: embraced.

"That sucks," she heard Ofer say to Adam. "We spent the whole summer killing flies in Nebi Musa, and it turns out we killed the weak ones, so we created a generation of resistant flies, and now their genetics are much stronger." They laughed. They both have lovely teeth, Ora thought. Adam described the rats that run freely around the kitchen at his reserve duty unit. Ofer struck back with a winning card: a fox, maybe even a rabid one, had infiltrated his crew's room while people were dozing and stolen a whole cake out of someone's backpack. They spoke in loud, deep voices, as they always do when they talk about the army. "But that might also be because Ofer's ears are always full of dust and grease," she explains to Avram. Ora and Ilan laughed and laughed, delighted, and gobbled down pieces of herb bread. Their role here was clear: they represented the sufficiently blurry background, the sounding board against which their children repeatedly declared their maturity and independence, and from which their declaration echoed back to the children themselves, at every age, so that they could finally believe in it. The boys changed the topic to accidents, big and small. There was practically a permanent order to these conversations, Ora realizes now, an organized, gradual escalation. Adam told them about how when he started his service in the Armored Corps, one of the commanders had demonstrated what could happen to a tank driver who got stuck in the gun's side traverse. He set a wooden crate on the hull, rotated the gun sideways, and showed how the barrel shattered the crate, "which is exactly what could happen to anyone who steps out of a tank without coordinating," Adam cautioned his younger brother, and Ora felt a chill.

"We have this soldier," Ofer said, "poor guy, a real screwup, he's the company's punching bag-everyone who walks past him gives him a punch. About a month ago, in a camouflage drill, he fell off the tank and his arm swelled up. So they sent him to rest in the DT"-the "discipline tent," he begrudgingly translated when he saw Ora's look-"and there an antenna fell on his head and cracked it open." Ilan and Ora exchanged quick glances of horror, but they knew they must not respond to the story with a single word. Anything they said, any concerned expression, would be met with mockery ("skirt on the left," Adam liked to warn Ofer against Ora), but Adam and Ofer of course picked up on their glances, and everyone got what they wanted, and now, once the foundations were laid, once the parents had been duly enlightened about the many and varied dangers from which they could no longer protect their sons, Ofer told them casually that the suicide bomber who had blown himself up two weeks earlier at the central bus station in Tel Aviv, killing four civilians, had probably pa.s.sed through his roadblock-meaning, the roadblock his battalion was responsible for.

Ilan asked guardedly if they knew when exactly the terrorist had gone through, and whether anyone was holding Ofer's battalion responsible. Ofer explained that there was no way to tell who was on s.h.i.+ft when he'd gone through, and that he could have been carrying a new kind of explosive that was impossible to detect at the roadblock. Ora was dumbstruck, unable to speak. Ilan swallowed and said, "You know what? I'm glad he blew himself up in Tel Aviv and not on you at the roadblock." Ofer was outraged: "But, Dad, that's my job! I stand there precisely so they'll blow themselves up on me and not in Tel Aviv."

And Ora-what was she doing at that moment? Her memory is hazy, she cannot reconstruct it. All she remembers is that she suddenly felt hollow, a sh.e.l.l of herself. There was something stuck in her mouth, probably pine nutstudded rye bread dipped in walnut pesto. Ofer and Adam were already deep in conversation about a soldier they both knew, who on parents' day at the end of training had come up to a strange couple with his arms outstretched and shouted, "Mom, Dad, don't you recognize me?" Ofer and Adam, and probably Ilan too, rolled around laughing, and Ora sat with her mouth half open while nymphlike waitresses hovered around the tables and whispered: "How is everything?" And two weeks ago a terrorist packed with explosives had walked right past Ofer, and that was Ofer's job: he stood there precisely so that terrorists would blow themselves up on him and not in Tel Aviv.

Then Ofer turned very serious, and he told Adam and Ilan about his stint in Hebron during the past week. He wasn't allowed to talk about it, but he could give them the gist. The battalion was sent there to wage a campaign to eliminate wanted men in the kasbah-Ora was no longer really listening to him; she'd been transported-something they hadn't done before and which had never been one of their duties. They commandeered a whole building to use as a lookout post, and locked up the residents in one apartment. "We actually treated them really well," he said and gave her a sideways glance, but she was no longer there. Had she been listening, perhaps she could have changed something. Or perhaps not. And then-how did the conversation end up there? Only in retrospect, through a supreme effort that lasted weeks and months, was she able to piece together the fragments of that conversation into an approximate tapestry of the entire evening. Ofer asked Adam to explain something about the procedure for arresting a suspect, but here too she heard only fragments. You yell three times, in Hebrew and in Arabic, "Stop! Who's there?" And then three times, "Stop or I'll shoot" (Adam). "Wakef wa'la batukhak" "Wakef wa'la batukhak" (Ofer). And then you c.o.c.k your weapon and aim at sixty degrees through the sight (Ofer again?). And then you shoot (Adam). The music of their voices, Ora dimly noticed, sounded exactly like it did when they used to study for Adam's grammar exams together, when Adam was the teacher and Ofer the student. "You aim for the legs, yeah, knees-down, static, through the sight, and if he doesn't stop, you go for the center of the body ma.s.s and you shoot to kill." Ofer sheepishly admits that he doesn't remember what that "ma.s.s" is, exactly. Adam scolds: "Didn't you learn any physics at school?" Ofer says, "Yes, but where is it on a person?" Adam scoffs: "When I was in the Territories they told us, 'Shoot between their nipples.'" Ofer said, "At my last target practice, I shot the dummy in the stomach, and the P.C. goes, 'I told you to aim for the knees!' So I say, 'But, sir, won't he go down this way, too?'" They both laughed, and Ofer threw Ora a cautious glance. He knew she didn't like that kind of joke. Adam, who also knew, grinned and said, "Some soldiers are convinced that the Arabs walk around with bull's-eyes on their faces, just like in practice." (Ofer). And then you c.o.c.k your weapon and aim at sixty degrees through the sight (Ofer again?). And then you shoot (Adam). The music of their voices, Ora dimly noticed, sounded exactly like it did when they used to study for Adam's grammar exams together, when Adam was the teacher and Ofer the student. "You aim for the legs, yeah, knees-down, static, through the sight, and if he doesn't stop, you go for the center of the body ma.s.s and you shoot to kill." Ofer sheepishly admits that he doesn't remember what that "ma.s.s" is, exactly. Adam scolds: "Didn't you learn any physics at school?" Ofer says, "Yes, but where is it on a person?" Adam scoffs: "When I was in the Territories they told us, 'Shoot between their nipples.'" Ofer said, "At my last target practice, I shot the dummy in the stomach, and the P.C. goes, 'I told you to aim for the knees!' So I say, 'But, sir, won't he go down this way, too?'" They both laughed, and Ofer threw Ora a cautious glance. He knew she didn't like that kind of joke. Adam, who also knew, grinned and said, "Some soldiers are convinced that the Arabs walk around with bull's-eyes on their faces, just like in practice."

And now here she is with them again. She's back. The temporary fault in her brain has been fixed. She had experienced some sort of electrical short when Ofer said, "But, Dad, that's my job! I stand there precisely so they'll blow themselves up on me and not in Tel Aviv." She laughs with them, laughs despite herself, laughs because the three of them are laughing and she can't afford to stay outside their circle of laughter. But something is not right. She looks helplessly from Ilan to Ofer to Adam and back. Something smells funny, and she laughs nervously and tries to figure out whether they can detect it, too. At the moment of the electrical short, she saw something: a picture, a real one, completely tangible, of someone who came running in from outside, from the fields, jumped up on the table, pulled down his pants, crouched down between them, and dumped a huge stinking pile of s.h.i.+t among the dishes and gla.s.ses. And they kept on talking as if nothing had happened, her guys, and everyone at the other tables was behaving normally too, and the nymphs fluttered and chirped, "How is everything? Is everything okay?" Yet something did not make sense to her, and everyone else seemed to have pa.s.sed a course on how to act in this situation, when your son tells you something like, "But, Dad, that's my job! I stand there precisely so they'll blow themselves up on me and not in Tel Aviv," and it turns out that she's missed a lot of cla.s.ses, and the air in the restaurant suddenly becomes unbearably hot, and now she realizes what happened, she feels the signs coming closer, and she starts to drip with sweat. She's had these kinds of attacks before. It's purely physical, it's nothing, just hot flashes, the rampages of menopause. It's completely beyond her control, a little intifada of the body. It happened at the ceremony after the advanced training course, in the parade courtyard at Latrun, when the formation pa.s.sed by a huge wall covered with thousands of names of fallen soldiers; and at a fire demonstration in Nebi Musa to which the parents were invited; and on two or three other occasions. Once her nose bled, another time she threw up, and once she cried hysterically. And now-she laughs nervously-now she thinks she's going to have diarrhea, and it's entirely possible that she won't even make it to the bathroom, it's that bad, and she clenches and constricts her body, even her face is strained. How can they not notice what's happening to her? She looks weakly from one to the other as they talk. It's good for them to laugh: Go ahead, laugh, she thinks, let out the week's tension. But inside her body the systems are collapsing. She is a sh.e.l.l containing only fluids. She is a coconut. Maybe they are actors? Maybe her family has been switched? Her heart pounds. How can they not hear it? How can they not hear her heart? Loneliness closes in on her. The bas.e.m.e.nt loneliness of childhood. It's so hot in here, I swear, it's like they turned on all the ovens and shut all the windows. And it stinks. Horribly. She practically gags. She has to pull herself together, and most important, she must not show them anything, not ruin this wonderful, happy evening. They're having such a good time, it's so fun here, and she's not going to ruin it for them with the stupid nonsense coming from her body, which has suddenly turned bleeding heart on her. One more minute and she'll have everything under control, it's just a matter of willpower. She just has to not think about the severity and the responsibility and the gravity with which he said, "But, Dad, that's my job!" And now, right in front of Ilan and Adam and Ofer's laughing faces, oh G.o.d, it's coming back, he's here again, in this soft lighting, among the dainty dragonflies-"How is everything? Is everything cool?"-there he is, jumping right up on the table with both feet and dumping a huge pile of s.h.i.+t, and a terrifying wave rises inside her, one second from now she'll have no more room in her body, it will burst out of her mouth, her eyes, her nostrils, and she desperately closes everything off, scurries among the treacherous orifices, and all she can think about is the relief of that guy, the immense, scandalous relief of the lowlife who jumped onto the table with two solid legs, and just like that, among the little white dishes and the delicate winegla.s.ses and the napkins and the dark bottles of wine and the asparagus spears, simply crouched down and shat out a huge, steaming pile of radioactive stench. And Ora struggles with all her might to uproot her gaze from the center of the table, from the huge naked fiend smiling at her with excremental seduction-he isn't, he isn't here, but he's about to split her open-wait for me! she chirps with charming sweetness and pursed lips, and flits away.

A long time ago, at the beginning of Ofer's service in the Territories ("This is parenthetical," she tells Avram. "It has nothing to do with that evening in the restaurant"), they were living in Ein Karem, and she heard a strange sound from the steps that led from the back of the house down to the garden. She followed the sound to the edge of the garden and saw Ofer sitting there, wearing shorts and an army s.h.i.+rt-he was on leave-carving a beautiful stick with his penknife. She asked what it was, and he looked up at her with his ironic, arched eyebrows and said, "What does it look like?"

"Like a rounded stick."

He smiled. "It's a club. Club, meet Mom. Mom, meet club."

"What do you need a club for?"

Ofer laughed and said, "To beat up little foxes." Ora asked if the army didn't give him weapons to protect himself with, and he said, "Not clubs, and clubs are what we need most, they're the most efficient weapon in our situation." She said that scared her, and he said, "But what's wrong with a club, Mom? It's minimal use of force."

Ora, with uncharacteristic cynicism, asked if they had an acronym for that, "MUF, or something."

"But clubs prevent violence, Mom! They don't create it."

"Even so, allow me to feel bad when I see my son sitting here making himself a club."

Ofer said nothing. "He usually avoids getting into these arguments with me," she tells Avram. "He could never be bothered with that kind of talk, always said politics just didn't interest him." He was doing his job and that's that, and when he got out, when everything was done, he promised her he would think over exactly what had happened.

He kept on smoothing the stick until it was completely round. Ora stood over him, at the top of the steps, and hypnotically watched his skilled hands at work. "He had wonderful hands. You should see some of the things he's made. A round dining table. And the bed he made for us."

Ofer wrapped elastic webbing around the head of the stick. Ora went down and asked to touch it. For some reason it was important to her to touch it, to feel what it's like when it strikes you-"a black, rigid, unpleasant sort of fabric," she reports to Avram, and he swallows and looks out into the distance-and Ofer added more brown binding around the stick itself, and then the club was ready, and that's when he made the move move. She shows Avram how Ofer hit his open palm with the club three times to a.s.sess its strength, to appraise its hidden force. And he played around with it, like someone would with a dangerous animal whose training has only just begun. "That was a bad moment, when I saw Ofer sitting there whittling a club. And it was important to me that you know about that."

Avram nods to confirm that he has accepted this too from her.

"Where was I?"

"Hugs," he reminds her, "and that restaurant." He likes the way she asks "Where was I?" every so often. A sloppy, dreamy, distracted young girl peers out of her face when she does.

Ora sighs. "Yes. We were celebrating Adam's birthday, and the truth is we didn't even think they'd both be home that Shabbat until the last minute. Adam was on reserve duty in the Bik'ah, and Ofer was in Hebron and wasn't supposed to get out for the weekend, but they let him go at the last minute, there was a vehicle leaving for Jerusalem, and he got home late and was exhausted. He even nodded off during dinner a couple of times. He'd had a hard week, we later learned, and he was so tired he barely knew where he was."

Avram looks at her expectantly.

"It was a lovely evening," she says, skipping tactfully over the sudden indigestion that meant she ate almost nothing the whole meal. "And then I wanted us all to toast Adam," she continues in the same tense voice, hoping she has managed to establish for Avram the fact of Ofer's abysmal exhaustion, his main line of defense in the inquiries and questionings held afterward, and in his endless arguments with her. "We always have a little toasting ritual when we're celebrating something ..."

She hesitates again: All these family affairs of ours, all our little rituals, do they pain you? His eyes signal back to her: Go on, go on already.

"Normally, Adam never let us toast him. We weren't allowed to do that in public, where strangers could hear. He's so much like Ilan that way."

Avram smiles. "G.o.d forbid you might be overheard by all those people who booked tables months in advance so they could eavesdrop on you?"

"Exactly. But that evening Adam said yes, though only if Ofer would do it. Ilan and I quickly said, 'Fine,' we were so surprised he'd agreed at all. And I thought I'd give him my toast later, when I was alone with him, or I'd write it for him. I always used to write birthday wishes for him, to all of them actually, because I think, I thought, that these occasions were an opportunity to sum things up, or to summarize a period, and I knew he kept my cards-Hey, have you noticed we're really talking now?"

"So I hear."

"We'll have to hike the whole country three times to fit everything in."

"That's not a bad idea."

She says nothing.

"Where was I?" Avram says a while later instead of her, and replies, "The restaurant. Ofer's toast."

"Oh, the birthday."

She sinks back into her thoughts. That weekend, those final moments of the careful, fragile happiness. And she realizes what she's been doing here all these days: reciting a eulogy for the family that once was, that will never be again.

"So Ofer leaned his head between his hands and thought quietly for a few minutes. He wasn't in any hurry. He's always a little slower than Adam. In general, there's something heavier, more solid about him, his movements, his speech, even his appearance. Usually strangers who see them both think he's older than Adam. And it was so nice, the way he treated Adam's request so seriously.

"Then he said that first of all he wanted to say how happy he was to be Adam's little brother, and how in the last few years, since he'd started going to Adam's high school, and even more once he joined the battalion where Adam had served, he was getting to know Adam through all the other people who knew him-teachers, soldiers, officers. At first it got on his nerves the way everyone kept calling him Adam by mistake, and treating him as just Adam's little brother, but now ..."

"Seriously," Ofer said in his slow, raspy, deep voice, "people are always coming up to me and talking about you-what a great guy you are, what a good friend, and how you always took the initiative. Everyone knows your jokes, and everyone in the battalion has a story about how you helped him, how you cheered him up when he was b.u.mmed out-"

"This is Adam?" Avram asks carefully. "You're talking about Adam, right?"

"Yes, we were also intrigued by this new side of him. Ilan even joked that Ofer was recklessly destroying the reputation Adam had spent years building up at home."

"Or like the bingo you invented," Ofer told Adam with a giggle, "which is still named after you at school."

"What's that?" Ilan interrupted.

"You pick seven words that are totally unlikely for a teacher to say in cla.s.s. Like 'pizza,' or 'belly dancer,' or 'Eskimo.' And when cla.s.s starts, everyone has the words written down in front of them, and they have to ask the teacher questions that sound all innocent, like they have something to do with the material, so that the teacher himself, without knowing it, says all the words."

Ilan leaned forward with a glimmer in his eye and slowly interlaced his fingers. "And the teacher doesn't know anything about it, of course."

"Not a thing." Adam smiled. "He's just happy to see the students suddenly so interested in his boring cla.s.s."

"Ha!" Ilan said and looked admiringly at Adam. "I've raised a real snake."

Adam bowed his head modestly, and Ofer said, smiling at Ilan, "An 'inventional spark,' don't you think?" Ilan confirmed this, and b.u.mped his shoulder against Ofer's. Ora still didn't get the rules of the game, and she didn't like what she did understand. She was impatient to get back to what Ofer had started saying to Adam.

"And who wins?" asked Ilan.

"Whoever makes the teacher say the most words from the list."

Ilan nodded. "Okay. Give me an example of how you get him to say a word."

"But Ofer was in the middle of telling Adam something," Ora reminded them.

"Hang on, Mom," Ofer said cheerfully, "this is super cool. Go on, gimme a word."

"You pick one," said Adam.

"But don't let me hear it, I'm the teacher!" Ilan laughed.

The boys leaned in, whispered, laughed, and nodded.

"But it's a history lesson," Adam said, adding a twist.

"Then we'll do the Dreyfus affair," Ilan decided. "I still remember that one a bit."

Ilan launched into an account of the French Jewish officer accused of treason, and Ofer and Adam bombarded him with questions. He talked about the trial, about the silencing of Dreyfus's defenders, about the conviction. They were more interested in Dreyfus's family, its customs, its dress and food. Ilan stuck to his lecture and avoided all the traps. Theodor Herzl showed up in the audience at Dreyfus's public humiliation. The boys' questions grew more frequent. Ora leaned back and watched, and the three of them felt her watching them and picked up the speed. Dreyfus was imprisoned and exiled to Devil's Island, Emile Zola wrote his J'accuse! J'accuse!, Esterhazy was captured and convicted, Dreyfus was released, but the boys were more interested in Herzl. Der Judenstaat Der Judenstaat was published, and then came Herzl's meetings with the Turkish Sultan and the German Kaiser. Ilan leaned forward and licked his lips. His eyes sparkled. The boys salivated on either side of him like two young wolves closing in on a buffalo. Ora found herself swept up in the excitement, though she was entirely unsure whom she wanted to win. Her heart was with the boys, but something about the wild enthusiasm on their faces made her crumple, and she felt compa.s.sion for the new, scant grayness gradually emerging on Ilan's temples. The First Zionist Congress convened in Basel, was published, and then came Herzl's meetings with the Turkish Sultan and the German Kaiser. Ilan leaned forward and licked his lips. His eyes sparkled. The boys salivated on either side of him like two young wolves closing in on a buffalo. Ora found herself swept up in the excitement, though she was entirely unsure whom she wanted to win. Her heart was with the boys, but something about the wild enthusiasm on their faces made her crumple, and she felt compa.s.sion for the new, scant grayness gradually emerging on Ilan's temples. The First Zionist Congress convened in Basel, Altneuland Altneuland was published, Britain offered the Zionists a state on a large piece of land in Uganda-"'a land that will be beneficial for the health of whites,'" Ilan quoted, recalling his high school days-and Adam wondered what things would have been like had the offer been accepted: all of Africa would have been stricken with frenetic zeal had the Jews gone there and started stirring things up with their hyperactive nervousness. Ilan added, "And you can be sure that within sixty seconds there would already be deep-seated anti-Semitism." was published, Britain offered the Zionists a state on a large piece of land in Uganda-"'a land that will be beneficial for the health of whites,'" Ilan quoted, recalling his high school days-and Adam wondered what things would have been like had the offer been accepted: all of Africa would have been stricken with frenetic zeal had the Jews gone there and started stirring things up with their hyperactive nervousness. Ilan added, "And you can be sure that within sixty seconds there would already be deep-seated anti-Semitism."

Ofer laughed. "And then we'd have had to occupy Tanzania."

"And Kenya and Zambia!"

"Of course, just to protect ourselves from their hatred."

"And teach them to love Israel and give them a little Yiddishkeit Yiddishkeit with chicken soup!" Adam rolled around laughing. with chicken soup!" Adam rolled around laughing.

"Not to mention gefilte fish," Ilan snickered, and the boys jumped up and cheered: "Bingo!"

The main courses arrived. Ora remembers every dish. Adam had steak tenderloin, Ilan ordered the goose leg, and Ofer got steak tartare. She remembers her gaze being drawn to Ofer's raw meat; she missed the vegetarian Ofer. In the weeks and months that followed, during the sleepless nights and nightmarish days when she replayed the events of that evening, minute by minute, she often wondered what really went through Ofer's mind when he ate the steak, or during that game of bingo, and whether he honestly did not remember anything-after all, they had talked about occupation and hatred and had even mentioned locking up people and releasing them, and there was even something about silencing. How could it be that not a single alarm bell had sounded in him? How had he not picked up even the vaguest a.s.sociation between all of that and, say, an old man with his mouth gagged, trapped in a meat locker in the cellar of a house in Hebron?

"He was just really tired," she states apropos of nothing. "His eyes were half closed and he could barely hold his head up. He hadn't slept for two whole days, and he'd had three beers, too. But somehow the game and the joking around kept him up."

There was a moment, she thinks, when it seemed as if he remembered. He suddenly asked for Adam's phone and wanted to call the army. She can see it: he held the phone in his hand. His eyebrows moved. His forehead was strained. He was trying to gather something in through the tiredness. But then he saw the screen and got excited about some new function he'd never seen before, and Adam demonstrated it for him.

"Ofer, you didn't finish toasting Adam," Ora said.

"You're off the hook," said Adam and started to devour his steak.

"No fair!" Ora pleaded. "He hasn't said anything yet!"

"Only if he wants to," Adam said. "And no violins!"

Ofer turned serious again. His face softened and hardened intermittently. His chiseled, generous lips, Avram's lips, moved unconsciously. He put down his fork. Ora noticed the exchange of amused glances between Adam and Ilan: Watch out, their eyes said, get your handkerchiefs ready.

Then Ofer spoke. "The truth is, I don't even know how I would get along in life without your help, and without the way you took care of me in all kinds of bad situations that Mom and Dad don't even know about."

That was surprising. Ora perked up, and so did Ilan. "Because we only knew the opposite situation, where Ofer took care of Adam. And he suddenly opened up a whole world we'd never known, but which I'd always somehow hoped did exist, you know? Do you understand?"

Avram nods vigorously. His lower lip surrounds his whole mouth.

"And I saw Adam lower his gaze, and he got this kind of flush on his neck, and I knew that it was true."

"And I think," Ofer continued, "that there's no one else in the world who knows me like you do, knows all my most private stuff, and who always, from the minute I was born, did only good things for me."

Adam did not comment or crack a joke. Ora felt that he really wanted her and Ilan to hear these things.