To the End of the Land (46 page)

“Good?” She glances at him from the side. She hasn’t heard that word from him for a long time.

“Young people.
Shanti.
”

“Go on, go on,” she murmurs, heroically passing a plaque with a poem by Moshe Tabenkin, where a moustached tour guide stands reading it out loud to a group of tourists. They must all be deaf, Ora thinks angrily and speeds up; he’s practically yelling. The mountains echo back to her:

Our boy was—like a pine in the woodlands
.

Was—a fig tree putting forth its figs
.

Our boy was—a myrtle of dense roots
.

Was the most fiery of poppies—

“Well, go on,” she gripes. “Why did you stop?”

Avram, rapidly: “The whole restaurant is really one big room, like a very wide hall, with no interior walls, just support pillars. It’s a pretty run-down building.” He describes the place with a furrowed brow, like someone delivering extremely important testimony that has to be exhaustive and precise. She is grateful for the meticulous details, which take her away from here—from the marble square. The twenty-eight names are carved in stone, she remembers, and there’s a mass grave, too. She was on a school trip here once, when she was thirteen. The teacher stood facing them, wearing shorts, and read with a booming voice from a page: “Nebi Yusha was but a fortress on the road, and now it is a symbol for all times!” Ora had surreptitiously peeled a clementine on the marble square, and a teacher had yelled at her: “Show some respect for the fallen soldiers!” If only she could be that stupid and ignorant of sorrow today, to stand eating a clementine on the marble square. It’s good to get away from the news a bit, that man had said. Especially after yesterday. A scream kicks around inside her body, searching for a way out, and Avram, continuing his mission, takes her to a district of auto-repair shops, trucking companies, and massage parlors
in South Tel Aviv. He walks her up a crooked, dirty staircase. Starting on the second floor, there are rugs on the stairs and pictures on the walls, and the smell of incense. “And you walk in,” he says, and she suddenly remembers: Dudu was killed here. Dudu from the song:
In the Palmach, none could outdo / Our hero, our lost soldier, Dudu
. She racks her brain for a word that rhymes with Ofer.

“And inside”—Avram’s voice hovers somewhere out there in his little India—“the whole big room is covered with rugs, and there are lots of low tables, and you sit on big cushions. As soon as you walk in, at the far end opposite you, you see gas ranges with huge, charred pots. Mighty pots.”

They leave the fortress and Ora lets her breath out. She looks at Avram gratefully, and he shrugs his shoulders.

The words, she thinks dimly, they’re coming back to him.

“You’ll laugh, but I’m the oldest one there,” he says.

“No kidding,” she mumbles, stealing a look back at the fortress. “Come on, let’s cross the road here.”

“I swear,” he chuckles, shrugging one shoulder as if apologizing for some trick played on him long ago, in the years when she was absent from his life. “The owner is all of twenty-nine, and the cook is maybe twenty-five. All the others, too. Sweet kids.”

Ora feels somehow robbed—why is he so excited about a few kids he barely knows?

“They’re all graduates of India. I’m the only one who hasn’t been. But I already know everything as if I’ve been there. And they don’t fire anyone at this place. There’s no such thing as firing.”

They walk among hedgerows of fleshy prickly pears, past a large tomb with domes on its roof and trees growing out of its walls. Blankets and mats are scattered around the large chambers that look out onto the Hula Valley, and there are a few empty dishes, left from offerings brought by the faithful to Nebi Yusha—Yehoshua Ben Nun.

“Some of the people who work there couldn’t get a job anywhere else.”

People like him, she thinks. She tries to picture him there. The oldest one, he’d said with real surprise, as if that were utterly improbable. As though they were still twenty-two years old, and everything else was a mistake. She sees him among those sweet young people, with his heaviness and his bulky slowness, with his big head and long, thinning hair hanging down on either side. Like some exiled, downfallen professor, forlorn and ridiculous at the same time. But the fact that they never fire anyone reassures her.

“And they don’t give you a check at the end of your meal.”

“So how do you know how much to pay?”

“You go up to the register and tell them what you ate.”

“And they believe you?”

“Yes.”

“What if I cheated?”

“Then you probably had no choice.”

“Are you serious?” A little light goes on inside her. “Is there really such a place?”

“I’m telling you.”

“Take me there, now!”

He laughs. She laughs.

“The walls are covered with big photos that someone took in India or Nepal. They change them every so often. And on the side, near the bathroom, there are three washing machines running constantly. Free, for whoever needs them. While people eat, some guys and girls go around offering treatments, Reiki and acupressure and shiatsu and reflexology. And soon, when the renovations are done, I’ll start working in the sweets.”

“Working in the sweets …” she echoes.

The picture suddenly picks up speed. She sees him darting around, clearing tables, taking out the trash, vacuuming, lighting candles and incense sticks. She is fascinated by his movements, his swiftness, his lightness. “Avram FSF,” as he used to introduce himself to new girls, with a flourish and a bow: fat, speedy, and flexible.

“And whoever wants to can smoke. Anything, no problem.”

“You, too?” She laughs nervously—she can’t see the fortress anymore, but she suddenly feels as if they’re running, as if the path is pulling them too quickly to Jerusalem, to home, to the notice that might be waiting there for her with the calm patience of an assassin. I’ll go back—it flickers in her—and there’ll be death notices up on the street. On the utility poles. Next to the grocery store. I’ll know from a distance.

“Go on, tell me.” She turns to Avram in a panic. “I want to hear!”

“Well, nothing heavy, mostly joints.” His hand habitually pats the non-pocket on his chest. “Sometimes a hash blunt, some E, acid, if there’s any going around, nothing serious.” He looks at her and smiles. “Do you still uphold the Scouts’ commands?”

“I was in the Machanot Olim, not the Scouts,” she reminds him drily. “Forget it, I’m afraid of those things.”

“Ora, you’re running again.”

“Me? It’s you.”

He laughs. “You suddenly get these … You start running ahead as if God knows what is chasing you.”

To their left, the Hula Valley grows steamier as the heat increases. Their faces are red, burning with effort and warmth, they drip with sweat, and even speech is tiring. On the side of the road, at the foot of an old olive tree, lies a huge, fancy chandelier. Avram counts twenty-one crystals, all intact, connected with stylish thin glass pipes. “Who threw this here?” he wonders. “Who throws out something like that? It’s too bad we can’t take it.” He crouches down and examines the chandelier. “Good stuff.” He tilts his head and laughs softly, and Ora questions him with her eyebrows. Avram says: “Look at it. What does it remind you of?” She stares and doesn’t see anything. “Doesn’t it look like some sort of ballerina? Like an insulted prima donna?” Ora smiles. “It does.” Avram stands up. “It’s shimmering with insult, hey? Look at it from here, wallowing in its tutu, I swear.” Ora laughs deeply. A forgotten pleasure gurgles into the corners of her eyes.

“And Ofer?” he asks later. “Does he take anything?”

“I don’t know. How can you know anything about them at this age? Adam, I think so. Here and there.”

Or most of the time, or all of it, she thinks. How could he not? With those guys he hangs out with, with his eyes, always bloodshot, and that bashed-up, bashing-up music. Oh God, what do I sound like? When did old age creep up on me like this?

“It’s too bad you didn’t take some weed from my place when you kidnapped me. You’d have seen what good stuff is.”

“So you keep it around at home?” She struggles to maintain a measured, enlightened voice and feels like a social worker interviewing a homeless guy.

“For personal use, what do you think? I grow it in a flower box. With the petunias.”

“Do you miss it now?”

“Let’s just say, it would have set me right, especially in the first few days.”

“And now?”

“Now I’m okay.” He sounds astonished. “Don’t need anything.”

“Really?” Her face lights up, her glasses glisten with happiness.

“But if there were any”—he quickly cools her excitement and puts her in her place; for a moment she looked as though she’d pulled off a rapid intervention plan straight out of a kids’ comic book—“if there were any, I wouldn’t say no.”

How far apart we’ve grown, she thinks. A whole life separates us. She imagines him in his restaurant again, circling among the low tables, clearing leftovers, joking with the customers, taking their banter with good spirits. She hopes they don’t mock him. She hopes he doesn’t seem pathetic to those young people. She tries to picture herself there.

“You take your shoes off before you go in,” he notes, as though guiding her.

She sits down on a cushion. She’s uncomfortable. Too upright, doesn’t know what to do with her hands. She smiles in
all directions. Her fakery rustles all around her. She wonders if she could have lived with Avram, in his apartment, in the meager neglect of his life. For some reason her thoughts adopt the guttural Mizrahi speech of the man they met in the riverbed. She thinks about his red checkered shirt. He looked like someone had dressed him up nicely this morning and sent him off on a hike. She sees the colorful woman’s glasses that dangled on his chest. Maybe they were not tasteless foppishness or a defiant pose, as she had thought, but a small private gesture? A gesture to a woman? She sighs softly and wonders if Avram had picked up on anything back there.

And without even noticing it, they’re having a conversation. Two people conversing as they walk on one path.

“On the army base in Sinai, there was an Ofer,” Avram muses. “Ofer Havkin. He was a special guy. Used to wander around the desert on his own, playing the violin for the birds, sleeping in caves. He wasn’t afraid of anything. A free spirit. And so all these years I thought Ilan had that Ofer in mind when you chose the name.”

Ora delights in the words that came out of his lips—“free spirit”—then says, “No, I was the one who chose it, because of the verse in Song of Songs:
‘My love is like a young hart’—Domeh dodi le’Ofer ayalim
. And I liked the way it sounds, too:
o-fer
. It’s soft.”

Avram silently repeats the name in Ora’s music, and then says quietly, reverently, “I could never give someone a name.”

“When it’s your own child, you’ll be able to,” she says—it just slips out, and they both fall silent.

The path is wide and comfortable. So many colors, she thinks, when all I saw at first was black and white and gray.

“I’m just curious, did you think of any names other than Ofer?”

“We thought of girls’ names too, because we didn’t know what we were having. I was convinced halfway through the pregnancy that it was a girl.”

A flock of birds alights inside Avram, noisily beating their wings: He had never thought of that possibility—a daughter!

“And what … Which names did you think of for a girl?”

“We thought of Dafna, and Ya’ara, or Ruti.”

“Just imagine …” He turns to face her. The bags under his eyes glow, and now he is entirely here, shining with life, and the pillar of fire he used to be is visible through his skin. Ofer is protected now, she senses, protected in the palms of two hands.

“A girl,” she says softly. “That would have made everything simpler, wouldn’t it?”

Avram expands his chest and takes a deep breath. “A girl” rocks him even more than “a daughter.”

They walk, each lost in thought, the path crunching beneath their feet. She thinks: Even the path suddenly has voices. How did I not hear anything all those days? Where was I?

“Didn’t you want to try again?” he asks bravely.

Ora replies simply that Ilan didn’t want to, because as it was, he said, with all the complications, we already had an excess of kids.

And parents, Avram thinks. “And you? Did you want to?”

Ora lets out a little bray of pain. “Me? Are you asking seriously? My whole life I’ve felt that I missed out terribly by not having a daughter.” After a moment’s hesitation she adds, “Because I always think a girl would have made us into a family.”

“But you … I mean, you already are …”

“Yes,” she says, “we were, absolutely, but still, that’s how I felt all these years. That if I had a daughter, if Adam and Ofer had a sister, it would give them so much, it would change them”—she outlines a circle with both hands—“and also, if I’d had a daughter, I think it would have strengthened me against them, the three of them, and maybe it would also have softened them a little toward me.”

Avram hears the words and does not understand their meaning. What is she giving him here?

“Because I’m alone,” she explains. “I wasn’t enough to soften them, and they turned so hard over time, especially toward me, and even more so recently. Hard and tough, the three of them.
Ofer, too,” she adds with some effort. “Listen, it’s really difficult to explain.”

“Difficult to explain to
me
, or in general?”

“In general, but especially to you.”

“Try.”

The insult in his voice is good, it’s a sign of life, but she can’t explain it, not yet. She’ll bring him in slowly. It’s painful to admit to him that even Ofer wasn’t tender with her. Instead of answering, she says, “I always thought that if I’d had a daughter, maybe I would have remembered what it was like to be me. The me from before everything that happened.”

Avram turns to face her. “I remember how you were.”