“Tell me,” I almost shout at Oded, “do you also think that suffering is more real than happiness? That happiness is only a momentary relief from suffering? No more than that?”
“After Mitzpe Jericho take a right. There should be a sign for Nebi Musa.”
“As if you put something heavy on someone, say a suitcase, and then lift it,” I say.
“Or as if someone is dying of thirst and then you give him water,” replies my husband. “Pay attention now, here’s the sign.”
There’s a certain movement on the back seat. I don’t look in the mirror. My eyes are on the road. A turn right, and we’re on a dirt track. We pass a white-domed building. A big pothole yawns in the road, the Defender takes it in its stride. The headlamps illuminate a black tent, the sliver of moon right over it.
“You know how to distinguish the new moon from the moon at the end of the month?” our tour guide asks in a loud voice. “I’m sure Elinor knows, it’s a trick for people who know Hebrew. You add a little line at the top, if it comes out like the letter ‘gimmel,’ the first letter of the word ‘gorea,’ diminish, it means it’s the end.”
The car jumps over bumps in the ground. The road is becoming more and more rocky. Our car is big and strong and high. It skips over mountains and leaps over hills like a roller coaster. The movement is liberating, and only the bundle in the back oppresses.
A jackal runs across the road. Not a jackal. Probably a dog. Another dark animal emerges from nowhere, a meter in front of us, and freezes. I brake, and the second dog disappears in the wake of the first. The dirt track twists and turns. The path disappears for a moment and then appears again. We cross some kind of bridge. Pass concrete huts. Suddenly a clear desert plain in front of us.
“Not good. A military training ground. Turn around here,” says Oded, and we go back a little. “Take a right. Now left.” My salt of the earth in the middle of the desert. “Give it more gas.” We’re almost at the top of the ridge, opposite us, a little to the left is an escarpment. “Okay. The Kidron River. We can stop here.”
I turn off the ignition and leave the lights on. Whistling sounds of breathing spoil the silence. “Thirty six degrees tomorrow in Jerusalem, forty at the Dead Sea,” says Oded, and the artificial sentence is swallowed up in a genuine yawn. The whistling breather swallows all the oxygen in the car, and others have to yawn in order to get their share of air.
“Okay,” repeats Oded, this time as if to himself. And then again: “Okay, I think we’ve reached the emergency room. Elinor, you stay in the car.”
Not-man says that he doesn’t need the emergency room, he doesn’t want the emergency room. “Your sister,” he says, “your sister Elisheva forgave me. She wrote me a letter. I can show you. I have it in writing.”
Oded gets out of the car, leaving the door open, and from outside he opens the other door. “Come on, professor, out.”
Once more there are sounds of movement in the back, and I am still holding the steering wheel when the voice pleads: “But there’s no need: I understand that it was an accident. I won’t complain.”
“Out.”
My husband and Not-man stand in front of the Defender. I get out of the car. All the police procedurals I’ve ever seen go into action fast. “Empty your pockets,” says my super-cop. “All of them, please.” A handkerchief, notebook, cell phone, hotel-room key and old-fashioned leather wallet are piled on the hood. Oded wraps the handkerchief around his hand, picks up the cell phone, and throws it like a pro into the wadi.
“But listen to me, I swear by all that’s holy to me. .”
“Calm down, we’re only going to talk. So just relax and put your things back in your pockets. You really think I would harm my wife’s only uncle? Does that sound logical to you?” I’m sure I heard something similar in a movie. Where did I hear it?
“I swear to you that I’ve forgiven. .”
“Let’s go. It’s time to talk.”
My husband guides him in the direction of the escarpment of the wadi. He keeps a few steps behind him, without touching. “Go on.” A winding goat track, hardly a path at all. A stone is dislodged when Not-man begins the descent, and he lets out a hoarse cry.
“Keep going.”
The beam of the headlights catches a bush and stones and a body sinking slowly, step by step, into the wadi. The legs, the torso, and finally the head.
Only when the First Person has completely disappeared, Oded begins climbing down after him. Again the sound of tumbling stones, this time a lot of them: one stone dislodging another. I go closer to the edge. The silhouettes creep with unreal slowness. At moments they seem to be standing still, but at no moment does the figure bringing up the rear send out its hand to touch the one in front. And all the time I watch to make sure that it is not sent. The pounding in my chest cries out for the movement to be speeded up. The pounding that rises to my ears refuses to adapt itself to the slowness of the scene, but I am patient and even my accelerated heartbeat does not urge Oded to hurry: to speed things up and bring them to an end he would have to touch, and come what may, on no account do I want my husband to touch him.
When the silhouettes vanish behind a dark fold in the ground, I remain where I am, and only when Oded reappears, climbing up easily toward me, do I return to the car, because at last it’s okay to hurry.
— 11 -
“Should I drive?”
“No, let me.”
Risen from the darkness, bending forward, my husband directs me back to the main road. Even though I didn’t have a clue about the way, I anticipated most of his directions, as if I had heard them even before he opened his mouth, and at the same time I was glad of every word he said, simply because of the fact that he was speaking. He was sweating as if he had been running, but he didn’t smell strange, and his clipped instructions, “pay attention, right turn coming up,” or “straight ahead,” sounded normal. Oded is always short and to the point when he’s giving directions, and like our sons, he too doesn’t tolerate being spoken to or distracted when he’s concentrating.
If there had been any other vehicle on the road we would have seen its lights from far in the distance. We didn’t see any lights, and there was no reason to imagine that any of the Bedouin we passed would be interested in our doings, yet it was obvious that our first priority was to get out of there in a hurry.
A new time was born. Events were still too pressing and urgent for my mind to take in the breadth of the grace, but even as I hurried forward I knew with a certain knowledge that there would be time for the two of us to talk: even if a shadow had coiled itself around us, I would not rest until I had undone it knot by knot. Limitless expanses of patience would be granted me in the new time.
Oded didn’t make a single mistake. Even before the air-conditioner had time to cool the car we were at the junction, and I negotiated it with the greatest possible care. I hadn’t driven so carefully since our sons were small and everything dear to me was inside the car. I was careful of myself too then, when they were babies, simply because they needed me so much. From the minute I started driving back from the wadi, I became aware that the frightening feeling of the fragility of the body had returned, and that I could no longer take any pleasure in the capricious leaps of the car.
When we reached the bridge of light of the expressway, Oded leaned back. “Good, so he won’t be publishing his novel now. I don’t want to think about what that book would have done to your sister.” His voice sounded hollow under its armor, and that boastful, contemptuous sentence—“so he won’t be publishing his novel now”—still seemed like something I had once heard in a movie.