Asaaf slept late and spent afternoons tooling around on the tractor or strolling through the citrus groves. As he and Yael walked through the property, moshavniks popped up from the crops and congratulated him on his medal of valor. Asaaf had told my mother she was being ridiculous when she made a show of hanging it from the living room shelf, but out there he nodded humbly, thanking the workers, though later he told me they were fools if they believed medals meant anything. They’d never have known; he had a way of talking to people that made them feel both witty and important, and sometimes I wondered if I was the only one on earth who knew his other, judgmental side: repeating their words under his breath as we walked away, twisting their compliments into something crass and idiotic. I watched him and Yael zigzag through the squash and tomatoes and down to the dairy, and when he leaned in to kiss her, I felt my heart cave.
He’d always had girlfriends, but before Yael they’d been the kind who lounged inside on their cell phones rather than working in the fields. I’d known her for years — back in high school we used to ride the bus home together while Asaaf stayed after for track practice, sharing vending machine junk, playing cards and road games I knew were childish but liked because I usually won. It would be inaccurate to say I enjoyed those rides together, when I always felt both terrified and thrilled sitting beside her as the bus bumped through the valley. She was more serious than almost anyone I knew back then, as if she were constantly looking beyond school, our neighborhood, even the country. That she believed she deserved a different, better life than the people around her hadn’t even struck me as snobbish, simply because she made whomever she was talking to, myself included, feel as though we deserved it too. Still, whenever I was with her I felt as if I were on uneven ground, that I could say one stupid thing and she’d find someplace else to sit.
But that never happened, and those rides carried through to graduation, which was right around the time Asaaf noticed her. She’d never seemed his type — not just that she was always in sweats and flip-flops; more that she didn’t even seem to exist within the same orbit as the other girls he usually dated, the ones who threw as much of themselves into getting his attention as he did into winning the hundred-meter dash. But then he went for her, without a thought that I might be interested myself, and she surprised me by falling for him as quickly and gushingly as all the others. And just like that, our time together seemed blotted-out and forgotten, as she lay beside Asaaf on our sofa, watching TV at night, or scrambling eggs in the morning while he leaned against the counter in his boxers, swigging juice straight from the carton. But that wasn’t the worst part. It was that they actually made sense together. She made him nicer, he made her more relaxed, and together they were like some strong, unstoppable force, breezing through life on a sleek and glorious ship while the rest of us watched from the shore.
She was the one girlfriend of his my mother could stand, the one girl who helped around the house, the dairy, in the garden, sifting through the mud for nightcrawlers. That’s disgusting, Asaaf had said as the bugs skirted down her fingers and into the compost, but Yael shook her head. You see their pink bellies? They’re kind of beautiful, she said, and in her hands they actually were.
AND NOW, for the second time this week, I welcomed Asaaf back home. He was in a clean white t-shirt with the medical tag still dangling from his wrist, and my mother had to swerve his wheelchair around the driveway to avoid potholes. His face was the same — three days in the hospital hadn’t paled him — but his eyes were sleepy and red from the painkillers, and his left sweatpant leg was folded over neatly, like the flap of an envelope.
Asaaf squinted up at me as my mother ran back to the car for his duffel. “What are you looking at?”
“Nothing.” I wanted to stare at him for a long time, but looked at the ground instead.
He tried to tip himself back to get through the open screen door, but the wheels banged against the raised wood I only now noticed separated the porch from the kitchen. He grunted and pushed again, but the wheelchair didn’t budge. “Here,” I said, reaching for the arms, “let me help.” But he swatted my hand away, and for a minute I just stood there, listening to the wheels hit the threshold over and over.
Behind us, people trickled up the driveway, carrying foil-wrapped cookies and cakes. Dedy and the neighbors were here again, along with high school classmates Asaaf probably hadn’t thought about in years. I’d made a dozen family visits like this one — earlier this month, even, when a soldier from the moshav had been wounded in a raid on his base — and knew to wheel Asaaf to his room and stay out of the way while the guests lined up to see him. But every one of them came forward and slapped my back and asked about the drive — and as I stood beside his bed, the only thing stopping me from holding court all day was knowing I’d seem even more impressive if I didn’t.
As the crowd shuffled into his room I followed my mother, hoping to be of use. She moved quickly, making sure guests’ glasses were filled and then rushing outside to pull our good napkins and tablecloth from the clothesline. She’d always been this kind of worker, quick and impatient, and I saw it reflected throughout our house: in the sagging shelves filled with paperbacks and my father’s old Yehoram Gaon records; in the herbs she repotted in anything she could find, coffee cans or olive oil tins. It felt good working as a team, and for the first time she didn’t seem annoyed as I trailed behind her: handing me cucumbers to dice into a salad, asking me to drag over the picnic benches from the groves so there was enough seating in our yard.
When I checked on Asaaf, he was in bed with the guests all around him. His bandaged leg was propped on a pillow and hidden beneath a blanket. The shades were up, and his bedside table, which a few days ago had held gum wrappers and cigarettes and keys, was now cluttered with orange prescription bottles and rolls of gauze.
“It’s good it was below the knee,” Dedy, self-proclaimed expert on everything, was saying.
“Better for the prosthesis,” Yael said. She twisted her long dark hair into a braid and curled up beside Asaaf. I had no idea how she could seem so unfazed. Maybe it was hearing guns fired all day as a shooting instructor in the army, or maybe she was just tougher than I’d thought.
“And that won’t be a problem,” Asaaf said. “I’ll be so bored by tomorrow I’ll be doing laps around the house.” This was the solid, capable tone he always used in public, but when he sat up to face the group, his blanket slid off. Everyone stood there, silently rocking back on their heels, looking as if they wanted to leave but didn’t know if they should. They all had to know what a bandaged leg looked like, and anyway there was nothing to see, just that sweatpant leg pinned back. But still they stared, and suddenly the last place I wanted to be was in that room, so I slipped out the front door.
Outside the moshav gates, the brown roads were almost desolate: just a few kids selling sunflowers at the bus stop. Sheep huddled together in the open yellow field, as if desperate for contact, and above them, far beyond, ran the long barbed fence tracing the Syrian border. Being in these hills reminded me of all the days Asaaf and I spent playing out here as boys. Other times it made me miss a part of my life I couldn’t even remember, before I lost my father to a mine while he was on reserve duty, almost twenty years ago. I imagined a different mother then, sleepy and smiling, leaning into my father’s knees like in the photos she kept shelved away in albums.
Across the road, I climbed down a hill and peered into the valley. Lake Kinneret glittered below, dotted with figures so small I couldn’t tell whether they were swimmers or ducks bobbing along in the ripples. If I stood still in this spot, sometimes my voice would bounce off the hills and I’d yell things I couldn’t say to anyone, like for my mother to get off my back or for Lieutenant HaLevi to drive his sedan off a cliff.