At three o’clock, Sami would come to take her and Ofer to the meeting point. Three o’clock was the farthest point in her thoughts. She did not have the strength to imagine what would occur after that, and this was further proof of her frequent claim that she had no imagination. But that was no longer true, either. That too had changed. Recently she’d been flooded by imaginings — she had imagination-poisoning. Sami would make the drive easier for her, especially the way back, which would undoubtedly be far more difficult than the way there. They had a domestic routine, she and Sami. She liked to listen to him talk about his family, about the complex relationships between the different clans in Abu Ghosh, about the intrigues in the town council, and about the woman he had loved when he was fifteen, and perhaps had never stopped loving even after he was married off to Inaam, his cousin. At least once a week, by total coincidence, he claimed, he would see her in the village. She was a teacher, and there were years when she taught his daughters, and then she became a superintendent. She must have been a strong, opinionated woman, judging by his stories, and he always drew the conversation out so that Ora would ask about her. Then he would report her news with a sort of reverence: another child, her first grandson, a prize from the Ministry of Education, her husband’s death in a work accident. With touching detail he quoted their chance conversations in the mini-market, the bakery, or on the rare occasions when he drove her in his cab. Ora guessed that she was the only person he allowed himself to talk to about this woman, perhaps because he trusted her never to ask him the one question whose answer was obvious.
Sami was a seasoned man, a quick thinker, and his life wisdom was augmented by his business acumen, which had produced, among other things, his own small fleet of taxis. When he was twelve he had a goat, and every year she birthed two kids. And a year-old kid in good health, he once explained to Ora, can sell for a thousand shekels. “When the kid would get to a thousand shekels, I would sell it and put the money away. I put away, and I put away, until I had eight thousand shekels. At seventeen I got my license and bought a Fiat 127, an old model but it worked. I bought it from my teacher, and I was the one boy in the village who came to school with wheels. Afternoons, I did private drives, errands, take this, bring that, go, fetch, and that way, slowly-slowly …”
Last year, amid the great upheavals in her life, a friend of Ora’s found her a part-time temporary job working for a new museum being built in Nevada, which for some reason was interested in the material culture of Israel. Ora liked the unusual work that had fallen into her lap to distract her from herself a little, and she preferred not to delve too deeply into the museum’s ulterior motives or what had led its planners to invest a fortune in the construction of a model of Israel in, of all places, the Nevada desert. She was on the team in charge of the fifties and knew there were another few “gatherers” like her on various other teams. She never met any of them. Every two or three weeks she set off with Sami on delightful buying trips around the country, and out of some vague intuition she avoided discussing the museum and its intentions with him. Sami never asked, and she wondered what he imagined and how he described these trips to Inaam. The two of them spent days roaming the country together. They bought a collection of stainless-steel basins from a kibbutz in the Jordan Valley, an antique milking machine from a moshav in the north, a shiny like-new icebox in a Jerusalem neighborhood, and of course the trivial, forgotten items whose discovery gave her an almost physical joy: an eighth of a bar of Tasbin soap, a tube of Velveta hand cream, a package of sanitary napkins, textured rubber “thimbles” that Egged bus drivers once used, a collection of wildflowers dried between the pages of a notebook, and vast quantities of textbooks and popular books — one of her tasks was to reconstruct a typical kibbutz household library from the fifties. Time after time she watched as Sami Jubran’s warm, earthy charm encircled everyone he met. The elderly kibbutzniks were positive that he was a former kibbutz member (which was true, he told her jokingly: “Half of Kiryat Anavim’s lands belong to my family”). In Jerusalem, at a local backgammon club, a few men pounced on him, convinced he had grown up with them in the Nachlaot neighborhood and even claimed to remember him climbing pine trees to watch Hapoel soccer games in the old stadium. And a vibrant Tel Aviv widow with bronzed skin and jangling bracelets determined that he was without a doubt from the Kerem: even though he a was little fat for a Yemenite, it was obvious that he was “with roots,” she said when she called Ora the next day for no reason. “And very
charmant,” she added, “the kind of guy who definitely fought in the Etzel. And by the way, do you think he’s available for a moving job?” Ora saw the way people agreed, for Sami, to part with beloved possessions, because they felt that these objects, which their children belittled and would undoubtedly get rid of as soon as the old people passed on, if given to him, would in some sense stay in the family. And on every trip, even a ten-minute drive, they always got into politics, keenly confabbing over the latest developments. And even though years ago, after the devastation with Avram, Ora had completely cut herself off from the “situation”—I’ve paid my price, she asserted with a narrow, distancing smile — she found herself drawn into these talks with Sami over and over again. It was not his arguments or his reasonings that pulled her in, because she’d heard them all before, from him and from others, and she didn’t believe anyone had a single unused claim left in this eternal debate. “Who could possibly come up with a new, decisive argument that hasn’t yet been heard?” she asked with a sigh when anyone else tried to take it up with her. But when she and Sami discussed the situation, when they argued with little jabs and cautious smiles — and with him, curiously, she frequently veered much further to the right than she intended, further than her real opinions, while with Ilan and the boys she was always, as they said, on the delusional left, and she herself couldn’t say exactly what she was and where she stood, “and anyway,” she would say with a charming shrug, “only when it’s all over, the whole story, will we really know who was right and who was wrong, isn’t that so?” Yet still, when Sami used his Arabesque Hebrew to undermine the long-winded, indignant, greedy pretenses of both Jews and Arabs, when he skewered the leaders of both peoples on a sharp Arab saying that often aroused from the depths of her memory the equivalent idiom in her father’s Yiddish, she sometimes experienced a subtle latency, as if in the course of talking with him she suddenly discovered that the end, the end of the whole big story, must be good, and good it would be, if only because the clumsy, round-faced man sitting beside her was able to preserve within his fleshy thickness a flame of delicate irony, and mainly because he still managed to be himself within all this. There were also times when it occurred to her that she was learning from him what she would need to know, one day, if — or when — the situation in Israel was reversed, God forbid, and she found herself in his position, and he in hers. That was possible, after all. It was always lurking behind the door. And perhaps, she realized, he thought about that too — perhaps she was teaching him something by still being herself in all this.