Because of all these reasons it was very important that she observe him as much as she could, to learn how he had been able to avoid becoming embittered all these years. As far as she could tell he was not even suppressing a silent yet murderous hatred deep inside, as Ilan had always claimed. She was astonished to see — and wished she could learn from him — how he managed to avoid attributing the daily humiliations, large and small, to some personal defect of his own, as she would undoubtedly do with great fervor were she, God forbid, in his position — and as she in fact had been doing, truth be told, quite a bit during this lousy year. Somehow, within all the chaos, all the mess, he remained a free person, which she herself only rarely managed to be.
Now it grows and swells and threatens to burst: her stupidity, her failure in the principled and complicated matter of being a gentle human being in this place, in these times. Not just being gentle, or ladylike—there are some words she still hears only in her mother’s voice — merely because you are incapable of being anything else by nature, but being intentionally and defiantly gentle, being a gentle person who dives headfirst into the local vat of acid. Sami was a truly gentle man, even if it was hard to tell from his size and his heaviness and his thick features. Even Ilan had to admit it, although grudgingly and always with a note of suspicion: “Gentle he may be, but just wait till he gets his chance. Then you’ll get to see some gentleness à la Allah.”
But in all the years she’d known him, and as much as she observed him — and she constantly did — she was unable to lose the childish curiosity about some congenital handicap she sensed in him, in his condition, in his split or double existence here; she was absolutely certain that he had never failed. In gentleness, he had never failed.
He once drove her and the kids to the airport to meet Ilan, who was coming back from a trip. The cops at the airport checkpoint took him away for half an hour, while Ora and the boys waited in the taxi. They were little then, Adam was six and Ofer around three, and it was the first time they discovered that their Sami was Arab. When he came back, pale and sweaty, he refused to tell them what had happened. All he said was, “They kept saying I was a shitty Arab, and I said, ‘You may shit all over me, but that doesn’t make me shitty.’ ”
She never forgot that sentence, and lately she recited it to herself ever more firmly, like medication to strengthen her heart whenever they shat all over her, everyone, like the pair of obsequious managers—unctuous, Avram used to call their type — at the clinic where she’d worked until recently, and a few friends who had more or less turned their backs on her after the separation and stuck with Ilan (but I would too, she thinks to herself; if I only could, I would choose Ilan and not get stuck with me), and she could add to the list the son of a bitch judge who took away her freedom of movement, and in fact she could include her kids among those who shat on her, especially Adam, not Ofer, hardly at all, she wasn’t sure, she just wasn’t sure anymore, and Ilan too, of course, the master of shitters, who once, about thirty years ago, had sworn that his purpose in life was to protect the corners of her mouth so that they would always curl upward. Ha. She absentmindedly touches the edge of her upper lip, the one that droops slightly down, the empty one — even her mouth had eventually joined with those who shat on her. Through all the trips with Sami, all the little unexpected challenges, the suspicious looks people sometimes gave him, the casual comments that were so horrifyingly rude coming from the warmest, most enlightened people they met, through all the tests with identical questions that daily life gave them together, a quiet, mutual confidence had grown between them, the kind you feel with your partner in a complicated dance or a dangerous acrobatic trick: you know he won’t disappoint you, you know his hand won’t shake, and he knows you’ll never ask him for something you are absolutely forbidden to ask for.
And today she had failed, and she was causing him to fail, and by the time she realized this it was too late, when he hurried to open the taxi door for her, as he always did, and suddenly saw Ofer coming down the steps from the house wearing his uniform and carrying his rifle, and this was the Ofer he’d known since he was born. He had driven her and Ilan home from the hospital with Ofer because Ilan was afraid to drive that day, said his hands would shake, and on the way from the hospital Sami told them that for him life really only started when Yousra was born, his oldest daughter. At the time he had just the one; later there were two boys and another two girls—“I’ve got five demographic problems,” he would cheerfully tell anyone who asked — and Ora noticed on that trip that he drove very carefully, smoothly rounding the car over potholes and bumps so as not to disturb Ofer as he slept in her arms. During the years that followed, when the boys went to school downtown, Sami drove the carpool she organized for five kids from Tzur Hadassah and Ein Karem. And whenever Ilan was overseas, Sami helped out with chauffeuring, and there were years when he was an integral part of the family’s daily routine. Later, when Adam was older but didn’t have his license yet, Sami would drive him home from his Friday night outings downtown, and then Ofer joined in, and the two boys would phone from a pub and Sami would come from Abu Ghosh, at any hour, denying he’d been asleep, even at three a.m., and he would wait for Adam and Ofer and their friends outside the pub until they finally remembered to come out, and he probably listened to their conversations, their army stories — who knows what he heard all those times? she suddenly thinks with horror, and what they said as they kidded around and told alcohol-fueled jokes about their checkpoint experiences — and then he would shuttle the boys to their homes in the various neighborhoods. Now he would shuttle Ofer to an operation in Jenin or Nablus, she thought, and she had forgotten to mention this one little detail when she phoned him, but Sami was quick. Her heart sank when she saw his face darken in a deadly coupling of anger and defeat. He got it all in the blink of an eye: he saw Ofer coming down the steps with his uniform and rifle, and realized that Ora was asking him to add his modest contribution to the Israeli war effort.