An ashen current had spread slowly through the dark skin of his face, the soot from a fire that leaped up and died down inside him in an instant. He stood without moving and looked as though someone had slapped him, as though she herself had come over and stood facing him, smiled broadly with her light-filled joy and warmth, and slapped his face as hard as she could. For one moment they were trapped, the three of them, condemned in a flash: Ofer at the top of the steps, his rifle dangling, a magazine attached with a rubber band; she with the silly purple suede handbag that was far too fancy, grotesque even, for a trip like this; and Sami, who did not budge but nevertheless grew smaller and smaller, slowly emptying out. And then she realized how old he had grown. When she first met him he had looked almost like a boy. Twenty-one years had gone by, and he was three or four years younger than she was but he looked older. People age quickly here — them too, she thought oddly. Even them.
She made things worse by getting into the back of the car, not the passenger side where he held the door open for her — but she always sat next to Sami, how could it possibly be otherwise? — and Ofer came down and sat next to her in the back, and Sami stood outside the taxi with his arms hanging at his sides and his head slightly tilted. He stood by the open door like a man trying to remember something, or muttering a forgotten sentence to himself that had popped into his mind from some distant place, perhaps a prayer or an ancient saying, or a farewell to something that can never be regained. Or perhaps just like a man taking a moment of absolute privacy to inhale the glorious spring air, which was bursting with sunny yellow blossoms of spiny broom and acacia. And only after this brief pause did he get into the taxi and sit down, upright and rigid, and wait for directions.
“It’s going to be kind of a long drive today, Sami, did I tell you on the phone?” Ora said. Sami didn’t shake his head or nod, or look at her in the rearview mirror. He only lowered his thick, patient neck a little. “We have to take Ofer to the, you know, that campaign, you probably heard on the radio, the meeting point, up near the Gilboa. Let’s start driving and we’ll explain on the way.” She spoke quickly and tonelessly. “That campaign,” she’d said, as if she were telling him about an advertising campaign, and the truth is that she’d almost said “that stupid campaign,” or even “your government’s campaign.” But she had restrained herself with great difficulty, perhaps because she knew she would make Ofer angry, and rightly so: How could she forge subversive alliances on a day like this? Besides, maybe it was true, as Ofer had tried to persuade her over lunch at the restaurant, that they had to come down on them once and for all, even if it obviously would not eliminate them completely or dissuade them from wanting to hurt us — on the contrary, he had insisted, but maybe it would at least give us back a little deterrence. Now Ora bit her tongue and pulled her left knee into her stomach and hugged it, tormented over her rudeness to Sami. To quell the commotion inside her, she kept trying to start a casual conversation with Ofer, or with Sami, and kept coming up against their silence, and decided she wasn’t going to give in, and so she found herself, to her complete surprise, telling Sami an old story about her father, who had gone almost completely blind at the age of forty-eight—“just imagine!”—and at first he’d lost his sight in his right eye, because of glaucoma, “and that’s probably what I’ll get one day,” she said, and over the years he’d developed a cataract in his left eye, all of which left him with a field of vision about the size of a pinhead, “and if genetics do their job, that’s more or less what I’ll have, too.” She laughed excessively and reported into the space of the taxi in a cheerful voice that her father, for years, was afraid to have cataract surgery on his one almost-seeing eye. Sami said nothing, and Ofer looked out the window and puffed his cheeks out and shook his head as if refusing to believe how low she could go to ingratiate herself with Sami, how she was willing to offer such an intimate story as a sacrifice to make up for her crude mistake. She saw all this, and still could not stop herself. The story took on its own force, because after all it was Ofer, he alone, who had managed, with patience and stubbornness and endless conversations, to convince her father to have the surgery, and thanks to Ofer he had gained another few good years before his death. As she talked she realized that Ofer was the one who kept her childhood anecdotes and recollections in his memory, her stories about school and her friends, about her parents and the neighbors in her childhood neighborhood of Haifa. Ofer had lived those little stories with a pleasure that was unexpected in a boy his age, and he always knew how to pull them out at exactly the right moment, and secretly she felt that he was preserving her childhood and youth for her, and that must be why she had deposited the stories with him all these years. Almost without noticing, she had slowly given up on Ilan and Adam as listeners. She sighed and immediately felt it was a different sigh, a new one, carved from a different place inside her, with an ice-cold edge. She was frightened, and for a brief moment she was a child again, fighting with Ada, who insisted on letting go of her hand and jumping off the cliff; she hadn’t been there with her for years — why had Ada suddenly come back to hold her hand, only to let go? She kept chattering through Sami and Ofer’s silence and found it even more depressing that these two men, despite everything that stood between them now, had still managed to unite against her. There was an alliance, Ora finally realized, an alliance at her expense, and it turned out to be deeper and more effective than everything that divided them.
A nose-blowing interrupted her so violently that she stopped talking. Ofer had a cold. Or allergies. The last few springs his allergies had lasted almost until the end of May. He blew his nose into a tissue pulled from the ornate little olive-wood box that Sami had installed in the back for his passengers. He pulled out square after square and blew loudly and scrunched the used tissues into an overflowing ashtray. His Glilon assault rifle sat between them; its barrel had been pointed at her chest for several minutes, and now she could no longer bear it and motioned for him to turn it away. But when he moved the rifle and placed it between his legs with a sharp, irritated gesture, the front sight scratched the car-ceiling upholstery and pulled out a thread. Ofer said immediately, “Sorry, Sami, I ripped this.” Sami looked quickly at the unraveling thread and said hoarsely, “Don’t worry about it,” and Ora said, “No, no, there’s no argument, we’ll pay for the repair.” Sami took a deep breath and said, “Forget it, it’s no big deal.” Ora whispered to Ofer to fold the butt in at least. Ofer hissed in a half whisper that it wasn’t standard practice, he only folded it in when he was in the tank, and Ora leaned forward and asked Sami if he had a pair of scissors to cut off the thread, but he didn’t, and she held the thread that danced and spun in front of her eyes and looked, for a moment, like a spilled-out gut, and she said maybe it could be sewn back, “if you have a needle and thread here I can sew it right now.” Sami said his wife would do it, and then he added, without any color in his voice, “Just be careful with the gun”—he was clearly addressing them both—“so it doesn’t scratch the upholstery. I just reupholstered a week ago.” Ora said with a crushed smile, “Okay, Sami, no more damages,” and she saw him lower his eyelids over a look she did not recognize.