A new fear trickles into Ora with each step. Perhaps she is wrong. Perhaps she has the whole thing upside down. Perhaps the more stories she tells Avram about Ofer, the less will remain of Ofer’s life. And in a state of suffocation she lets out: “I just wonder what kind of person he’ll be when he gets back.”
“Yes,” Avram whispers beside her. “I was just thinking that.”
“I can’t force myself to imagine what he’s seeing and doing there.”
“Yes, yes.”
“He may come back a completely different person.”
They walk on, bowed, dragging heavy weights.
But maybe Ofer’s immune now, she wonders. Maybe after the thing in Hebron he can withstand anything. What do I know? What do I really know about him? Maybe he really is more suited to life here than I am.
’Cause if I’d only kept my big mouth shut, she thinks, I might still have a family today. The three of them, Ilan and Adam and Ofer, had warned her so many times. They’d sent a thousand little signals to tell her that there are some situations, some issues, that it’s better to keep quiet about. Just put a sock in it. You don’t have to pour out a live broadcast of your whole stream of consciousness, right? But only when it was all over did she get it: they were constantly preparing themselves for every situation—every situation. And they knew ahead of time, and beyond any doubt, that there would in fact be a “situation.” It wasn’t difficult to assume, after all, given that Adam and Ofer served there for six years, three each, with patrols and checkpoints and chases and ambushes and night searches and demonstrations to suppress, that it was impossible for a “situation” not to arise. It was this annoying, exasperating, male wisdom that made Ora seethe. And the three of them were all decked out in protective gear while she walked around naked, like a little girl. “You’re not in Haifa anymore, Dorothy,” Adam spat at her during one family argument. What was it about? Something to do with Ofer’s problem, or a different matter? Who can remember? And by the time she realized what he was talking about and what he was insinuating, they’d already changed topics. They changed topics remarkably quickly back then, switching the subject like cardsharps when she started up with her business. She wonders what Avram would say about it.
Avram quickly checks in on all his auditoriums: five, like the fingers on one hand. Once there were more, lots more, but over the years he’d managed with great effort to reduce the number. It was beyond his powers to keep them all active simultaneously; it was beyond his means. He scurries back and forth past the row of closed doors, counts them on the fingers of both hands — the second hand is just backup — and pricks up an ear to detect the dull murmur coming from inside, the soundtrack of plays produced continuously, day and night, for twenty-six years now, never losing their novelty. He grabs a line here and a line there; sometimes all he needs is one word to know what point in the plot they’re at. Sometimes he wishes he could shut them down for good, turn the lights off. On the other hand, the thought of the silence that would then prevail was utterly terrifying — a hollow sound, the whistling wind of an infinite plunge into the abyss.
He secretly counts his fingers again, running the thumb over each digit. He has to do that periodically, at least once an hour, as part of his duties, his maintenance routine. There’s the play about the war, and the one about after the war, with the hospitalizations and the operations, and the one with the interrogations in Israel with Field Security and the Shabak and the Ministry of Defense and the Intelligence GHQ, and the one with Ilan and Ora and their children’s lives, and the one about the POW prison, of course, in Abbasiya, which he really should have noted earlier, before anything else, in Auditorium One. He forgot to start with that one, which is not good. The thoughts about Ofer must have thrown him, the thoughts about Ofer who is fighting now. Not good.
He runs over his fingers again. The thumb, the counter, is of course the POW one, which he mustn’t insult under any circumstances, and obviously there will have to be a small sacrificial offering for his grave mistake, the unforgivable insult, the hurtful, impudent humiliation he has just caused it. The second one is the war. The hospital and treatments are in Three. And the interrogations in Israel are in Four. And Ora and Ilan’s family, Five.
For good measure, he thrusts his hand into his pocket and pinches himself, twisting the flesh of his thigh and digging his nails in, thumb and ring finger, as if into foreign flesh — how dare you, how could you forget to start with the POW prison! Still walking, he falls on his knees and begs the moustached interrogator, the tall one, Doctor Ashraf, the one with the terrifying, sinewy hands. It almost never happens, he explains. It’s happened so rarely. It won’t happen again. And deeper inside, through the tearing skin: well done, now you’re talking, now you understand your mistake. And the dampness is spreading through the fabric and his fingertips.
Ora is holding his face in her hands. “Avram!” she yells at him as if into an empty well. “Avram!” He looks at her with dead eyes. He is not here. He is frantically flitting among his dark auditoriums. “Avram, Avram,” she calls in to him, alarmed, fighting, not giving up, she has the power to do it. And he slowly comes back in hesitant waves, rises up and appears again through his pupils, smiles with miserable submission.
“Once every three weeks or so, he’d come home on leave,” Ora says. She would pounce on him as soon as he walked through the door, press her whole body against him, then remember to hold her chest away and feel his soft stubble on her cheeks. Her fingers would recoil from the metal of the gun slung over his back and search for a demilitarized space on that back, a place that did not belong to the army, a place for her hand. She would shut her eyes and thank whoever needed to be thanked — she was willing to reconcile even with God — for bringing him home in one piece again. And she would sober up when he gave her three quick slaps on her back, as if she were just a friend, a male friend. With that thwack-thwack-thwack he would both embrace her and mark the boundaries. But she was also well versed and would soon drown out the whisper of insult with cheers of joy: “Come on, let’s have a look at you. You’re tan, you’re sunburned, you don’t use enough sunscreen. Where’s this scratch from? How can you lug all that weight around, are you telling me everyone goes home with a backpack this heavy?” He’d mumble something, and she’d resist reminding him that he always used to take the whole house on his back to school as well. She should have guessed he would end up in the Armored Corps.
He slowly removed his Glilon rifle and fastened the magazines with a thick khaki band. He looked giant, as though the house were too small for him. His shaved head and round forehead gave him a menacing look, and for a fraction of a second she was meekly handing him her identification card at a checkpoint. “But you must be hungry!” she said cheerfully with a dry throat. “Why didn’t you let us know you were coming at lunchtime? We thought you’d only get here in the afternoon. You could have at least phoned on the way, so I would have had time to defrost a steak for you.”
“To this day I’m still not used to him eating meat,” she tells Avram. “At age sixteen or so, he just changed his mind. And the fact that he gave up his vegetarianism was somehow harder for me than for him. Do you understand that?”