“Questions?” The grandfather turns to her with his whole body. “What kind of questions?”
“Nothing, just a little thing,” she giggles. “We’re doing — actually we haven’t really started it, we were just thinking of doing — we met someone who was doing a sort of little survey, along the way.” She laughs nervously again and does not look at Avram. “We thought, I thought, that every time we meet someone, we’d ask them two questions. Small ones.”
Avram looks at her in astonishment.
“Which questions?” asks Ali, the boy, his cheeks flushed with excitement.
“Is this for the newspaper or something?” his grandfather asks, constantly stirring the coffee, turning the flame up and down under the pot.
“No, no, it’s private, just for us.” She blinks at Avram. “A souvenir from our trip.”
“Ask away,” says the grandson, and he spreads his legs out on the mat.
“If you don’t mind,” Ora says, pulling out the blue notebook, “I’ll write down what you say, otherwise I won’t remember anything.” She is already holding a pen and looks from the old man to the younger one. “Very short questions,” she adds, trying to retreat now, to shrink, to postpone the actual questioning, sensing the metallic taste of an approaching mistake. But all eyes are upon her and there’s no way out. “Okay, so the first question, it goes like this, what do you most—”
“Maybe it’s better if we don’t,” the grandfather interrupts with a grin. He puts a heavy hand on the upper back of his grandson the singer. “More watermelon?”
“Once every three weeks or so, he would come home on leave,” Ora repeats the next day, threading her way back into what came unraveled on Mount Devorah in the afternoon. She remembers how she would fall on him in the doorway, set upon him with insatiable hunger. His giant backpack would block the doorway and Ora would try to dislodge it with both hands and give up. “Yalla, come on, unpack now, before you do anything else. Straight into the washing machine. I’ll thaw out some meatballs for you, we’ll leave the steak for tonight. There’s a new Bolognese sauce I want you to try — Dad loves it, maybe you’ll like it too — and I have stuffed vegetables, and we’ll have a nice salad soon, and tonight we’ll have a big meal. Ilan!” she shouts, “Ofer’s here!”
She retreats into the depths of the kitchen, brimming with animal happiness. If she could, she would lick him all over — even now, at his age — and scrub off everything that had stuck to him, restore the childhood smells that still linger in her nostrils, her mouth, her saliva. A wave of warmth spills out to him inside her, and Ofer, without budging at all, moves a whole hairsbreadth away from her. She feels it, and she knew it would happen: he seals himself off with that same quick shift of the soul that she knows from Ilan and Adam, from all her men, who time after time have slammed their doors shut in the face of her brimming, leaving her tenderness fluttering outside, faltering, turning instantly into a caricature.
But she will not allow the hurt to bubble up. Not now. And here comes Ilan from his study, taking his glasses off, and he hugs Ofer warmly, measuredly. He is careful with him. Cheek touches cheek. “Stop getting taller already,” he scolds. Ofer lets out a tired, pale laugh. Ilan and Ora move around him with a mixture of happiness and caution. “So what’s new in the trenches?” “Nothing really, how are things at home?” “Not bad, you’ll find out everything soon enough.” “Why, did something happen?” “No, what could happen? Everything’s just like it was when you left.” “Do you want to take a shower first?” “No, later.”
He finds it difficult even to let go of the stinking uniform and the dirt that has stuck to his flesh and that, Ora guesses, protects him a little. Three weeks in the field, on patrols, fixing tanks, checkpoints, ambushes. He has a strong odor. His fingers are rough and full of cuts. His fingernails are black. His lips look as if they are constantly bleeding. His gaze is distracted and vacant. She sees the house through his eyes. The cleanliness, the symmetry of the rugs and the pictures and the little knickknacks. He seems to find it hard to believe that such refinement exists in the world. The softness is almost unbearable to him. When she looks at Ilan, she feels clearly how he sees himself now in Ofer’s eyes, all nonchalant citizenry, demilitarized, almost criminal. Ilan crosses his arms over his chest, juts his chin out slightly, and murmurs to himself in a deep voice.
Ofer sits down at the kitchen table and holds his head in his hands. His eyes almost close. Gradually, a casual conversation begins to hum among the three of them, crumbs of speech that no one listens to, whose purpose is only to give Ofer a few minutes to adapt, to connect the world he has come from with this world, or perhaps, she thinks, to detach them from one another.
She knows — she explains to Avram — that she and Ilan cannot even guess the effort it takes to erase, or at least to suspend, his other world so that he can come into the house without getting burned in the transition. The thought must pass through Ilan’s mind at that moment too, and they glance at each other. Their faces are still full of joy, but somewhere deep in their eyes, they avoid each other like accomplices to a crime.
Suddenly Ofer gets up and stands there rubbing his shaved head vigorously. He slowly moves between the kitchen and the dining area, back and forth, back and forth. Ilan and Ora watch him with sidelong looks; he isn’t here, that’s obvious. He’s walking a different track, one that is imprinted in his mind. They concentrate on slicing bread and frying food. Ilan turns the radio on loud, and the sounds of the midday news program pour into the room. Ofer revives immediately and sits back down at the table as though he had never gotten up. A young soldier from the Jalameh checkpoint is telling the interviewer how she caught a seventeen-year-old Palestinian boy that morning trying to smuggle explosives through in his pants. She giggles that today happens to be her birthday. She’s nineteen. “Happy birthday,” says the interviewer. “Cool!” the soldier laughs. “I couldn’t have thought of a better birthday present.”
Ofer listens. Jalameh is no longer in his sector. He served there about eighteen months ago. It could have been him who had found the explosives. Or not found them. After all, that’s his job, to stand there so the terrorist blows himself up on him and not on civilians. Ora’s breath is short. She feels something approaching. She recites to herself the names of the checkpoints and posts where he’s served. Hizmeh and Halhul and Al Jab’ah, those ugly names. And all that Arabic, she thinks as she pads from one foot to the other, with the gurgles and grunts and yammers. Why were Ilan and Avram so into it in high school and the army? She riles herself up even more: I mean, almost every word in that language has something or other to do with tragedy or catastrophe, doesn’t it? She shoves Ilan: “Look at how you’re chopping those vegetables. Don’t you know he likes his salad chopped really fine? You set the table, do me a favor!” Ilan throws his hands up with an obedient smile, and Ora attacks the vegetables. She grabs a sharp knife, swings it, and lands it down furiously to dice Abd al-Qader al-Husseini with Haj Amin al-Husseini and Shukeiri and Nimeiri and Ayatollah Khomeini and Nashashibi and Arafat and Hamas and Mahmoud Abbas and all their kasbahs and Qaddafis and SCUDs and Izz ad-Din al-Qassam and Qassam rockets and Kafr Qasim and Gamal Abdel Nasser. She slaughters them all together: Katyushas and intifadas and martyr’s brigades, and the sacred and the sanctified and the oppressed, Abu-Jilda and Abu Jihad, Jebalia and Jabaliyya, Jenin and Zarnuga, and Marwan Barghuouti, too. God knows where all those places are, anyway. If they could at least have normal-sounding names. She sighs. At least if their names were just a little nicer! Feverishly brandishing the knife, she finely chops up Khan Yunis and Sheikh Munis, Deir Yassin and Sheikh Yassin, Saddam Hussein and al-Qawuqji. All they bring is trouble, from the very first minute it’s been nothing but trouble with them, she growls through gritted teeth. And what about Sabra and Shatila, and what about Al-Quds and the Nakba, and jihad and the shaheeds and Allahu akbar, and Khaled Mashal and Hafez al-Assad and Kōzō Okamoto? She pounds them all indiscriminately like a hornet’s nest that must be destroyed, and she adds Baruch Goldstein and Yigal Amir, and with a sudden revelation she also throws in Golda and Begin and Shamir and Sharon and Bibi and Barak and Rabin, and Shimon Peres too — after all, don’t they have blood on their hands? Did they really do everything they could so she could get five minutes of peace and quiet around here? All those people who razed her life, who keep nationalizing another one of her children every second — she stops when she notices Ofer’s and Ilan’s looks. She wipes the sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand and asks angrily, “What? What is it?” As if they too are to blame for something. Then she quiets herself. “It’s nothing, never mind, I just remembered something, something was getting on my nerves.” She dresses the salad generously with olive oil and a quick dash of salt and pepper, squeezes a lemon, and puts the lovely bowl down in front of Ofer, a kaleidoscope of colors and scents. “Here you go, Ofer’ke. An Arabic salad, just the way you like it.”