Ofer arches his eyebrows to express his opinion of her curious performance. He is still moving very slowly. His distracted look gets trapped by a newspaper on the table and he stares at a cartoon without comprehending it, without knowing the context. He asks if there was anything on the news this week. Ilan gives him a report and Ofer flips through the paper. He’s not interested, Ora thinks. This country, which he is protecting, doesn’t really interest him. She’s sensed that in him for a while now: it’s as though the connection between the outer layer, where he spends most of his time, and the interior one, here, has been severed. “Where’s the sports?” he asks, and Ilan extricates the sports section from the recycling pile. Ofer buries his head in it. Ora asks cautiously if he hears the news over there, if he’s been following what’s going on in Israel. He shrugs one shoulder wearily but also with a strange bitterness: all those arguments, right, left, same difference, who can be bothered.
He gets out of his chair, kneels, unfastens the straps of his backpack, and starts emptying it out. His skull amazes her: so large, full of power, and solid. Such a complex structure of heavy, mature bones. She stands there wondering when he had time to develop bones like that and how this head could have passed through her body. When he opens the backpack, a sharp stink of dirty socks fills the air. Ora and Ilan laugh awkwardly. The smell speaks volumes: Ora has the feeling that if she focuses on it, if she splits it into its filaments, she will know exactly what Ofer has gone through these past few weeks.
As though hearing her thoughts, he looks up at her with a pair of large eyes that are dark with exhaustion. For a moment he is very young again, needing Mom to read him. “What is it, Ofer’ke?” she asks feebly, alarmed at his expression. “Nothing is it,” he answers habitually, and forces a tired smile. Pussycat, pussycat, where have you been? she thinks. I’ve been to Halhul and the kasbah in Hebron. Pussycat, pussycat, what did you there? I lay in an ambush and shot rubber bullets at kids throwing stones.
“I’m begging you,” she’d said to him roughly a year earlier, even before the whole thing happened, maybe a month before. “Don’t ever, ever shoot at them.”
“Then what am I supposed to do?” he asked with a smirk. He skipped and danced around her, his broad chest bare and red, holding up a filthy khaki undershirt and writhing like a matador avoiding a bull. Every so often he leaned down and planted a light kiss on her forehead or cheek. “Just tell me what to do with them, Mom. They’re a risk to people driving along the road!”
“Scare them,” she said cunningly, as though she were trying out a new theory of warfare. “Slap them, punch them, anything, just don’t shoot them!”
“We aim at the feet,” he explained calmly, with that same amused superiority she knew from Adam and Ilan and the military analysts on television and the government ministers and the army generals. “And don’t worry about them so much. The most a rubber bullet can do is break an arm or a leg.”
“And if you miss and take someone’s eye out?”
“Then that someone won’t throw stones again. Let me give you an example: one of our guys shot three boys throwing stones at the pillbox this week, bang-bang-bang, broke their legs, one each, very elegantly done, and believe me, those kids won’t be back there again.”
“But their brothers will! And their friends will, and in a few years their children will!”
“Maybe you should aim so they’ll never have any children,” Adam suggested as he walked by, quiet and shadowy.
The boys laughed with slight embarrassment and Ofer glanced awkwardly at Ora.
She grabbed his hand and dragged him into Ilan’s study and stood facing him. “Now! I want you to promise me right now that you will never shoot someone to hurt them!”
Ofer looked at her and the anger began to rise. “Mom, khalas, stop it, what are you … I have instructions, I have orders!”
Ora stomped her feet. “No! Never, do you hear me? You will never shoot to hurt a human being! For all I care, aim at the sky, aim at the ground, miss in every direction, just don’t hit anyone!”
“And if he’s holding a Molotov cocktail? If he has a gun? Huh?”
They’d already had this conversation, or one like it. Or maybe that was with Adam when he started his service. She knew all the arguments, and Ofer knew them, too. She had sworn to herself that she’d keep quiet, or at least be very careful. She was always afraid that at the decisive moment of battle, or if he were taken by surprise, ambushed, her words would enter his mind and fail him, or delay his reaction for a split second.
“If your life is in danger then okay, I’m not saying that. Then you try to save yourself any way you can, I’m not arguing about that, but only then!”
Ofer crossed his arms over his chest in Ilan’s broad, relaxed posture, and widened his grin. “And how exactly am I supposed to know whether my life is in danger? Maybe I could ask the guy to fill out a declaration of intent?”
She was trapped in the loathsome feeling she always got when he — when anyone — played with her, exploited her well-known lack of debating skills, the rickety assertions that came to her in such moments.
“Really, Mom. Wake up. Hello! There’s a war going on there! And anyway, I didn’t think you were exactly crazy about them.”
“What difference does it make what I think of them?” she screamed. “That’s not the point. I’m not arguing with you now about whether we should even be there or not!”
“Well, for all I care, we can get out of there today and let them live their fucked-up lives on their own and kill each other. But at this point in time, Mom, when I have the lousy luck of having to be there, what do you want me to do? No, tell me. D’you want me to lie there and spread my legs for them?”
He had never talked to her that way before. He was burning with rage. Her spirits fell. There must be a winning argument that would counteract all these claims of his. Her fingers spread in a mute scream next to her ears. Wait a minute. She exhaled and tried to gather her ragged thoughts. Soon she’d get it together and clarify to herself exactly what she wanted to say. She’d arrange the words along the right thread, the simple one. “Listen, Ofer, I’m not any smarter than you” (she wasn’t) “or any more moral than you” (even the word scared her; secretly she felt she didn’t really understand its true meaning, unlike everyone else, who apparently did), “but I do have — and this is a fact!” (she shrieked this in a slightly cheap way) “I do have more life experience than you!” (Really? Suddenly this too melted away: Do you really? With everything he’s going through in the army? With everything he sees and does, with everything he faces every single day?) “And I also know something that you simply cannot yet know, which is—”