Ora bit her lip. Mustering up all the restraint she could find within herself, she said, “Still, Dvir, I can’t understand how a bunch of guys—”
“Mom!” Ofer yelled. A single yell that cut like a knife. They drove the rest of the way in silence. When they got to HQ, Ofer wouldn’t let her wait for him to hear the results of the preliminary inquiry, as she had intended to do. “You’re going home now,” he announced.
Ora looked at him, at her strong child with the shaved head and the pure gaze, and her eyes brimmed with tears. The question almost burst out again, and Ofer said in a terrifyingly quiet voice, “Mom, listen closely. This is the last time I’m going to tell you. Get off my case. Get off my case!”
His eyes were gray steel, his lips iron wire, and his shaved skull a ball of cold fire. Ora shrank back from his power, his hardness, and above all his foreignness, and he turned his back on her and left without letting her kiss him.
She drove off, wild with sorrow, hardly able to see the road. A pelting, dusty rain began to fall, and one of the Fiat Punto’s windshield wipers didn’t work, and Ilan phoned and she couldn’t say more than a few words without shouting the question, and of course he lost his patience too — it’s a wonder he kept it for so long — and said he was getting sick and tired of her sanctimonious self-righteousness and that she should really keep in mind that Ofer needed her now, needed her full support.
Ora bellowed, “Support for what? Support for what?” even though she wanted to yell, Support for whom? Because she really wasn’t sure anymore.
Ilan softened his voice. “Support for your son. Listen, you’re his mother, right? You’re the only mother he has, and he needs you unconditionally now, do you understand? You’re his mother, you’re not some Mother for Peace, okay?”
Ora was dumbfounded: Where had he come up with that? What did she have to do with Mothers for Peace? What did she have to do with those leftist women and their supposedly neutral checkpoint observations? She didn’t even like them! There was something defiant and annoying and unfair about them and the whole idea, coming to harass soldiers while they worked. How could you blame those kids, who’d been stuck there to man those checkpoints for three years? Instead of doing that, why didn’t they go and demonstrate at the military compound, or go and shout outside the Knesset? She’d always sensed a slightly grumbling weakness about them, with their excessive self-confidence and their total lack of reverence when they faced officers at the checkpoints or debated senior commanders on television panels. If not reverence, she thought, at least they should show a little gratitude, just a tiny bit, for the people who were doing our dirty work and eating all the Occupation shit for us, to keep us safe. As she conducted this confused dialogue with herself, Ilan kept talking softly: “Yes, there was a screwup. It really is awful, I agree with you. But Ofer isn’t to blame, get that into your head. There were twenty soldiers in that building and in the periphery. Twenty. You can’t saddle this whole case on him. He wasn’t the commander there, he isn’t even an officer. Why do you think he has to be more righteous than everyone else?”
“You’re right,” Ora murmured. “You’re a hundred percent right, but”—and again the question dislodged itself against her will. It had been like that for weeks, she had no control over it, as though her body was independently producing the toxic compound that hiccupped out of her at regular intervals. Ilan was still in control of himself. It was amazing how all the people around her controlled themselves while she was falling apart. Sometimes she even suspected that the three of them were able to control themselves precisely because she was crumbling and that in some strange way, upholding some hidden and complicated home economics, she was even conducting her embarrassing, shameful collapse instead of them, and perhaps for their sake. Ilan reminded her for the thousandth time that as early as Thursday morning, roughly at four-thirty a.m., nine hours after the old man was put in the room—“was put,” he said; she noticed that the three of them had started using the passive voice: “was put,” “was left,” “had been forgotten”—Ofer had actually asked his commander what about the guy in the room downstairs, and he was told that Nir, the company commander, must have sent someone to take him out by now. At six that evening he’d asked Tom, the operations sergeant, and they’d told him over the walkie-talkie that there was no way someone hadn’t let the man out by now.
And then he didn’t ask anymore, Ora thought. And Ilan said nothing. Ofer himself had told them he’d somehow forgotten, he had other fish to fry, and Ora realized that perhaps there comes a moment when you can no longer ask that kind of question, because you begin to fear the answer.
Avram listens and thrusts his head lower and lower between his shoulders. She cannot see his eyes at all.
Ilan took a deep breath and said, “What do you want, Ora? Up to now, in all the investigations, the army has even cleared Nir and Tom, because of all the chaos going on around them.”
“I don’t want anything, and I hope they really do clear all the guys. But still, just explain to me how for two whole days Ofer didn’t think to go down and check for himself—”
They’d had this argument many times during the last month, reciting their lines over and over again with growing desperation, and now Ilan yelled, “Enough with this already! Listen to yourself, what’s gotten into you? You’ve become a crazy woman!” And he hung up on her. After a few minutes he called to apologize. They never hung up on each other, and he’d never burst out at her like that before. “But you’re really getting on my nerves with this,” he said in a weary voice, and she could hear his desire for reconciliation and knew he was right and that they had to unite to get through this together. If matters were not handled sensibly and calmly, the case could deteriorate into a court-martial, rather than just the comprehensive inquiry being held in the battalion and the brigade. And if that happened, it was only a matter of time before it got into the news, as Ilan often reminded her, and those assholes were just looking for an excuse to dig up some dirt. You also had to remember, Ora recited to herself, that ultimately no one had died in that meat locker, and no one had been wounded or even starved, because there were cows and sheep and goats hanging on the meat hooks, and the old Palestinian man had managed to remove the gag they’d tied on his mouth so he wouldn’t shout. And thanks to the frequent power cuts mandated by the army in the killing zone, the man didn’t even freeze, and in fact at times he was kind of cooking down there — they boiled him and then froze him, then thawed him out again, as she had gradually understood from Ofer’s fellow soldiers with whom she was able to talk. Naked and reeking and covered with animal blood, he had rolled around on the floor when they’d finally opened the meat locker’s door — Ofer was home by then. “That Friday, at six p.m., he’d been sent home,” she murmurs to Avram. “Do you understand? He wasn’t even there.” And after they opened the door, he started to twitch and convulse on the sidewalk, and it was as if he performed a strange dance for the soldiers as he lay there, banging his head on the sidewalk. He pointed at the soldiers and at himself and cackled horribly, as though for the two days he was locked up he had kept hearing a tremendous joke, and soon he would get his act together and tell it to them. They ordered him to get up and he refused, or maybe he could not stand up. He just stumbled and squirmed at their feet and kept banging his head on the sidewalk and crowing his crazy laugh. Ora resisted telling Ofer’s friends, or Ilan and Adam, and Ofer himself, what was on the tip of her tongue: that perhaps going out of his mind was the only way a Palestinian could get through all the checkpoints and the permits and the physical examinations. But that thought was foreign to her too, and it seemed to have been created by her brain against her own will, and for a moment she wondered what would happen if she started having more and more of these outbursts, left-wing Tourette’s attacks, and she quickly pulled herself together. After all, she reasoned, you should be grateful to Ilan for being so supportive of Ofer. He had studied the details of the case and reconstructed with Ofer every single minute of those two days, and prepped him carefully before each interrogation and questioning. He’d also talked to a couple of people he knew in the army and elsewhere and had gently pulled a few strings to bring the matter to a quick conclusion, by limiting it to the internal inquiry in the brigade. Ora swore that from now on she would try to control her big mouth. All was not yet lost, and now that she’d had her say, she could finally resume her natural place in the family and once again be mama bear protecting her cub. It was so clear, after all, that she could not keep enflaming this fight for even one more day. Cracks and slits were widening and appearing everywhere, and whenever she looked at Ilan she knew he felt the same way, that he was just as alarmed and no less paralyzed by what was happening to them.