Last week, on a routine drive, Ora had encountered the new upholstery: synthetic leopard skin. Sami had watched her expression closely, and then commented: “You don’t like this kind of thing, Ora. This, for you, is not considered a pretty thing, right?” She replied that in general she wasn’t crazy about animal-fur upholstery, not even imitation fur, and he laughed: “No, for you this is probably Arab taste, isn’t it?” Ora tensed at the unfamiliar bitterness in his voice and said that as far as she could remember, he had never chosen that kind of thing before, either. He replied that he actually found it beautiful, and a man couldn’t change his taste. Ora did not respond. She imagined he’d had a rough day, maybe a passenger had insulted him, maybe they had shat on him at a checkpoint again. They both somehow extricated themselves from the gloom that momentarily drifted through the taxi, but an unease gnawed at her all day, and only that evening, when she was watching television, did it occur to her that his new taste in upholstery might have something to do with the group of settlers who had planned to detonate a car bomb outside a school in East Jerusalem. They had been caught a few days before, and one of them described on television how they had designed the car, inside and out, to match “Arab taste.”
Now the silence in the car grew even thicker, and Ora was once again driven to fill it with chatter. She spoke about her father and how she missed him, and about her mother, who no longer knew right from left, and about Ilan and Adam who were off having fun in South America. Sami remained expressionless, but his eyes darted around, examining the convoy in which he’d been crawling for over an hour. Once, on one of their first trips together, he had told her that ever since he was a boy he’d had a habit of counting every truck he saw on the roads in Israel, civilian or military. When she’d looked at him questioningly, he’d explained that they would come in trucks to take him and his family and all the ’48 Arabs over the border. “Isn’t that what your transferists promise?” he’d asked with a laugh. “Promises should be kept, no? And take it from me, our idiots will line up to drive the trucks if they can get a few bucks out of it.”
Ofer wipes his nose constantly and blows it with trumpeting sounds she’s never heard before, which seem grating and alien to his natural tenderness. He scrunches the tissues and pushes them into the ashtray and immediately pulls another tissue out, and the used tissues fall to the floor and he doesn’t pick them up, and she gives up on constantly leaning over to put them into her handbag. A “Storm” Jeep passes them, honking repeatedly, and cuts in front. Behind them a Hummer lunges, almost touching them, and Sami keeps running his hand over his large, round bald spot. He presses his huge back against the orthopedic seat cushion and jolts forward every time he feels Ofer’s long legs prodding his seatback. His slightly burned masculine scent, always mingled with an expensive aftershave she likes, has been replaced in the last few minutes with a sweet smell of sweat that is worsening, and it bursts through and fills the entire car, overpowering the air-conditioning, and Ora gags and does not dare open the window, so she sits back and breathes through her mouth. Large beads of sweat form on Sami’s bald head and run down his face over his puffed cheeks. She wants to offer him a tissue but she is afraid, and she thinks about the way he swiftly dips his fingers in the rose water they bring to the table after meals at his favorite restaurant in Majd el’Krum.
His eyes dart between the Jeep in front of him and the one tailgating him. He reaches up and uses two fingers to pull his shirt collar away from his neck. He is the only Arab in this whole convoy, she thinks, and she too starts to feel a prickle of sweat: he’s simply scared, he’s dying of fear, how could I have done this to him? One large drop hangs from the edge of his chin and refuses to fall. A thick, teary drop. How can it not fall? Why doesn’t he wipe it off? Is he leaving it like that on purpose? Ora’s face is hot and red and her breathing is heavy, and Ofer opens a window and grumbles, “It’s hot,” and Sami says, “The A/C is weak.”
She leans back and takes off her glasses. Waves of yellow blossoms sway in front of her. Wild mustard, probably, which her deficient eyes crumble and crush into bright smudges. She shuts her eyes and at once feels the pulse of the convoy burst through and rise, as if from her own body, in a tense, menacing growl. She opens her eyes: the dark pounding stops at once and the waves of light return. She covers her eyes again and the growl picks up, with a heavy drumbeat within, a stubborn, dulled, abysmal sound, a medley of engines and pistons, and beneath them the beating of hearts, pulsating arteries, quiet splutters of fear. She turns back to look at the snake of vehicles, and the scene is almost celebratory, excitable, a huge, colorful parade full of life: parents and brothers and girlfriends, even grandparents, bringing their loved ones to the campaign, the event of the season. In every car sits a young boy, the first fruits, a spring festival that ends with a human sacrifice. And you? she asks herself sharply. Look at you, how neatly and calmly you bring your son here, your almost-only-son, the boy you love dearly, with Ishmael as your private driver.
When they get to the meeting point, Sami pulls into the first parking spot he finds, yanks up the emergency brake, folds his arms over his chest, and announces that he will wait for Ora there. And he asks her to be quick, which he has never done before. Ofer gets out of the cab and Sami does not move. He hisses something, but she can’t tell what. She hopes he was saying goodbye to Ofer, but who knows what he was muttering. She marches after Ofer, blinking at the dazzling lights: rifle barrels, sunglasses, car mirrors. She doesn’t know where he is leading her and is afraid he will get swallowed up among the hundreds of young men and she will never see him again. Meaning — she immediately corrects herself, revising the grim minutes she has been keeping all day — she won’t see him again until he comes home. The sun beats down, and the horde becomes a heap of colorful, bustling dots. She focuses on Ofer’s long khaki back. His walk is rigid and slightly arrogant. She can see him broaden his shoulders and widen his stance. When he was twelve, she remembers, he used to change his voice when he answered the phone and project a strained “Hello” that was supposed to sound deep, and a minute later he would forget and go back to his thin squeak. The air around her buzzes with shouts and whistles and megaphone calls and laughter. “Honey, answer me, it’s me, Honey, answer me, it’s me,” sings a ringtone on a nearby cell phone that seems to follow her wherever she goes. Within the commotion Ora swiftly picks up the distant chatter of a baby somewhere in the large gathering ground, and the voice of his mother answers sweetly. She stands for a moment looking for them but cannot find them, and she imagines the mother changing the baby’s diaper, maybe on the hood of a car, bending over and tickling his tummy, and she stands slightly stooped, hugging her suede bag to her body, and laps up the soft double trickle of sounds until it vanishes.
It is all a huge, irredeemable mistake. It seems to her that as the moment of separation approaches, the families and the soldiers fill with arid merriment, as if they have all inhaled a drug meant to dull their comprehension. The air bustles with the hum of a school trip or a big family excursion. Men her age, exempt from reserve duty, meet their friends from the army, the fathers of the young soldiers, and exchange laughter and backslaps. “We’ve done our part,” two stout men tell each other, “now it’s their turn.” Television crews descend on families saying goodbye to their loved ones. Ora is thirsty, parched. Half running, she trails behind Ofer. Every time her gaze falls on the face of a soldier she unwittingly pulls back, afraid she will remember him: Ofer once told her that when they had their pictures taken sometimes, before they set off on a military campaign, the guys made sure to keep their heads a certain distance from each other, so there’d be room for the red circle that would mark them later, in the newspaper. Screeching loudspeakers direct the soldiers to their battalions’ meeting points — a meetery, they call this, and she thinks in her mother’s voice: barbarians, language-rapists — and suddenly Ofer stops and she almost walks into him. He turns to her and she feels a deluge. “What’s the matter with you?” he whispers into her face. “What if they find an Arab here and think he’s come to commit suicide? And didn’t you think about how he feels having to drive me here? Do you even get what this means for him?”