Avram listens and wraps his arms tightly around himself. He feels a frost descend on him in the midst of the blinding light-blue shades of the Tzippori River — the frost of a dark confinement cell, a forehead slammed against stone. Ora, her lips drained of blood, tells him how she and Ilan used to wake up and lie silently next to each other during those nights. They felt that their family was coming apart with remarkable speed; a trampling force that seemed to have been lurking all those years had now burst out and lunged at them with incomprehensible fervor, even with an oddly gleeful vengefulness. Avram contorts his face with intolerable pain and shakes his head, No, no.
With just a little restraint and coolheadedness, she could still stop the deterioration, she thought as she drove and listened to Ilan softly try to placate her. It depended only on her now, on one kind word from her, on her giving up this poison that was bubbling inside her and killing her, too. But suddenly she pounded the steering wheel with both hands and shouted at the phone from the depths of her heart: “How could he not remember? A man in a meat locker!”—she slammed the wheel to the rhythm of her words, and Avram pulled back as though he were the one being hit—“A night and a day, and another night and day — how could he not remember? He remembers every single thing that has to be done, doesn’t he? Every leaky faucet, every door handle. He’s the most responsible kid in the world, yet he can forget a human being for a whole night and day and night—”
“But why are you picking on him?” Ilan had groaned painfully, and she felt that she had finally managed to penetrate a shield. Ilan muttered, as if to himself, “Did he initiate it? Did he want something like this to happen? Did he decide to put that man in there?” Only now did Ora notice that two police cars were flashing their lights behind her and to her left, and the policemen were signaling for her to drive onto the shoulder. Suddenly frightened, she sped up. God knows what she’d done now; she’d only gotten her license back two months ago, after a six-month revocation. “And do I have to remind you again that there was a big operation going on there?” Ilan went on. “There were wanted men, and shooting, and Ofer hadn’t slept for forty-eight hours, and only by chance his guys were sent to do a job they weren’t even supposed to do and weren’t trained for, so what are we even arguing about?”
“But he was there in the building, three floors up, and he ate and drank there and went up and down the stairs.” She slid onto the muddy shoulder and drove quickly, hoping somehow to outrun the police. She finally stopped when they closed in on her. “And he talked over the radio at least twenty times with Chen and with Tom, and he had twenty opportunities to ask if they’d let the old man out already, and what did he do?” Ilan did not answer. “Tell me, Ilan, what did he do, our child?” Ora roared hoarsely. She heard Ilan straining to hold his breath and not explode again. Three policemen got out of the two cars and approached. One of them was talking on his walkie-talkie. Ilan said, “You know he meant to go down there and see.” She scoffed — an alien, loathsome scoff. “Meant to, yeah, sure. For two whole days he kept meaning to go down, but just when he was most meaning to, they came to tell him there was a ride leaving for Jerusalem, right? And then we all went out to the restaurant, right? And he forgot, right?” She let out an amazed guffaw and held her head in both hands, as though she was only now, for the first time, finding out the true story. “And that whole evening in the restaurant, he didn’t remember! Oops, sorry, slipped my mind! Doesn’t that incense you?” Ora roared and the veins on her neck swelled. “Tell me, Ilan, doesn’t that make you crazy?” “Ora, you’re losing your mind,” Ilan said, retreating into his sobering tone, the one that observed her with amused wonder, the one he used when they fought, when he let her wallow alone in her bitterness, in the filth that burst out of her. “Just please be careful and keep your eye on the road,” he added with that same tone of lawyerly advice. Ora locked the Punto’s doors from inside and ignored the cops rapping on the windows, their faces pressed up against the glass. One of them ran a scolding finger over the half of the front windshield that was caked with drops of muddy rain, and Ora laid her head on the steering wheel and murmured, “But it’s Ofer, do you understand that, Ilan? It happened to us. It’s our Ofer. How could Ofer, how could he?”
AT FIVE-THIRTY in the morning, at the point where Mount Carmel begins to rise, Ora and Avram disentangle from each other. He folds the tents and the sleeping bags and packs up their two backpacks, and Ora goes to buy some food at a nearby grocery store.
“We haven’t been apart for a long time,” she says, coming back to wrap herself around him.
“Should I come with you?”
“No, stay here with the stuff. I’ll only be a few minutes.”
“I’ll wait.”
“And I’ll be back,” she adds, sounding uncertain. “I don’t know what I’m suddenly afraid of,” she murmurs into his embrace.
“Maybe that you’ll see what civilization is like and you’ll want to stay.”
She is uneasy. An obstinate embolus moves inside her body like the undigested remnants of a dream. She stretches her arms and holds Avram back to look at him, engraving him in her memory. “Now I can see that I didn’t give you a good haircut. I’ll snip that straggler off today.”
He fingers the stray lock.
“And maybe you’ll let me shave you, too?”
“Yes?”
“I don’t know, it’s annoying to see you with a beard.”
“Oh, that.”
“Yes, that.”
“Okay.”
“Maybe just a trim. We’ll see. We’ll just take a little off.”
“Don’t you think I’m off enough as it is?”
They look at each other. The spark of a smile in their pupils.
“Buy some salt and pepper. And we’re almost out of oil.”