“One thing I know, which I never imagined,” he said during one of those hours, with her head resting on his chest.
“Hmmm?”
“You can live an entire life without purpose.”
“Is that what this is?” She lifted up on her elbows and looked at him. “Without any purpose at all?”
“Once, when I was still the dearly departed me, if you’d told me this was what I could expect, a whole life of this, I’d have done myself in on the spot. Today I know it’s not that terrible. That you certainly can. I’m living proof.”
“But what does that mean? Explain it to me. What do you mean, a life without purpose?”
He pondered. “I mean that nothing really hurts you and nothing really makes you happy. You live because you live. Because you happen not to be dead.”
She managed to resist asking what he would feel if something happened to Ofer.
“Everything passes in front of you,” he said. “It’s been that way for ages.”
“Everything?”
“There’s no desire.”
“And when you’re with me like this?” She moved her hips against him.
He smiled. “Well, there are moments.”
She turned over and lay on him. They moved slowly against each other. She arched her back a little and opened to him, and he did not enter. He was happy this way, and he wanted to talk.
“And lots of times I thought—”
She stopped moving abruptly: something in his face, in his voice.
“If you have a child, say,” he mumbled quickly, “that’s a purpose in life, isn’t it? That’s something worth getting up for in the morning, no?”
“What? Yes, usually. Yes.”
“Usually? Not always? Not all the time?”
Ora thought back to some of the mornings this past year. “Not always. Not all the time.”
“Really?” Avram asked wonderingly. “But I thought …”
They lay silently again, moving over each other’s bodies carefully. His foot curled over her shin, his hand caressed the back of her neck.
“Can I tell you something weird?”
“Tell me something weird,” she hummed and held her whole body against his.
“When I got back from there, right? When I started to understand what had happened to me, you know, all that”—he waved his hand dismissively—“I suddenly realized that even when I’d had it, I mean the desire, and a purpose in life, I somehow, in some recess, always knew it was only borrowed. Only for a limited time.” He paused. “Only till the truth emerged.”
“And what is the truth?” she asked, and thought: the two rows of hitters. The cruel decree.
“That it’s not really mine,” said Avram stiffly. He propped himself up on his arms and gazed at her intently. “Or that I don’t even deserve to have it,” he added, like someone deciding to confess to a horrible crime at the end of a trivial questioning.
A notion flitted through her mind: And if he has a child?
“What happened?” Avram asked.
“Hold me.”
If he has a child, she thought feverishly, his own child, whom he’ll raise. How did I never think of that? Of the possibility that he will be a father one day—
“Ora, what’s up?”
She breathed into his neck. “Hold me, don’t leave me. You’ll walk with me all the way home, right?”
“Of course. We’re walking together, what are you—”
“And we’ll always, always be together?” She tossed him the fragment of a sentence that had suddenly floated to the surface of her memory, a promise he’d sent her by telegram on her twentieth birthday.
“Until death us do join,” he completed the sentence without hesitation.
And then, at that moment, Avram felt that Ofer was in danger. He had never known the sensation before: something dark and cool slashed his heart. The pain was intolerable. He held Ora hard. They both froze.
“Did you feel it?” she whispered in his ear. “You felt it, didn’t you?”
Avram breathed into her hair, mute. His body was bathed in cold sweat.
“Think about him,” she whispered and clung to him with her whole body until she put him inside her. “Think of him inside me.”
They moved slowly, gripping each other as in the eye of a storm.
“Think about him, think about him!” she cried out.
“Listen,” she says angrily a few hours later, on the path from Yagur up to the Carmel. “He left me a message yesterday. Ofer. ‘I’m okay, the bad guys not so okay.’ ”
“Didn’t he ask where you were, where you’d disappeared to, how you were doing?”
“Yes, of course, several times. He’s a terrible worrier. The biggest worrier of all of us. And he always has to know”—she doesn’t feel like telling him anything now, but it tumbles out of her anyway, so that he’ll know this too, so that he’ll remember—“he has this need, it’s really compulsive, ever since he was a child, to know exactly where each of us is, so no one will disappear on him for too long. He needs to hold us all together—”
She stops talking and remembers how, as a child, Ofer used to get scared every time an argument broke out, even a tiny one, between her and Ilan. He would dance around and push them at each other, force them to be close. How, then, did he end up being the reason we broke up? she wonders. She lurches forward again in a sudden surge, butting the air with her forehead, and Avram wonders if Ilan left her a message, too. Or perhaps it was Adam who called and said something that hurt her.
The dog rubs up against him as though to strengthen him and to seek refuge from Ora’s fury. Her tail droops and her smile is gone.
“What was it you said? ‘I’m okay, the bad guys—’ ”
“The bad guys not so okay.”
Avram repeats the words silently. Tasting the arrogance of youth, he thinks—
But Ora is already muttering out loud what he was thinking: “ ‘Back in Pruszkow, they didn’t say things like that.’ ”
Avram throws up his hands: “I can’t win with you! You know it all.”
His attempt at flattery falls flat. She sticks her chin out and lopes ahead.
In the shift logs kept by the translators at Bavel, he had written a regular column entitled “Our Town of Pruszkow,” in which he logged his reports using the trembling, suspicious grumblings of the shtetl-dwellers Tzeske, Chomek, and Fishl-Parech. An Egyptian MiG-21 transferred from Zakazik to Luxor, a Tupolev grounded due to rudder problems, battle rations issued to commando fighters — all these were adorned with churlish, defeatist, and bitter commentary from the three elderly Pruszkowites invented by Avram. He constantly expanded and enriched their characters, until the base commander uncovered “the Jewish underground,” as Avram called it, and sentenced him to a week of night-guard duty next to the flag in the parade courtyard, to strengthen his nationalist convictions.
“But Ora,” he says, to exploit quickly the sweetness of memory that might be softening her heart toward him.
“Well, what is it?”
With a stifled grunt, almost sobbing. Without even turning her face to him. Are her shoulders trembling or is it just his imagination?
“Were there any other messages?”
“A few, nothing important.”
“From Ilan, too?”
“Yes, he deigned to call, your friend. Finally heard what was going on here, and all of a sudden he’s terribly worried about the situation in Israel, and even about my disappearance. Imagine.”