They kept walking in the dark, with only the light of the moon, and then the sky began to brighten. For a few hours they had not said a word. Avram felt that they were running to reach Ofer in time, the way you dash to rescue someone from the ruins of a building: every second counts. It’s not good that she’s quiet, he thought. She isn’t talking about Ofer. Now is when we have to talk about him, when she has to talk about him. We have to talk about him.
And then he started talking to himself, silently. He repeated stories about Ofer, things Ora had told him, trivia, little moments, word for word.
“Just tell me he’s okay,” he growls into the blinding sun. With a sudden lurch, he overtakes her and blocks her path. “Tell me nothing happened to him, that you’re not hiding something from me. Look at me!” he yells. They both breathe heavily.
“I only know up to the night before last. As of then he was fine.” The sharpness is gone from her face. He senses that something has happened to her in the last hour, somewhere between the tea and sunrise. She looks tattered and stooped, as though finally defeated after a prolonged battle.
“Then what’s wrong? Why have you been like this since yesterday? What did I do?”
“Your girlfriend,” Ora says heavily.
“Neta?” The blood rushes out of his face. “What happened to her?”
Ora gives him a long, miserable look.
“Is she all right? What happened to her?”
“She’s fine. Your girlfriend is fine.”
“Then what?”
“She sounds nice, actually. Funny.”
“You talked to her?”
“No.”
“Then how?”
Ora trudges off the trail and into a tangled thicket. Dragging past thistles and shrubs, she trips as she walks, and Avram follows her. She climbs up a little crag of tall, gray rocks, and he follows. And suddenly they’re inside a small crater, where the light is dull and shadowy; the sun seems to have gathered up its rays from this place.
Ora plunges onto a rock ledge and buries her face in her hands. “Listen, I did something … It was wrong, I know that, but I called your apartment. I picked up your messages.”
He straightens up. “My apartment? Wait, you can do that, too?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“There’s a code, a general one, the manufacturer’s default option before you set it yourself. It’s really not that complicated.”
“But why?”
“Don’t ask me.”
“I don’t understand. Wait—”
“Avram, I did it, and that’s that. I had no control over it. I dialed home first, and then my fingers just jumped to the numbers.”
The dog comes over and nestles between them, offering Ora her warm, padded body, and Ora puts her arms on the dog. “I don’t know what came over me. Listen, I’m really … I’m so ashamed.”
“But what happened? What did she do? Did she do something to herself?”
“I just wanted to hear her, to hear who she is. I didn’t even think—”
“Ora!” he practically bellows. “What did she say?”
“You had a few messages. Ten, and nine are from her. There’s one from your boss at the restaurant. They’re finishing the renovations next week, and he wants you to go back to work. He really likes you, Avram, you can feel it in his voice. And there’ll be a housewarming party that they—”
“But Neta, what about Neta?”
“Sit down, I can’t do this while you’re standing over me like that.”
Avram doesn’t appear to hear her. He stares at the gray rocks protruding all around him. Something in this place is closing in on him.
Ora rests her cheek on the dog’s body. “Listen, she called about a week and a half ago, maybe more, and asked you to call her back immediately. Then she called a few more times and asked … No, she just said your name. ‘Avram?’ ‘Avram, are you there?’ ‘Avram, answer me.’ That kind of thing.”
Avram kneels down in front of her. His head is suddenly too heavy to bear. The dog, with Ora hunched over her, turns to him with her dark, soft eyes.
“Then there was one message where she said”—Ora swallows, and her face takes on a childish, startled expression—“that she had something important to tell you, and then … Let’s see, yes, the last message is from the evening before last.” She laughs nervously. “That’s exactly the same time Ofer left his last message for me.”
Avram is hunched, rounded into himself, ready for the blow — he won’t be taken by surprise.
“ ‘Avram, it’s Neta,’ ” Ora says in a hollow voice, her eyes fixed on a spot beyond him. “ ‘I’m in Nuweiba and you haven’t been home for ages and you won’t call back your loving ones—’ ”
Avram nods, recognizing Neta through Ora’s voice.
Ora continues lifelessly, as though her entire being is operated by a ventriloquist. “ ‘A little while ago I thought I might be slightly pregnant, and I didn’t have the courage to tell you, and I came down here to think about what to do, and organize my thoughts, and of course in the end I’m not, as usual, it was a false alarm, so you have nothing to worry about, my love.’ And then there was a beep.”
He stares at her. “What? I don’t understand. What did you say?”
“What’s not to understand?” Ora rouses from her trance and sharpens her knives at him again. “What exactly don’t you understand? Did I say anything not in Hebrew? Do you understand the word ‘pregnant’? Do you understand ‘false alarm’? Do you understand ‘my love’?”
His mouth drops. His face stiffens with immeasurable wonderment.
Ora abruptly turns away from him and the dog. She hugs herself and rocks back and forth. Stop this, she orders herself. Why are you attacking him? What did he do to you? But she cannot stop. Back and forth she rocks, finding pleasure in pulling this molten thread farther and farther out of her innards and unspooling herself until she disappears completely — if only. And poor Neta—and of course in the end I’m not, as usual, it was a false alarm—and suddenly Ora knows how Avram and Neta sound when they talk to each other, she knows their music, and the soft playfulness, exactly the way he used to fence with Ilan, and the way Ilan still does with the boys, with that same lightning-fast wit that Ora herself is no longer capable of and in fact never was. False alarm, Neta had giggled. But does he even realize how much she loves him, and how much she is suffering?
He grunts. “I still don’t understand what you’re angry about.”
“Angry?” She flings her head back and lets out a toxic spray of ridicule. “Why would I be angry? What do I have to be angry about? On the contrary, I should be happy, right?”
“About what?”
“About the mere possibility,” she explains with a serious face and a dizzy sort of matter-of-factness, “that you may have a child one day.”
“But I don’t have a child,” he says sternly. “Other than Ofer I have no child.”
“But maybe you will. Why not? Men your age can still do it, after all.” She regains her senses for a moment and almost falls into his arms to apologize for the madness that took hold of her, for the narrow-mindedness, for the smallness of her soul. Because more than anything she wants to say how good it would be for him to have a child and what a wonderful father he would be, a full-time dad. But then another flaming sword turns every which way inside her, and she jumps up with an astonished realization: “Maybe you’ll even have a girl. Avram, you’ll have a girl.”
“What are you talking about?” He gets up quickly and stands facing her. “Neta said she wasn’t, that she just thought she was.” He reaches out to embrace her and Ora flows through his arms and crumples into a large pit in the rock. Her hands cover her mouth as though she is sucking a finger or trying to stifle a scream.