She doesn’t have the energy to argue or explain. He’s right, but she really wasn’t in a state to think about anything. How can he not understand her? She just wasn’t thinking. A white fog had filled her mind from the moment he told her that instead of going on the trip to the Galilee with her he was going off to some kasbah or mukataa. That was at six a.m. She had woken to hear his voice whispering into the phone in the other room, and hurried in there. Seeing his guilty look she had tensed and asked, “Did they call?”
“They say I have to go.”
“But when?”
“ASAP.”
She asked if it couldn’t wait a little while, so they could at least do the trip for two or three days, because she realized immediately that a whole week with him was a dream now. She added with a pathetic smile, “Didn’t we say we’d have a few puffs of family-together time?”
He laughed and said, “Mom, it’s not a game, it’s war,” and because of his arrogance — his, and his father’s, and his brother’s, their patronizing dance around her most sensitive trigger points — she spat back at him that she still wasn’t convinced that the male brain could tell the difference between war and games. For a moment she allowed herself some modest satisfaction with the debating skills she’d displayed even before her morning coffee, but Ofer shrugged and went to his room to pack, and precisely because he did not respond with a witty answer, as he usually did, she grew suspicious.
She followed him and asked, “But did they call to let you know?” Because she remembered that she hadn’t heard the phone ring.
Ofer took his military shirts from the closet, and pairs of gray socks, and shoved them into his backpack. From behind the door he grumbled, “What difference does it make who called? There’s an operation, and there’s an emergency call-up, and half the country’s reporting for duty.”
Ora wouldn’t give in — Me? Pass up getting pricked with such a perfect thorn? she asked herself later — and she leaned weakly against the doorway, crossed her arms over her chest, and demanded that he tell her exactly how things had progressed to that phone call. She would not let up until he admitted that he had called them that morning, even before six he had called the battalion and begged them to take him, even though today, at nine-zero-zero, he was supposed to be at the induction center for his discharge, and from there to drive to the Galilee with her. As he lowered his gaze and mumbled on, she discovered, to her horror, that the army hadn’t even considered asking him to prolong his service. As far as they were concerned he was a civilian, deep into his discharge leave. It was he, Ofer admitted defiantly, his forehead turning red, who wasn’t willing to give up. “No way! After eating shit for three years so I’d be ready for exactly this kind of operation?” Three years of checkpoints and patrols, little kids in Palestinian villages and settlements throwing stones at him, not to mention the fact that he hadn’t even been within spitting distance of a tank for six months, and now, at last, with his lousy luck, this kind of kick-ass operation, three armored units together — there were tears in his eyes, and for a moment you might have thought he was haggling with her to be allowed to come back late from a class Purim party — how could he sit at home or go hiking in the Galilee when all his guys would be there? In short, she discovered that he, on his own initiative, had convinced them to enlist him on a voluntary basis for another twenty-eight days.
“Oh,” she said, when he finished his speech, and it was a hollow, muffled Oh. And I dragged my corpse into the kitchen, she thought to herself. It was an expression of Ilan’s, her ex, the man who had shared her life and, in their good years, enriched the goodness. The fullness of life, the old Ilan used to say and blush with gratitude, with reserved, awkward enthusiasm, which propelled Ora toward him on a wave of love. She always thought that deep in his heart he was amazed at having been granted this fullness of life at all. She remembers when the kids were little and they lived in Tzur Hadassah, in the house they bought from Avram, how they liked to hang the laundry out to dry at night, together, one last domestic chore at the end of a long, exhausting day. Together they would carry the large tub out to the garden facing the dark fields and the valley, and the Arab village of Hussan. The great fig tree and the grevillea rustled softly with their own mysterious, rich lives, and the laundry lines filled up with dozens of tiny articles of clothing like miniature hieroglyphics: little socks and undershirts and cloth shoes and pants with suspenders and colorful OshKosh overalls. Was there someone from Hussan who had gone out in the last light of day and was watching them now? Aiming a gun at them? Ora wondered sometimes, and a chill would flutter down her spine. Or was there a general, human immunity for people hanging laundry — especially this kind of laundry?
Her thoughts flit as she remembers how Ofer presented her and Ilan with his new “tankist” overalls. They had already sold the Tzur Hadassah house by then and moved north to Ein Karem, closer to the city. Ofer came out of his room wrapped in the big, fireproof overalls, approached them with little hops and skips, swayed this way and that, flapped his arms, and shouted sweetly: “Mommy! Daddy! Teletubbies!” Two decades earlier, in the garden at night, in the middle of hanging up the boys’ clothes, Ilan had walked through the crowded lines and hugged her, and they had both rocked together, entangled in the damp laundry, laughing softly, sighing lovingly, and Ilan had whispered in her ear, “Isn’t it, Orinkah? Isn’t it the fullness of life?” She had hugged him as hard as she could, with a salty happiness pulsing in her throat, and had felt that for one fleeting moment she had caught it as it rushed through her, the secret of the fruitful years, their tidal motion, and their blessing in her body and his, and in their two little children and in the house they had built for themselves, and in their love, which finally, after years of wandering and hesitating, and after the blow of Avram’s tragedy, was now, it seemed, standing up on its own two feet.
Ofer finished packing in his room, and she stood motionless, dropsical, in the kitchen, and thought that Ilan had won again without any effort: she would not go on the trip with Ofer, she would not have even one week with him. Ofer must have sensed what she was going through, as he always did, even if he sometimes denied it, and he came and stood behind her and said, “Come on, Mom, it’s okay …” He said it tenderly, in a voice that only he knew how to use. But she hardened her heart and did not turn to him. They had planned the Galilee trip for a whole month. It was her gift to him for finishing the army, and it was a gift for herself too, of course, for her release from his army. Together they’d gone out and bought two little tents that folded up into small squares and elaborate backpacks and sleeping bags and hiking boots, but only for her: Ofer wouldn’t give up his dingy pair. In her spare time she’d bought thermal underwear and hats and fanny packs and Band-Aids for blisters and canteens and waterproof matches and a camping stove and dried fruit and crackers and canned food. Every so often, Ofer would pick up the swelling backpacks in her bedroom, gauge their weight in astonishment, and comment, “They’re coming along well, really growing nicely.” He joked that she’d have to find a Galilean Sherpa to carry all the gear she was packing. She laughed heartily, responding to his good spirits, to the light in his face. In the last few weeks, as his discharge date approached, she could feel the tastes and smells slowly returning from exile. Even the sounds sharpened, as they do when you get your ears flushed. Little surprises awaited her, wild crossbreeds of sensations: she would open a water bill and feel as if she had unwrapped a package of fresh parsley. Sometimes she would say to herself out loud, so she could believe it: “One week alone, the two of us, in the Galilee.” And mostly she proclaimed to no one: “Ofer is being released from the army. Ofer is getting out. He’s getting out of it in one piece.”