She tosses the eggplant into the trash can, scrubs the pan, wipes it devotedly, and gives a sideways glance at the treacherous phone. What now? Where was I? The door. The lower part of the door. Four short bars over thick frosted glass. She takes three sheets of A4 paper from the printer and tapes them over the glass. That way she won’t see their military boots. And now what? The fridge is practically empty. In the pantry she finds a few potatoes and onions. Perhaps a quick soup? Tomorrow morning she’ll go shopping and fill the house again. It occurs to her that they could arrive in the middle of all sorts of things. Like when she’s unpacking the groceries and putting things in the fridge. Or when she sits down and watches television. Or when she sleeps, or when she’s in the bathroom, or when she’s chopping vegetables for soup.
Her breath pauses for a moment, and she quickly turns on the radio like someone opening a window. She finds the Voice of Music and listens for a couple of minutes to something from the Middle Ages. But no, she needs talk, a human voice. On the local station a young reporter is talking on the phone to an older women with a deep Mizrahi Jerusalem accent. Ora stops abusing the vegetables, leans against the cracked marble counter, wipes the sweat off her brow with the back of her hand, and listens to the woman talk about her older son who fought in the Gaza battle this week. “Seven soldiers were killed,” she says. “All of them were his friends from the battalion.” Yesterday they’d let him come home for a few hours, and this morning he was already back in the army.
“And while he was at home, did you give him your breast food?” the reporter asks, to Ora’s astonishment.
“My breast food?!” repeats the woman, also surprised.
The reporter laughs. “No, I asked if you gave him the best food.”
“Of course,” the woman says, laughing softly. “I thought you asked … Of course I cooked all my best dishes for him, and I pampered him.”
“Tell us how you pampered him,” the reporter urges.
And the mother, with a generosity that envelops Ora in its warmth, recounts: “I pampered him just like he deserves, with his favorite treats, and a nice warm bath and a really soft towel, and the shampoo he likes, which I bought special for him.” Then her voice turns grave. “But I want to say that, you know, I have two more sons, twins, and they also followed the way my oldest showed them, and they’re in the same battalion, Tzabar, the three of them in the same battalion I have, and I want to make a request from our army over the radio, can I?”
“Certainly you may.” Ora hears the slight derision in the reporter’s voice. “What exactly would you like to say to the IDF?”
“What can I tell you?” The mother sighs, and Ora’s heart goes out to her. “My sons, the two, when they were in basic training they signed a waiver, so they’re allowed to serve together, and that was well and good when they were in basic training, I’m not saying it wasn’t, but now they’re going down to the border, and everyone knows that the border for Givati is Gaza, and Gaza, I don’t have to tell you what that means, and I would really like to ask the army to think about it a bit more, and to think a little about me, too, I’m sorry for—”
What if they come in the middle of the potato? Ora thinks and stares at the large spud lying semi-peeled in her hand. Or in the middle of the onion? It gradually dawns on her that every movement she makes may be the last before the knock on the door. She reminds herself again that Ofer is unquestionably still at the Gilboa, and there’s no reason to panic yet, but the thoughts crawl up and wrap themselves around her hands as they clutch the peeler, and for an instant the knock on the door becomes so inevitable, such an intolerable provocation of the capacity for disaster embodied in every human condition, that her mind confuses cause with effect and the dull, slow movements of her hands around the potato seem like the essential prelude to the knock.
During this eternal moment, she, and faraway Ofer, and everything that occurs in the vast space between them, are all deciphered in a flash of knowledge, like a densely woven fabric, so that the very act of her standing by the kitchen table, and the fact that she stupidly continues to peel the potato — her fingers on the knife whiten now — and all her trivial, routine household movements, and all the innocent, ostensibly random fragments of reality around her, become nothing less than vital steps in a mysterious dance, a slow and solemn dance, whose unwitting partners are Ofer, and his friends preparing for battle, and the senior officers scanning the map of future battles, and the rows of tanks she saw on the outskirts of the meeting point, and the dozens of smaller vehicles that moved among the tanks, and the people in the villages and towns over there, the other ones, who would watch through drawn blinds as soldiers and tanks drove down their streets and alleys, and the quick-as-lightning boy who might hit Ofer tomorrow or the day after, or perhaps even tonight, with a rock or a bullet or a rocket (strangely, the boy’s movement is the only thing that violates and complicates the slow heaviness of the entire dance), and the notifiers, who might be refreshing their procedures at the Jerusalem army offices right now, and Sami too, who must be at home in his village at this late hour, telling Inaam about the day’s events. Everyone, everyone is part of this massive, all-encompassing process, and the people killed in the last terrorist attack are part of it too, unaware of their role: they are the casualties whose death will be avenged by the soldiers now setting off on a new campaign. Even the potato she is holding, which is suddenly as heavy as an iron weight and she can no longer continue to slice it, it too might be a link, a tiny but irreplaceable link in the dark, calculated, formal course of the larger system, which comprises thousands of people, soldiers and civilians, vehicles and weapons and field kitchens and battle rations and ammunition stores and crates of equipment and night-vision instruments and signaling flares and stretchers and helicopters and canteens and computers and antennas and telephones and large, black, sealed plastic bags. And all these, Ora suddenly feels, as well as the visible and hidden threads that tie them to one another, are moving around her, above her, like a massive fishing net, tossed up high with a sweeping motion, spreading slowly to fill the night sky. Ora quickly drops the potato, and it rolls off the counter and onto the floor between the fridge and the wall, where it shines with a pale glow as she leans on the table with both hands and stares at it.