By nine p.m. she’s climbing the walls. To her astonishment, she thinks she sees herself and Ofer on television, hugging goodbye at his battalion’s gathering point. She remembers, horrified, that there were cameras there, just after he barked at her for bringing Sami. He had stopped his barking when he noticed her reddening face, and through his fury he had wrapped her in his arms and held her to his broad chest, and said warmly, “Mom, Mom, you’re such a space cadet …” She jumps up, knocking a chair over, and practically glues her face to the screen, to Ofer—
Who holds her with a slightly authoritarian arrogance and turns her toward the camera — his move had caught her by surprise and she’d almost tripped, then held on to him with a nervous laugh, and it was all there, even the stupid purple handbag — to show the cameraman his worrying mother. Thinking back, she sees real treachery in the way he suddenly spun her around and exposed her to the camera. Her hand had flown up to make sure her hair wasn’t too disheveled and her mouth had twisted into a sanctimoniously mollifying Who, me? smile. But the treachery had been smoldering between them since last night, when he had decided to volunteer for the operation and kept it from her. When he had given up, without much deliberation, on their trip. An even greater treachery, and an intolerable foreignness, resided in his ability to be such a soldier-going-to-war, so able to do his job, so insolent and joyful and thirsty for battle, thereby imposing her role upon her: to be wrinkled and gray, yet glowing with pride (a poor man’s coat of arms: Mother of Soldier), and to be a total dimwit, blinking with ignorant charm at the men’s stance in the face of death. There he is smiling at the camera, and her mouth — on television and at home — unwittingly mimics his shining grin, and there are the three little magic wrinkles around his eyes, and she pushes away a thought: When will they broadcast this picture of him again? She sees it clearly, right on the screen, the halo of a red circle around his head. Then someone shoves a boom pole between them. “What can a son tell his mother at a moment like this?” asks the reporter, all sparkling with amusement. “Keep the beer cold for me till I get back!” the son laughs, and hearty cheers come from every direction. “Wait!” Ofer stops the merriment and holds up one finger, effortlessly drawing the attention of the reporter, the cameraman, and everyone around them — such an Ilan movement, the gesture of someone who knows everyone will be silent whenever he holds up a finger like that. “I have something else to tell her,” says her son on the television, and he smiles knowingly. He puts his lips to her ears and still looks at the camera with one twinkling eye, full of life and mischief, and she remembers his touch and his warm breath on her cheek, and she sees the camera quickly trying to invade the space between mouth and ear, and she sees the extremely attentive expression on her own face, her pathetic supplication exposed as she displays for all to see, for Ilan to see — do they get Channel 2 on the Galápagos? — what soft and natural intimacy flows between her and Ofer. The editor finally cuts away, and now the reporter is joking around with another solider and his girlfriend, who embraces him and his mother, both women with bare midriffs, and Ora feels two pinches. She drops heavily to the edge of the armchair and her hand grasps the skin of her neck, squeezing. It’s a good thing they didn’t show the way she had grimaced and pulled back when she heard what he whispered in her ear. The memory slaps her: Why did he have to tell me that? When did he rehearse that line, where did he get the idea?
She stands up quickly. She must not sit. Not be a sitting target for the beam already probing for her, for the huge fishing net slowly descending. She cocks her head to the door. Nothing. Through the window she sees a strip of road and sidewalk. She scans it but there is no unfamiliar car, no car with military plates, no nervous barks from the neighbors’ dogs, and no band of evil angels. Besides, it’s too early. Not for them, she replies. Those people come even at five in the morning, that’s exactly when they come, they get you sleepy, dazed, defenseless, too weak to throw them down the steps before they can deliver their punch line. But right now it really is too early, and she honestly doesn’t think anything has happened there in the few hours since they parted. She rubs the back of her neck. Relax, he’s still with his friends in the Gilboa, there are procedures, paperwork, debriefing, lots of complicated processes. Before anything can happen they have to mix everyone’s smells together, ignite the powerful lightning in their eyes and the beating pulse in their necks. She can feel Ofer renewing himself with them, with his friends, with their measured aggression, their battle thirst, their thick sap of warfare, their well-hidden fear; he receives and delivers these important things with a quick hug, half-chest pressed to half-chest, two pats on the back, slaps of identity, tickets punched. She distractedly drags herself into his room, where everything would freeze from this day onward, and she discovers that the room has beat her to it and already taken on the vacant expression of an abandoned place. The objects seem orphaned: his sandals with their splayed straps, the chair at his computer desk, the history textbooks he keeps by his bed because he liked history — likes, of course she means likes, and will continue to like — and all the Paul Auster books on the shelf, and the D & D books he liked as a kid, and the posters of Maccabi Haifa soccer players whom he worshipped at twelve and refused to take off the wall even when he was twenty-one, twenty-one, when he was twenty-one.
Perhaps she should not move around the room, not break the still-hanging threads of his motion, not silence the faint echo of his childhood vapors that still sometimes waft up from a pillow, a balding yellow tennis ball, a toy commando soldier equipped with endless miniature battle accessories, which she and Ilan used to bring him and Adam from their trips overseas, bought in toy shops they stopped visiting once the boys grew up, and hoped to return to in a few years, for the grandchildren. Their dreams were small and modest, yet they had quickly become so complicated and virtually unattainable. Ilan left, off to breathe in some bachelor air. Adam left with him. Ofer is away now. She steps sideways out of the room, careful not to turn her back on his belongings, and stands looking in with the yearning of the exiled. A crumpled Manchester United shirt, an army sock tossed in the corner, a letter peeking from an envelope, an old newspaper, a soccer magazine, a picture of him with Talia by some waterfall in the north, the small five-kilo iron weights on the rug, a book lying open, facedown — what was the last sentence he read? What would be the last picture he saw? A narrow alleyway, a stone block sailing through the air, and the masked face of a young man, eyes burning with fury and hatred. From there her mind skips quickly to an office at the army compound, where a soldier walks over to a filing cabinet full of personnel files — but that was how they did things in her day, in prehistoric times; these days it’s a computer: one click, a flicker on the screen, the soldier’s name, contact details for notification in case of a tragedy. Has he already let them know about the split in his parents’ addresses?
The phone gives a wrenching ring. It’s him. Overjoyed. “Did you see us on TV?” Friends had called to tell him.
“Listen,” she whispers, “you haven’t left yet, have you?”
“I wish! We’ll still be here tomorrow night at this rate.”
She hardly hears the words. Attentive only to the foreign deepness of his voice, the echo of his new treachery, the treachery of the one and only man who had always been loyal to her. Since yesterday, perhaps since he’d tasted the pleasure of betrayal, of betraying her, it seemed he wanted to savor the taste again and again, like a puppy eating meat for the first time.