“Hang on Mom, one sec.” He laughs and calls out to someone standing near him: “Why are you making such a big deal? We’ll go in, rattle our guns at them, and get out.” Then he comes back to her fast and frantic, outflanking her and enjoying it. “Um, Mom, can you tape The Sopranos for me tomorrow? There’s an empty tape on the TV, you know how to work the VCR, right?” As they talk she rummages through the drawer of tapes looking for the scrap of paper on which she once wrote down the instructions he dictated. “You press the far left button, then the one with the picture of an apple …”
“But what are you doing there meanwhile?” she asks, mourning for these precious wasted hours that he could have spent at home, with her. On the other hand, what could she offer him here with her funereal face? Pretty soon, she thinks, he’ll want to rent a room somewhere, or move in with Ilan like Adam did. And why not? With Ilan everything’s such fun, good times, the three adolescents can party all they want without any annoying parents getting in the way. Meanwhile, Ofer is telling her something and she can’t separate the words. She shuts her eyes. She’ll find an excuse to phone Talia later that evening; Talia has to talk to him before he leaves.
He tries to drown out the chaos in the background. “Shut up already, it’s my mom!” Then come roars of joy and admiration, and they howl like jackals in heat, sending warm regards to his awesome mom. “Tell her to send her rugelach!” Ofer walks to a quieter place. “Animals,” he explains, “tank loaders, the lot of them.”
She can hear his breath as he walks. At home he also walks when he’s on the phone, and so does Adam. They learned that from Ilan — my genes are as soft as butter, she thinks. Sometimes the boys and Ilan would hold three simultaneous phone calls, each on his cell, all walking briskly around the large living room, crossing one another’s paths in quick diagonals, never colliding.
Now it’s suddenly quiet. Perhaps he’s found a hiding place behind one of the tanks. The silence makes her nervous, and he seems to feel the same, facing her alone now without the entire Israel Defense Forces to protect him. He quickly tells her that 110 percent of the forces showed up, “all raring to go, jonesing to lay into them”—he militarizes himself as he talks. “The adjutant says he doesn’t remember a call-up like this”—in that case they can do without you, Ora thinks, but manages to keep quiet—“and the problem is, there aren’t enough ceramic vests for everyone, and some of the guys don’t have vehicles to team up with, ’cause half the transporters are stuck in traffic in Afula.” Whoever shoved this gravel into his mouth is probably the same person who makes her ask if he has any idea when it will be over. Ofer lets her question echo for a moment until its total pointlessness and stupidity is exhausted. That was also one of Ilan’s little tricks against her. Kids pick up these things and use them without understanding what sort of multigenerational weapon they’ve activated. Ofer, at least, comes back to her quickly, but she’s already wondering when that will end too, when he will jab her with one of Ilan’s long needles and not come back to recover the casualty. “Nu, really, Mom.” His voice is warm and healing like his embrace. “We won’t stop until we eliminate the terrorism infrastructure”—here she can hear him start to smile, mimicking the prime minister’s arrogant intonation—“and until we defeat the murderous gangs and sever the head of the snake and burn out the nests of—”
She quickly pushes her way into the crack of his laughter. “Oferiko, listen, I think I might go away for a few days after all, up north.”
“Hang on, the reception here’s lousy. Wait — what’s that?”
“I’m thinking of going up north.”
“You mean, to the Galilee?”
“Yes.”
“Alone?”
“Alone, yes.”
“But why go alone? Don’t you have anyone who …” He immediately realizes his unfortunate phrasing. “Maybe you could go with a girlfriend or someone.”
She chokes down his so-accurate tactlessness. “I don’t have anyone who, and I don’t feel like going with girlfriends or anything, and I don’t feel like being at home now, either.”
His voice wrinkles. “Wait, Mom, I’m not following. You’re really going away alone?”
Suddenly the lid flips off her mouth. “Who have I got to go with, in your opinion? My partner bailed on me at the last minute, decided to volunteer for the Jewish brigades—”
He interrupts impatiently. “So you’re going to go to our places, the ones we planned?”
She bravely overcomes the pilfered our. “I don’t know, I only just now thought of it.”
“Well, at least you have a backpack ready to go,” he snickers.
“Two.”
“Honestly, though, I really don’t get it.”
“What is there to get? I just can’t be here now. I’m suffocating.”
A huge engine turns on somewhere behind him. Someone shouts to hurry up. She hears his thoughts. He needs her at home now, that’s the thing, and he’s right, and she almost gives in, at that very moment, but she realizes just as quickly and urgently that she has no choice this time.
A gluey silence. Ora fights to make herself turn her back on him, and the map of memory with its countless little marks of blame spreads out inside her: Ofer at age three, undergoing complicated dental surgery. When the anesthesiologist placed the mask on his nose and mouth, she was told to leave the room. Ofer’s terrified eyes pleaded, but she turned her back and left. When he was four, she left him screaming for her, clinging with all ten fingers to the preschool fence, and his shouts stayed with her for the rest of the day. There were many more of these little abandonments, escapes, eye-shuttings, face-hidings, and today, undoubtedly, is the hardest of them all. But every moment she spends at home is dangerous for her, she knows it, and dangerous for him too, and he can’t understand that and there’s no point hoping he will. He’s too young. His desires are simple and crude: he needs her to wait for him at home without changing anything about home or about herself, preferably without moving at all for all these days — the way he pulled back from her and flailed in anger, she recalls, when he was five and she had her curls straightened! — so that if he comes home on leave, he will hug her and defrost her and he’ll be able to use her, to impress her with the splinters of horror that he’ll scatter around with affected indifference, revealing secrets he should not divulge. Ora hears his breath. She breathes with him. They both feel the unbearable stretching of tendons — the tendons of her back-turning.
“So how long d’you think you’ll be gone for?” he asks in a voice touched by anger and weakness and a shred of defeat.
“Ofer, don’t talk like that. You know how much I wanted this trip with you, you know how much I looked forward to it.”
“Mom, it’s not my fault there’s an emergency call-up.”
She heroically refrains from reminding him that he had volunteered. “I’m not blaming you, and you’ll see, we’ll take our trip when you’re finished, I promise. I won’t give up on that. But right now I have to get out of here, I can’t stay here alone.”
“Sure, no, sure, I’m not saying, but”—he hesitates—“you’re not going to sleep in the field, like, alone?”
She laughs. “No, are you crazy? I won’t sleep alone ‘in the field.’ ”
“You’ll have your phone, right?”