“I don’t know, I haven’t thought about it.”
“But listen, Mom, what was I going to ask you … Does Dad know you’re—”
“What about Dad? What does this have to do with Dad? D’you think he tells me where he is?”
Ofer retreats. “Okay, okay, Mom, I didn’t say anything.”
A thin sigh inadvertently leaves his lips, the sigh of a little boy whose parents have suddenly lost their minds and decided to separate. Ora can hear it, and she feels his battle spirit dissipate, and she thinks with alarm: What am I doing? How can I send him to battle when he’s confused and dejected? A sourness fills her throat: Where did phrases like “sending him to battle” even come from? What do they have to do with her? She is not one of those mothers who sends her sons to battle, not part of one of those military dynasties like the communities of Um Juni or Beit Alpha or Negba, or Beit HaShita or Kfar Giladi. Yet she is now surprised to discover that that is exactly what she is: she escorted him to the battalion “meetery” and stood there hugging him with measured restraint, so as not to embarrass him in front of his friends, and she shook her head and shrugged her shoulders as required, with a proud grin of helplessness at the other parents who were making all the same moves — where did we learn this choreography? And how do I obey it all, obey them, those people who send him there? She was poisoned by the words Ofer whispered to her when the TV camera caught them. His final request. Her mouth had gaped in terrible pain, not only because of what he said but also because he had said it with a sort of matter-of-factness, completely lucid, as though he had rehearsed every word ahead of time, and as soon as he said it he hugged her again, but this time it was to hide her from the camera. She’d already embarrassed him once before, at the ceremony when he finished his training course, when she sat in the quad at Latrun and wept as the parade walked past the long wall inscribed with thousands of names of fallen soldiers. She had wept loudly, and the parents and commanders and soldiers looked at her, and the corps officer leaned over and whispered something to the division commander. But this time, well trained, Ofer threw himself on her like a blanket on a fire, almost strangling her with his arm, and probably glanced awkwardly over her head in all directions. “Stop, Mom, you’re making a scene.”
“Okay,” he sighs now. “What’s the story, Mom?”
He sounds defeated, and it shows and it pinches, and she says, “No story, there’s no story.”
“To tell you the truth, it’s weird for me to hear you like this.”
“What’s weird? What is so weird? Going on a hike in the Galilee is weird, but going into the kasbah in Nablus you think is normal?!”
“But when I get home will you be there?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“What d’you mean you don’t know?” He snorts. “You’re not going to, like, disappear or something?” And now it’s his familiar, worrying, almost fatherly voice, aimed squarely at her deepest thirst.
“Don’t worry, Ofer’ke, I’m not going to do anything dumb. I just won’t be here for a few days. I can’t sit on my own and wait.”
“Wait for what?”
She cannot say, of course, but he finally understands, and there is a long silence, and Ora makes up her mind with irrefutable simplicity: twenty-eight days exactly. Until his emergency call-up is over.
“But what if everything’s over in a couple of days and I come home?” he asks with renewed annoyance. “Or let’s say I get injured or something — where do they find you?”
She doesn’t answer. They don’t, she thinks, that’s exactly the point. And something else flickers in her: if they don’t find her, if they can’t find her, he won’t get hurt. She can’t understand it herself. She tries to. She knows it makes no sense, but what does?
“And if there’s a funeral?” Ofer inquires agreeably, changing tactics and unconsciously imitating Ilan, who uses death and its derivatives as punctuation in his sentences. She’s never been immune to these remarks, least of all now, and his joke, if it can be called that, seems to shock them both, because she can hear him swallow.
The stray thought from this afternoon comes back to her: Why do I collaborate with all this instead of being loyal to—
His voice resurfaces. “Mom, I’m not joking. Maybe you should take a phone, so you can be contacted.”
“No, no.” From one moment to the next she feels a greater comprehension of her plan. “Just not that.”
“Why not? You can leave it turned off, just use it for messages, for SMS.”
In fact she has become a skilled text-messager, an expertise acquired recently thanks to her new friend, her maybe lover, the Character with a capital C, because that’s her only way to communicate with him. She considers for a moment and shakes her head: “No, not even that.” Then she gets carried away on a stray thought: “Ofer, d’you have any idea what SMS stands for?”
He stares at her through the phone. “What? What’d you ask?”
“Could it be ‘Save my Soul’?”
Ofer sighs. “Honestly, Mom, I have no clue.”
She quickly returns from her contemplations. “I’m not taking my cell. I don’t want to be found.”
“Not even by me?” he asks in a suddenly thin, stripped voice.
“Not even you. No one,” Ora replies sadly. The vague notion gains clarity inside her. The whole time he’s there, she cannot be found. That’s the thing. That’s the law. All or nothing, like a kid’s oath, a crazy gamble on life itself.
“But what if something really does happen to me?” he yells, protesting this incomprehensible, shocking disruption of order.
“No, no, nothing will happen to you, I’m telling you, I know it. I just have to disappear for a while, please understand. Actually, you know what? I don’t expect you to understand. Just pretend I took a trip abroad”—like Dad did, she manages not to say.
“Now? Now you’re going abroad? At a time like this? At war?”
He is almost begging, and she moans, and her body and soul are transfixed on one point, on his mouth finding its way to her nipple.
She wrenches her gaze away from that mouth. It’s for his own good. She’s leaving him for his own good. But he won’t understand. “I have to go.” She repeats the words again and again like an oath, with a furrowed brow. She is denying him, she is doing this for him, she doesn’t fully understand it either, but she’s feels it strongly—
And how is it that I’m loyal to them, to the ones sending him there — she finally extricates something from the fog in her brain — more than to my motherhood?
“Listen, Ofer, listen to me, don’t shout at me. Listen!” She cuts him off, and something in her voice must frighten him, introducing an unfamiliar coolness of authority. “Don’t fight with me now. I have to leave for a while. I’ll explain it, but not now. I’m doing this for you.”
“For me? How is it for me?”
She almost says, When you’re older you’ll understand, but in fact she knows it’s the opposite: When you’re younger you’ll understand, when you’re a little boy again, making ridiculous bargains with frightening shadows and nightmares, then maybe you’ll understand.
And now it’s decided. She has to obey this thing that instructs her to get up and leave home, immediately, without waiting even one minute. She cannot stay here. And in some strange and confusing way, this thing seems to be her maternal instinct, which she thought had dulled, and upon which so many doubts had lately been cast.
“Promise me you’ll take care of yourself,” she says softly, trying to hide the rigid decisiveness emerging behind her eyes. “And don’t do anything stupid, d’you hear me? Be careful, Ofer, don’t hurt anyone there, and don’t get hurt, and know that I’m doing this for you.”