“Doing what for me?” He’s exhausted by her capriciousness. He’s never seen anything like this in her. Since when does she have whims? But then he has a small revelation: “What is this, some kind of vow you’re making?”
Ora is happy that he has understood, has come very close. Who, if not he, could understand her? “Yes, you could say it’s a vow, yes. And remember that we’ll meet when your thing is over, your emergency call-up.”
He sighs. “Whatever you say.”
She feels him take one step back from the place where they just met — there are still moments, here and there, so rare, when his insides are exposed and revealed to her. And perhaps, she thinks, they are the reason that he prefers the kasbahs and the mukataas to a week in the Galilee with her. She guesses that what scares him is not her vow but the fact that she—she—is suddenly starting to flip out with all kinds of magical thinking.
Ofer is already pulling his voice together and taking another little step away from her. “Okay, Mom,” he sums up, and now he is the grown-up shrugging at her girlish whims. “If that’s what you need right now, then cool, go for it. I’m with you. Okay, gotta go now.”
“See you soon, Oferiko. I love you.”
“Just don’t do anything stupid up there, Mom, promise me.”
“You know I won’t.”
“No, promise me.” He smiles, and the warmth seeps back into his voice, melting her away.
“I promise, don’t worry, I’ll be fine.”
“Me, too.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
“I love you.”
“Awesome.”
“Take care of yourself there.”
“You too, and don’t worry, it’ll be fine. Bye.”
“Bye, Ofer, my sweet—”
She stands with the phone in her hand, spent and sweaty, and thinks with perfect lucidity: That might have been the last time I hear his voice. She is afraid she may forget it. And another thought: Who knows how many more times I will replay that trivial conversation of meaningless phrases? I told him to take care of himself, and he said don’t worry it’ll be fine. Perhaps in two or three days the campaign will end and that conversation will join with hundreds of others and settle down and be forgotten. But never before has she had such a clear feeling. All day, freezing cold shards have been digging into her lower abdomen, making every movement painful. Now she sucks the remainder of his voice out of the phone and remembers how, when he was a boy, they built up their goodbye kisses into a long and complicated ritual — but wait, was that with him or with Adam? — a ritual that began with hugs and loud, fervent kisses, growing subtler and gentler, until they finished with a butterfly kiss on his cheek, then on hers, on his forehead and hers, on his lips and hers, the tip of his nose and hers, until only the lightest echo of a touch remained, a fluttering breeze of flesh that was almost unreal.
The phone rings again. A gravelly, hesitant male voice asks if it’s Ora. She sits down, short-winded, and listens to his heavy breathing. “It’s me,” he says, and she replies, “I know it’s you.” His breath keeps coming through in thin whistles and she thinks she can hear his heart beating. He must have seen Ofer on TV, she thinks, and something jolts her: Now he knows what Ofer looks like.
“Ora, it’s over, isn’t it?”
“What’s over?” She is confused, and horrified by the shadow of the word.
“His army service,” he whispers. “When we spoke before he enlisted, you said it would be over today, right?”
She realizes that in the general chaos of the day she has neglected to think about this, about him. She has managed to erase his part in the complication, this man who needs protection today even more than she does.
“Listen,” she begins — again that tight-lipped, teacher’s listen—and his tension reaches her like an electrical current, and she has to concentrate very hard to choose her words; she cannot make a mistake. “Yes, Ofer was supposed to be done today”—she speaks slowly, cautiously, but she can hear the panic in his soul, can almost see him shielding his head with his hands like a beaten child—“but you must know there’s an emergency situation, I’m sure you heard it on the news, and there’s that campaign, so they took Ofer. In fact they just showed him on TV.” As she talks she remembers that he has no television, and she finally grasps the enormity of the shock she is giving him, the reversal from what he expected to what he is now finding out. “Avram, I’ll explain everything and you’ll see that it’s not that bad, not the end of the world.”
She tells him again that they took Ofer for the military campaign, and he listens to her, or doesn’t, and when she finishes he says lifelessly, “But that’s not good.”
She sighs. “You’re right, it’s not good.”
“No, I really mean it. It’s not good. It’s not a good time.”
The phone is damp in Ora’s hand and her whole arm aches from the effort of holding it, as if the man’s entire weight has been poured into the receiver. “What’s going on with you?” she whispers. “We haven’t talked for ages.”
“But you said he was getting out today. You said so!”
“You’re right, today is his discharge date.”
“Then why aren’t they letting him out?!” He is yelling at her now. “You said today was his date! That’s what you said!”
A breath of fire seems to come at her from the receiver. She holds the phone away from her face. She wants to scream with him: He was supposed to get out today!
They both fall silent. For a moment he seems to have calmed a little, and she whispers, “But how are you, tell me? You disappeared for three years.”
He doesn’t hear her, just repeats to himself, “This is not good. Keeping him on longer at the last minute is the worst.”
Ora, who has rationed all her oaths and talismans to last exactly three years, to the second, and has now exhausted them and herself, feels that beyond Avram’s words is a knowledge even keener than her own.
“How long will he be there?” he asks.
She explains that there’s no way of knowing. “He was already on his discharge leave, and they suddenly phoned from the army”—she elides—“and asked him to come.”
“But for how long?”
“It’s an emergency call-up. It could be a few weeks.”
“Weeks?”
“It’s something like twenty-eight days,” Ora says quickly, “but chances are it’ll all be over long before that.”
They are both exhausted. She collapses from the armchair onto the rug, her long legs folded beneath her, head bowed, her hair falling on her cheek, her body unknowingly reconstructing her adolescent pose. This is how she used to sit when they talked on the phone at seventeen, nineteen, twenty-two, long hours of pouring their souls out to each other. That was back when he still had a soul, Ilan comments from afar.
A quiet rustle passes through the line, interferences of time and memory. Her finger traces the curved pattern in the rug. Someone should research that one day, she thinks sourly: Why does running your finger over a woolly rug bring back memories and longings? She still cannot remove her wedding ring and may never be able to. The metal clings to her flesh and refuses to leave. And if it came off easily, would you? Her lips sag. Where is he now — Ecuador? Peru? He might be hiking with Adam among the turtles on the Galápagos, unaware that there’s practically a war here. That she had to take Ofer on her own today.
“Ora,” Avram says strenuously, as if hoisting himself out of a well, “I can’t be alone now.”
She stands up quickly. “Do you want me to … Wait, what do you want?”