BUT WHEN SHE CALLS, even before explaining that she has to make a very urgent trip to Tel Aviv, Sami answers with crushing coldness that he isn’t feeling well. He threw his back out right after getting home from their trip and he has to lie down for a few hours. Ora senses the lie in his voice and her heart sinks. The thing she has kept pushing away since they parted, which has tormented her with regular bites of mockery and doubt, now solidifies and slams her, revealing her own naïveté, her own stupidity. She wants to say that she understands and will call another taxi, but she hears herself trying to persuade him to come.
“Mrs. Ora, I need to rest now. I’ve had a rough day, and I can’t do two big trips in one day.”
She is deeply hurt by his “Mrs. Ora” and almost hangs up. But she doesn’t, because she feels that until she clears up what happened between them today, she will have no peace. Patiently, without losing her temper, she says that she too, as he well knows, has had a difficult day, but Sami cuts her off and offers to send one of his drivers. At this point she pulls herself together and remembers that she has her dignity too, if only a little. She says haughtily that there is no need, thank you, she’ll manage. The coldness in her voice must have alarmed him, and he asks her please not to take it personally, and then he pauses. Hearing the new acquiescence in his voice, she cracks and says, “But what can I do, Sami? I always take you personally.” He sighs. She waits quietly. She can hear someone, a man, talking loudly and excitedly in Sami’s house. Sami wearily tells the man to be quiet. And because of the fatigue in his voice, or perhaps because of a shadow of desperation that accompanies it, she suddenly feels a great urgency to see him again, immediately. She has the feeling that if she can just spend a little more time with him, even a few moments, she can straighten out everything that went wrong. What I did before wasn’t really mending, she thinks. This time I’ll talk with him about completely different things, things we’ve never talked about, the roots of my mistake today, the fears and the hatred we both drank with our mothers’ milk. Maybe we haven’t even started talking, she thinks oddly: maybe in all those hours that we drove and talked so much, and argued and jabbed each other and laughed, we never really started talking.
The yelling in Sami’s house grows louder. There is a heated argument among three or four people, and a woman is shouting. It might be Inaam, Sami’s wife, although Ora does not recognize the voice. She begins to wonder if it has something to do with her and what happened between them today, and if it is possible — a crazy thought, but on a day like this, in a country like this, anything is possible — that someone has informed on Sami for driving a soldier to the operation.
“Wait a minute,” says Sami, and addresses the young man in sharp, quick Arabic. He shouts with a violence that Ora has never imagined in him, but instead of getting riled up, the man replies in an accusatory tone full of contempt, grunting his words in a way that sounds to Ora like a spray of poison. She hears the sobs of a small child, much smaller than Sami’s youngest, and then there is a thud. Perhaps someone kicked a table or even threw a chair. She increasingly feels that the incident is connected to their trip and wants to end the call and disappear from his life without doing any more damage. He slams the receiver down on the table, and she hears his footsteps receding and almost hangs up, yet continues to listen, transfixed: the fabric of their privacy has been ripped open, providing a rare porthole, and she is drawn to it. This is what they’re like when they’re alone, she thinks, without us, if it really is without us, if they even have a without us. Then she hears a bitter, wild yell, and she cannot tell if it came from Sami or from the other man, and then there are two loud smacks, like hands clapping or cheeks being slapped, and then silence, broken only by the thin, desperate wail of the boy.
Ora leans weakly against the kitchen table. Why did I have to call him again? she thinks. How stupid. What was I even thinking — that after driving me to the Gilboa and back he’d be able to drive me to Tel Aviv? I just keep making mistakes. Whatever I touch goes wrong.
His voice comes back to her, frightened and cracked. Now he speaks rapidly, almost whispering. He wants to know where exactly she needs to go in Tel Aviv and asks if she minds making a stop in the south of the city, where he has to take care of something. Ora is confused. She was about to tell him to forget the whole thing, but she senses that he must need her very much, and his neediness presents an opening for mending, and she swears to herself she will only go as far as Tel Aviv with him and then take a different cab to the Galilee, no matter the cost. He asks urgently, “Is that okay, Ora? Can I come? Are you ready to leave?” The commotion in the background has started up again, and now it is no longer an argument. The other man is shouting, but he seems to be shouting at himself, and a woman laments in a desperate sort of prayer — Ora now thinks it probably is Inaam — a prolonged, defeated wail. For a moment the sound is suffused with a distant moan that Ora has heard once before. It has been decades since she’s recalled the sobbing of the Arab nurse from the isolation ward, in the small Jerusalem hospital where she stayed with Avram and Ilan.
Ora asks Sami if they’ll be delayed in South Tel Aviv for long. “Five minutes,” Sami says, and when he senses her hesitation he implores her explicitly, which he seldom does: “I need this from you as a big favor.” She remembers the promise she gave him only a few hours earlier and feels a twinge of poetic justice — Righteous of the Nations, my ass. “That’s fine,” she says.
She carries her backpack down to the sidewalk and with a sudden impulse goes back and picks up Ofer’s, too, which is packed and ready for the trip and now sits forlorn. She ignores the ringing phone, because she thinks it must be Avram, alarmed at his boldness and calling to beg her not to come. But it might also be Sami, with a change of heart. And quickly, like a fugitive, she goes down the steps, those very same steps up which — in a day or a week, or maybe never, yet she knows they will, she has no doubt — the notifiers will climb, three of them usually, so they say, quietly they’ll climb up those steps. It is impossible to believe that this will happen, but they will, they will climb up the steps, this one and the next, and that one that’s slightly broken, and on their way they will silently recite the information they are bringing her. All those nights she has spent waiting for them, ever since Adam enlisted and through all his stints in the Territories, and then for the three years of Ofer’s service. All those times she has walked to the door when the bell rings and told herself, This is it. But that door will remain shut a day from now, and two, and in a week or so, and that notification will never be given, because notifications always take two, Ora thinks — one to give and one to receive — and there will be no one to receive this notice, and so it will not be delivered, and this is the thing that is suddenly illuminated in her with a light that grows brighter by the minute, with needle-sharp flashes of furious cheer, now that the house is closed up and locked behind her and the phone inside is ringing incessantly and she herself is pacing the sidewalk, waiting for Sami.