As it turns out, they are not going to South Tel Aviv but to Jaffa, and not to a hospital but to an elementary school that Sami locates only after driving around for a long time. Yazdi, who has recovered slightly, sits with his face pressed to the window and laps up the streets and scenes. Every so often he turns to Ora with a look of disbelief that such things can truly exist. Behind Sami’s back the two of them make up a game: he looks at her, she smiles, he looks back at the window and then peeks at her again over his shoulder. When they drive along the waterfront promenade, Sami says to Yazdi, “Shuf el bahr”—look at the sea. The boy puts his head and shoulders out of the window, but beyond the streetlamps the sea is just a dark mass with a few frothy mounds. He murmurs, “Bahr, bahr,” and spreads his fingers out. Ora asks, “Haven’t you ever seen the sea?” He does not answer, and Sami laughs: “This one, where’s he gonna see the sea? At the promenade of the refugee camp?” A breeze carries a whiff of saltwater, and Yazdi’s nostrils widen as he sniffs and tastes. His face has a strange, almost tortured expression, as if its features cannot tolerate the happiness.
Then the illness bears down on him again. His arms and head begin to jerk, and he looks like someone trying to avoid things being thrown at him. Ora keeps mopping his sweat with tissues, and when they run out she uses a rag she finds under the front seat. There is a plastic bag there too, with his underwear, a pair of socks, a Ninja Turtles T-shirt that used to belong to Ofer and was passed on to Sami’s kids, a screwdriver with spare blades, and a clear globe with a tiny dinosaur inside. Yazdi is thirsty and his tongue flicks around in his mouth. The water bottle is empty, but Sami is afraid to stop for water at a kiosk. “On a day like this, an Arab at one of these kiosks, it’s not a good idea,” he explains drily. Soon, perhaps because of Sami’s nervous driving and the circuitous ambling around the maze of Jaffa’s alleyways, Yazdi starts to vomit.
Ora feels his body seize up, his ribs spasmodically rise and fall, and tells Sami to stop the car. Sami gripes that he can’t pull over here: a police van is parked on the opposite sidewalk. But when he hears another fitful gargle from the back, he speeds up as if he’s lost his mind. He runs red lights, looking for a dark corner or an empty lot, and yells at Yazdi in Arabic to hold it in. He threatens the boy, and curses him and his father and his father’s father. A projectile of vomit erupts from the boy’s mouth. Sami yells at Ora to aim Yazdi’s head at the floor, away from the upholstery, but the boy’s head jerks in all directions like a balloon with its air let out, and Ora is sprayed all over her feet, pants, shoes, and hair.
Sami’s right hand reaches back like lightning, feels around, touches something, and pulls back in disgust. “Gimme his hand!” he screeches in a thin, feminine voice. “Put his hand here!” Ora mechanically obeys the urgency in his voice, dimly hoping he might know some instant cure or Palestinian-Shamanic trick, and she holds Yazdi’s limp hand on the fake-wood space between the two front seats. Sami, without even looking, slams down on the hand with his heavy sledgehammer of a fist. Ora screams as though she is the one who’s been hit, and reaches to pull back Yazdi’s hand, but Sami, who doesn’t see what is happening, lands another blow on her arm.
A few minutes later they reach the school. They stop outside a locked gate and a young bearded man, who was waiting in the shadows inside, emerges and looks in all directions, then motions to Sami to follow him along the fence. They walk with the fence between them. At a dark corner the young man holds open a broken part of the fence and comes out to Sami, and the two men whisper quickly, glancing around. Ora gets out of the taxi and inhales the damp night air. Her left arm is burning, and she knows the pain will get worse. In the light of the streetlamp she sees that she is covered with vomit stains. She tries to shake herself off. The bearded man holds Sami’s arm and walks him back to the taxi. They look at Yazdi lying inside, and Sami examines the upholstery with grieving eyes. They both ignore Ora. The young man gives some sort of signal over a cell phone, and three boys come running out of the dark school. Not a single word is uttered. The three pull Yazdi out of the taxi and carry him inside quickly, through a side gate. One of them holds Yazdi’s shoulders, and the other two hold his legs. Ora looks at them and thinks, This is not the first time they’ve carried someone inside like that. Yazdi’s head and arms droop, and his eyes are closed, and it is somehow clear to her that this is not his first time, either.
When she starts walking after them, the bearded man turns to her and then looks at Sami. Sami goes up to her: “Maybe it’s better if you stay here.”
Ora gives him a piercing look. He gives in, walks back to the bearded man, and whispers something to him. Ora assumes he is telling him it’s all right; perhaps he even said, “She’s one of us.”
Inside, the school is completely silent and dark, illuminated only by the moon and the streetlamp. Sami and the bearded man disappear, swallowed up into one of the rooms. Ora stops and waits. When her eyes grow accustomed to the dark, she sees that she is in a fairly large auditorium, with a few corridors leading out of it. Empty window boxes are placed here and there, and posters promoting quiet, neatness, and cleanliness hang crookedly on the walls. She can smell children’s sweat and a distant odor of locker rooms and above all the stench of vomit from her own clothes. She wonders how she will find Sami and Yazdi but is afraid to call out to them. She walks carefully through the darkness, taking small steps, with her arms out in front of her, until she reaches a round supporting column in the middle of the auditorium. Her gaze orbits the walls. She sees pictures of faces she cannot make out, possibly Herzl and Ben-Gurion, or perhaps the prime minister and the chief of staff. A small memorial made out of a heap of rocks sits in the corner opposite her, beneath a large picture that seems to be of Rabin, with black metal letters affixed to the wall above. Ora slowly walks around the column, touching it with one hand. The rotation awakens in her the sweet dizziness she used to summon as a child, with a slight sensation of burning in her fingertips.
As though gathering images while she circles, she begins to see shadowy figures of men, women, and children dressed in rags, silent, submissive, dusted with refugee ash. They are standing some distance away, along the walls, watching her. Ora freezes in terror. They’re coming back, she thinks. For a brief deceptive moment she is convinced that her motion has made real the nightmare that always flickers in the distance. A young woman walks up to Ora and whispers in broken Hebrew that Sami said she could wash her clothes in the bathroom.
Ora follows the woman. The hallways rustle with shadows and the sounds of quick steps. Dim shapes hurry past. She hears almost no voices. The woman silently points to the girls’ bathroom and Ora goes in. She understands that she must not turn on the light, that the entire place must remain dark. In one of the doorless stalls she sits down and pees into the small toilet. Then she washes her face and hair in the sink, scrubs the vomit off her clothes as best she can, and runs cold water over her aching left arm. When she is done, she stands with both hands on the stainless-steel counter, shuts her eyes, and succumbs to an overwhelming weariness. But with weakness comes a sharp pang of fright, again, as though she has left her post.