What have I done.
I took Ofer to war.
I brought him to the war myself.
And if something happens to him.
And if that was the last time I touched him.
At the end, when I kissed him, I touched his cheek on the soft spot where there’s no stubble.
I took him there.
I didn’t stop him. I didn’t even try.
I called a cab and we went.
Two and a half hours on the road, and I did not try.
I left him there.
I left him for them.
With my own hands, I did.
Her breath stops. She is afraid to move. Paralyzed. It’s a feeling she has, a sharp, real knowledge.
Be careful, she thinks at him without moving her lips, and look behind you.
Then, of its own accord, her body begins to move very gently, almost imperceptibly. Shoulders, hips, a slight shift of the waist. She has no control over her limbs. She only feels that her body is communicating to Ofer how he should move to get out of some danger or trap over there. The peculiar involuntary motion continues for a long minute, and then her body quiets and returns to her, and Ora breathes and knows everything is all right, for now. “Ahh,” she sighs to her little abdomen reflected in the low mirror.
Sometimes I think I can remember almost every moment I had with him, from the second he was born. Yet at other times I find that entire phases are lost to me. “My friend Ariela gave birth prematurely, in her second trimester,” she tells a heavyset older woman in a floral scarf who has come into the bathroom and stands quietly to the side. She watches Ora with kind eyes and seems to be waiting for her to recover from whatever is paining her.
“They gave her an injection,” Ora says softly. “An injection that was supposed to kill the fetus in her womb. He wasn’t right, he had Down syndrome, and she and her husband decided they couldn’t raise a child like that. But the child was born alive, do you see? Do you understand me?” The woman nods and Ora continues. “There must have been a mistake in the amount of stuff they injected, and my friend asked them to let her hold the child for as long as he was alive. She sat up in bed, her husband walked out, he couldn’t take it”—Ora flashes her eyes at the woman and thinks she sees a spark of understanding and comradeship—“and for fifteen minutes he was alive in her arms, and she kept talking to him, she hugged him and kissed him all over, it was a boy, and she kissed each of his fingers and fingernails. She always says he looked like a perfectly healthy child, except tiny, and translucent, and he moved around a little and had facial expressions, just like a baby. He moved his hands and his mouth, but he didn’t make any sound.” The woman listens with her arms folded over her chest. “And very slowly, he simply ended. He just went out like a candle, in total silence and without making any trouble about it, he twisted a little and folded in, and that was that. And my friend remembers those moments even more than the other three childbirths, before and after, and she always says that in the short time she had with him, she tried to give him as much life as she possibly could, and all her love, even though she was actually the one who killed him, or shared the decision to kill him.” Ora murmurs and runs her hands stiffly over her head and temples and crushes her cheeks between her hands, and her mouth opens briefly in a silent scream.
The woman bows her head slightly and says nothing. Now Ora notices that she is very old, and that her face is furrowed with deep wrinkles and covered with tattoos.
“And what do I have to complain about?” Ora continues in a cracked voice. “I held my child for twenty-one years—wakhad wa-ashrin sana,” she says in the tentative Arabic she remembers from high school. “But they went by so quickly, and I barely had time for anything with him, but now that his army is finished we could have really started.” Her voice breaks but she pulls herself together. “Come on, ma’am, let’s get out of here, please take me to Sami.”
It isn’t easy to find him. The old woman does not know Sami and seems not to understand what Ora wants. Still, she willingly leads her from room to room, pointing inside each one, and Ora peers into the dark classrooms. In some of them she sees people, not many, three here, five there, children and adults, huddled around a cluster of desks whispering, or sitting on the floor and warming up dinners on little gas cookers, or asleep in their clothes on desks and chairs joined together. In one room she sees someone lying on a long bench, with several people bustling around him quickly but silently. In another a man kneels down to bandage the foot of a man sitting on a chair. A young woman cleans the wound of a man with a bare chest and a grimace on his face. From other rooms she hears stifled moans of pain and murmurs of comfort. There is a sharp smell of iodine in the air.
“And in the morning, what happens?” Ora asks in the hallway.
“Morning,” the old woman repeats in Hebrew and smiles broadly, “in the morning kulhum mafish—they’re all gone!” She mimes a bubble bursting.
Ora finally finds Sami and Yazdi. There is no light but the moonlight and the room is utterly silent. She stands in the doorway and looks at the little chairs turned upside down on the desks. A huge cardboard cutout of a seal hangs on the wall, with the caption Recon-seal-iation. Each of its parts is a conflict that has to be reconciled: Ashkenazim and Sephardim, left wing and right wing, religious and secular. Sami and the bearded man stand a few steps away, next to the blackboard, talking quietly with an older man who is short, solid, and silver-haired. Sami nods slightly at Ora, but his face is impervious. Something in his posture and the way he cuts through the air as he makes hand gestures is new to her and very foreign. Three little children, two or three years old, discover Ora and start running around her, excitedly pulling her by the pants without any embarrassment. They also make almost no sound, to Ora’s surprise: they too are well-trained partridge chicks. She follows them to the corner of the classroom, near the window. A little circle of women tightens around someone in the center. Ora glimpses between the women’s heads and sees a large woman sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall with her bare feet stretched out in front of her. She is breast-feeding Yazdi. His mouth is attached to her nipple and his feet hang over her lap. He is wearing different clothes: a brown-and-white-checkered shirt with black pants. For the first time since Ora met him, his face looks serene. The breast-feeding woman watches him with deep concentration. She has a strong, wild face and bony, slightly masculine cheeks, and a full white breast. The women look hypnotized, all strung on one thread. Ora stands on her tiptoes, drawn inside the circle — after all, she has some part in Yazdi too, or perhaps she just wants to touch his hand one last time, to say goodbye. But when she tries to squeeze her way through, the women tighten up against her as one, and she withdraws and stands behind them.
A hand touches her shoulder. Sami. Pale and exhausted. “Come on, we’re done here.”
“What about him?” She motions at Yazdi with her eyes.
“It’ll be okay. His uncle will come soon to get him.”
“And who is that?” She looks at the wet nurse.
“A woman. The doctor told her to give him milk. Milk his body doesn’t throw out.”
“There’s a doctor here?”
Sami arches his eyebrows at the short, silver-haired man.
“What is a doctor doing here? What is this place?”
Sami hesitates. “These, these people,” he says halfheartedly, “from all over town they come here at night.”
“Why?”
“At night it’s the IRs’ hospital.”
“Hospital?”
“For all the ones that get hurt on the job, or the ones that get beat.”