He lets out a long exhalation and begins to defrost his limbs. He stretches his arms, back, shoulders, elbows, wrists. Everything is working, Ora thinks as she watches surreptitiously: broad, diagonal movements, the large muscle groups. He looks at the stream without believing he really crossed it, and when he smiles awkwardly at Ora, a fraction of the old charm flashes through. She feels a pang as she looks at him: Oh, my old, suspended lover. She returns a measured smile, very careful not to flood him. This is another piece of wisdom she’s learned in her long life among the tribe of men: the wisdom of not flooding them.
She shows him where to sit and how to put his feet on the rock so they’ll dry faster, and from a side pocket in the backpack she takes some crackers, processed cheese, and two apples. She holds them out to him and he munches heavily and methodically, glancing around with his suspicious, studious look. He gets stuck again on her long, narrow feet, which have turned very pink from the cold water, and he quickly looks away. Then he slowly straightens his neck and spreads his arms out from his body, with cautious movements, like a huge dinosaur chick erupting from its egg. As he looks contemplatively at the opposite bank, Ora realizes that now, having crossed the stream, he is beginning to grasp that he has left behind what used to be, and that from here on there will be a new reality.
She starts talking, to distract him before he can get scared. She shows him how to peel off the large cakes of mud drying on his legs and slaps her own legs lightly to get the blood flowing. Then she puts her socks and shoes back on, ties her shoelaces the way Ofer taught her — she likes to feel that even from afar he is zipping and fastening her up with his embrace — and wonders whether she should try to tell Avram that Ofer, when he showed her the double knot, had said he was positive that no future invention could ever replace man’s ingenuity when it came to the simple act of tying shoelaces. “No matter what they invent,” he’d said, “we’ll always have that, and that’s how we’ll remember every morning that we’re human.” Her heart had filled with pride, perhaps because he’d said “human” so naturally, with such humanness. She had quoted Nahum Gutman, who wrote in his Path of the Orange Peels that every morning when he put on his shoes, he whistled excitedly, “because I am glad of the new day breaking.” And of course they both brought up Grandpa Moshe, her father, who had worn the same pair of shoes for seventeen years, explaining that he simply “walked lightly.” Ora had not been able to resist telling Ofer — she thought he’d probably heard the story before, but she risked it anyway — that when he was about eighteen months old and she’d put his first pair of shoes on, she’d accidentally put the left shoe on the right foot and vice versa. “And to think that for half a day you walked around with your shoes on the wrong feet, just because I decided that was the right way. It’s terrible how parents can determine their — Wait, have I already told you this story?” “Let’s see,” Ofer had said, laughing, and punched in a calculation on his phone. They had endless such conversations, full of laughter and mutual potshots. An awkward warmth flowed between them, with soul-penetrating glances. In recent years this was diminishing, much as everything between them was diminishing. It seemed that ever since the two of them started to mature, he and Adam, they’d moved more into Ilan’s domain, and sometimes she thought they’d been transferred into a different magnetic field, with its own laws and sensibilities, and mainly its own impermeabilities, where she flailed in a tapestry of wires that tripped her up and made her falter ridiculously with each step. But it was still there, she convinced herself repeatedly. What existed between them must still exist somewhere, it’s just that it was slightly subterranean now, especially while he was serving in the army, and it would come back after he finished, and it might even be richer and fuller. She sighs loudly and wonders how it happened that her expertise in recent years was to look for signs of life in people.
Avram gravely observes Ora’s hands as she ties her laces, but he gets mixed up when he tries to follow, and she sits down next to him to show him. She notices that the water has washed the sharp smell of urine off him, and that she can now stand next to him without gagging. And then Avram himself suddenly says, “I wet myself yesterday, huh?”
“Don’t ask.”
“Where did it happen?”
“Never mind.”
“I can’t remember anything.”
“It’s better that way.”
He examines her face and decides to let it go, and she wonders if she’ll ever tell him about that night with Sami.
Only when she’d walked with Avram on her back right up to the taxi door had he deigned to get out of the cab, irate and begrudging, and the two of them together had managed to shove the sleeping Avram into the backseat. That was when it occurred to Ora that Sami hadn’t even known up until this moment that they were picking up a man. For a few months now he’d lurked in his subtle, polite way, hoping to find out whether she had anyone new. This isn’t really someone new, she’d thought. In fact he’s someone very old. It’s secondhand Avram, maybe even third. She stood by the taxi catching her breath, her shirt wrinkled and damp with sweat, her legs still shaking.
“Drive,” she said when she sat down next to Sami.
“Where to?”
She thought for a moment. Without looking at him, she said, “To where the country ends.”
“For me it ended a long time ago,” he hissed.
Every so often, as they drove, she felt him throw her a questioning, hostile, and somewhat frightened look. She did not turn to face him, did not know what he saw, and felt that something about her was already different. They passed Ramat HaSharon, Herzliya, Netania, and Hadera, turned toward Wadi Ara, drove by the kibbutzim of Gan Shmuel and Ein Shemer, and the Arab villages of Kfar Kara, Ar’ara, and the city of Umm al’Fahm, crossed Megiddo Junction and HaSargel Junction, and took a wrong turn and got lost in Afula, which had presumptuously installed the new traffic patterns of a big city. They bounced from one traffic circle to the next, but finally they escaped Afula and drove past Kfar Tavor and Shibli, north on Route 65 all the way to Golani Junction, and farther north past Bu’eine and Eilabun to Kadarim Junction, which was also called Amud River Junction, and Ora thought to herself, It’s been years since I hiked the Amud River. If I was with Ofer I would convince him to do it, but what am I doing here with Avram? They turned onto Route 85 and drove to Ami’ad Junction, and Ora, whose anger at Sami had imperceptibly faded away, just as it always did — she was quick to heat up and quick to cool down, and sometimes simply forgot she was angry — pointed out that there was a nice little café around here. “On a good day you could see the Kinneret, and on any day you can see the beautiful woman who owns the place.” Ora smiled appeasingly, but Sami did not respond and refused the apple and squares of chocolate she offered. She stretched out and rubbed the body parts that ached and remembered that she hadn’t even finished the story she’d started telling him — that afternoon? Was it only that afternoon? — about her father’s glaucoma and the surgery he finally had to save his one seeing eye. It bothered her that the story had been truncated, although she knew that from their current positions there was probably no way back to the tone of voice that would allow the story to end. But it was good that she’d remembered it, she thought as she sat back comfortably and closed her eyes, because through it she could be with Ofer, who had insisted on staying with her father in the hospital the night after the operation and had taken him home with Ora, driving with a tenderness that had filled her with joy. She remembered how he walked the old man carefully from the car to the house, supporting him down the path through the apartment complex’s garden, and her father had pointed wondrously at the lawn and the plants. After fifteen years of almost total blindness, his mind had confused the colors, and shadows looked like real things. Ofer realized immediately what was happening and translated the sights for him, and the different shades, reminding him gently: blue, yellow, green, purple. Her father had pointed at various things and recited the colors with Ofer. Ora had followed them and listened to Ofer and thought to herself, What a wonderful father he will make. He led her father up the stairs to the apartment with an arm around his shoulders, efficiently removing any obstacles in his way, and inside the apartment her mother had fled into the pantry. Ofer saw and understood and kept walking her father, holding his hand, to see the photograph of his grandchildren on the sideboard for the first time. Then he walked him through the rooms and showed him the various pieces of furniture purchased during his years of blindness. Still her mother did not show herself, and then Ofer had an idea. He took her father into the kitchen and they stood peering into the refrigerator together, and her father was amazed: “The fruits and vegetables are so colorful! In my day it wasn’t like this!” He told Ofer with astonishment about every new thing he noticed, as if he wished to give him the gift of this primordial sight. And all that time her mother fussed around in the other rooms, and her father did not ask about her, and Ofer did not say anything, until finally, through the little window shared by the pantry and the bathroom, she presented her face to his eyes. Ofer gently smoothed his hand over his grandfather’s back and signaled to his grandmother to smile.