He started walking around the tree. He tried to think, finally to ask himself when exactly he’d last heard from her, and found that it had been at least three weeks. Or more? Maybe it really had been a month since she’d disappeared. And what if she’d done something to herself? He froze and remembered her dancing with a ladder on the railing around the rooftop of her apartment building in Jaffa, and he knew that her potential in this area had been nagging at him for days now, and that his fear for her had existed alongside his profound confidence in her. He finally acknowledged how much the nerve-racking anticipation of Ofer’s release must have scrambled the rest of his mind and even caused him to forget about her.
He sped up his circles around the tree and calculated again. The restaurant had been closed for renovations for a month now. And it was roughly since then that she hadn’t been around. I haven’t seen her or heard from her or looked for her since then. What was I doing all that time? He remembered long walks on the beach. Street benches. Beggars. Fishermen. Waves of longing for her that he forcefully repressed by beating his head against the wall. Alcohol in quantities he was not used to. Bad trips. Double doses of sleeping pills, starting at eight p.m. Bad headaches in the morning. Whole days of one album, Miles Davis, Mantovani, Django Reinhardt. Hours of digging through the garbage dumps of Jaffa looking for junk, work tools, rusty engines, old keys. There were a few days of occasional work that had generated some decent income. Twice a week he shelved books in the library of a college in Rishon LeZion. Once in a while he served as an experiment subject for pharmaceutical and cosmetic companies. In the presence of friendly, polite scientists and lab technicians, who measured and weighed him and recorded every detail and gave him various forms to sign and finally handed him a voucher for coffee and a croissant, he swallowed brightly colored pills and slathered himself with creams that may or may not ever be used. In his reports, he invented physical and emotional side effects that the developers had never imagined.
For the past week, as Ofer’s release date approached, he had not left the house. He stopped talking to people. Answering the phone. Eating. He felt that he needed to reduce the space he occupied in the world as much as possible. He hardly moved from his armchair. He sat waiting and diminishing himself. And when he got up and walked around the apartment, he tried not to make any fast movements, so as not to rip, not to disturb the gossamer thread from which Ofer now hung. And on the last day, when he thought Ofer was done, he sat motionless by the phone and waited for Ora to call and tell him it was over. But she didn’t call, and he froze up more and more and knew that something bad had happened. The hours went by, evening fell, and he thought that if she did not call right now he would never be able to move again. With his last remaining strength he dialed her number and heard what had happened and felt himself turning to stone.
“But where was I for a whole month?” he moaned, and the sound of his own voice startled him.
He hurried over to Ora, almost running, just at the moment she called out to him.
She was sitting huddled in her coat. “When did you get up?”
“I don’t know, a while ago.”
“And where did you go?”
“Nowhere, I just walked around a bit.”
“Did I disturb you when I cried?”
“No, it’s okay. You can cry.”
Dawn slowly opened its eyes. They sat quietly and watched the night bleed out its blackness.
“Listen,” she said, “and let me finish saying this. I can’t go on this way.”
“What way?”
“With you not saying anything.”
“I’m actually talking a lot.” He forced a laugh.
“Yes, you’ll get hoarse if you keep it up,” she said drily. “But I just can’t stand that you won’t even let me talk about him.”
Avram made a not-that-again gesture, and she slowly inhaled and then said, “Listen, I know it’s difficult for you to be with me, but I’m losing my mind with this, too. It’s worse than if I was on my own. Because then at least I could talk out loud to myself, about him, and now I can’t even do that, because of you. I was thinking, what was I thinking”—she stopped and studied her fingertips; she had no choice—“that soon, when we reach the highway, we can try to get a ride to Kiryat Shmonah, and then we’ll put you on a bus to Tel Aviv and I’ll stay here and go on a bit farther. What do you say? Can you make the trip home on your own?”
“I can do anything. Don’t make an invalid out of me.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I’m not an invalid.”
“I know.”
“There’s nothing I can’t do,” he said angrily. “There are only things I don’t want to do.”
Like help me with Ofer, she thought.
“And how will you manage here?”
“Don’t worry, I’ll manage. I’ll just walk. I don’t even need to walk much. I’ll be happy just crossing one field, back and forth, like yesterday or the day before. What’s important to me is not where I am but where I’m not, do you understand?”
He snorted. “Do I understand?”
“It will be best for both of us,” she said dubiously, sadly, and when he did not answer, she continued. “You may think I can stop it, that I can just not talk about him, I mean, but I can’t. I’m incapable of holding back now, I have to give him strength, he needs me, I can feel it. I’m not criticizing you.”
Avram lowered his head. Don’t move, he thought, let her keep talking, don’t interrupt.
“And it’s not just because of your memory.”
He gave her a puzzled look.
“You know, ’cause you’ll remember everything, and my mind is like a sieve lately. That’s not why I wanted you to come with me.”
His head nestled against his chest and his whole body was hunched forward.
“I wanted you to come with me so I could talk about him with you, just tell you about him, so that if something happens to him—”
Avram crossed his arms and dug his hands deep into his sides. Don’t move. Don’t run away. Let her talk.
“And believe me, I wasn’t thinking about all this before.” Her nose was stuffed up. “You know me, I didn’t plan anything. I wasn’t even thinking about you when you called, and the truth is, you’d completely gone out of my thoughts that day, with everything that was going on. But when you phoned, when I heard you, I don’t know, I suddenly felt that I had to be with you now, you see? With you, not with anyone else.” The more she spoke, the straighter she sat and the sharper her eyes became, as though she had finally begun to decipher a secret code. “And I felt that we had to, both of us together, how can I put this, Avram—” She struggled to keep her voice steady and clean. She did not want her voice to shake. Not even a tremor. She constantly reminded herself of the allergy Ilan and the boys had to her frequent inundations. “Because really, we’re his mother and father,” she said softly. “And if we, together, I mean, if we don’t do what parents—”
She stopped. He had stretched his arms out and up as far as he could, and his body was jerking as though ants were gnawing at his flesh. She scanned him and shook her head heavily a few times.
“All right.” She sighed and started to stand up. “What more can I … I’m an idiot, how could I even think you—”
“No,” he said quickly and put his hand on her arm, then pulled it away. “I was actually thinking … what do you say … maybe we could stay for another day, one day, no big deal, then we’ll see.”
“See what?”
“I don’t know. Look, it’s not like I’m all that, you know, it’s not like I’m suffering, is it? It’s not like you said”—he swallowed hard—“it’s just that when you pressure me with it, with him …”