trembles a little from the tension. She cannot see his face. His face is hidden in his arms, and his arms embrace his knees. She has the feeling that he’s listening to her from within the depths of his flesh, like an animal in its lair.
“And the fact that we’re living here,” Ilan said.
“It’s just until he gets back,” she murmured. “We’re just looking after his house.”
“I keep telling him that when I’m with him,” Ilan whispered, “and I don’t know if he even understands that we’re actually living here.”
“But as soon as he gets back, we’ll leave.”
Ilan sneered. “And now our kid is going to grow up here.”
Ora thought that if Ilan didn’t come over and hold her immediately, her body would fall to the ground and shatter.
“And I can’t see any way out of it, or any chance that anything will ever work out for us”—he was shouting now—“and just think about it, we’ll live out our lives here, and we’ll have another child and maybe another, we once talked about four, including one we’d adopt, right? To repay a kindness to humanity, didn’t we say? And every time we look into each other’s eyes we’ll see him. And all that time, through all our lives, and his; twenty, thirty, fifty years, he’ll sit there in his darkness, do you understand?” Ilan seized his head with both hands and hammered with his voice, and Ora was suddenly afraid of him. He bellowed: “There will be a child here who’ll grow up and be an entire world, and over there he’ll be a living dead, and this child could have been his, and you could have been his too, if only—”
“And then maybe you would have been a living dead somewhere.”
“You know what?”
And she did.
“Is this hard for you?” Ora asks Avram in a muffled voice.
“I’m listening,” he answers, his jaws breaking the words up into tight syllables.
“Because if it’s too difficult—”
He lifts his head and his face looks as though a firm hand is crushing it. “Ora, it’s my finally hearing from the outside something I’ve been hearing inside my head for years.”
She wants to touch his hand, to absorb some of what’s overflowing from him, but she doesn’t dare. “You know, it’s strange, but it’s the same way for me.”
• • •
She had no strength left. She collapsed on the couch. Ilan came and stood facing her and said he had to leave.
“Where to?”
“I don’t know, I can’t stay here.”
“Now?”
He was suddenly very tall. It was as though he stretched out more and more from above and looked all stiff and his eyes glistened.
“You mean you’re going to walk out and leave me alone with him?”
“I’m no good here, I’m poisoning the air, I hate myself here. I even hate you. When I see you like that, so full, I just can’t stand you.” Then he added, “And I can’t love Adam. I can’t manage to love him. There’s a glass wall between him and me. I don’t feel him, I don’t smell him. Let me go.”
She said nothing.
“Maybe if I think quietly a bit, for a few days, maybe I’ll be able to come back. Right now I have to be alone, Ora, give me one week alone.”
“And how am I supposed to manage here?”
“I’ll help you, you won’t have to worry about anything. We’ll talk on the phone every day, I’ll find help for you, a nanny, a babysitter, you can be totally free, you can go back to school, find a job, do anything you want, just let me go now, it’s not good for me to stay here even for ten minutes.”
“But when did you think about all this?” Ora murmured dully. “We were together the whole time.”
Ilan spoke rapidly, organizing her bright future in a blink. “I could actually see,” she tells Avram, “how in a second that mechanism of his was turned on, you know? The cogwheels in his eyes?”
She looked at Ilan and thought that as smart as he was, he didn’t understand anything, and that she had made a terrible mistake with him. She tried to imagine what her parents would say and how devastated they would be.
“And I thought about how they always warned me about you,” she tells Avram, “and how they admired him, mainly my mother, who in my opinion always wondered what a guy like him saw in me.”
Avram smiles, his face hidden in his arms. Hochstapler, her mother used to call him, and Ora