a different phone? No, but they’ve been doing roadwork outside his place for three months now, digging up the street and paving it over day and night, and there’s a terrible racket, and you know how noise makes him crazy. ‘So where does your new number live?’ ‘In Evan Sapir, near Hadassah Hospital. I found a nice little apartment in someone’s backyard.’ ‘Is it quiet there?’ I ask. ‘Like a graveyard,’ he assures me, and I change the number on the fridge.
“A few weeks later, another call. His landlord’s son bought a drum set. He holds the phone out the window, so I can enjoy it, too. Huge drums, apparently. A tom-tom, at the very least. A person can’t live this way. I agree with him and walk to the fridge with pen in hand. ‘I’ve already settled on a little place in Bar Giora,’ he says in a nasal voice. Bar Giora? That’s pretty close, I think, it’s right across the valley. I feel my stomach contracting, and I can’t tell if it’s excitement or alarm at his sudden proximity. But a week goes by, and another week, and I see no change in our relationship. He’s over there, we’re over here, and there starts to be more and more of an ‘us.’
“After a while, another phone call. ‘Listen, I had a slight falling-out with the landlord, he has two dogs, murderous rottweilers. I’m moving again, and I thought you’d want to know: it’s quite close to you.’ He giggles. ‘It’s more or less in Tzur Hadassah itself, I mean, if that won’t bother you.’ ‘Hey, Ilan, are you playing hot and cold with me?’ ”
Ilan had laughed. Ora knew him and his systems of laughs, and in this laughter there was something weak and pathetic, and she felt once again how strong she was. “I’m telling you,” she says to Avram, “I didn’t even know up to then that I was such a lioness. But I’m also a dishrag, as you know, and a doormat, and I missed him almost all the time and everything reminded me of him—Adam’s suckling used to make me so horny for Ilan.” She laughs quietly to herself as she remembers. “I would pick up Ilan’s smell from Adam at night and it woke me. And all that time I felt as though he were just a couple of meters away.”
When she says that, she can hear the music in which Ilan spoke to her on the phone all the years they were together, with a firm sort of sharpness and a rousing “Ora!” Sometimes, when he said her name that way, she had a vague sense of guilt—like a soldier asleep on guard duty whose officer calls him out—but there was almost always something daring in the way he addressed her too, and teasing, and arousing and inviting: Ora! She smiles to herself: Ora! As though he were establishing a decisive, solid fact that she herself often doubted.
“So I pretend to be strong and ask softly, ‘What’s going on, Ilan? Is this like some kind of Monopoly game for you, renting and selling houses in all sorts of streets around town? Or is my learned friend a little homesick?’ And without even blinking, he says yes, that he’s had no life since he left home, that he’s going crazy. And then I hear myself say, ‘Then come back,’ and straightaway I think, No! I don’t need him and I don’t want him here. I don’t want any man getting under my feet around here.”
She smiles broadly when Avram briefly lifts his heavy eyelids and an ancient spark glimmers slyly in his eyes. “There you are,” she says.
“Sometimes at night,” Ilan told her back then, “I drive to the house. It’s some kind of force … It just gets hold of me, wakes me up at one o’clock in the morning, or two, throws me out of bed, and I get up like a zombie and get on my motorbike and drive to you, and I know I’ll be with you in one minute, in your bed, begging you to forgive me, to forget, to erase my madness. And then, when I’m twenty meters from the place, the counter-force kicks in, always at the same point, as if that’s where the magnet’s poles get reversed. I can actually feel something physically pushing me, and it says: Move away, get out of here, it’s no good to be here—”
“Is that really what happens?”
“I’m going