we couldn’t visit him because he was never home. Adam was enchanted by this new thing, and perhaps by the idea that there was a man who was never home. Every time we went out or came home, he would pull me to the shed. He drew pictures and wanted to bring them as gifts to the man in the shed. He kept kicking his ball at the shed. He would stand there and stroke Ilan’s motorbike with both hands, and the chain that tied it to the gate.
“Sometimes I played with him in the garden, near the shed, or gave him a bath in a big tub outside, or we would picnic on a blanket on the lawn. About once every minute he would say, ‘Can the man see us?’ ‘Maybe we should invite him?’ ‘What’s the man’s name?’
“When I finally broke down and told him the name, he started calling him. ‘Ilan, Ilan!’ ” She cups her hands over her mouth to illustrate: “Ilan, Ilan.” Avram looks at her.
“You see, up until then he’d had some instinct not to even learn the word ‘daddy.’ But now he started to say ‘Ilan’ with such dedication. He would open his eyes in the morning and ask if Ilan was still there. Come back from day care and check with me whether Ilan was back from work. In the afternoons he would stand on the porch facing the garden, hold on to the railing, rock it as hard as he could, and shout ‘Ilan!’ a hundred times, a thousand times, never giving up, until I took him inside. Sometimes I really had to drag him into the house.
“You know, telling you this, I realize what I did to him.
“I wasn’t thinking about anything then, do you understand?
“Ilan and I were—
“You have to understand.
“There was a kind of circle of madness around us both.
“And all my natural instincts just seemed to—
“Listen, I don’t know where I was.
“It was as though I didn’t exist.”
She picks up only after a long break, during which she wipes her eyes and nose and swallows down the toxic thought that perhaps it is this too that Adam is now punishing her for. “It wasn’t his usual attraction to men. Not the attraction to every man who happened to come through the house, every postman delivering a package, whom he would flirt with and ask to stay and cling to his leg. There was something in Ilan—you know, his absent presence, and the fact that he was capable of ignoring Adam so completely, when everyone else made such a big deal about how cute he was—something that just drove him mad. And to this day it’s like that.” She sighs. She can see Adam performing on a stage, his eyes rolling back in a very private ecstasy, a mixture of torment and pleading.
“Like what?”
“Like he’s always wanting Ilan to see him.
“And just so you know, at least twice a day I would decide that was it, Ilan had to leave, get out of the shed, just to stop torturing Adam. But on the other hand, I wasn’t able to give up that one-thousandth of a chance that he might still come home. I kept trying to understand what Ilan was going through when he heard Adam wailing on the porch, and how it could not make him crazy. What sort of a person was he, tell me this, that he could withstand that kind of thing?”
“Yes,” Avram says, his voice hardening.
“I also thought maybe that was exactly what he was looking for.”
“What?” Avram grunts.
“Exactly that torture.”
“Which was what? I don’t get it.”
“That right-across-the-way,” she says rhythmically. “For thou shalt see us afar off, but thou shalt not go thither. That sort of thing. And believe me, that kind of torture I don’t—”
His face tenses up and his eyes dart around. His entire expression alters. She stops. Puts a hand on his arm.
“I’m sorry, Avram, I didn’t … Don’t go there now, be with me.”
“I’m with you,” he says after a minute. His voice is thick and strained. He wipes the sweat off his upper lip. “I’m here.”
“I need you.”
“I’m here, Ora.”
They walk silently. A road runs by not too far away, and they can already hear the vehicles. Avram senses them the way a dreamer starts to be aware of sounds in the household that has awoken before he has.
“I looked down on him, and sometimes I pitied him the way you pity a handicapped person. And I