certainly possible that he’ll be better in a few weeks or months, but it might take longer. Our estimate—our guess, to be more accurate—is that he is somehow controlling it, his rate of recovery, not consciously of course—”
“I don’t understand! Are you telling me he’s pulling our leg? That he’s acting?”
“God forbid.” The psychologist holds his hands up. “I—we, meaning, the system—just think that he probably prefers to return to life with small steps. Very, very small. I would suggest trusting that he probably knows better than all of us what’s best for him.”
“Let me ask you something,” Ora says, placing a restraining hand on Ilan’s arm. “Is it possible that the fact that we had a child, Ilan and I, is somehow connected to … how can I put it …”
“To his unwillingness to live,” Ilan hisses.
“That is a question only he can answer,” says the psychologist without looking at them.
Ilan keeps on living in the shed, and his presence, like his absence, gradually fades. Ora stops believing he’ll ever be able to cross the ocean between the shed and the house. He himself tells her on the phone one night that this seems to be the distance he can tolerate from her and Adam. She no longer asks what he means. Deep inside, she’s already given up on him. He asks again, as he does occasionally, if she wants him to leave. She just has to say the word and he’ll be gone tomorrow. Ora says, “Leave, stay, what difference does it make.”
For a short while she has a new boyfriend, a guy called Motti, a divorced accordion player who leads public sing-alongs, whom her friend Ariela set her up with. She usually meets him out of the house, more because of Adam than Ilan. When Adam goes to stay with her parents in Haifa for three days, she invites Motti to sleep over. She knows that Ilan in his shed can see, or at least hear. She doesn’t try to hide it. Motti sleeps with her ungracefully. He probes his way inside her and keeps asking insistently if he’s “already there.” Ora doesn’t want to be his there. She remembers the times when she was entirely here. Afterward, Motti sings “Where Are You, Beloved?” in the shower, in a ringing tenor voice, and Ora sees Ilan’s shadow in the shed, darting back and forth. She doesn’t invite Motti back again.
One evening, in Avram’s apartment in Tel Aviv, she and Avram are making a salad, and she watches out of the corner of her eye to make sure he’s using the knife properly and not throwing out half the cucumber with its peel. He tells her about a nurse from Tel Hashomer who’s asked him out twice, and he’s said no.
“Why did you say no?”
“Because.”
“Because what?”
“Because, you know.”
“No, I don’t, what am I supposed to know?” But she suddenly feels cold.
“Because after the movie she’ll invite me up to her place.”
“And what’s wrong with that?”
“Don’t you get it?”
“No, I don’t get it,” she almost shouts.
He keeps chopping vegetables silently.
“Is she nice?” Ora asks casually, as she crushes a tomato.
“She’s fine.”
“Is she attractive?” she asks with trembling disinterest.
“She’s pretty good-looking, nice body, barely nineteen years old.”
“Oh. So what’s wrong with going up to her place?”
“I can’t,” he says emphatically, and Ora quickly switches to an onion, to have an excuse for the tears that will come.
“Ever since I got back I’m this way. Can’t do it.” He snickers: “A broken reed.”
She feels chilly and hollow in her stomach. As if only now, after several years of delay, has the final and terrible shock wave of his tragedy settled over him. “Have you even tried?” she whispers, and thinks, How did I not know about this? How did it not occur to me to find out about this? I took care of his whole body, and I forgot about that? About that, with him, I forgot?
“I tried four times. Four times is a representative sample, isn’t it?”
“With who?” she asks, amazed. “Who did you try with?”
He doesn’t seem embarrassed. “Once with the cousin of a soldier who was in the bed next to mine, and once with a Dutch volunteer who works there. Once with a soldier from rehab, once with someone I met on the beach a while ago.” He sees the expression on her face. “What are you looking at me like that for? I didn’t even initiate it! It’s them …” Then he adds helplessly, “Turns out