And after a minute—her neck is flushed now—he adds, “You think you’re the only one who can make them?”
“Make those bargains with fate, you mean?”
Silence. She draws short lines in the dirt with a twig and puts a triangle over them—a roof. Three years of abstinence from meat, she thinks, and every evening he crossed off one line on the wall. What does that say? What is he saying to me?
She went on. “Ofer thought about it some more, and asked if the cow that you take the meat from grows out new meat.”
“Grows out,” Avram repeats with a smile.
“I squirmed, and I said, ‘Not really, that’s not exactly how it works.’ Ofer paced around the kitchen again, faster and faster, and I could see that something was starting up inside him, and then he faced me and asked if the cow got a boo-boo when you took its meat. I had no choice, so I said yes.”
Avram listens, every cord of his soul suddenly fascinated by the picture. By Ora talking with her child in the kitchen, and the little boy, thin and serious and troubled, darting around the narrow room, tugging on his earlobe, looking helplessly at his mother. Avram unwittingly holds his hand up in front of his face to ward off the domestic particles being hurled at him with intolerable abundance. The kitchen, the open fridge, a table set for two, steaming pots on the stove, the mother, the little boy, his distress.
“Then he asked if they take the meat from a cow that’s already dead so it doesn’t hurt her. He was really trying to find some dignified way out of the mess, you see, for me, but somehow also for all of humanity. I knew I had to make up a white lie, and that later, with time, once he grew stronger and bigger and had enough animal protein, the time would come to tell him what you once called ‘the facts of life and death.’ Ilan was so furious with me afterward for not being able to come up with something, and he was right, he really was!” Her eyes grow fiery. “Because with kids you have to cut corners here and there, you have to hide things, soften the facts for them, there’s just no other way, and I wasn’t … I was never able to, I couldn’t lie.”
Then she hears what she is saying.
“Well, apart from … you know.”
Avram does not dare to ask with words, but his eyes practically spell out the question.
“Because we promised you,” she says simply. “Ofer doesn’t know anything.”
There is a hush. She wants to add something, but finds that after years of silence, of contracting the large muscle of consciousness, she cannot talk about it even with Avram.
“But how can you?” he asks with a wonderment that confuses her. She thinks she hears a tone of condemnation.
“You just can,” she whispers. “Ilan and I together. You can.”
She is flooded by the warmth of the covenant they made together, which had only deepened around the large open pit of secretive silence, through the tenderness that emanated from the two of them on its brink, the cautious way they held on to each other so as not to fall in but not get too far away either, and the bitter knowledge, which also held a hint of special sweetness, that their life story was always being written in inverted letters too, and that no one else in the world—not even Avram—could read it. Even now, she thinks, even apart, we have that, that definitive thing of ours.
She clenches her jaw and pushes deep back inside her what had dared to peer out into the light for a moment, and then, through the force of almost twenty-two years of practice, she transposes herself back onto the straight track, the simple one, from which she was displaced a moment ago, and she wipes the last few minutes off her slate—the memory of the vast and ungraspable anomaly of her life.
“Where was I?”
“In the kitchen. With Ofer.”
“Yes, and Ofer of course got even more stressed out by my silence, and he was flying around the kitchen like a spinning top, back and forth, talking to himself, and I could see that he wasn’t even capable of putting into words what he suspected. Finally, I’ll never forget it, he bowed his head and stood there all tense and crooked”—with the subtlest of gestures, she becomes him in her body, in her