by the way, it’s not just his clothes in here.” She scans the backpack, eyebrow raised, still not touching. “There are some of Adam’s and Ilan’s shirts, too. And there’s a pair of sharwals he always wears when he goes to Sinai. You could definitely wear those, they’re so baggy.” And silently she adds: They won’t infect you with Ofer.
“But why Adam’s and Ilan’s clothes?”
“That’s what he wanted. To be enveloped in the two of them while he hiked.”
She resists telling him that they share underwear too, her three men.
She finally reaches in, hesitant at first, afraid to disturb Ofer’s order, but then she plunges deep down, penetrating, and now both hands are tunneling in, grabbing handfuls of sun-warmed clothes that have been baking for a week now, and her hands encounter paired socks, and they thrust into crevices with pickpocket speed, and here a towel, and there a flashlight, and sandals and underwear and T-shirts. Her fingers dig wildly in the depths, beyond her field of vision, looting whatever they can. A strange feeling spreads through her: his clothes, his shells, and somehow his insides, warm and damp.
She leans down and buries her face in the backpack. The smell of clean clothes, crammed in and unaired. They had packed together the night before, recalling the solemn preparations on the eve of the great battle in The Wind in the Willows, which Ora had read to him three consecutive times in his childhood: a shirt for Mole, and a pair of socks for Toad. And it turns out that through the whole cheerful ceremony, while Ora could not stop rolling around with laughter, Ofer was planning and scheming, perhaps even already knew with complete confidence that he wasn’t going on the trip with her, that it was all a big charade. How could he trick her? And why, in fact, did he do it? Maybe he was afraid he’d be bored spending a whole week with her. That they wouldn’t have anything to talk about, or that she’d interrogate him about Talia and the breakup again, or whine about Adam, or try to recruit him to her side—which would never have occurred to her!—against Ilan, or ask him about Hebron again. Yes, it might have been mainly that.
The entire state of particulars revolts her. A sour taste crawls up her throat. Her face is buried in the backpack and her hands clutch it on either side. She looks like someone drinking thirstily from a well, but Avram notices that the lovely, slender vertebrae on the back of her neck are twitching beneath her skin.
Inside, she sobs uncontrollably, flooded with self-pity over the ruination of her life, her family, her love, Ilan, Adam, and now Ofer out there, and God forbid, and what is left of her, and who is she now that all these have vanished or simply ripped themselves away from her, and what was all her brilliant motherhood worth? Nothing but cowardice—that’s what her motherhood was. A skilled sponge. Most of what she’d done for twenty-five years was mop up everything that poured out of the three of them, each in his own way, everything they spat out constantly over the years into the family space, namely into her, because she herself, more than any of them, and more than the three of them together, was the family space. She’d mopped up all the good and all the bad that came out of them—mainly the bad, she thinks bitterly, prolonging her self-castigation, though she knows in the depths of her heart that she’s distorting things, wronging them and herself, yet still she refuses to give up the bitter spew that flies out of her in all directions: so many toxins and acids she’s absorbed, all the excrements of body and soul, all the excess baggage of their childhood and their adolescence and adulthood. But someone had to absorb all that, didn’t they? she sobs into the shirts and socks that cling to her face like little consolation puppies—soft, how soft the touch, soft the scent of laundry, despite its gently mocking derision: two-bit feminist, an insult to women’s lib, a stain on the neon glow that emanates from the books her friend Ariela insists on buying her, books she’s never managed to read more than a few pages of, written by decisive, witty, opinionated women who use expressions like “the duality of the clitoris as signifier and signified,” or “the vagina as male-encoded deterministic space,” which immediately activate