what he thought about her and Avram? What story did he tell himself in his mind? She stops abruptly, horrified, and Avram almost walks into her: “What if that guy finds the notebook and reads it?”
Between two rocks, she remembers. I put it down for a minute, this morning, while I rolled up my sleeping bag, and I left it there. How could I leave it there?
“With any luck,” she says out loud, perhaps too loud, “no one will find it before we get there.”
It happened very early that morning. She and Avram were hiking up the riverbed when they saw a figure walking down the hillside in their direction. Perhaps that was why he had at first seemed taller and thinner than he was. And the strange light coming through the terebinth branches—a dusty, yellowish dawn light—made him look dark and blurry. Ora stood watching the figure for a moment, pondering the way sometimes, in the morning, when someone comes at you from the opposite direction and the sunlight is behind them, in your eyes, all you can see is the outline of a spindly Giacometti body that disintegrates and re-forms itself with every step, and it’s hard to know if the figure is a man or a woman, and whether it’s coming toward you or moving farther away. And then she heard stones skidding behind her, and Avram jumped ahead in a flash to stand between her and the stranger, who gave them a slightly bewildered smile.
Avram’s move also confused her, and she did not respond. Having planted himself in front of her, Avram stood breathing deeply, his chest puffed out, and stared intently not at the man in front of him but at the pebbles on the ground. He looked like a guard dog: loyal, stubborn, dense, protecting his lady.
The men faced each other as Avram blocked the path. The stranger cleared his throat, said a cautious good morning, and Ora answered feebly, “Good morning.” “You’re coming from down there?” asked the man redundantly, and Ora nodded. She didn’t look at him, either. She felt that she did not have the strength to make even the slightest trivial connection. She only wanted to keep walking with Avram and talking with Avram about Ofer, and anything else was a distraction and a waste of energy. “So long,” she said, and waited for Avram to keep going. But he did not move, and the man cleared his throat again and said, “When you get to the top, you’ll see some lovely flowers. Carpets of spiny broom, and the redbuds are in bloom, too.” Ora glanced at him wearily: What was he talking about? All this nonsense about blossoms. She noticed that he was around her age, a little older, fifty-something, bronzed and solid and relaxed. In his eyes she saw herself and Avram. They gave off a forlorn whiff of the persecuted, and disaster hovered over them. The man grasped the straps on his backpack with two remarkably long, arched thumbs, and seemed to be considering taking the bag off.
“So you’re hiking the trail?”
“What?” she murmured. “What trail?”
“The Israel Trail.” He pointed to an orange-blue-and-white marker on one of the rocks.
“What’s that,” she said. She did not have the strength to round her voice into a question mark.
“Oh,” the man said, smiling, “I thought you were—”
“Where does the trail go?” Ora asked urgently. Too many things were suddenly demanding her comprehension at once. The smile that cleaved his long, serious face into two. And the warm olive tone of his skin. And the way Avram was still standing between them, a lump, a human wall. And maybe also the Yedioth newspaper rolled up in the pocket of the stranger’s backpack, and a pair of large feminine glasses, like hers, but blue—hers were red—that hung on a string around his neck and looked completely wrong for him, and somehow also indescribably annoying. And on top of all that, now he was saying that this modest, intimate path that she and Avram had been walking for a week, had a name. Someone had given it a name. All at once, she had been robbed of something.
“It goes all the way to Eilat. All the way to Taba. Goes down the entire country.”
“From where?”
“From the north. Around Tel-Dan. I’ve been hiking it for a week. I hike a bit, then I go back a bit. Around in circles. It’s hard for me to leave this area, with the blossoms and everything, but