had even infected a few of the other children, although not all of them were as good at rhyming as Adam was. “The kindergarten was full of rhymes today! We had a school full of little poets today, didn’t we, children?”
Adam furrowed his smooth brow and said in a slightly angry voice, “Girls and boys, make some noise. And play with toys.”
As they rode home on Ora’s bike, he squeezed her waist tightly with an unfamiliar strength and answered all her questions in rhyme. Her patience for these games of his and Ilan’s was limited to begin with, so she asked him to stop. He said: “With a skip and a hop.” Ora decided he was just doing it to aggravate her, so she said nothing.
He kept it up at home. Ora threatened that she’d stop talking to him until he could behave, and he shouted, “Brave, save, wave!” He sat watching Pretty Butterfly on TV, and when Ora looked, she found him hunched forward, his hands in fists on his lap, and his lips moving after each sentence uttered by the characters on the show. She realized he was answering them in rhyme.
She took him for a drive, thinking the excursion would refresh him and make him forget the strange rhyming compulsion. They drove to nearby Mevo Beitar, and she showed him roofers fixing tiles on a roof, and he said, “Miles, piles, woof, hoof.” When they drove past the store, he shouted out, after some moments of distress: “Snore.” She stopped to let an old dog cross the road and heard a heavy silence from the backseat. When she looked in the mirror she saw his lips moving quickly and his eyes brimming with tears because he could not find a rhyme for “dog.” “Fog,” she said softly, and he breathed a sigh of relief. “And log,” he quickly added.
“Now tell me how your day was at school?” she asked when they sat in a hiding place they both liked, on the way to the Ma’ayanot River. “Cool, fool,” he blurted. She put her finger on his lips and said, “Now don’t talk, just listen to what I have to say.” He looked at her fearfully and mumbled, “Way, hay.” Ora suddenly grew concerned at the sadness and desperation in his eyes. He seemed to be begging her to be quiet, for the whole world to be quiet, not to make a single sound ever again. She gathered him in her arms and held him close, and he buried his head in her neck, his body taut and rigid. She tried to calm him, but every time she forgot herself and said even one word, he was compelled to answer with a rhyme. She took him home, fed him and bathed him, and noticed that even when she was completely silent, he made rhymes for the sounds of the water in the bath, and a distant door slamming, and the beeping of the hourly news update on the neighbors’ radio.
The next day, when she woke him up—in fact she asked Ilan to wake him, but he suggested that she go, and she went into the room with fictitious merriment and said to Ofer and Adam cheerfully: “Good morning, my dears!”—she heard Adam mumble into his pillow, “Fears, tears.” His eyes quickly sharpened out of sleepiness, and his face turned dark with terror.
“What’s wrong with me?” He sat up and asked her with a distant voice, and even before she could answer, he said, “Be strong with me, sing a song with me.” He reached out for her to hug him. “I don’t even want to speak,” he shouted. “Leak, weak, sneak.”
Ilan stood in the doorway. There was shaving cream on his face, and Adam pointed to him feebly and whispered, “Saving, waving.”
“Je ne sais quoi faire,” Ora whispered to Ilan.
“Bench, wrench,” Adam murmured, and Ora was relieved for a moment, but her heart sank when she realized he was finding rhymes for “French.”
“What’s the matter, honey?” Ilan said severely.
“Money, funny,” Adam sighed and buried his face in Ora’s neck, seeking shelter from Ilan.
“This went on for maybe three months,” Ora tells Avram. “Every sentence, every word, whatever anyone said to him and whatever sounds he heard. A rhyming machine. A robot.”
“What did you do?”
“What could we do? We tried not to say anything. Not to make him nervous. We tried to just ignore it.”
“There was that movie,” Avram says, “we saw it once at the Jerusalem Cinema, the