really does look like mine,” she mumbles awkwardly, feeling naked. “Even I was confused.”
She turns the pages back, looking for the place where the writers switched. Twice, then three times, she flips past the right point before recognizing her final lines: Aren’t we like a little underground cell in the heart of the ‘situation’? And that really is what we were. For twenty years. Twenty good years. Until we got trapped. Immediately after those words—even without turning the page: such chutzpah! Even without a separating line!—she reads: Next to Dishon River I meet Gilead, 34, an electrician and djembe drummer, who used to be from a moshav in the north. Now lives in Haifa. What does he miss: “Dad was a farmer (pecans), and in slow years he did all kinds of jobs. There was a time when he gathered construction planks from dumps and sold them to an Arab in the village nearby.”
“What is this?” She thrusts the notebook at Avram’s chest. “What is this supposed to be?” She pulls it back and reads with a choked-up voice:
“Wood, you see—you have to know how to treat it. You can’t just throw it in the basement. You have to carefully stack big ones on big ones, and small ones on small ones, and put bricks on top of it all, otherwise it warps. But first of all you have to take out the nails. So I would stand with Dad at night in the sheltered area where he kept the wood—
“What on earth is this? What is all this stuff?” She raises her eyebrows at Avram, but his eyes are closed, and he signals: Keep reading.
“Dad had a blue undershirt, with holes here. And we had a crowbar that we connected to an extension handle, and we would take an iron chisel and separate, say, two planks nailed together. Dad on this end, me on that end, bracing, and after we separated them, we’d work together on the plank, pulling out nails with the other end of the hammer. It went on for hours, with a little bulb hanging above from a string, and that’s something I still miss to this day, the way I worked with him like that, together.
“There’s more. Listen, that’s not all. There’s more.
“Now about the regret. Well, that’s a harder one. I regret lots of things (laughs). I mean, do people just come out and tell you? Look, at some point I had a ticket to Australia, to work on a cotton farm. I had a visa and everything, and then I met a girl here and I canceled my trip. But she was worth it, so it’s just a partial regret.”
Ora frantically turns the page and her eyes run over the lines. She reads silently: Tamar, my darling, someone lost a notebook with her life story. I’m almost positive I met her earlier, when I walked down to the river. She looked like she was in a bad state. In danger even (she wasn’t alone). Ever since I saw her, I’ve been asking you what to do but you haven’t answered. I’m not used to not getting answers from you, Tammi. It’s all a little confusing. But I am asking the questions you posed at the end: What do we miss most? What do we regret?
Ora slaps the notebook shut. “What is he? Who is this?”
Avram’s face is gloomy and distant.
“Maybe a journalist, interviewing people along his way? But he doesn’t look like one at all.” A doctor, she remembers. He said he was a pediatrician.
She glances at the pages again: Near Moshav Alma I meet Edna, 39, divorced, a kindergarten teacher, Haifa: “What I miss most is my childhood days in Zichron Yaakov. Originally I’m a Zamarin, that was my maiden name, and I miss the days of innocence, the simplicity we had then. Everything was less complicated. Less, kind of, ‘psychological.’ You wouldn’t believe it to look at me, but I have three grown sons (laughs). It doesn’t show, does it? I married early and divorced even earlier…”
Ora is sucked in. She turns the pages rapidly and sees, on every page, longings and regrets. “I don’t understand,” she murmurs, feeling deceived. “He looked like such a”—she searches for the right word—“solid man? Simple? Private? Not a man who … who would just walk around asking people these kinds of questions.”
Avram says nothing. He digs the tip of his shoe into the gravel.
“And why in my notebook?” Ora asks loudly. “Aren’t there any