splutters. Perhaps he doesn’t like the taste. She pours some water into her palm and touches his forehead lightly, and his cheeks, and his dry lips. Sami looks at her again with that same tensely observing gaze. It is the gaze of a director, she realizes, examining a scene he has set up. The boy shivers and his body burrows more deeply into hers. He suddenly opens his eyes and looks at her without seeing, but his lips part in a strange, dreamy smile, and for a moment he contains both poise and childishness, and she leans forward again and asks Sami in a firm whisper what his real name is.
Sami takes a deep breath. “What for, Ora?”
“Tell me his name,” she repeats, her lips white with anger.
“His name is called Yazdi. Yazdi, he’s called.”
The boy hears his name and trembles in his sleep and lets out fragments of Arabic words. His legs jerk sharply, as though he is dreaming of running, or fleeing.
“He needs to see a doctor urgently,” Ora says.
“The people near Tel Aviv, the family, they have the most specialist doctor for his illness.” Ora asks what his illness is, and Sami says, “Something with his stomach, he wasn’t born right with the stomach, digestion, something about that. There’s only three or four things he eats, everything else comes out.” Then he adds, as if in a forced confession, “And he’s not right, here.”
“Where?” The side of her body touching the boy tenses up.
“In the head. A retard. Around three years ago, all of a sudden, retarded.”
“All of a sudden? That’s not something that happens suddenly.”
“With him it did.” Sami purses his lips.
She turns to face the window. She can see her reflection with the boy leaning on her. They are driving very slowly. A sign alerts them to a roadblock three hundred meters ahead. Sami moves his lips quickly, as though arguing with someone in his mind. He raises his voice briefly: “What do I need this, everyone on me, yechrabethom, they think I’m some kind of …” Then his voice is swallowed up in incomprehensible mumblings.
Ora leans forward. “What’s the story?” she asks quietly.
“No story.”
“What’s the story with this kid?” she demands.
“There’s no story!” he suddenly shouts and hits the wheel with his hand. The boy grasps her and stops breathing. “Not everything always has to have a story, Ora!” She senses the contempt wrapped around her name in his voice. It seems to her that as he speaks, almost from one word to the next, he is shedding his Israeli, sabra accent, and a different sound, rough and foreign, is sneaking in. “You people,” he hisses through the rearview mirror, “you’re always looking for a story in everything. So you’ll have it for your telefision show or a movie for your bestivals, not so? Ha? Not so?”
Ora pulls back as though she’s been slapped. “You people,” he called her. “Bestival,” he said, brandishing the accent of Palestinians from the Territories, whom he’s always derided. He was defying her with a put-on “dirty Arab” persona.
“And this kid, it’s just a sick kid, just nothing. Sick. A ree-tard. You can’t make a movie about him! There’s no story here! We take him, we drop him at a house down there, with some doctor, we go to wherever you need, we drop you there, and khalas, everyone’s happy.”
Ora’s cheeks are flushed. It was the way he shoved her into that “you people” that riled her up and, as though she really is not facing him alone—as though she is with them—she says slowly, almost spelling out each letter, “I want to know who this child belongs to. Now, before we reach the checkpoint, I want to know.”
Sami does not reply. She senses that her voice, her authority, has restored his wits and reminded him of a thing or two, things she has never before wanted or needed to mention explicitly. There is a long silence. She feels her will and his arch their backs at each other. Then Sami lets out a long breath and says, “He’s the kid of a guy I know, an okay guy, there’s nothing on him in the, you know, in the security. Don’t worry. You got nothing to worry about.” His shoulders droop and crumple. He runs his hand over his bald spot, touches his forehead, and shakes his head in dismay. “Ora, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m tired, beat. You made me crazy today, the lot of