and disdained him and pitied him and realized she must have truly lost her mind to have believed he could help her or be with her in her time of trouble. The whole idea was fundamentally sick, sadistic even—to inflict this sort of trek on him, to expect that suddenly, after twenty-one years of erasure and separation, he would want to start hearing about Ofer. She swore she would put him on the first bus to Tel Aviv in the morning, and from now on she would not say a word about Ofer.
By evening the pain of him became so strong that she shut herself up in her tent and sobbed quietly, secretly, trying to muffle the noise. The contractions—that was how she felt: they were like labor contractions—came frequently and sharply and grew into a constant, blinding pain, and she thought that if this continued she would somehow have to get to an emergency room. But what would she say when she got there? And besides, a doctor might persuade her to go home immediately and wait for them.
Avram, in his tent, heard her and decided not to take a sleeping pill, not even his girlfriend Neta’s pills, because Ora might need him during the night. But how could he help her? He lay awake, motionless, his arms crossed over his chest and his hands in his armpits. He could have lain that way for hours, almost without moving. He heard her sobbing to herself, a long, monotonous wail. In Egypt, in Abbasiya Prison, there was a short, thin reservist from Jerusalem who came from a family of Cochin Jews. He used to cry for hours every night, even if they hadn’t been tortured that day. The guys almost lost their minds because of him, even the Egyptian wardens couldn’t stand it, but the Cochin guy wouldn’t stop. One day when he and Avram were standing in the corridor waiting to be taken to an interrogation, Avram managed to communicate with the man through the sacks over their faces, and the Cochin guy said he was crying out of jealousy for his girlfriend, because he could sense that she was being unfaithful. She had always loved his older brother, and his imaginings of what she was doing now were eating him alive. Avram had felt a strange reverence for this gaunt man, who within the hell of captivity could find such dedication to his own private pain, which had nothing to do with the Egyptians and their tortures.
Avram stepped quietly out of the tent and walked away until he could barely hear her, then sat down under a terebinth to try to focus. During the day, with Ora next to him, he could not think at all. Now he wrote the indictment of his pathetic and cowardly conduct. He dug his fingers into his face, his forehead and cheeks, and groaned softly: “Help her, you shit, you traitor.” But he knew that he wouldn’t, and his mouth twisted with loathing.
As he did whenever he thought about himself honestly, he simply found it difficult to comprehend why he was still alive. What made life hold on to him and preserve him? What was there in him, still, that justified such persistent effort on life’s part, such stubbornness, or perhaps just vengefulness?
He closed his eyes and tried to conjure up the figure of a boy. Any boy. Recently, as Ofer’s discharge date had grown closer, he would sometimes pick out a boy at the right age in the restaurant where he worked, or on the street, and observe him stealthily, even follow him for a block or two, and try to imagine how he saw things. He allowed himself more and more of these hallucinations, these Ofer-guesses, these shadows.
A thick nocturnal silence enveloped him. Soft breezes passed silently over him, plowing furrows through all of space. From time to time a large bird called out, sounding very close. Ora, in her tent, felt it, too. She listened as something seemed to flitter over her skin. Thousands of cranes made their way through the night sky heading north, and neither of them saw or knew. For a long time there was a huge invisible rustle, like the sighing of waves on a beach full of shells. Avram leaned against the tree with his eyes closed and saw the shadow of Ofer’s back slip away in the image of young Ilan—for some reason it was Ilan who popped up, walking half a step
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