bandage in the pus, carefully twisted it in the crater of flesh, soaked up the fluids, and threw it away. Ora, sprawled on a chair near Avram’s bed, looked at the precise movements of Ilan’s hand, and wondered how he was able to dig into the wound without causing pain. Later, when Avram fell asleep, she suggested they take a short walk for some fresh air. They meandered through the paths among the little buildings and talked, as usual, about Avram’s condition, his upcoming surgery, and his complicated financial dealings with the Ministry of Defense. They sat on a bench near the X-ray center, with some distance between them, and Ora talked about Avram’s balance problem, whose cause the doctors had not yet determined. Ilan murmured, “We need to look into his ingrown toenail, that could drive him crazy. And I think the Novalgin is giving him diarrhea”—and she thought, Stop, stop with that now, and turned to him and jumped over the void and kissed him on the mouth. It had been such a long time since they’d touched each other that Ilan froze, then hesitantly took her in his arms. For a moment they moved cautiously against each other, as if they were covered in shattered glass, amazed at the force with which their bodies ignited as though they had only been waiting for someone to come to them for comfort. That night they drove to Avram’s empty house in Tzur Hadassah, where they had been living since he was released from the POW prison, and which they had turned into a sort of private headquarters for all matters concerning his treatment. There, in his boyhood room, with the sign on the door from when he was fifteen, saying Only the Mad May Enter, on a straw mattress on the floor, they conceived Adam.
She doesn’t know how much Avram remembers of the period when he was hospitalized, operated on, rehabilitated and treated, and periodically investigated by agents of the Shabak and Field Security and Military Intelligence, who tormented him relentlessly with their suspicions about information he might or might not have given away as a POW. He was indifferent to it all and devoid of any volition, yet still, from the depths of his absence, he consumed her and Ilan like a baby, and not just because of the many complications, medical and bureaucratic, that resulted from his situation and that only they could handle for him. It was his actual existence—empty, hollow—that devoured them constantly, so she felt at the time, and sucked the life out of them. Almost without moving, he turned them into shells, like he himself was.
Adam’s birth, she says. They are sitting side by side in a rocky hiding place above the valley, surrounded by a yellow sea of acacia and spiny broom whose blossoms make the bees frantic. The lichen-covered rocks glisten red and bright purple in the sun, and she knows that she can talk with greater ease about Adam. She can even tell him about Adam’s birth and ostensibly start from a distance.
“I had a difficult labor with him. It was long and hard. I was in Hadassah Mount Scopus for three days. Women came and gave birth and left, and I lay there like a rock. Ilan and I joked that some women who were barren had already come in and had babies, and I was still lying there waiting. Every doctor and resident had checked me and looked at me and measured me, and there were regular medical staff meetings around me, and they kept arguing over my head about whether or not to induce labor, and how I would respond to this or that. They told me I should walk around. They said the movement would induce labor. So we walked together, me and Ilan, two or three times a day. Me with the Hadassah robe and a belly like a whale, walking arm in arm and hardly talking. It was nice. There was a pleasantness between us, or so I thought.”
Start from a distance. She smiles to herself and remembers that on the night she and Avram first met, as teenagers, he sailed in large circles around the room where she lay in the dark, in the isolation ward, coming closer and then receding, as if he were secretly practicing routes for getting nearer and farther away from her.
“After the birth, Ilan drove us home in the Mini Minor—you remember it, my parents bought it for