To The End Of The Land Part 9

"Where?" The side of her body touching the boy tenses up.

"In the head. A r.e.t.a.r.d. Around three years ago, all of a sudden, r.e.t.a.r.ded."

"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 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 telefision show or a movie for your show or a movie for your bestivals bestivals, not so? Ha? Not so?"

Ora pulls back as though she's been slapped. "You people," he called her. "Bestival," he said, brandis.h.i.+ng 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 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 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 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 you. I've had enough. I need some quiet. Just quiet, ya rab ya rab."

She leans her head back. Everyone's going out of their minds, she thinks. He's allowed. Through half-closed eyelids she can see him throwing nervous glances at the pa.s.sengers in the cars on either side. The three lanes merge into two, then into one. Up ahead they can see blue flas.h.i.+ng lights. A police jeep is parked diagonally on the side of the road. Without moving her lips Ora says, "If they ask me, what do I say?"

"If they ask, tell them he's your boy. But they won't ask." He stares ahead and tries not to meet her eyes in the mirror.

Ora nods quietly. So that's my role, she thinks. That's why he's wearing these clothes, the jeans and the s.h.i.+mon Peres. She presses the boy to her and his head falls on her chest. She says his name quietly into his ear and he opens his eyes and looks at her. She smiles, and his eyelids shut again, but a moment later he smiles at her as if in a dream. "Turn the heat on, he's s.h.i.+vering."

Sami cranks the heat up. She is boiling, but the boy's s.h.i.+vering subsides a little. She wipes his sweat with a tissue and smoothes her hand over his hair. The fever speaks to her skin. About a year ago, an eccentric old man from the village of Dura was left in a meat locker in Hebron. He spent almost forty-eight hours there. He did not die and may even have fully recovered. But since that day her life, her family's life, had slowly begun to unravel. The blue lights are flas.h.i.+ng everywhere now. There are six or seven police vehicles. Patrolmen and police officers and army officers dart on the shoulders of the road. Ora is dripping with sweat. She reaches into her blouse and pulls out a thin silver chain with a s.h.i.+viti s.h.i.+viti amulet, an enamel pendant bearing the inscription "I have set the Lord always before me." Gently, almost stealthily, she places the amulet, an enamel pendant bearing the inscription "I have set the Lord always before me." Gently, almost stealthily, she places the s.h.i.+viti s.h.i.+viti on the boy's forehead and holds it there for a moment. Her friend Ariela gave it to her years ago. "Everyone needs a little churchagogue," she said when Ora laughed and tried to reject the gift. But in the end she started wearing it every time Ilan went overseas, and when her father was hospitalized, and in other can't-do-any-harm situations-a superst.i.tious belief in G.o.d, she explained to anyone who asked-and she kept wearing it throughout Adam's army service, and then Ofer's. Now, in order to do the right thing with everyone and not convert the little Muslim without his knowledge, she whispers to herself, on the boy's forehead and holds it there for a moment. Her friend Ariela gave it to her years ago. "Everyone needs a little churchagogue," she said when Ora laughed and tried to reject the gift. But in the end she started wearing it every time Ilan went overseas, and when her father was hospitalized, and in other can't-do-any-harm situations-a superst.i.tious belief in G.o.d, she explained to anyone who asked-and she kept wearing it throughout Adam's army service, and then Ofer's. Now, in order to do the right thing with everyone and not convert the little Muslim without his knowledge, she whispers to herself, I have set Allah always before me I have set Allah always before me.

The police cars close in on their lane. Lengths of barbed wire zigzag all over the road. The cops are jumpy. They s.h.i.+ne powerful flashlights into the cars and examine the pa.s.sengers for a long time, constantly shouting to one another. A few officers stand along the side of the road talking on cell phones. This is worse than usual, Ora thinks. They're not usually this edgy. There is only one car in front of them, and Ora leans forward and says urgently, "Sami, I want to know now, who does this child belong to?"

Sami looks ahead and sighs. "He's no one, really, just the son of a guy who does plaster work for me, from the Territories. Honestly, he's an IR, you know. Illegal resident. And since yesterday night he got like this. Sick all night, and this morning, throwing up all the time, and with blood in ...ya'ani, in the bathroom."

"Didn't you get him any help?"

"Sure we did. We brought a nurse from the village, ya'ani ya'ani, and she said for his disease we have to go to a hospital urgent, but how can we go to a hospital with him illegal?" His voice dies down and he grunts and murmurs to himself, perhaps reconstructing some conversation or argument, and then he slams the wheel with his hand.

"Calm down," Ora says sharply. She runs a hand quickly to smooth over her disheveled face. "Calm down now, it'll be all right. And smile!"

A young policeman, almost a kid himself, comes up to them and vanishes from Ora's sight when the brilliance of his flashlight hits her. She blinks painfully; this sort of light is torture for her defective retinas. She smiles broadly in the general direction of the light. The officer makes quick circles with his other hand, and Sami rolls down his window. "All is good?" says the policeman in a Russian accent and thrusts his head into the car to scan their faces. Sami, in a pleasant, rich, masterly voice, replies, "Good evening, everything is excellent, baruch hashem baruch hashem."

"Where are you coming from?"

"From Beit Zayit," Ora says, smiling.

"Beit Zayit? Where's that?"

"Near Jerusalem." Even without looking at Sami, Ora feels a spark of astonishment at the policeman's ignorance pa.s.s between them.

"Near Jerusalem," the officer repeats, perhaps to gain time for scanning them. "And where are you headed now?"

"Tel Aviv," Ora replies with a pleasant smile. "To visit family," she adds without being asked.

"Trunk," says the officer, backing away from the car window. He walks around to the trunk and they hear him rummage and shake the two backpacks. Ora sees Sami's shoulders tense up, and a thought flies through her mind: Who knows what he's carting back there? Possibilities flash in her mind like scenes from a deranged movie. Her eyes quickly scan Sami's body, gather information, sort, weigh, rule out. A completely impersonal mechanism has been activated in her, a complex array of acquired reflexes. She barely has time to realize what she is doing. A fraction of a second, no more. She flits around the whole world and back, and nothing on her face moves.

Sami might or might not have noticed what she went through. There is no way to know from his expression. He's had a lot of practice too, she thinks. He sits there, rigid and chunky, one finger drumming rapidly on the gears.h.i.+ft.

The policeman's face-sharp, fox-like, ears pulled back, the face of a boy whom life has chiseled too soon-reappears, this time in her window. "Whose are those two backpacks, missus?"

"Mine. I'm going to the Galilee tomorrow, on a hike." She smiles broadly again.

The policeman looks at her and the boy for a long time and turns back with half his body, apparently wanting to consult with someone. One of his fingers rests sloppily on the open window beside her. Ora looks at it and thinks: amazing how a thin finger can stop, prevent, decide a fate. How thin the fingers of arbitrariness are sometimes. The cop calls out to one of the officers, but he is busy on the phone. Deep down Ora knows that she is the one arousing suspicion. Something about her signaled to the policeman that there is guilt here. His face turns back to her. She thinks that if he looks at her that way for one more minute she will collapse.

The boy wakes up and blinks in confusion at the flashlight. Ora grins and grasps his shoulders tightly. The boy slowly moves his spindly arms in the ray of light, and for a moment he looks like a fetus swimming in amniotic fluid. Only then does he notice the face and the uniform behind the light and his eyes widen, and Ora feels a strong jerk through his body and she holds him tighter. The policeman leans in and examines the boy. A note of bitter abandonment stretches from his face to the boy's. The beam of light drops to the boy's body, lighting up the words s.h.i.+mon Peres, My Hope for Peace s.h.i.+mon Peres, My Hope for Peace. The cop pulls the corners of his mouth into a smirk. Ora feels a heavy weariness descend upon her, as though she has despaired of understanding what is going on. Only Yazdi's wild heartbeats against her arm keep her sitting up straight. She wonders how he knows that he must keep quiet now. How can he keep so wonderfully quiet? Like a baby partridge that freezes and camouflages itself when it hears its mother's warning chirp.

And how do I know how to be a mother partridge? she thinks. An utterly natural mother partridge.

A car honks behind them, and then another. The policeman sniffs. Something is bothering him. Something isn't right. He is about to ask another question, but Sami, with acrobatic swiftness, beats him to it. He laughs heartily, jerks his head back at Ora, and says to the cop, "Don't worry, buddy, she's one of ours."

The policeman curls his lip in slight revulsion, moves his flashlight around, and waves them through. The little interrogation had lasted for only a few minutes, but Ora's body is bathed in sweat-her own and the boy's.

"An IR?" she asks later, when she regains her voice and Sami starts accelerating toward the Ayalon freeway. "You employ workers from the Territories?"

Sami shrugs. "Everyone has workers from the Territories. Them ones are the cheapest, the dafawim dafawim. You think I can afford a plasterer from Abu Ghosh?"

She sits back more comfortably. The boy, too. Ora wipes off his sweat and her own. She keeps looking to her side, thinking she can still see the policeman's finger on her window ledge, pointing at her. She doesn't think she will ever be able to go through a roadblock experience like that one again. "And what you said to him about me being 'one of ours'?"

Sami smiles and licks his lower lip. Ora knows the gesture: he is savoring a good quip even before it comes out. She smiles to herself and ma.s.sages her neck and stretches her toes. For a moment it feels as though they are putting the house back in order after a rampage.

"'One of ours,'" says Sami, "means 'even though you look like a lefty.'"

The boy relaxes a little and falls asleep again. Ora puts his head on her lap. She leans back and breathes slowly. This may be her first quiet moment of the day.

Since Sami has always been a sort of distant extension of Ilan for her, and more recently a connecting thread to him, she begins to feel homesick. Not for the house she rented in Beit Zayit after the separation, nor for the house in Tzur Hada.s.sah that she and Ilan had bought from Avram. The home she misses achingly is the last home she and Ilan had in Ein Karem, an expansive old two-story house with thick, cool walls, surrounded by cypress trees. It had big arched windows with deep ledges, and decorative floor tiles, some of which wobbled. Ora had seen it for the first time as a student. It stood there, empty and closed up, and it was love at first sight. With Avram's encouragement she wrote a love letter. "My dear, despondent, lonesome house," she began, then proceeded to tell the house about herself and explain how well suited they were for each other. She promised to make it happy. In the envelope she placed a photo of herself with long, curly, copper hair, wearing orange sweats and laughing as she leaned on a bike. She sent it with a note to the owners saying that if they ever decided to sell-and they did.

She and Ilan had become increasingly affluent, even becoming wealthy over the years-Ilan's office flourished: leaving his job twenty years ago to focus on the slightly esoteric field of intellectual property was a hugely successful gamble. Since the mid-eighties the world had filled with ideas, patents, and inventions that needed protection, requiring knowledge and swift action wherever legislation and legal loopholes were concerned in various countries; new computer applications, inventions in communication and encoding, genetic medicine and engineering, all kinds of World Trade Organization treaties and agreements; Ilan was there one minute before everyone else-and although they could afford to renovate and beautify and build and design whatever they wanted to, Ilan let her nurture and tame the house as she wished, and so she allowed it to be itself, to grow at its own pace, and happily mount into a plethora of disparate styles. For several years there was a huge gla.s.s-doored refrigerator in the kitchen, an extremely efficient eyesore that Ora had bought at a liquidation sale from a man who sold equipment to supermarkets. She got the dining-room chairs for a steal at the Jerusalem cafe Tmol s.h.i.+lshom, because Adam once mentioned in conversation how comfortable they were. The shadowed living room was a lair of thick rugs, huge cus.h.i.+ons, and pale bamboo furniture, with overflowing bookshelves covering three walls. The ma.s.sive dining table, the hostess's pride and joy, which could seat fifteen guests without elbows touching, was carved and adorned by Ofer as a surprise for her forty-eighth birthday. Ofer made it round: "That way, no one ever has to sit at a corner." The house itself was finely attuned and responsive to Ora's moods. It carefully, hesitantly shed its age-old gloominess, stretched its limbs, and cracked its stiff joints, and when it realized that Ora was permitting it to retain the occasional pocket of charming abandon and even some healthy neglect, it grew into a comfortable unkemptness, until at times, when a certain light hit, it almost looked happy. Ora felt that Ilan was also content in the house, with the collegiate mess she created in it, and that her taste-meaning, her a.s.sortment of tastes-was to his liking. Even when things suddenly went bad between them, and their togetherness emptied out with alarming speed, she believed that his affection for the home she had made for them still pulsed inside him. And she remains convinced that beneath the layers in which he began to cloak himself-his impatience and grumbling and constant criticism of everything she did and said, of everything she was; beyond his back-turning, beyond his polite concern and insulting sh.e.l.l of decency toward her, beyond the small and large denials with which he tried to repudiate her and their love and their friends.h.i.+p, and despite his claim that he'd run his course with the relations.h.i.+p-that despite all this he still remembered and knew that he had no better wife or friend or lover than she, and that even now, as they both approach fifty and he has traveled to the far corners of the earth to get away from her, he knows deep in his heart that only together can they continue to bear everything that happened to them when they were young, practically children.

She remembers the way Ilan's face lit up-it was in the army, in Sinai, when they were nineteen and a half and Ilan still dreamed of making movies and music, and Avram was still Avram-when he told her how moved he was every time he read in the book of Kings of how the great woman of Shunem told her husband they should prepare a resting place for the Prophet Elisha. Let us make, I pray thee, a little chamber on the roof Let us make, I pray thee, a little chamber on the roof, Ilan read to her from the little army-issue Bible. And let us set for him there a bed, and a table, and a stool, and a candlestick; and it shall be, when he cometh to us, that he shall turn in thither And let us set for him there a bed, and a table, and a stool, and a candlestick; and it shall be, when he cometh to us, that he shall turn in thither.

They were lying on a narrow cot in his room on the base. Avram must have been at home on leave. His empty cot faced them, and on the wall above it was a line handwritten in charcoal: It is not good that man should be ... It is not good that man should be ... The quote trailed off without bothering to include the last word, The quote trailed off without bothering to include the last word, alone alone. Her head rested in the depression of Ilan's shoulder. He read to her until the end of the chapter, slowly running his long musician's fingers through her hair.

As it turns out, they are not going to South Tel Aviv but to Jaffa, and not to a hospital but to an elementary school that Sami locates only after driving around for a long time. Yazdi, who has recovered slightly, sits with his face pressed to the window and laps up the streets and scenes. Every so often he turns to Ora with a look of disbelief that such things can truly exist. Behind Sami's back the two of them make up a game: he looks at her, she smiles, he looks back at the window and then peeks at her again over his shoulder. When they drive along the waterfront promenade, Sami says to Yazdi, "Shuf el bahr" "Shuf el bahr"-look at the sea. The boy puts his head and shoulders out of the window, but beyond the streetlamps the sea is just a dark ma.s.s with a few frothy mounds. He murmurs, "Bahr, bahr," "Bahr, bahr," and spreads his fingers out. Ora asks, "Haven't you ever seen the sea?" He does not answer, and Sami laughs: "This one, where's he gonna see the sea? At the promenade of the refugee camp?" A breeze carries a whiff of salt.w.a.ter, and Yazdi's nostrils widen as he sniffs and tastes. His face has a strange, almost tortured expression, as if its features cannot tolerate the happiness. and spreads his fingers out. Ora asks, "Haven't you ever seen the sea?" He does not answer, and Sami laughs: "This one, where's he gonna see the sea? At the promenade of the refugee camp?" A breeze carries a whiff of salt.w.a.ter, and Yazdi's nostrils widen as he sniffs and tastes. His face has a strange, almost tortured expression, as if its features cannot tolerate the happiness.

Then the illness bears down on him again. His arms and head begin to jerk, and he looks like someone trying to avoid things being thrown at him. Ora keeps mopping his sweat with tissues, and when they run out she uses a rag she finds under the front seat. There is a plastic bag there too, with his underwear, a pair of socks, a Ninja Turtles T-s.h.i.+rt that used to belong to Ofer and was pa.s.sed on to Sami's kids, a screwdriver with spare blades, and a clear globe with a tiny dinosaur inside. Yazdi is thirsty and his tongue flicks around in his mouth. The water bottle is empty, but Sami is afraid to stop for water at a kiosk. "On a day like this, an Arab at one of these kiosks, it's not a good idea," he explains drily. Soon, perhaps because of Sami's nervous driving and the circuitous ambling around the maze of Jaffa's alleyways, Yazdi starts to vomit.

Ora feels his body seize up, his ribs spasmodically rise and fall, and tells Sami to stop the car. Sami gripes that he can't pull over here: a police van is parked on the opposite sidewalk. But when he hears another fitful gargle from the back, he speeds up as if he's lost his mind. He runs red lights, looking for a dark corner or an empty lot, and yells at Yazdi in Arabic to hold it in. He threatens the boy, and curses him and his father and his father's father. A projectile of vomit erupts from the boy's mouth. Sami yells at Ora to aim Yazdi's head at the floor, away from the upholstery, but the boy's head jerks in all directions like a balloon with its air let out, and Ora is sprayed all over her feet, pants, shoes, and hair.

Sami's right hand reaches back like lightning, feels around, touches something, and pulls back in disgust. "Gimme his hand!" he screeches in a thin, feminine voice. "Put his hand here!" Ora mechanically obeys the urgency in his voice, dimly hoping he might know some instant cure or Palestinian-Shamanic trick, and she holds Yazdi's limp hand on the fake-wood s.p.a.ce between the two front seats. Sami, without even looking, slams down on the hand with his heavy sledgehammer of a fist. Ora screams as though she is the one who's been hit, and reaches to pull back Yazdi's hand, but Sami, who doesn't see what is happening, lands another blow on her arm.

A few minutes later they reach the school. They stop outside a locked gate and a young bearded man, who was waiting in the shadows inside, emerges and looks in all directions, then motions to Sami to follow him along the fence. They walk with the fence between them. At a dark corner the young man holds open a broken part of the fence and comes out to Sami, and the two men whisper quickly, glancing around. Ora gets out of the taxi and inhales the damp night air. Her left arm is burning, and she knows the pain will get worse. In the light of the streetlamp she sees that she is covered with vomit stains. She tries to shake herself off. The bearded man holds Sami's arm and walks him back to the taxi. They look at Yazdi lying inside, and Sami examines the upholstery with grieving eyes. They both ignore Ora. The young man gives some sort of signal over a cell phone, and three boys come running out of the dark school. Not a single word is uttered. The three pull Yazdi out of the taxi and carry him inside quickly, through a side gate. One of them holds Yazdi's shoulders, and the other two hold his legs. Ora looks at them and thinks, This is not the first time they've carried someone inside like that. Yazdi's head and arms droop, and his eyes are closed, and it is somehow clear to her that this is not his first time, either.

When she starts walking after them, the bearded man turns to her and then looks at Sami. Sami goes up to her: "Maybe it's better if you stay here."

Ora gives him a piercing look. He gives in, walks back to the bearded man, and whispers something to him. Ora a.s.sumes he is telling him it's all right; perhaps he even said, "She's one of us."

Inside, the school is completely silent and dark, illuminated only by the moon and the streetlamp. Sami and the bearded man disappear, swallowed up into one of the rooms. Ora stops and waits. When her eyes grow accustomed to the dark, she sees that she is in a fairly large auditorium, with a few corridors leading out of it. Empty window boxes are placed here and there, and posters promoting quiet, neatness, and cleanliness hang crookedly on the walls. She can smell children's sweat and a distant odor of locker rooms and above all the stench of vomit from her own clothes. She wonders how she will find Sami and Yazdi but is afraid to call out to them. She walks carefully through the darkness, taking small steps, with her arms out in front of her, until she reaches a round supporting column in the middle of the auditorium. Her gaze orbits the walls. She sees pictures of faces she cannot make out, possibly Herzl and Ben-Gurion, or perhaps the prime minister and the chief of staff. A small memorial made out of a heap of rocks sits in the corner opposite her, beneath a large picture that seems to be of Rabin, with black metal letters affixed to the wall above. Ora slowly walks around the column, touching it with one hand. The rotation awakens in her the sweet dizziness she used to summon as a child, with a slight sensation of burning in her fingertips.

As though gathering images while she circles, she begins to see shadowy figures of men, women, and children dressed in rags, silent, submissive, dusted with refugee ash. They are standing some distance away, along the walls, watching her. Ora freezes in terror. They're coming back, she thinks. For a brief deceptive moment she is convinced that her motion has made real the nightmare that always flickers in the distance. A young woman walks up to Ora and whispers in broken Hebrew that Sami said she could wash her clothes in the bathroom.

Ora follows the woman. The hallways rustle with shadows and the sounds of quick steps. Dim shapes hurry past. She hears almost no voices. The woman silently points to the girls' bathroom and Ora goes in. She understands that she must not turn on the light, that the entire place must remain dark. In one of the doorless stalls she sits down and pees into the small toilet. Then she washes her face and hair in the sink, scrubs the vomit off her clothes as best she can, and runs cold water over her aching left arm. When she is done, she stands with both hands on the stainless-steel counter, shuts her eyes, and succ.u.mbs to an overwhelming weariness. But with weakness comes a sharp pang of fright, again, as though she has left her post.

What have I done.

I took Ofer to war.

I brought him to the war myself.

And if something happens to him.

And if that was the last time I touched him.

At the end, when I kissed him, I touched his cheek on the soft spot where there's no stubble.

I took him there.

I didn't stop him. I didn't even try.

I called a cab and we went.

Two and a half hours on the road, and I did not try.

I left him there.

I left him for them.

With my own hands, I did.

Her breath stops. She is afraid to move. Paralyzed. It's a feeling she has, a sharp, real knowledge.

Be careful, she thinks at him without moving her lips, and look behind you.

Then, of its own accord, her body begins to move very gently, almost imperceptibly. Shoulders, hips, a slight s.h.i.+ft of the waist. She has no control over her limbs. She only feels that her body is communicating to Ofer how he should move to get out of some danger or trap over there. The peculiar involuntary motion continues for a long minute, and then her body quiets and returns to her, and Ora breathes and knows everything is all right, for now. "Ahh," "Ahh," she sighs to her little abdomen reflected in the low mirror. she sighs to her little abdomen reflected in the low mirror.

Sometimes I think I can remember almost every moment I had with him, from the second he was born. Yet at other times I find that entire phases are lost to me. "My friend Ariela gave birth prematurely, in her second trimester," she tells a heavyset older woman in a floral scarf who has come into the bathroom and stands quietly to the side. She watches Ora with kind eyes and seems to be waiting for her to recover from whatever is paining her.

"They gave her an injection," Ora says softly. "An injection that was supposed to kill the fetus in her womb. He wasn't right, he had Down syndrome, and she and her husband decided they couldn't raise a child like that. But the child was born alive, do you see? Do you understand me?" The woman nods and Ora continues. "There must have been a mistake in the amount of stuff they injected, and my friend asked them to let her hold the child for as long as he was alive. She sat up in bed, her husband walked out, he couldn't take it"-Ora flashes her eyes at the woman and thinks she sees a spark of understanding and comrades.h.i.+p-"and for fifteen minutes he was alive in her arms, and she kept talking to him, she hugged him and kissed him all over, it was a boy, and she kissed each of his fingers and fingernails. She always says he looked like a perfectly healthy child, except tiny, and translucent, and he moved around a little and had facial expressions, just like a baby. He moved his hands and his mouth, but he didn't make any sound." The woman listens with her arms folded over her chest. "And very slowly, he simply ended. He just went out like a candle, in total silence and without making any trouble about it, he twisted a little and folded in, and that was that. And my friend remembers those moments even more than the other three childbirths, before and after, and she always says that in the short time she had with him, she tried to give him as much life as she possibly could, and all her love, even though she was actually the one who killed him, or shared the decision to kill him." Ora murmurs and runs her hands stiffly over her head and temples and crushes her cheeks between her hands, and her mouth opens briefly in a silent scream.

The woman bows her head slightly and says nothing. Now Ora notices that she is very old, and that her face is furrowed with deep wrinkles and covered with tattoos.

"And what do I have to complain about?" Ora continues in a cracked voice. "I held my child for twenty-one years-wakhad wa-ashrin sana," she says in the tentative Arabic she remembers from high school. "But they went by so quickly, and I barely had time for anything with him, but now that his army is finished we could have really started." Her voice breaks but she pulls herself together. "Come on, ma'am, let's get out of here, please take me to Sami." she says in the tentative Arabic she remembers from high school. "But they went by so quickly, and I barely had time for anything with him, but now that his army is finished we could have really started." Her voice breaks but she pulls herself together. "Come on, ma'am, let's get out of here, please take me to Sami."

It isn't easy to find him. The old woman does not know Sami and seems not to understand what Ora wants. Still, she willingly leads her from room to room, pointing inside each one, and Ora peers into the dark cla.s.srooms. In some of them she sees people, not many, three here, five there, children and adults, huddled around a cl.u.s.ter of desks whispering, or sitting on the floor and warming up dinners on little gas cookers, or asleep in their clothes on desks and chairs joined together. In one room she sees someone lying on a long bench, with several people bustling around him quickly but silently. In another a man kneels down to bandage the foot of a man sitting on a chair. A young woman cleans the wound of a man with a bare chest and a grimace on his face. From other rooms she hears stifled moans of pain and murmurs of comfort. There is a sharp smell of iodine in the air.

"And in the morning, what happens?" Ora asks in the hallway.

"Morning," the old woman repeats in Hebrew and smiles broadly, "in the morning kulhum mafish kulhum mafish-they're all gone!" She mimes a bubble bursting.

Ora finally finds Sami and Yazdi. There is no light but the moonlight and the room is utterly silent. She stands in the doorway and looks at the little chairs turned upside down on the desks. A huge cardboard cutout of a seal hangs on the wall, with the caption Recon-seal-iation Recon-seal-iation. Each of its parts is a conflict that has to be reconciled: Ashken.a.z.im and Sephardim, left wing and right wing, religious and secular. Sami and the bearded man stand a few steps away, next to the blackboard, talking quietly with an older man who is short, solid, and silver-haired. Sami nods slightly at Ora, but his face is impervious. Something in his posture and the way he cuts through the air as he makes hand gestures is new to her and very foreign. Three little children, two or three years old, discover Ora and start running around her, excitedly pulling her by the pants without any embarra.s.sment. They also make almost no sound, to Ora's surprise: they too are well-trained partridge chicks. She follows them to the corner of the cla.s.sroom, near the window. A little circle of women tightens around someone in the center. Ora glimpses between the women's heads and sees a large woman sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall with her bare feet stretched out in front of her. She is breast-feeding Yazdi. His mouth is attached to her nipple and his feet hang over her lap. He is wearing different clothes: a brown-and-white-checkered s.h.i.+rt with black pants. For the first time since Ora met him, his face looks serene. The breast-feeding woman watches him with deep concentration. She has a strong, wild face and bony, slightly masculine cheeks, and a full white breast. The women look hypnotized, all strung on one thread. Ora stands on her tiptoes, drawn inside the circle-after all, she has some part in Yazdi too, or perhaps she just wants to touch his hand one last time, to say goodbye. But when she tries to squeeze her way through, the women tighten up against her as one, and she withdraws and stands behind them.

A hand touches her shoulder. Sami. Pale and exhausted. "Come on, we're done here."

"What about him?" She motions at Yazdi with her eyes.

"It'll be okay. His uncle will come soon to get him."

"And who is that?" She looks at the wet nurse.

"A woman. The doctor told her to give him milk. Milk his body doesn't throw out."

"There's a doctor here?"

Sami arches his eyebrows at the short, silver-haired man.

"What is a doctor doing here? What is this place?"

Sami hesitates. "These, these people," he says halfheartedly, "from all over town they come here at night."

"Why?"

"At night it's the IRs' hospital."

"Hospital?"

"For all the ones that get hurt on the job, or the ones that get beat."

As though there's some permanent quota of beatings, Ora thinks.

"Yalla," says Sami, "we're out of here."

"Why here?"

But Sami has left her in the room with the question echoing. She follows him down the corridor. She finds it difficult to leave the place and its secretive, beneficial murmur. And it is also Yazdi-why deny it-or whatever he aroused in her when he leaned against her, when she cleaned up his vomit, when they played peek-a-boo, when she comforted him in her arms after Sami hit them both. She feels that these small gestures have awakened in her a precious, obsolete trait, which she herself had almost forgotten. She thinks of turning back to sneak another look at the great woman breast-feeding him, to see once again the look of utter concentration on her face, and the slight tremor in her forehead. How gently she signaled to him not to bite, Ora thinks. Such natural maternity, and he isn't even her child.

Women and children are was.h.i.+ng the floors of the auditorium, and she remembers that years ago Sami told her he could never understand the Jews' logic: "During the day you're always checking us and following us and going through our underwear, and at night you suddenly give us the keys to your restaurants and your gas stations and your bakeries and your supermarkets?"