And today she had failed, and she was causing him to fail, and by the time she realized this it was too late, when he hurried to open the taxi door for her, as he always did, and suddenly saw Ofer coming down the steps from the house wearing his uniform and carrying his rifle, and this was the Ofer he’d known since he was born. He had driven her and Ilan home from the hospital with Ofer because Ilan was afraid to drive that day, said his hands would shake, and on the way from the hospital Sami told them that for him life really only started when Yousra was born, his oldest daughter. At the time he had just the one; later there were two boys and another two girls—“I’ve got five demographic problems,” he would cheerfully tell anyone who asked—and Ora noticed on that trip that he drove very carefully, smoothly rounding the car over potholes and bumps so as not to disturb Ofer as he slept in her arms. During the years that followed, when the boys went to school downtown, Sami drove the carpool she organized for five kids from Tzur Hadassah and Ein Karem. And whenever Ilan was overseas, Sami helped out with chauffeuring, and there were years when he was an integral part of the family’s daily routine. Later, when Adam was older but didn’t have his license yet, Sami would drive him home from his Friday night outings downtown, and then Ofer joined in, and the two boys would phone from a pub and Sami would come from Abu Ghosh, at any hour, denying he’d been asleep, even at three a.m., and he would wait for Adam and Ofer and their friends outside the pub until they finally remembered to come out, and he probably listened to their conversations, their army stories—who knows what he heard all those times? she suddenly thinks with horror, and what they said as they kidded around and told alcohol-fueled jokes about their checkpoint experiences—and then he would shuttle the boys to their homes in the various neighborhoods. Now he would shuttle Ofer to an operation in Jenin or Nablus, she thought, and she had forgotten to mention this one little detail when she phoned him, but Sami was quick. Her heart sank when she saw his face darken in a deadly coupling of anger and defeat. He got it all in the blink of an eye: he saw Ofer coming down the steps with his uniform and rifle, and realized that Ora was asking him to add his modest contribution to the Israeli war effort.
An ashen current had spread slowly through the dark skin of his face, the soot from a fire that leaped up and died down inside him in an instant. He stood without moving and looked as though someone had slapped him, as though she herself had come over and stood facing him, smiled broadly with her light-filled joy and warmth, and slapped his face as hard as she could. For one moment they were trapped, the three of them, condemned in a flash: Ofer at the top of the steps, his rifle dangling, a magazine attached with a rubber band; she with the silly purple suede handbag that was far too fancy, grotesque even, for a trip like this; and Sami, who did not budge but nevertheless grew smaller and smaller, slowly emptying out. And then she realized how old he had grown. When she first met him he had looked almost like a boy. Twenty-one years had gone by, and he was three or four years younger than she was but he looked older. People age quickly here—them too, she thought oddly. Even them.
She made things worse by getting into the back of the car, not the passenger side where he held the door open for her—but she always sat next to Sami, how could it possibly be otherwise?—and Ofer came down and sat next to her in the back, and Sami stood outside the taxi with his arms hanging at his sides and his head slightly tilted. He stood by the open door like a man trying to remember something, or muttering a forgotten sentence to himself that had popped into his mind from some distant place, perhaps a prayer or an ancient saying, or a farewell to something that can never be regained. Or perhaps just like a man taking a moment of absolute privacy to inhale the glorious spring air, which was bursting with sunny yellow blossoms of spiny broom and acacia. And only after this brief pause did he get into the taxi and sit down, upright and rigid, and wait for directions.
“It’s going to be kind of a long drive today, Sami, did I tell you on the phone?” Ora said. Sami didn’t shake his head or nod, or look at her in the rearview mirror. He only lowered his thick, patient neck a little. “We have to take Ofer to the, you know, that campaign, you probably heard on the radio, the meeting point, up near the Gilboa. Let’s start driving and we’ll explain on the way.” She spoke quickly and tonelessly. “That campaign,” she’d said, as if she were telling him about an advertising campaign, and the truth is that she’d almost said “that stupid campaign,” or even “your government’s campaign.” But she had restrained herself with great difficulty, perhaps because she knew she would make Ofer angry, and rightly so: How could she forge subversive alliances on a day like this? Besides, maybe it was true, as Ofer had tried to persuade her over lunch at the restaurant, that they had to come down on them once and for all, even if it obviously would not eliminate them completely or dissuade them from wanting to hurt us—on the contrary, he had insisted, but maybe it would at least give us back a little deterrence. Now Ora bit her tongue and pulled her left knee into her stomach and hugged it, tormented over her rudeness to Sami. To quell the commotion inside her, she kept trying to start a casual conversation with Ofer, or with Sami, and kept coming up against their silence, and decided she wasn’t going to give in, and so she found herself, to her complete surprise, telling Sami an old story about her father, who had gone almost completely blind at the age of forty-eight—“just imagine!”—and at first he’d lost his sight in his right eye, because of glaucoma, “and that’s probably what I’ll get one day,” she said, and over the years he’d developed a cataract in his left eye, all of which left him with a field of vision about the size of a pinhead, “and if genetics do their job, that’s more or less what I’ll have, too.” She laughed excessively and reported into the space of the taxi in a cheerful voice that her father, for years, was afraid to have cataract surgery on his one almost-seeing eye. Sami said nothing, and Ofer looked out the window and puffed his cheeks out and shook his head as if refusing to believe how low she could go to ingratiate herself with Sami, how she was willing to offer such an intimate story as a sacrifice to make up for her crude mistake. She saw all this, and still could not stop herself. The story took on its own force, because after all it was Ofer, he alone, who had managed, with patience and stubbornness and endless conversations, to convince her father to have the surgery, and thanks to Ofer he had gained another few good years before his death. As she talked she realized that Ofer was the one who kept her childhood anecdotes and recollections in his memory, her stories about school and her friends, about her parents and the neighbors in her childhood neighborhood of Haifa. Ofer had lived those little stories with a pleasure that was unexpected in a boy his age, and he always knew how to pull them out at exactly the right moment, and secretly she felt that he was preserving her childhood and youth for her, and that must be why she had deposited the stories with him all these years. Almost without noticing, she had slowly given up on Ilan and Adam as listeners. She sighed and immediately felt it was a different sigh, a new one, carved from a different place inside her, with an ice-cold edge. She was frightened, and for a brief moment she was a child again, fighting with Ada, who insisted on letting go of her hand and jumping off the cliff; she hadn’t been there with her for years—why had Ada suddenly come back to hold her hand, only to let go? She kept chattering through Sami and Ofer’s silence and found it even more depressing that these two men, despite everything that stood between them now, had still managed to unite against her. There was an alliance, Ora finally realized, an alliance at her expense, and it turned out to be deeper and more effective than everything that divided them.
A nose-blowing interrupted her so violently that she stopped talking. Ofer had a cold. Or allergies. The last few springs his allergies had lasted almost until the end of May. He blew his nose into a tissue pulled from the ornate little olive-wood box that Sami had installed in the back for his passengers. He pulled out square after square and blew loudly and scrunched the used tissues into an overflowing ashtray. His Glilon as
sault rifle sat between them; its barrel had been pointed at her chest for several minutes, and now she could no longer bear it and motioned for him to turn it away. But when he moved the rifle and placed it between his legs with a sharp, irritated gesture, the front sight scratched the car-ceiling upholstery and pulled out a thread. Ofer said immediately, “Sorry, Sami, I ripped this.” Sami looked quickly at the unraveling thread and said hoarsely, “Don’t worry about it,” and Ora said, “No, no, there’s no argument, we’ll pay for the repair.” Sami took a deep breath and said, “Forget it, it’s no big deal.” Ora whispered to Ofer to fold the butt in at least. Ofer hissed in a half whisper that it wasn’t standard practice, he only folded it in when he was in the tank, and Ora leaned forward and asked Sami if he had a pair of scissors to cut off the thread, but he didn’t, and she held the thread that danced and spun in front of her eyes and looked, for a moment, like a spilled-out gut, and she said maybe it could be sewn back, “if you have a needle and thread here I can sew it right now.” Sami said his wife would do it, and then he added, without any color in his voice, “Just be careful with the gun”—he was clearly addressing them both—“so it doesn’t scratch the upholstery. I just reupholstered a week ago.” Ora said with a crushed smile, “Okay, Sami, no more damages,” and she saw him lower his eyelids over a look she did not recognize.
Last week, on a routine drive, Ora had encountered the new upholstery: synthetic leopard skin. Sami had watched her expression closely, and then commented: “You don’t like this kind of thing, Ora. This, for you, is not considered a pretty thing, right?” She replied that in general she wasn’t crazy about animal-fur upholstery, not even imitation fur, and he laughed: “No, for you this is probably Arab taste, isn’t it?” Ora tensed at the unfamiliar bitterness in his voice and said that as far as she could remember, he had never chosen that kind of thing before, either. He replied that he actually found it beautiful, and a man couldn’t change his taste. Ora did not respond. She imagined he’d had a rough day, maybe a passenger had insulted him, maybe they had shat on him at a checkpoint again. They both somehow extricated themselves from the gloom that momentarily drifted through the taxi, but an unease gnawed at her all day, and only that evening, when she was watching television, did it occur to her that his new taste in upholstery might have something to do with the group of settlers who had planned to detonate a car bomb outside a school in East Jerusalem. They had been caught a few days before, and one of them described on television how they had designed the car, inside and out, to match “Arab taste.”
Now the silence in the car grew even thicker, and Ora was once again driven to fill it with chatter. She spoke about her father and how she missed him, and about her mother, who no longer knew right from left, and about Ilan and Adam who were off having fun in South America. Sami remained expressionless, but his eyes darted around, examining the convoy in which he’d been crawling for over an hour. Once, on one of their first trips together, he had told her that ever since he was a boy he’d had a habit of counting every truck he saw on the roads in Israel, civilian or military. When she’d looked at him questioningly, he’d explained that they would come in trucks to take him and his family and all the ’48 Arabs over the border. “Isn’t that what your transferists promise?” he’d asked with a laugh. “Promises should be kept, no? And take it from me, our idiots will line up to drive the trucks if they can get a few bucks out of it.”
Ofer wipes his nose constantly and blows it with trumpeting sounds she’s never heard before, which seem grating and alien to his natural tenderness. He scrunches the tissues and pushes them into the ashtray and immediately pulls another tissue out, and the used tissues fall to the floor and he doesn’t pick them up, and she gives up on constantly leaning over to put them into her handbag. A “Storm” Jeep passes them, honking repeatedly, and cuts in front. Behind them a Hummer lunges, almost touching them, and Sami keeps running his hand over his large, round bald spot. He presses his huge back against the orthopedic seat cushion and jolts forward every time he feels Ofer’s long legs prodding his seatback. His slightly burned masculine scent, always mingled with an expensive aftershave she likes, has been replaced in the last few minutes with a sweet smell of sweat that is worsening, and it bursts through and fills the entire car, overpowering the air-conditioning, and Ora gags and does not dare open the window, so she sits back and breathes through her mouth. Large beads of sweat form on Sami’s bald head and run down his face over his puffed cheeks. She wants to offer him a tissue but she is afraid, and she thinks about the way he swiftly dips his fingers in the rose water they bring to the table after meals at his favorite restaurant in Majd el’Krum.
His eyes dart between the Jeep in front of him and the one tailgating him. He reaches up and uses two fingers to pull his shirt collar away from his neck. He is the only Arab in this whole convoy, she thinks, and she too starts to feel a prickle of sweat: he’s simply scared, he’s dying of fear, how could I have done this to him? One large drop hangs from the edge of his chin and refuses to fall. A thick, teary drop. How can it not fall? Why doesn’t he wipe it off? Is he leaving it like that on purpose? Ora’s face is hot and red and her breathing is heavy, and Ofer opens a window and grumbles, “It’s hot,” and Sami says, “The A/C is weak.”
She leans back and takes off her glasses. Waves of yellow blossoms sway in front of her. Wild mustard, probably, which her deficient eyes crumble and crush into bright smudges. She shuts her eyes and at once feels the pulse of the convoy burst through and rise, as if from her own body, in a tense, menacing growl. She opens her eyes: the dark pounding stops at once and the waves of light return. She covers her eyes again and the growl picks up, with a heavy drumbeat within, a stubborn, dulled, abysmal sound, a medley of engines and pistons, and beneath them the beating of hearts, pulsating arteries, quiet splutters of fear. She turns back to look at the snake of vehicles, and the scene is almost celebratory, excitable, a huge, colorful parade full of life: parents and brothers and girlfriends, even grandparents, bringing their loved ones to the campaign, the event of the season. In every car sits a young boy, the first fruits, a spring festival that ends with a human sacrifice. And you? she asks herself sharply. Look at you, how neatly and calmly you bring your son here, your almost-only-son, the boy you love dearly, with Ishmael as your private driver.
When they get to the meeting point, Sami pulls into the first parking spot he finds, yanks up the emergency brake, folds his arms over his chest, and announces that he will wait for Ora there. And he asks her to be quick, which he has never done before. Ofer gets out of the cab and Sami does not move. He hisses something, but she can’t tell what. She hopes he was saying goodbye to Ofer, but who knows what he was muttering. She marches after Ofer, blinking at the dazzling lights: rifle barrels, sunglasses, car mirrors. She doesn’t know where he is leading her and is afraid he will get swallowed up among the hundreds of young men and she will never see him again. Meaning—she immediately corrects herself, revising the grim minutes she has been keeping all day—she won’t see him again until he comes home. The sun beats down, and the horde becomes a heap of colorful, bustling dots. She focuses on Ofer’s long khaki back. His walk is rigid and slightly arrogant. She can see him broaden his shoulders and widen his stance. When he was twelve, she remembers, he used to change his voice when he answered the phone and project a strained “Hello” that was supposed to sound deep, and a minute later he would forget and go back to his thin squeak. The air around her buzzes with shouts and whistles and megaphone calls and laughter. “Honey, answer me, it’s me, Honey, answer me, it’s me,” sings a ringtone on a nearby cell phone that seems to follow her wherever she goes. Within the commotion Ora swiftly picks up the distant chatter of a baby somewhere in the large gathering ground, and the voice of his mother answers sweetly. She stands for a moment looking for them but cannot find them, and she imagines the mother changing the baby’s diaper, maybe on the hood of a car, bending over and tickling his tummy, and she
stands slightly stooped, hugging her suede bag to her body, and laps up the soft double trickle of sounds until it vanishes.
It is all a huge, irredeemable mistake. It seems to her that as the moment of separation approaches, the families and the soldiers fill with arid merriment, as if they have all inhaled a drug meant to dull their comprehension. The air bustles with the hum of a school trip or a big family excursion. Men her age, exempt from reserve duty, meet their friends from the army, the fathers of the young soldiers, and exchange laughter and backslaps. “We’ve done our part,” two stout men tell each other, “now it’s their turn.” Television crews descend on families saying goodbye to their loved ones. Ora is thirsty, parched. Half running, she trails behind Ofer. Every time her gaze falls on the face of a soldier she unwittingly pulls back, afraid she will remember him: Ofer once told her that when they had their pictures taken sometimes, before they set off on a military campaign, the guys made sure to keep their heads a certain distance from each other, so there’d be room for the red circle that would mark them later, in the newspaper. Screeching loudspeakers direct the soldiers to their battalions’ meeting points—a meetery, they call this, and she thinks in her mother’s voice: barbarians, language-rapists—and suddenly Ofer stops and she almost walks into him. He turns to her and she feels a deluge. “What’s the matter with you?” he whispers into her face. “What if they find an Arab here and think he’s come to commit suicide? And didn’t you think about how he feels having to drive me here? Do you even get what this means for him?”
To the End of the Land Page 7