“Certainly you may.” Ora hears the slight derision in the reporter’s voice. “What exactly would you like to say to the IDF?”
“What can I tell you?” The mother sighs, and Ora’s heart goes out to her. “My sons, the two, when they were in basic training they signed a waiver, so they’re allowed to serve together, and that was well and good when they were in basic training, I’m not saying it wasn’t, but now they’re going down to the border, and everyone knows that the border for Givati is Gaza, and Gaza, I don’t have to tell you what that means, and I would really like to ask the army to think about it a bit more, and to think a little about me, too, I’m sorry for—”
What if they come in the middle of the potato? Ora thinks and stares at the large spud lying semi-peeled in her hand. Or in the middle of the onion? It gradually dawns on her that every movement she makes may be the last before the knock on the door. She reminds herself again that Ofer is unquestionably still at the Gilboa, and there’s no reason to panic yet, but the thoughts crawl up and wrap themselves around her hands as they clutch the peeler, and for an instant the knock on the door becomes so inevitable, such an intolerable provocation of the capacity for disaster embodied in every human condition, that her mind confuses cause with effect and the dull, slow movements of her hands around the potato seem like the essential prelude to the knock.
During this eternal moment, she, and faraway Ofer, and everything that occurs in the vast space between them, are all deciphered in a flash of knowledge, like a densely woven fabric, so that the very act of her standing by the kitchen table, and the fact that she stupidly continues to peel the potato—her fingers on the knife whiten now—and all her trivial, routine household movements, and all the innocent, ostensibly random fragments of reality around her, become nothing less than vital steps in a mysterious dance, a slow and solemn dance, whose unwitting partners are Ofer, and his friends preparing for battle, and the senior officers scanning the map of future battles, and the rows of tanks she saw on the outskirts of the meeting point, and the dozens of smaller vehicles that moved among the tanks, and the people in the villages and towns over there, the other ones, who would watch through drawn blinds as soldiers and tanks drove down their streets and alleys, and the quick-as-lightning boy who might hit Ofer tomorrow or the day after, or perhaps even tonight, with a rock or a bullet or a rocket (strangely, the boy’s movement is the only thing that violates and complicates the slow heaviness of the entire dance), and the notifiers, who might be refreshing their procedures at the Jerusalem army offices right now, and Sami too, who must be at home in his village at this late hour, telling Inaam about the day’s events. Everyone, everyone is part of this massive, all-encompassing process, and the people killed in the last terrorist attack are part of it too, unaware of their role: they are the casualties whose death will be avenged by the soldiers now setting off on a new campaign. Even the potato she is holding, which is suddenly as heavy as an iron weight and she can no longer continue to slice it, it too might be a link, a tiny but irreplaceable link in the dark, calculated, formal course of the larger system, which comprises thousands of people, soldiers and civilians, vehicles and weapons and field kitchens and battle rations and ammunition stores and crates of equipment and night-vision instruments and signaling flares and stretchers and helicopters and canteens and computers and antennas and telephones and large, black, sealed plastic bags. And all these, Ora suddenly feels, as well as the visible and hidden threads that tie them to one another, are moving around her, above her, like a massive fishing net, tossed up high with a sweeping motion, spreading slowly to fill the night sky. Ora quickly drops the potato, and it rolls off the counter and onto the floor between the fridge and the wall, where it shines with a pale glow as she leans on the table with both hands and stares at it.
By nine p.m. she’s climbing the walls. To her astonishment, she thinks she sees herself and Ofer on television, hugging goodbye at his battalion’s gathering point. She remembers, horrified, that there were cameras there, just after he barked at her for bringing Sami. He had stopped his barking when he noticed her reddening face, and through his fury he had wrapped her in his arms and held her to his broad chest, and said warmly, “Mom, Mom, you’re such a space cadet …” She jumps up, knocking a chair over, and practically glues her face to the screen, to Ofer—
Who holds her with a slightly authoritarian arrogance and turns her toward the camera—his move had caught her by surprise and she’d almost tripped, then held on to him with a nervous laugh, and it was all there, even the stupid purple handbag—to show the cameraman his worrying mother. Thinking back, she sees real treachery in the way he suddenly spun her around and exposed her to the camera. Her hand had flown up to make sure her hair wasn’t too disheveled and her mouth had twisted into a sanctimoniously mollifying Who, me? smile. But the treachery had been smoldering between them since last night, when he had decided to volunteer for the operation and kept it from her. When he had given up, without much deliberation, on their trip. An even greater treachery, and an intolerable foreignness, resided in his ability to be such a soldier-going-to-war, so able to do his job, so insolent and joyful and thirsty for battle, thereby imposing her role upon her: to be wrinkled and gray, yet glowing with pride (a poor man’s coat of arms: Mother of Soldier), and to be a total dimwit, blinking with ignorant charm at the men’s stance in the face of death. There he is smiling at the camera, and her mouth—on television and at home—unwittingly mimics his shining grin, and there are the three little magic wrinkles around his eyes, and she pushes away a thought: When will they broadcast this picture of him again? She sees it clearly, right on the screen, the halo of a red circle around his head. Then someone shoves a boom pole between them. “What can a son tell his mother at a moment like this?” asks the reporter, all sparkling with amusement. “Keep the beer cold for me till I get back!” the son laughs, and hearty cheers come from every direction. “Wait!” Ofer stops the merriment and holds up one finger, effortlessly drawing the attention of the reporter, the cameraman, and everyone around them—such an Ilan movement, the gesture of someone who knows everyone will be silent whenever he holds up a finger like that. “I have something else to tell her,” says her son on the television, and he smiles knowingly. He puts his lips to her ears and still looks at the camera with one twinkling eye, full of life and mischief, and she remembers his touch and his warm breath on her cheek, and she sees the camera quickly trying to invade the space between mouth and ear, and she sees the extremely attentive expression on her own face, her pathetic supplication exposed as she displays for all to see, for Ilan to see—do they get Channel 2 on the Galápagos?—what soft and natural intimacy flows between her and Ofer. The editor finally cuts away, and now the reporter is joking around with another solider and his girlfriend, who embraces him and his mother, both women with bare midriffs, and Ora feels two pinches. She drops heavily to the edge of the armchair and her hand grasps the skin of her neck, squeezing. It’s a good thing they didn’t show the way she had grimaced and pulled back when she heard what he whispered in her ear. The memory slaps her: Why did he have to tell me that? When did he rehearse that line, where did he get the idea?
She stands up quickly. She must not sit. Not be a sitting target for the beam already probing for her, for the huge fishing net slowly descending. She cocks her head to the door. Nothing. Through the window she sees a strip of road and sidewalk. She scans it but there is no unfamiliar car, no car with military plates, no nervous barks from the neighbors’ dogs, and no band of evil angels. Besides, it’s too early. Not for them, she replies. Those people come even at five in the morning, that’s exactly when they come, they get you sleepy, dazed, defenseless, too weak to throw them down the steps before they can deliver their punch line. But right now it really is too early, and she honestly doesn’t think anything has happened there in the few hours since they parted. She rubs the back of her neck. Relax, he’s still with his friends in the Gilboa, there are procedures, paperwork
, debriefing, lots of complicated processes. Before anything can happen they have to mix everyone’s smells together, ignite the powerful lightning in their eyes and the beating pulse in their necks. She can feel Ofer renewing himself with them, with his friends, with their measured aggression, their battle thirst, their thick sap of warfare, their well-hidden fear; he receives and delivers these important things with a quick hug, half-chest pressed to half-chest, two pats on the back, slaps of identity, tickets punched. She distractedly drags herself into his room, where everything would freeze from this day onward, and she discovers that the room has beat her to it and already taken on the vacant expression of an abandoned place. The objects seem orphaned: his sandals with their splayed straps, the chair at his computer desk, the history textbooks he keeps by his bed because he liked history—likes, of course she means likes, and will continue to like—and all the Paul Auster books on the shelf, and the D & D books he liked as a kid, and the posters of Maccabi Haifa soccer players whom he worshipped at twelve and refused to take off the wall even when he was twenty-one, twenty-one, when he was twenty-one.
Perhaps she should not move around the room, not break the still-hanging threads of his motion, not silence the faint echo of his childhood vapors that still sometimes waft up from a pillow, a balding yellow tennis ball, a toy commando soldier equipped with endless miniature battle accessories, which she and Ilan used to bring him and Adam from their trips overseas, bought in toy shops they stopped visiting once the boys grew up, and hoped to return to in a few years, for the grandchildren. Their dreams were small and modest, yet they had quickly become so complicated and virtually unattainable. Ilan left, off to breathe in some bachelor air. Adam left with him. Ofer is away now. She steps sideways out of the room, careful not to turn her back on his belongings, and stands looking in with the yearning of the exiled. A crumpled Manchester United shirt, an army sock tossed in the corner, a letter peeking from an envelope, an old newspaper, a soccer magazine, a picture of him with Talia by some waterfall in the north, the small five-kilo iron weights on the rug, a book lying open, facedown—what was the last sentence he read? What would be the last picture he saw? A narrow alleyway, a stone block sailing through the air, and the masked face of a young man, eyes burning with fury and hatred. From there her mind skips quickly to an office at the army compound, where a soldier walks over to a filing cabinet full of personnel files—but that was how they did things in her day, in prehistoric times; these days it’s a computer: one click, a flicker on the screen, the soldier’s name, contact details for notification in case of a tragedy. Has he already let them know about the split in his parents’ addresses?
The phone gives a wrenching ring. It’s him. Overjoyed. “Did you see us on TV?” Friends had called to tell him.
“Listen,” she whispers, “you haven’t left yet, have you?”
“I wish! We’ll still be here tomorrow night at this rate.”
She hardly hears the words. Attentive only to the foreign deepness of his voice, the echo of his new treachery, the treachery of the one and only man who had always been loyal to her. Since yesterday, perhaps since he’d tasted the pleasure of betrayal, of betraying her, it seemed he wanted to savor the taste again and again, like a puppy eating meat for the first time.
“Hang on Mom, one sec.” He laughs and calls out to someone standing near him: “Why are you making such a big deal? We’ll go in, rattle our guns at them, and get out.” Then he comes back to her fast and frantic, outflanking her and enjoying it. “Um, Mom, can you tape The Sopranos for me tomorrow? There’s an empty tape on the TV, you know how to work the VCR, right?” As they talk she rummages through the drawer of tapes looking for the scrap of paper on which she once wrote down the instructions he dictated. “You press the far left button, then the one with the picture of an apple …”
“But what are you doing there meanwhile?” she asks, mourning for these precious wasted hours that he could have spent at home, with her. On the other hand, what could she offer him here with her funereal face? Pretty soon, she thinks, he’ll want to rent a room somewhere, or move in with Ilan like Adam did. And why not? With Ilan everything’s such fun, good times, the three adolescents can party all they want without any annoying parents getting in the way. Meanwhile, Ofer is telling her something and she can’t separate the words. She shuts her eyes. She’ll find an excuse to phone Talia later that evening; Talia has to talk to him before he leaves.
He tries to drown out the chaos in the background. “Shut up already, it’s my mom!” Then come roars of joy and admiration, and they howl like jackals in heat, sending warm regards to his awesome mom. “Tell her to send her rugelach!” Ofer walks to a quieter place. “Animals,” he explains, “tank loaders, the lot of them.”
She can hear his breath as he walks. At home he also walks when he’s on the phone, and so does Adam. They learned that from Ilan—my genes are as soft as butter, she thinks. Sometimes the boys and Ilan would hold three simultaneous phone calls, each on his cell, all walking briskly around the large living room, crossing one another’s paths in quick diagonals, never colliding.
Now it’s suddenly quiet. Perhaps he’s found a hiding place behind one of the tanks. The silence makes her nervous, and he seems to feel the same, facing her alone now without the entire Israel Defense Forces to protect him. He quickly tells her that 110 percent of the forces showed up, “all raring to go, jonesing to lay into them”—he militarizes himself as he talks. “The adjutant says he doesn’t remember a call-up like this”—in that case they can do without you, Ora thinks, but manages to keep quiet—“and the problem is, there aren’t enough ceramic vests for everyone, and some of the guys don’t have vehicles to team up with, ’cause half the transporters are stuck in traffic in Afula.” Whoever shoved this gravel into his mouth is probably the same person who makes her ask if he has any idea when it will be over. Ofer lets her question echo for a moment until its total pointlessness and stupidity is exhausted. That was also one of Ilan’s little tricks against her. Kids pick up these things and use them without understanding what sort of multigenerational weapon they’ve activated. Ofer, at least, comes back to her quickly, but she’s already wondering when that will end too, when he will jab her with one of Ilan’s long needles and not come back to recover the casualty. “Nu, really, Mom.” His voice is warm and healing like his embrace. “We won’t stop until we eliminate the terrorism infrastructure”—here she can hear him start to smile, mimicking the prime minister’s arrogant intonation—“and until we defeat the murderous gangs and sever the head of the snake and burn out the nests of—”
She quickly pushes her way into the crack of his laughter. “Oferiko, listen, I think I might go away for a few days after all, up north.”
“Hang on, the reception here’s lousy. Wait—what’s that?”
“I’m thinking of going up north.”
“You mean, to the Galilee?”
“Yes.”
“Alone?”
“Alone, yes.”
“But why go alone? Don’t you have anyone who …” He immediately realizes his unfortunate phrasing. “Maybe you could go with a girlfriend or someone.”
She chokes down his so-accurate tactlessness. “I don’t have anyone who, and I don’t feel like going with girlfriends or anything, and I don’t feel like being at home now, either.”
His voice wrinkles. “Wait, Mom, I’m not following. You’re really going away alone?”
Suddenly the lid flips off her mouth. “Who have I got to go with, in your opinion? My partner bailed on me at the last minute, decided to volunteer for the Jewish brigades—”
He interrupts impatiently. “So you’re going to go to our places, the ones we planned?”
She bravely overcomes the pilfered our. “I don’t know, I only just now thought of it.”
“Well, at least you have a backpack ready to go,” he snickers.
“Two.”
“Honestly, though, I really don’t g
et it.”
“What is there to get? I just can’t be here now. I’m suffocating.”
A huge engine turns on somewhere behind him. Someone shouts to hurry up. She hears his thoughts. He needs her at home now, that’s the thing, and he’s right, and she almost gives in, at that very moment, but she realizes just as quickly and urgently that she has no choice this time.
A gluey silence. Ora fights to make herself turn her back on him, and the map of memory with its countless little marks of blame spreads out inside her: Ofer at age three, undergoing complicated dental surgery. When the anesthesiologist placed the mask on his nose and mouth, she was told to leave the room. Ofer’s terrified eyes pleaded, but she turned her back and left. When he was four, she left him screaming for her, clinging with all ten fingers to the preschool fence, and his shouts stayed with her for the rest of the day. There were many more of these little abandonments, escapes, eye-shuttings, face-hidings, and today, undoubtedly, is the hardest of them all. But every moment she spends at home is dangerous for her, she knows it, and dangerous for him too, and he can’t understand that and there’s no point hoping he will. He’s too young. His desires are simple and crude: he needs her to wait for him at home without changing anything about home or about herself, preferably without moving at all for all these days—the way he pulled back from her and flailed in anger, she recalls, when he was five and she had her curls straightened!—so that if he comes home on leave, he will hug her and defrost her and he’ll be able to use her, to impress her with the splinters of horror that he’ll scatter around with affected indifference, revealing secrets he should not divulge. Ora hears his breath. She breathes with him. They both feel the unbearable stretching of tendons—the tendons of her back-turning.
“So how long d’you think you’ll be gone for?” he asks in a voice touched by anger and weakness and a shred of defeat.
To the End of the Land Page 9