To the End of the Land

Prologue, 1967

HEY, GIRL, quiet!

Who is that?

Be quiet! You woke everyone up!

But I was holding her

Who?

On the rock, we were sitting together

What rock are you talking about? Let us sleep

Then she just fell

All this shouting and singing

But I was asleep

And you were shouting!

She just let go of my hand and fell

Stop it, go to sleep

Turn on a light

Are you crazy? They’ll kill us if we do that

Wait

What?

I was singing?

Singing, shouting, everything. Now be quiet

What was I singing?

What were you singing?!

In my sleep, what was I singing?

I’m supposed to know what you were singing? A bunch of shouts. That’s what you were singing. What was I singing, she wants to know …

You don’t remember the song?

Look, are you nuts? I’m barely alive

But who are you?

Room Three

You’re in isolation, too?

Gotta get back

Don’t go … Did you leave? Wait, hello … Gone … But what was I singing?

AND the next night he woke her up again, angry at her again for singing at the top of her lungs and waking up the whole hospital, and she begged him to try to remember if it was the same song from the night before. She was desperate to know, because of her dream, which kept getting dreamed almost every night during those years. An utterly white dream. Everything in it was white, the streets and the houses and the trees and the cats and dogs and the rock at the edge of the cliff. And Ada, her redheaded friend, was also entirely white, without a drop of blood in her face or body. Without a drop of color in her hair. But he couldn’t remember which song it was this time, either. His whole body was shuddering, and she shuddered back at him from her bed. We’re like a pair of castanets, he said, and to her surprise, she burst out with bright laughter that tickled him inside. He had used up all his strength on the journey from his room to hers, thirty-five steps, resting after each one, holding on to walls, doorframes, empty food carts. Now he flopped onto the sticky linoleum floor in her doorway. For several minutes they both breathed heavily. He wanted to make her laugh again but he could no longer speak, and then he must have fallen asleep, until her voice woke him. Tell me something

What? Who is it?

It’s me

You …

Tell me, am I alone in this room?

How should I know?

Are you, like, shivering?

Yeah, shivering

How high is yours?

It was forty this evening

Mine was forty point three. When do you die?

At forty-two

That’s close

No, no, you still have time

Don’t go, I’m scared

Do you hear?

What?

How quiet it is suddenly?

Were there booms before?

Cannons

I keep sleeping, and all of a sudden it’s nighttime again

’Cause there’s a blackout

I think they’re winning

Who?

The Arabs

No way

They’ve occupied Tel Aviv

What are you … who told you that?

I don’t know. Maybe I heard it

You dreamed it

No, they said it here, someone, before, I heard voices

It’s from the fever. Nightmares. I have them, too

My dream … I was with my friend

Maybe you know

What?

Which direction I came from

I don’t know anything here

How long for you?

Don’t know

Me, four days. Maybe a week

Wait, where’s the nurse?

At night she’s in Internal A. She’s an Arab

How do you know?

You can hear it when she talks

You’re shaking

My mouth, my whole face

But … where is everybody?

They’re not taking us to the bomb shelter

Why?

So we don’t infect them

Wait, so it’s just us—

And the nurse

I thought

What?

If you could sing it for me

That again?

Just hum

I’m leaving

If it was the other way around, I would sing to you

Gotta get back

Where?

Where, where, to lie with my forefathers, to bring me down with sorrow to the grave, that’s where

What? What was that? Wait, do I know you? Hey, come back

AND the next night, too, before midnight, he came to stand in her doorway and scolded her again and complained that she was singing in her sleep, waking him and the whole world, and she smiled to herself and asked if his room was really that far, and that was when he realized, from her voice, that she wasn’t where she had been the night before and the night before that.

Because now I’m sitting, she explained. He asked cautiously, But why are you sitting? Because I couldn’t sleep, she said. And I wasn’t singing. I was sitting here quietly waiting for you.

They both thought it was getting even darker. A new wave of heat, which may have had nothing to do with her illness, climbed up from Ora’s toes and sparked red spots on her neck and face. It’s a good thing it’s dark, she thought, and held her loose pajama collar up to her neck. Finally, from the doorway, he cleared his throat softly and said, Well, I have to get back. But why? she asked. He said he urgently had to tar and feather himself. She didn’t get it, but then she got it and laughed deeply. Come on, dummy, enough with your act, I put a chair out for you next to me.

He felt along the doorway, metal cabinets, and beds, until he stopped way off, leaned his arms on an empty bed, and panted loudly. I’m here, he groaned. Come closer to me, she said. Wait, let me catch my breath. The darkness filled her with courage and she said in a loud voice, in her voice of health, of beaches and paddleball and swimming out to the rafts on Quiet Beach, What are you afraid of? I don’t bite. He mumbled, Okay, okay, I get it, I’m barely alive. His grumbling tone and the heavy way he dragged his feet touched her. We’re kind of like an elderly couple, she thought.

Ouch!

What happened?

One of these beds just decided to … Fuck! So, have you heard of the Law of Malicious—

What did you say?

The Law of Malicious Furniture — heard of it?

Are you coming or not?

The trembling wouldn’t stop, and sometimes it turned into long shivers, and when they talked their speech was choppy, and they often had to wait for a pause in the trembling, a brief calming of the face and mouth muscles, and then they would quickly spit out the words in high, tense voices, and the stammering crushed the sentences in their mouths. How-old-are-you? Six-teen-and-you? And-a-quar-ter. I-have-jaun-dice, how-a-bout-you? Me? he said. I-think-it’s-an-in-fec-tion-of-the-o-va-ries.

Silence. He shuddered and breathed heavily. By-the-way-that-was-a-joke, he said. Not funny, she said. He groaned: I tried to make her laugh, but her sense of humor is too — She perked up and asked who he was talking to. He replied, To my joke writer, I guess I’ll have to fire him. If you don’t come over here and sit down right now, I’ll start singing, she threatened. He shivered and laughed. His laughter was as screechy as a donkey’s bray, a self-sustaining laughter, and she secretly gulped it down like medicine, like a prize.

He laughed so hard at her stupid little joke that she barely resisted telling him that lately she wasn’t good at making people roll around with laughter the way she used to. “When it comes to humor, she’s not much of a jester,” they sang about her at the Purim party this year. And it wasn’t just a minor shortcoming. For her it was crippling, a new defect that could grow bigger and more complicated. And she sensed that it was somehow related to some other qualities that were vanishing in recent years. Intuition, for example. How could a trait like that disappear so abruptly? Or the knack for saying the right thing at the right time. She had had it once, and now it was gone. Or even just wittiness. She used to be really sharp. The sparks just flew out of her. (Although, she consoled herself, it was a Purim song, and maybe they just couldn’t come up with a better rhyme for “Esther.”) Or her sense of love, she thought. Maybe that was part of her deterioration — her losing the capacity to really love someone, to burn with love, like the girls talked about, like in the movies. She felt a pang for Asher Feinblatt, her friend who went to the military boarding school, who was now a soldier, who had told her on the steps between Pevsner Street and Yosef Street that she was his soul mate, but who hadn’t touched her that time, either. Never once in two years had he put a hand or a finger on her, and maybe that never-touched-her also had something to do with it, and deep in her heart she felt that everything was somehow connected, and that things would grow clearer all the time, and she would keep discovering more little pieces of whatever awaited her.

For a moment she could see herself at fifty, tall and thin and withered, a scentless flower taking long, quick steps, her head bowed, a wide-brimmed straw hat hiding her face. The boy with the donkey laugh kept feeling his way toward her, getting closer and then farther away — it was as if he were doing it on purpose, she realized, like this was a kind of game for him — and he giggled and made fun of his own clumsiness and floated around the room in circles, and every so often he asked her to say something so he’d know which direction she was in: Like a lighthouse, he explained, but with sound. Smart-ass, she thought. He finally reached her bed and felt around and found the chair she had put out, and collapsed on it and breathed heavily like an old man. She could smell the sweat of his illness, and she pulled off one of her blankets and gave it to him and he wrapped it around himself and said nothing. They were both exhausted, and each of them shivered and moaned.

Still, she said later from under her blanket, your voice sounds familiar. Where are you from? Jerusalem, he said. I’m from Haifa, she said, accentuating slightly. They brought me here in an ambulance from Rambam Hospital, because of the complications. I have those too, he laughed, my whole life is complications. They sat quietly. He scratched his stomach and chest and grumbled, and she grumbled, too. That’s the worse thing about it, isn’t it? she said. She also scratched herself, with all ten fingernails. Sometimes I’m dying to peel all my skin off, just to make it stop. Every time she started talking, he could hear the soft sticky sound of her lips parting, and the tips of his fingers and toes throbbed.

Ora said, The ambulance driver said that at a time like this they need the ambulances for more important things.

Have you noticed that everyone here is angry at us? As if we purposely …

Because we’re the last ones left from the plague.

They sent home anyone who was feeling even a little bit better. Especially soldiers. Wham-bam, they kicked them right back to the army so they could make it in time for the war.

So there’s really going to be a war?

Are you kidding? There’s been a war for at least two days.

When did it start? she asked in a whisper.

Day before yesterday, I think. And I told you that already, yesterday or the day before, I can’t remember, the days get mixed up.

That’s right, you did say … Ora was dumbstruck. Clots of strange and terrifying dreams drifted through her.

How could you not hear? he murmured. There are sirens and artillery all the time, and I heard helicopters landing. There are probably a million casualties by now.

But what’s going on?

I don’t know, and there’s no one to talk to here. They have no patience for us.

Then who’s taking care of us?

Right now there’s just that thin little Arab woman, the one who cries. Have you heard her?

That’s a person crying? Ora was stunned. I thought it was an animal wailing. Are you sure?

It’s a person, for sure.

But how come I haven’t seen her?

She kind of comes and goes. She does the tests and leaves your medicine and food on a tray. It’s just her now, day and night. He sucked in his cheeks and said thoughtfully, It’s funny that the only person they left us with is an Arab, isn’t it? They probably don’t let Arabs treat the wounded.

But why does she cry? What happened to her?

How should I know?

Ora sat up straight and her body hardened, and she said coldly, quietly, They’ve occupied Tel Aviv, I’m telling you. Nasser and Hussein are already sipping coffee at a café on Dizengoff Street.

Where did you come up with that? He sounded frightened.

I heard it last night, or today, I’m almost positive, maybe it was on her radio, I heard it, they’ve occupied Beersheba and Ashkelon and Tel Aviv.

No, no, that can’t be. Maybe it’s the fever, it’s because of your fever, ’cause there’s no way! You’re crazy, there’s no way they’ll win.

There is, there is, she mumbled to herself, and thought, What do you even know about what could or couldn’t happen.

LATER, she awoke from a quick doze and looked around for the boy. Are you still here? What, yes. She sighed. There were nine girls in the room with me, and I’m the only one left, isn’t that annoying? Avram liked the fact that after three nights with her he still didn’t know her name, or she his; he liked little mysteries like that; in the sketches he wrote and recorded at home on his reel-to-reel, in which he played all the parts — children and old men and women and ghosts and kings and wild geese and talking kettles and any number of other characters — there were often brainy little games like this, creatures that appeared and disappeared, characters imagined by other characters. Meanwhile, he amused himself with guesses: Rina? Yael? Maybe Liora? She seems like a Liora, he thought. Her smile is full of light, so there must be an or in her name.

It was the same in his room, he told her. Almost everyone in Room Three had left, including the soldiers. Some could barely walk, but they still sent them back to their units. Now there’s only one other guy with him, not a soldier, actually someone from his class who came in two days ago with forty-one point two, and they can’t bring it down, all day long he dreams and tells himself a thousand and one nights — Wait, Ora cut him off. Were you ever in training at Wingate? Do you happen to play volleyball? Avram let out a small yelp of horror. Ora held back a smile and put on a stern expression: Well, isn’t there any sport you’re good at? Avram thought for a moment. Maybe as a punching bag, he said. Then what youth movement are you in? she asked angrily. I’m not in any movement, he said, smiling. No movement? Ora flinched. Then what are you? Just don’t tell me you’re in a movement, Avram said, still smiling. Why not? Ora was insulted. Because it’ll ruin everything for us, he said with an exaggerated sigh. Because I was starting to think you were the perfect girl. Ha! she spat out. I happen to be in the Machanot Olim. He jutted his chin forward and stuck out his lips, and gave a long, brokenhearted, canine howl at the ceiling. That’s a terrible thing you’re telling me, he said. I only hope medical science will find a cure for your suffering. She tapped her foot briskly. Wait, I know! Weren’t you with your buddies at the Yesud HaMaale camp once? Didn’t you have tents in the woods over there?

Dear diary, sighed Avram in a heavy Russian accent. At the midnight hour of a cold and tempestuous night, when I, woebegone, at last met a girl who was certain she knew me from somewhere — Ora sniffed contemptuously. Long story short, Avram continued, we examined every possibility, and after rejecting all her horrendous ideas, I came to the conclusion that perhaps it was in the future that we knew each other.

Ora cried out sharply, as though stabbed with a needle. What happened? Avram asked softly, infected by her pain. Nothing, she said. It’s nothing. She secretly stared at him, trying to penetrate the darkness and finally see who he was.

• • •

Somehow, in a super-avian effort, he flew to Room Three and landed on the edge of his classmate’s bed, and he too was trembling and sighing and scratching in his sleep. It’s so quiet here, Avram murmured. Have you noticed how quiet it is tonight? There was a long silence. Then the other boy spoke in a hoarse, broken voice: It’s like a tomb in here, maybe we’re already dead. Avram contemplated. Listen, he said, when we were alive, I think we studied in the same class at school. The boy said nothing. He tried to lift his head to look at Avram, but could not. After a few minutes he moaned, When I was alive, I basically didn’t study anything in any class. That’s true, said Avram with a thin, admiring smile. When I was alive there really was a guy in my class who basically didn’t study anything. A guy called Ilan. Unbelievable snob, never talked to anyone.

What could he possibly have to talk to you guys about? A bunch of babies, pussies the lot of you, clueless.

Why? asked Avram quietly. What do you know that we don’t?

Ilan let out a short, bitter snort of laughter, and then they sat quietly, sinking into turbulent sleep. Somewhere in the distance, in Room Seven, Ora lay in bed and tried to figure out if these things had really happened. She remembered that not long ago, a few days ago, when she was walking back from practice at the Technion courts, she had passed out on the street. She remembered that the doctor at Rambam had asked whether she had been to one of the new army camps set up in preparation for the war, and if she’d eaten anything or used the latrines. She was instantly uprooted from her home, then exiled to a strange city and trapped in total isolation by the doctors, on the third floor of a tiny, miserable, neglected hospital in a city she barely knew. She was no longer sure if her parents and friends were really forbidden to visit her or if in fact they had visited her while she was sleeping, had stood helplessly around her bed trying to revive her, had spoken to her, called her name, then walked away, turning back to give her one more look: What a shame, such a good girl, but it can’t be helped, life goes on and you have to look ahead, and now there’s a war and we need all our strength.

I’m going to die, Ilan mumbled.

Nonsense, Avram said, shaking himself awake. You’ll live, another day or two and you’ll be—

I knew this would happen, said Ilan softly. It was obvious from the beginning.

No, no, Avram said, scared now. What are you talking about, don’t think that way.

I never even kissed a girl.

You will, said Avram. Don’t be scared, it’s okay, things will work out.

When I was alive, Ilan said later — maybe a whole hour later — there was this kid in my class who only came up to my balls.

That was me, Avram laughed.

He could never shut up. It’s me.

Always made such a fuss.

It’s me, it’s me!

I used to look at him and think, That guy, when he was little, his dad used to beat the crap out of him.

Who told you? Avram asked, alarmed.

I see people, Ilan said, and fell asleep.

Agitated, Avram spread his wings and flew down the curved corridor, banging into walls until he finally landed in his spot on the chair next to Ora’s bed. He closed his eyes and slept fitfully. Ora was dreaming about Ada. In her dream, she was with Ada on that same endless white plain where the two of them walked almost every night, silently holding hands. In the early dreams, they talked all the time. From afar they could both see the rock looming over an abyss. When Ora dared to glance at her from the side, she saw that Ada no longer had a body. All that was left was a voice, quick and sharp and alert as it always used to be. The feeling of clasped hands was also still there, the fingers desperately clutching. The blood inside Ora’s head pounded: Don’t let go, Don’t let go, Don’t let go of Ada, not even for a minute—

No, Ora whispered, and woke up in a start, bathed in cold sweat, I’m so stupid—

She looked at the place where Avram was sprawled in the dark. The vein in her neck started to throb.

He woke up. What did you say? He tried to steady himself on the chair. He kept sliding down toward the floor, a despotic force pulling him to lie down, to rest his unbearably heavy head.

I had a friend who talked a bit like you do, she murmured. You still here?

I’m here, I think I fell asleep.

We were friends since first grade.

But not anymore? Ora tried in vain to control her hands, which suddenly shook wildly. It had been more than two years since she’d spoken to anyone about Ada. She hadn’t even said her name out loud. Avram leaned forward a little. What’s the matter with you? Why are you like that?

Listen—

What?

She swallowed and said quickly, In the first grade, on the first day, when I walked into the classroom, she was the first girl I saw.

Why?

Well, Ora giggled, she was a redhead, too.

Oh. Wait, are you?

She laughed out loud, and her laughter, again, was healthy and musical. She was so surprised that anyone could be with her and talk with her for such a long time, three nights, without knowing she was a redhead. But I don’t have freckles, she quickly clarified. Ada did, all over her face, and on her arms and legs. Does this even interest you?

On her legs, too?

Everywhere.

Why did you stop?

I don’t know. There’s not much to tell.

Tell me what there is.

It’s a little … She hesitated for a moment, unable to decide if she could tell him the secrets of the fraternity. You should know that the first thing a redheaded kid does is find out if there are any other redheads around.

To be their friend? Oh, no, the opposite. Right?

She smiled admiringly in the dark. He was smarter than she thought. Exactly, she said. And also so they never stand next to them or anything.

That’s just like how I–I look for the runts first.

Why?

That’s the way it is.

Are you … Wait, are you short?

I’m willing to bet I don’t reach your ankles.

Hah!

Seriously, you have no idea what kind of offers I get from circuses.

Tell me something.

What?

But be honest.

Go on.

Why did you come to me yesterday and today?

Don’t know. I just did.

Even so.

He cleared his throat and said, “I wanted to wake you before you started singing in your sleep, Avram lied.”

What did you say?

“I wanted to wake you before you started singing in your sleep again, lied the ever-scheming Avram.”

Oh, you’re—

Yes.

You’re adding in what you—

Exactly.

Silence. A secretive smile. Wheels spinning rapidly, on both ends.

And your name is Avram?

What can I do? That was the cheapest name my parents could afford.

And that would be like my saying, for example, “He’s talking to me as if he were a theater actor or something, thought Ora to herself”?

“You’ve got it, Avram praised Ora, and said to himself, Dear soul, I believe we’ve found—”

“So now be quiet for a minute, said Ora the genius, and delved into thoughts deeper than the ocean itself.”

“I wonder what she’s thinking thoughts deeper than the ocean itself about, Avram speculated nervously.”

“She’s thinking to herself that she really wants to see him, just for a minute — and then Ora, sly as a fox, revealed to him that apart from a chair, she had also today prepared this.”

A scratch, and another scratch, a flare, and a spot of light shines in the room. A long, fair, slender arm reaches out, holding a matchstick torch. The light sways on the walls like liquid. A large room with many empty, naked beds, and trembling shadows, and a wall and a doorframe, and in the heart of the circle of light is Avram, shrinking back a little from the glare of the match.

She lights another and holds it lower, as if not wanting to embarrass him. The flame reveals a young man’s thick, sturdy legs in blue pajamas. Surprisingly small hands grasp each other nervously on the lap, and the light climbs up to a short, solid body and cuts a large round face out of the darkness. Despite the illness, the face contains an almost embarrassing lust for life, curious and intense, with a bulbous nose and swollen lids, and above them a wild bush of black hair.

What astounds her more than anything is the way he presents his face for her perusal and verdict, closing his eyes tightly, strenuously wrinkling all his features. For a moment he looks like someone who has just tossed a very fragile object into the air and is now waiting fearfully for it to shatter.

Ora gasps with pain and licks her burned fingertip. After a moment’s hesitation, she lights another match and holds it with severe candor in front of her own forehead. She shuts her eyes and quickly runs the light up and down in front of her face. Her eyelashes flutter, her lips protrude slightly. Shadows break on her long, high cheekbones and around the defiant, swollen ball of her mouth and chin. Something dark and imbued with sleep hovers over this lovely face, something lost and unweaned, but perhaps it’s just the illness that makes it look that way. Her short hair glistens like burnished brass, and its brilliance glows in Avram’s eyes even after the match goes out and the darkness once again envelops her.

HEY—

What, what?!

Avram?

What?

Did you fall asleep?

Me? I thought you did.

Do you really think we’ll get better?

Of course.

But there must have been a hundred people in isolation when I got here. Maybe we have something they don’t know how to cure?

You mean — both of us?

Whoever is left here.

That’s just the two of us, and the other guy, from my class.

But why us?

Because we have the complications of hepatitis.

That’s just it. Why us?

Don’t know.

I’m falling asleep again—

I’m staying.

Why do I keep falling asleep?

Weak body.

Don’t sleep, watch over me.

Then talk to me. Tell me.

About what?

About you.

They were like sisters, she told him. People called them “the Siamese twins,” even though they looked nothing alike. For eight years, ages six to fourteen, first grade to the end of the first trimester in the eighth grade, they sat at the same desk. They didn’t part after school either, always together, at one or the other’s house, and in the Machanot Olim youth movement, and on hikes — Are you even listening?

What …? Yes, I’m listening … There’s something I don’t get — why aren’t you friends anymore?

Why?

Yes.

She isn’t—

Isn’t what?

Alive.

Ada?!

She heard him flinch as though he’d been hit. She folded her legs in and wrapped her arms around her knees and started rocking herself back and forth. Ada is dead, Ada’s been dead for two years, she said to herself quietly. It’s all right, it’s all right, everyone knows she’s dead. We’re used to it now, she’s dead. Life goes on. But she felt that she had just told Avram something secret and very intimate, something only she and Ada had really known.

And then, for some reason, she relaxed. She stopped rocking. She began to breathe again, slowly, cautiously, as if there were thorns in her lungs, and she had the peculiar notion that this boy could carefully remove them, one by one.

But how did she die?

Traffic accident. And just so you know—

An accident?

You have the same sense of humor.

Who?

You and her, but exactly the same.

So is that why—

What?

Is that why you don’t laugh at my jokes?

Avram—

Yes.

Give me your hand.

What?

Give me your hand, quick.

But are we allowed?

Don’t be stupid, just give it to me.

No, I mean, because of the isolation.

We’re infected anyway.

But maybe—

Give me your hand already!

Look how we’re both sweating.

It’s a good thing.

Why?

Imagine if only one of us was sweating.

Or only one was shaking.

Or scratching.

Or only one had—

What?

You know.

You’re gross.

It’s true, isn’t it?

Then say it.

Okay: shit—

The color of whitewash—

And with blood, loads of it.

She whispered: I never knew I had so much blood in my body.

What’s yellow on the outside, shakes like crazy, and shits blood? There, now you’re laughing … I was getting worried …

Listen to this. Before I got ill I thought I didn’t have any—

Any what?

Blood in my body.

How could that be?

Never mind.

That’s what you thought?

Hold my hand, don’t leave.

APART FROM THE COLOR of their hair, they were very different, almost opposites. One was tall and strong, the other short and chubby. One had the open, glowing face of a carefree filly, and the other’s was crowded and worried, with lots of freckles and a sharp nose and chin, and big glasses — like a young scholar from the shtetl, Ora’s father used to say. Their hair was completely different too: Ada’s was thick, frizzy, and wild, you could barely get a comb through it. I used to braid her hair, Ora said, in one thick braid, and then I’d tie it around her head like a Sabbath challah, that’s how she liked it. And she wouldn’t let anyone else do it.

Ada’s head was truly red, much redder than Ora’s, and it always stuck out in acclamation. Ora curled up on the bed now and saw it: Ada, like a match head, like a blotch of fire. Ora peeked at her, peeked and closed her eyes, unable to face the fullness of Ada. I haven’t seen her that way for a long time, she thought, in color.

She always walked on this side of me, Ora told Avram as she grasped his hand in both of hers, because Ada could hardly hear out of her right ear, from birth, and we always talked, about everything, we talked about everything. She fell silent suddenly and pulled her hands away from his. I can’t, she thought. What am I doing telling him about her? He isn’t even asking anything, he’s just quiet, as if he’s waiting for me to say it on my own.

She took a deep breath and tried to find a way to tell him, but the words wouldn’t come. They pressed on her heart and could not come out. What could she tell him? What could he even understand? I want to, she thought to him. Her fingers moved and burrowed into her other palm. That was how she remembered them together, she remembered the togetherness, and she smiled: You know what I just remembered? It’s nothing, just that a week before she — before it happened — we were doing a literary analysis of “The Little Bunny.” You know, the nursery rhyme about the bunny who gets a cold.

Avram shook himself awake and smiled weakly. What, tell me. Ora laughed. We wrote — actually Ada wrote most of it, she was always the more talented one — a whole essay about how dreadful it was that the plague of the common cold had spread to the animal kingdom, even to the most innocent of its creatures …

Avram whispered to himself: “Even the most innocent of its creatures.” She could feel him taste the words in his mouth, run his tongue over them, and suddenly, for the first time in ages, her memory was surprisingly lucid: She and Ada. It’s all coming back, she thought excitedly. Endless discussions about boys who did or did not have an “artistic personality,” and heart-to-hearts about their parents — after all, almost from the start they were more loyal to each other than to their family secrets. Now she thinks that if not for Ada she would not even know that it was possible, that such closeness was allowed between two people. And there was the Esperanto they started learning together but never finished … On the annual school trip to Lake Kinneret, she told him, on the bus, Ada had a stomachache and announced to Ora that she was going to die, and Ora sat next to her weeping. But when she really did, you know, I didn’t cry, I couldn’t. Everything in me completely dried up. I haven’t cried even once since she died.

One small road and an alley separated their houses in the Neveh Sha’anan neighborhood. They walked to school together, and together they walked home, always holding hands when they crossed the street; that was their habit since the age of six, and that is how they did it at the age of fourteen. Ora remembered the one time — they were nine, and they had fought about something that day, and she didn’t hold Ada’s hand when they crossed, and a municipal van came around the bend and hit Ada, tossing her high up—

She could see it again: her red coat opening up like a parachute. Ora was only two steps behind, and she turned back and ran to hide behind a row of bushes, where she kneeled on the ground with both hands over her ears, shut her eyes tightly, and hummed loudly to herself so she wouldn’t see or hear.

And I didn’t know it was only a dress rehearsal, she said.

I’m no good at saving people, she added later, perhaps to herself, perhaps to warn him.

And then it was Chanukah break, she said as her voice grew smaller. My parents and my brother and I were on vacation in Nahariya, we went there every year, to a guesthouse, for the whole holiday. The morning after vacation I went to school and waited for her by the kiosk where we used to meet every morning, and she didn’t come, and it was getting late so I walked on my own, and she wasn’t in the classroom, and I looked in the playground by our tree, in all our places, and she wasn’t there, and the bell rang and she hadn’t come, and I thought maybe she was sick, or maybe she was late and she’d be there soon. And then our homeroom teacher came in and we could see that he was confused, and he stood with his body kind of leaning sideways and said, Our Ada … And he burst into tears, and we didn’t understand what was going on, and a few kids even laughed, because he let out this kind of sob, from his nose …

She spoke in rapid whispers. Avram pressed her hand hard between his palms, hurting her, and she didn’t pull back.

And then he said she’d been killed in an accident, last night in Ramat Gan. She had a cousin there, she was walking down the street and a bus came, and that was that.

Fast and hot were her breaths on the back of his hand.

And what did you do?

Nothing.

Nothing?

I sat there. I don’t remember.

Avram breathed heavily.

There were two books of hers in my backpack. Two Youth Encyclopedia volumes I brought to return to her after the vacation, and I kept thinking, What am I going to do with them now?

And that’s how you first heard about it? In class?

Yes.

That can’t be.

It can.

And what happened afterward?

Don’t remember.

And her parents?

What?

What about them?

I don’t know what about them.

I’m just thinking, if something like that happened to me, an accident, my mom would probably go crazy, it would kill her.

Ora sat up straight, pulled her hand away and leaned back against the wall.

I don’t know … they didn’t say anything.

But how?

I didn’t …

I can’t hear, come closer.

I didn’t talk to them.

At all?

Ever since.

Wait, you mean they were killed, too?

Them? Of course not … They live in the same house to this day.

But you said … you said you and her, like sisters—

I didn’t go there …

Her body started to harden. No, no — she let out a cold, foreign shard of laughter. My mother said it would be better not to go, not to make them even sadder. Her eyes began to glaze over. And it’s okay that way, believe me, it’s for the best, you don’t have to talk about everything.

Avram sat quietly. He sniffed.

But we wrote an essay about her in class, every kid wrote something, I did too, and the composition teacher collected them and made a booklet and said she’d send it to her parents. Ora suddenly pressed her fist against her mouth. Why am I even telling you this?

Did she at least have any brothers or sisters? he asked.

No.

Just her?

Yes.

Just her and you.

You don’t understand, it’s not true what you’re … They were right!

Who? Who are you talking about?

My parents. Not my dad, my mom, she knows better than anyone about these things. She’s from the Holocaust. And I’m sure Ada’s parents didn’t want me to come either, that’s why they never asked me to come. They could have asked me to come, couldn’t they?

But you can go to them now.

No, no. And I haven’t talked about her with anyone since, and she — Her head was rocking and her whole body shook. No one in class talks about her anymore, ever, two years … She started banging her head back against the wall: bang-syllable-bang-syllable. As-if-she-ne-ver-e-ven-was.

Stop, said Avram, and she immediately stopped. She stared straight ahead in the dark. Now they both heard it: somewhere out there, in one of the distant rooms, the nurse was crying. A quiet, prolonged wail.

After a while he asked, What did they do with her chair in class?

Her chair?

Yes.

What do you mean? It stayed there.

Empty?

Yes, of course empty, who would sit in it?

She sat quietly, cautious. She had already begun to suspect earlier that she’d been wrong about him and his cute teddy bear look, which was slightly ridiculous. This wasn’t the first time he’d suddenly asked her a seemingly innocent question, which cut into her in a way she only felt later.

Did you keep sitting next to her chair?

Yes … No … They moved me back. They moved me, I can’t remember, three rows behind her seat, but on the side.

Where?

Where what?

Show me, he demanded eagerly, impatiently. Where exactly?

A new, unfamiliar exhaustion began to spread through her, the weakness of total submission. Let’s say our desk was here, she mumbled and quickly drew on his hand with her finger, Then around here.

So basically you could see it right in front of you the whole time.

Yes.

But why didn’t they put you somewhere else? Maybe closer to the front, so you wouldn’t have to keep—

Stop, that’s enough, shut up! Can’t you ever shut up?!

• • •

Ora—

What now, what do you want?

I was thinking, maybe one day, I don’t know …

What?

I was just thinking, maybe we’ll go and see her parents one day?

Me and you? But how could we?

If I’m ever in Haifa, I don’t know, I can come with you, if you’d like.

A desperate little chick began to beat its wings furiously, deep inside Ora’s throat.

And her parents have … they have a corner store on our street, and we stopped …

What, tell me—

Shopping there.

What do you mean you stopped?

My parents, my mom, she said it was better not to.

And you agreed?

So we go around the block …

But how do you—

Avram, hold me!

Repelled by her, drawn to her fear, he felt his way with his hands and bumped into knees, then a thin, sharp elbow, a slight curve, hot dry skin, the moisture of a mouth. When he held on to her shoulder she clung to him with her entire body, trembling, and he held her to him and was instantly filled to the brim with her sorrow.

They sat that way, clutching each other frantically. Ora cried with her mouth wide open, with snot, the way a lost little girl cries. Avram smelled her breath, the smell of illness. It’s all right, it’s all right, he said, caressing her damp head over and over, her sweaty hair, her wet face. They sat crowded together on her bed, and Avram thought it was fine with him if they had been forgotten by everyone. He wouldn’t care if it went on like this for another few days. Sometimes his hand stole down of its own accord and touched her warm neck or accidentally slid over her long thin arms with their walnut-like boy-biceps. With all his strength he struggled to remain merely good and kind, but as he did so, against his will, he also labored to gather supplies for his tortuous masturbation travels. Ora’s head leaned back a little as if nestling into his hand. A moment like this, Avram calculated through his fog, would last him a good few weeks. But no, leave her alone, he scolded himself. Not her.

Afterward, long afterward, she wiped her nose on her pajama sleeve. You’re very kind, you know? You’re not like a regular boy.

We starting with insults?

It’s good this way. Don’t stop.

And this way?

Also.

THE NEXT NIGHT—by now she had lost count of the days and nights — Avram pushed a wheelchair into her room. She woke up covered with cold sweat. She’d had the same strange nightmare again, with a metallic voice that crept around her describing horrible scenes. At times she was convinced it was coming from a transistor radio somewhere in the ward, down the corridor or in one of the empty rooms. She had even identified it as “The Voice of Thunder from Cairo,” which broadcast in Hebrew — the kids in class could already mimic the flowery Egyptian announcer, with his ridiculous Hebrew mistakes — and at other times she was certain the voice was coming from inside her, telling only her that the Zionist entity had been almost entirely occupied by the glorious Arab armies, who had “taken the enemy underwears.” Waves upon waves of courageous Arab warriors are at this moment flooding Beersheba and Ashkelon and Tel Aviv, the voice declared, and Ora continued to lie there with her heart pounding, bathed in sweat. And to think that Ada knew nothing of this, of what was happening to Ora here. And that it was not in Ada’s time anymore. What did that mean, not in her time? How could one make sense of the fact that they once shared the same time, and now Ada’s time was over, she was no longer in time at all. How could that be?

Then Ora heard the sound of wheels and sharp, wheezing breath. Avram? she murmured. I’m so glad you came, listen to what happened to me … Then she realized there were two people breathing, and she sat up in bed, wrapped in her sticky sheets, and stared into the dark.

Look what I brought you, he whispered.

All day she had waited for him to come back and be with her, talk to her, listen to her as if every single word she said was important to him. She missed him stroking her head and the back of her neck with his soft, hypnotic fingers. Soft like a girl’s fingers, she thought, or a baby’s. During the few lucid moments between the chills and the nightmares, she had tried to reconstruct the nights she had spent here with him and found that she had forgotten almost everything except the boy himself. Even he was difficult to remember. She could not picture him as someone she had seen and known. But she lay for long hours, asleep and awake, imagining his hand caressing her face over and over, strumming her neck. She had never been touched that way, and so few had touched her at all, and how did he know exactly how to do that if he’d never been with a girl that way? And now, amid the surge of kindness she felt toward him, after waiting for him all day so they could lie down together and have one of their talks, he had to make such a crude mistake, such a boy’s mistake, like those guys who make rude noises at the movies when there’s a kiss on-screen, like coming to her room with this other guy—

Who was asleep in his wheelchair, snoring lightly, and apparently didn’t know where he was. Avram maneuvered him into the room, bumped into a cabinet and a bed, and poured forth apologies and explanations: I feel bad leaving him alone in the room all night. Ilan has nightmares, his temperature is forty, maybe higher, he hallucinates all the time, he’s scared of dying, and when I leave the room to come to you, Ilan keeps hearing noises of the Arabs winning, horrible things.

He turned Ilan in his wheelchair to face the wall and felt his way over to her. From afar he could already sense her bristling, and with a delicate wisdom that surprised her, he did not get on the bed but sat down meekly on the chair next to her and waited.

She folded her legs in, crossed her arms over her chest, and sat in angry silence. She vowed not to say anything for all eternity, and she soon burst out: I want to go home, I’ve had it with this place!

But you can’t, you’re still sick.

I don’t care!

You know, Avram said sweetly, he was born in Tel Aviv.

Who?

Him, Ilan.

Good for him.

He just moved to Jerusalem a year ago.

Whoop-di-doo.

His dad was made some kind of commander on an army base here. Colonel, or something like that. And d’you want to hear something funny—

No.

Avram threw a cautious glance to the edge of the room, leaned forward, and whispered, He talks without knowing it.

What d’ya mean?

In his sleep, ’cause of his fever, he babbles on and on.

She leaned forward too and whispered, But, doesn’t that … that’s kind of embarrassing, isn’t it?

Wanna hear something else?

Go on.

Normally, we don’t speak.

Why not?

Not just me, the whole class, we don’t talk to him.

You blackballed him?

No, it’s the other way around. He’s the one blackballing us.

Wait a minute, one boy is blackballing the whole class?

It’s been like that for a year.

And?

I told you, with the fever, he doesn’t shut up … What?

I don’t know. Isn’t that a little …

I’m bored, so sometimes I … I pull him along, you know, and he answers.

In his sleep?

Well, he kind of half understands, not really.

But that’s—

What?

I don’t know, it’s like reading someone’s letters, isn’t it?

What can I do, put my hands over my ears? And the truth is, also—

What?

When he’s awake I really hate him, like at school, but when he’s asleep …

What then?

It’s like a different person. Let’s say he talks about his parents, right? About his dad and the army and all that?

Yeah.

So I tell him about my dad and my mom, and how he left us and what I remember about him, that kind of stuff.

Oh.

I tell him the straight truth, everything. So we’ll be even.

Ora adjusted her position and covered herself with a blanket. For the last few moments his voice had contained a shadowed hint, and a slight tension grabbed at her calves.

Like yesterday, Avram said, after I got back from you in the early morning, he was talking feverishly, and he told stories about a girl he saw on the street, he was too embarrassed to talk to her, afraid she wouldn’t be interested … Avram giggled. So I did, too.

Did what?

Don’t worry, he doesn’t take in anything anyway.

Wait a minute, what did you tell him?

What you and me, you know, and what you told me, about Ada—

What?

But he was asleep …

But those are things I told you! Those are private things, my secrets!

Yes, but he didn’t even—

Have you lost your mind? Can’t you keep anything to yourself? Not even for two seconds?

No.

No?!

She jumped out of bed, forgetting her weakness, and dashed around the room. She moved away from him in disgust, and from the other one, who was asleep with his head drooping on his chest, exhaling fervent breaths.

Ora, don’t … Wait, listen to me, when I got back from you I was so …

So what? she yelled, feeling her temples exploding.

I, I didn’t have any … space in my body, ’cause I was so—

But a secret! A secret! It’s the most basic thing, isn’t it?

Ora came close and lunged over him as she wagged her finger, and he shrank back a little. This is exactly what I thought of you the whole time, it’s all connected!

What, what’s connected?

The fact that you’re not in any youth movement and you don’t play any sport, and all that philosophizing, and that you don’t have a group of friends — you don’t, do you?

But what does that have to do with it?

I knew it! And the fact that you, you’re such a … such a Jerusalemite!

She leaped back on her bed and pulled the blankets up over her face, and kept on simmering there, in the depths. There’s no way she’s ever telling him another word about herself. She thought she could trust him, that’s what she thought. How did she even let herself be tempted by a pathetic loser like him? Come on, get out of here! Get out of here, d’you hear me? Split, I want to sleep.

Wait, that’s it?

And don’t come back! Ever!

Okay, he mumbled. Well … good night.

What do you mean good night?! Are you leaving him here for me?

What? Oh, sorry, I forgot.

He got up and felt his way over, slow and hunched.

Wait a minute!

What now?

First tell me what you told him. I want to know exactly what you told him!

You want me to tell you now?

D’you have a better time in mind? Should we wait for the Messiah?

But it doesn’t come out just like that … Listen, I have to sit down.

Why?

Because I don’t have the strength.

She considered. Sit down, but just for a minute.

She heard him walk back heavily, bumping into the corner of her bed, cursing and feeling with his hand until he found his chair and collapsed into it. She heard Ilan breathe fleetingly and sigh in his sleep. She tried to guess his voice from his sighs and the way he looked in the dark. She wondered what he already knew about her.

Somewhere out there an ambulance siren wailed. Echoes of distant explosions erupted. Ora exhaled with her lips pursed. A commotion was brewing in her head. She had already recognized that her anger at him was exaggerated, and maybe it was even a show of anger, and she tried to protect herself from the treacherous affection rising within her. She was alarmed to realize how distant she had grown from all the people she loved and cared for. She had hardly thought of Asher Feinblatt all these days in the hospital. She had boycotted him, and her parents and her friends from school. As if her entire world were now the illness and the fever and the stomach and the itching. And Avram, whom she hadn’t known until three or four days ago. How did that happen? How had she forgotten everyone? Where had she been this whole time and what had she dreamed?

A new chill iced over her burning skin. Avram slept across the way and sighed shortly, and Ilan at the other end of the room was sleeping in total silence now. She felt as though they were both slightly letting go of her so she could finally comprehend something hugely important that was happening to her. She sat upright in bed and wrapped her arms around her knees and felt as if she were being slowly cut out from the picture of her life, and a faded hole would remain in the place where Ora used to be.

Into her thoughts, into the sleepy rustle that took hold of her, stole a dim, hoarse voice, and at first she did not recognize it as Avram’s, and she thought maybe the other one, his psycho friend, had started talking to himself, and she tensed up. From the minute I saw you with the match in your hand I thought I could tell you anything on my mind. But you’ll get annoyed at me, I know it, you’re a firebrand redhead, with a quick temper, a short fuse, I can tell. You know what, if you get annoyed then kick me. She’s not kicking me, maybe she’s on a kicking fast today, maybe she joined some order that forbids kicking helpless runts? There, she smiled just now. I can see her mouth even in the dark. What a great mouth she has—

He waited. Ora swallowed. A new layer of sweat erupted from her body at once. She pulled the blanket up higher over her face so that only her eyes glimmered in the dark. She didn’t kick this time either, Avram noted, which must mean she’s letting me tell her, for example — he hesitated, it was suddenly too close; let’s see you, coward, sissy — for example, I can tell her that she’s so beautiful, the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen, even here in the hospital, with the fever and the illness. And from the moment I saw her, even though it was dark, I felt the whole time that she was light, something bright, pure … And she showed me herself with the match, and then she closed her eyes and her eyelashes trembled … The more he spoke, the more excited Avram grew. He was burning and erect from his boldness. Ora’s heart beat so hard she thought she would pass out. If any of her friends, boys or girls, didn’t matter, saw her like this, listening silently to all this talk, they wouldn’t believe it. This is cynical Ora? This is bullheaded Ora?

And she shouldn’t go thinking I’m such a big hero, Avram added hoarsely. I’ve never talked to a girl like this, only in my imagination. He held two fists up to his cheeks and focused on the burning embers glowing in his gut. I’ve never had the chance to be so close to someone so beautiful. I’m just noting that for the minutes, because she’s probably thinking, Oh, here’s another one of those lookers who has all the girls falling at his feet. Ora stuck out her chin and pursed her lips, but a dimple of laughter was twitching in her cheek. What a strange person, she thought. You can never tell if he’s serious or joking, or if he’s very smart or a total idiot. He keeps changing. She wiped the sweat off her brow with the blanket and thought that the most annoying thing about him, the truly insufferable thing, which could really drive a person mad, was that he seemed to be constantly stuck under your skin and you couldn’t get a second’s break from him, because from the moment he had come and sat down next to her two days ago, or whenever it was, she had known exactly when he was excited and when he was happy or sad, and above all she had known when he wanted her. He had such a nerve, he was a pickpocket, a spy — and a tiny eel slithered inside her like a little tongue, supple and flushed, not hers at all, where had it come from? And Ora jumped up in fright: Come here! Stand here for a minute!

What … what happened?

Get up!

But what did I do?

Shut up. Turn around!

They felt their way through the darkness until they were standing back to back. They shivered from the fever and other ardors, and their bodies twitched and danced against each other. Ilan sighed, and Avram thought, What lousy timing, please don’t wake up on me now. He felt her muscular calves against his own, her springy rear end touching his. After that things got off track: his shoulders were somewhere down there against her back. His head rested against the back of her neck. You’re a head taller than me, he noted lightly, himself amazed at such a cruel realization of his fears. But we’re still at that age, she said softly, and turned to face him. Despite the darkness, she could see his face and his huge, exaggerated eyes, which showered her with sad, yearning looks, and she quickly looked for Ada to hand her a trace of mockery to hold on to, to unravel his image and his entirety, and generally this whole place, along with the guy drilling a hole in her head from the other side of the room. But her heart was tensing in anticipation of bad news.

Hey, she whispered weakly, can you see me? Yes, he murmured. How come we can see now? she wondered, afraid she might be hallucinating again. He laughed. She examined him suspiciously. What’s funny? That you won’t let me say bad things about myself. It was when he laughed that his face changed. He had nice teeth, bright and evenly spaced, and nice lips. The whole mouth area, Ora thought feebly, is like someone else’s. If a girl ever kisses him, she’ll probably shut her eyes, and then she’ll just have his mouth. Can you make do with just a mouth? Stupid thought. Her knees felt a little shaky. She was going to fall. This illness was doing her in. Making a rag out of her. She grabbed on to his pajama sleeve and almost fell on him. Her face was close to his, and had he tried to kiss her she would not have had the strength to pull away.

And I want to tell her about her voice, Avram said, because the voice is the most important thing for me, always, even before a girl’s appearance. She has a voice that no one I know has, an orange voice, I swear, don’t laugh, with a little bit of lemon-yellow around the edges, and it has a spring, it has a pounce. And if she wants me to, I can describe to her right now on the spot something I’d love to write for her one day, and interestingly she isn’t saying no …

Yes, Ora whispered.

Avram swallowed and shivered. I think it will be a piece for voices, he said. Just voices. I’ve been thinking about it for a few days, since we started talking, and here’s how it will start: there are fourteen notes, you see. Single notes, one after the other, human voices. Human voices are my favorite. There is no lovelier sound in the world, is there?

Yeah? So do you, do you make … music?

No, not exactly music, it’s more a combination of … never mind. Voices, that’s what interests me now, in these years.

Oh, said Ora.

But why fourteen? he asked in a whisper, deliberating with himself as if Ora were not in the room. There are fourteen voices when I hear it, but why? He mumbled to himself: I don’t know. That’s how I feel it. It will start with one long note, you see? A kind of “Ah …,” for six beats, and only after it disappears the other voice will start: “Ah …” Like ships sailing in the fog, blowing their horns at one another. Have you ever heard that?

No … Yes, I’m from Haifa.

And it will be sad. He inhaled through his teeth, and she felt it: all of him, in the blink of an eye, immersed in that sadness, and the whole world was the sadness now, and she too, involuntarily, felt a bitter, heart-sucking sorrow lapping inside her.

She said, Maybe it’s because of Ada?

What is?

Because she was, I told you, she was fourteen when—

What?

The notes, like you said, how there are fourteen notes.

Oh, wait — one for each year?

Could be.

You mean — a farewell to each one of her years?

Something like that.

That’s nice. That’s really … I hadn’t thought of that. One for each year.

But you came up with it, she laughed, it’s funny how impressed you are with it.

But you’re the one, Avram smiled, you’re the one who showed me what I came up with.

YOU INSPIRE ME, Ada used to say with her childish gravity. And Ora would laugh: Me? I inspire you? I’m just a bear of very little brain! And Ada — she was thirteen then, Ora remembers, one year from her death, and how horrifying it is to realize how ignorant she was of that, how she went about her business and did everything as usual and never guessed, but still, deep inside she seemed to be growing more profound, more mature, and more solid that year — Ada took hold of Ora’s hand and swung it back and forth with enthusiasm and gratitude and said, You, yes, you. It’s like you just sit there quietly, but then you throw out a single word or ask one small question, like it’s nothing, and bang! Everything falls into place in my mind and all of a sudden I know exactly what I wanted to say. Oh, Ora, what would I do without you? How could I live without you?

She remembers: they looked into each other’s eyes. One year, dear God.

Alive and sharp, this memory was almost intolerable now: Ada reading to her from her notebook stories and poems that she had written, using voices and gestures, and sometimes costumes, with hats and scarves, acting out the different characters, and crying with them and laughing. Her rosy, freckled face is flushed as if flames are leaping inside her head and peeking through her eyes. Ora sits opposite her with her legs crossed, watching wide-eyed.

When Ada finished reading, she was often exhausted and lost and gaping, and Ora would quickly pull herself together. Now it was her turn: to hug, to encircle, to bandage Ada, not to leave her for even a moment without Ora’s hand.

And I keep asking myself whether she has a boyfriend, Avram said to himself from somewhere in the distance, in his throaty, daydreaming voice. I know she said she didn’t, but how could that be? A girl like that wouldn’t be alone for a minute, the guys in Haifa aren’t stupid. He paused and waited for her answer. She said nothing. Doesn’t she want to tell me about her boyfriend? Or does she really not have one? She doesn’t have one, Ora said quietly. How come? Avram whispered. She doesn’t know, Ora said after a long pause, unwillingly seduced by his style and finding that it was actually more comfortable to talk about herself this way. She didn’t even want a boyfriend at all for a long time, she said, inadvertently playing her words to the slow, tense beat of the pulsations coming from the edge of the room. And then there just wasn’t anyone right, I mean, really right for her.

And hasn’t she ever loved anyone? Avram asked. Ora did not answer, and in the dark he thought she was sinking deeper into herself, her long neck bending painfully down toward her shoulder, toward the distant side of the room, as if she too were now seized by a tyrannical power like the one gripping his own body. So she did love someone, said Avram, and Ora shook her head. No, no, she just thought she did, but now she knows she didn’t. It was nothing, she mumbled despairingly, just a waste. She felt that as soon as she started to tell him about Asher, the truth would rush out in a huge, roiling torrent, the truth of those two years of nothingness, and nothing could be turned back anymore, and she was frightened by how much she wanted to, burned to tell him.

Wait a minute, he whispered suddenly from the doorway, I’ll be back in a minute. What? Where are you? Ora was distraught. What are you doing leaving me now? Just for a minute, he said, I’ll be right back.

With his last remaining strength he pulled himself away and left the room. Leaning on the corridor walls, he dragged himself on, far away from her, and every few steps he stopped and shook his head and said to himself, Go back, go back now, but he kept uprooting himself until he got to his room, and he sat down on his bed.

She called out to him a few times, first shouting, then softly, but he did not come back. The nurse came and stood in the doorway, demanding to know what Ora was shouting about. A bitter coil wound through her voice. When she was gone, Ora lay terrified and tried to fall asleep, to dive under reason and thoughts, but the illness was playing tricks on her mind. Tendrils of wild dreams climbed up and grabbed hold of her. The air filled again with the thundering metallic voices and military music. I’m dreaming, Ora mumbled, it’s just a dream. She covered her ears and the voice that spoke Hebrew in a thick Arab accent echoed inside her head, orating about the glorious Syrian army’s tanks that were trampling the Zionist Galilee and the criminal Zionist kibbutzim, and they were on their way to liberate Haifa and obliterate the shame of the ’48 expulsion. Ora knew she had to escape, to save herself, but she could not find the strength. Suddenly she was completely awake and sat upright in bed, holding the matchbox like a shield against her face, because she thought someone at the end of the room was moving and calling weakly, Ora, Ora, talking to her in his sleep in an unfamiliar boy’s voice.

LATER, who knows how much later, Avram came back with his and Ilan’s blankets. He came into her room without a word, covered Ilan, swaddled him on all sides, and tucked the blankets under him. Then he sat down and covered himself and waited for Ora to say it.

She said: I don’t ever want to talk to you again. You’re messed up. Get out of my life.

He said nothing.

She was furious. I swear, you’re such a loser!

What did I do?

“What did I do?” Where did you disappear to?

I just popped over to my room.

“Popped over to my room”! Speedy Gonzales! Leaving me here alone and disappearing for hours—

What are you talking about, hours? Maybe half an hour, tops, and anyway you’re not alone.

Shut up. You’d better just shut up!

He shut up. She touched her lips. She thought they were on fire.

Just tell me one thing.

What?

What did you say his name was?

Ilan. Why? Was there … did something happen here while I was gone?

What could happen? You left and came right back, what—

I left and came right back? Now it’s “You left and came right back”?

Stop it, get off my case.

Wait, did he talk? Did he say something in his sleep?

Look, what are you, the Shabak?

Did you turn the light on?

None of your business.

I knew it, I just knew it!

So you knew, you’re a genius. So if you knew, why did you leave just when I—

And you saw him.

Okay, I saw him, I saw him! So what?

So nothing.

Avram?

What—

Is he really very sick?

Yes.

I think he’s sicker than both of us.

Yes.

Do you think he’s … I don’t know, in danger?

What do I know?

Ahh, Ora sighed from the depths of her heart, I wish I could fall asleep now for a month, a year, ach!

Ora?

What?

He’s good-looking, isn’t he?

I don’t know, I didn’t look.

Admit that he’s good-looking.

Not exactly my taste.

He’s like an angel.

Yeah, all right, I get the point.

The girls at school are crazy about him.

Tell it to someone who cares.

Did you talk to him?

He was asleep, like I said! He can’t hear a thing.

I meant — did you talk to him? Did you tell him anything?

Leave me alone, won’t you just leave me alone!

Ora?

What?

Did he open his eyes? Did he see you?

I can’t hear you, I’m not hearing anything, la-la-la-la—

But did he say anything? Did he talk to you?

“ … On a wagon bound for market, there’s a calf with a mournful eye …”

Just tell me if he spoke.

“ … High above him there’s a swallow, winging swiftly through the sky …”

Wait, isn’t that the song?

What?

That’s the song, I swear. From when you woke me up.

Are you sure?

Except then you were screaming it so loudly I couldn’t even make out—

That’s the song …

A calf with a mournful eye, yes, “Dona Dona.” But you were shouting it, like you were fighting with someone, arguing.

Ora could feel herself lift up out of her own body and float to a distant place that was not a place, where she and Ada walked together and sang Ada’s favorite song, and it was Ada’s mother’s favorite song too, and sometimes, when she washed the dishes, she would sing it to herself in Yiddish. The song about a calf being led to the slaughter, and a swallow that flies up in the sky and mocks him, then flutters away with lighthearted joy.

Avram, Ora said suddenly in horror, leave now, leave!

What did I do now?

Go! And take him with you! I have to sleep now, quick. I want to—

What?

I have to dream her …

Later, just before dawn, she suddenly appeared in the doorway of Room Three and called to him in a whisper. He jumped awake: What are you doing here? She said sadly, I’ve never met anyone like you, and then corrected herself: Any boy like you. He was hunched over, extinguished, and he murmured, So, did you dream about her? Ora mumbled, No, I couldn’t sleep. I wanted to so badly that I couldn’t. And he asked, But why did you want to? What was so …? She said, I have to tell her something important.

Ora, said Avram tiredly and without any pleasure, Do you want to see him again? She said, Do you have a screw loose or something? I’m talking about you, and all you keep doing is showing me him. Why are you, like, purposely — Honestly, I don’t know, he said. I’m always like that, it just comes out. And she said desperately, I don’t understand anything anymore, I don’t understand anything.

They sat hunched in the dark, suddenly very ill. From one moment to the next the burden of bad tidings swelled inside him. What a mistake he had made, what a terrible, destructive complication he had caused by leaving her alone with Ilan.

There’s something else I wanted to tell you, he said hopelessly, but you’re probably not interested, are you? She asked carefully, something like what? But even before he spoke she knew what he would say, and her body locked up against him. No one knows that I write, he said. I write all the time.

But what, what do you write? Her voice sounded oddly piercing to her own ears. Essays? Limericks? Tall tales? What?

I write all kinds of things, Avram said with slight arrogance. Once, when I was little, I used to make up stories, all the time. Now I write totally different things … I don’t understand, she hissed, you just sit there and write, for yourself? A desolate revulsion enveloped him. He wanted her to leave. To come back. To be who she was before. The thing that had been woven between them the last few nights, the wonder, the delicate secret cooled and faded away at once. And perhaps it had never existed at all, perhaps it had only been in his head, along with everything else.

Just explain to me, she urged him, suddenly eager for battle, what you mean by “I write totally different things”? But Avram sank into himself, amazed at the sting of betrayal. Ora mumbled stubbornly, And limericks are fun! Let me tell you, they are the ultimate entertainment! She recalled the way he had said earlier that in these years he was interested in voices—“in these years”! From which she was apparently supposed to conclude that in previous years he had been interested in other things, that snob, as if he already knew that in “the next years”—ha! — he would have yet other interests. Smart aleck. But she, she, where had she been “in these years”? What had she wasted herself on? All she’d done was cheat everyone and sleep with her eyes open. That was her big accomplishment. A cheating pro, sleepwalking champion of the world. She slept when she ran and did high jumps and played volleyball, and most of all when she swam, because it was a lot less painful in water than on land. She slept when she went with the team to the stadium in Ein Iron on Saturdays, and sometimes they went to the Maccabi courts in Tel Aviv, and in the back of the truck she roared cheers at the passersby along with everyone else.

She slept while she sang her heart out on hikes, and on the night trek to the beach at Atlit, and at the Machanot Olim all-nighter, and when they all took turns jumping onto a canvas held by the team, and when she did the zip line, and helped build a rope bridge and set up the fire displays. She didn’t think about anything when that was going on. Her hands moved, her legs moved, her mouth babbled constantly, she was all noise and bells, but her brain was empty and desolate, her body a desert wilderness.

And together with Miri S. and Orna and Shiffi, her new friends after Ada, she was once again brimming with funny songs and operettas for parties and trips, everything just like it was before. Life really did go on. It was almost ungraspable how it did. Her body kept making the usual moves — she ate and drank and walked, she stood and sat and slept and crapped and even laughed — it was just that for the whole first year she couldn’t feel her toes, sometimes for hours on end, and sometimes she couldn’t feel the skin on the back of her left hand, either. There were places on her thigh and her back too, and when she touched them, even scratched them softly, she couldn’t feel a thing. Once she held a burning match to the dead spot on her thigh and watched the fair skin singe and smelled the burning, but she did not feel any pain. She didn’t tell anyone about that. Who could she talk to about things like that?

There’s a hole, she thinks now, and feels cold and chilled. It’s been there for a long time. How could I not have seen it? Ever since Ada there’s an Ora-shaped hole where I used to be.

She coughed and sprang back to life. She must have fallen asleep in the middle of fighting with Avram. What were they fighting about? What was it about him that got to her? Or maybe they’d already made up? In the darkness she guessed at Avram’s sprawled figure on the other end of the bed, leaning on the wall, snoring heavily. Was this his room or hers? And where was Ilan?

He had told her he was going to die. He knew it would happen, knew it had to happen. From the age of zero he’d known he wouldn’t live long, because he didn’t have enough life energy inside him. That’s what he said, and she tried to calm him, to erase his strange words, but he didn’t hear her, maybe didn’t even know she was there. He shamelessly cried over his life, which had been ruined since his parents divorced and his father took him to his army base to live with all the animals there. Everything had been screwed up since then, he wailed, and the illness was just a natural extension of all that shit. He was burning, and half of what he said she couldn’t understand. Fragments of mutterings and whispers. So she just stood very close to him, bathed in his warmth, and carefully stroked his shoulder. Every so often she stroked his back too, and sometimes, with a pounding heart, she quickly slid her hand over his thick hair, and as she did so she realized she didn’t even know what he looked like, and perhaps she even vaguely imagined that he looked a lot like Avram, simply because they had both come into her life together. She kept telling him the things Avram said to her when she was afraid or miserable. Thanks to Avram, that idiot, she knew what to say. Ilan suddenly grasped her hand, squeezed it hard, and glided over her arm from one end to the other. She was taken aback but did not pull her hand away, and he leaned his cheek against her, and his forehead, and held her arm to his chest, and suddenly he kissed her, showering dry, burning little kisses on her arm, her fingers, the palm of her hand, and his head burrowed into her body, and Ora stood speechless, looked into the dark over his head, and thought wondrously: He’s kissing me, he doesn’t even know he’s kissing me. Ilan laughed suddenly to himself, laughed and shivered, and said that sometimes, at night, he snuck out and wrote on the walls of the army base huts: “The Commander’s Son Is a Fag.” His father went crazy when he saw the graffiti and walked around with a bucket of whitewash, and lay in wait to ambush whoever was doing it — but I’m warning you, bro, don’t you ever tell anyone, Ilan giggled and shivered. I’m only telling you this. He talked in a hoarse voice about the fat soldier his father was screwing in his office, and how the whole base could hear her, but even that was better than when my parents were together, he said, at least that nightmare is over. I’ll never get married, he groaned, and his forehead burned against her chest until it hurt, and she pressed him to her and thought he sounded like someone who really hadn’t spoken to anyone for a whole year. He laughed and buried his face in the crook of Ora’s arm and inhaled her scent. I’m crazy about the smell in that music shop on Allenby, he said. It’s the sweet smell of glue — they use it to stick the plastic pads that plug the saxophone holes. He told her that a year ago he found a used Selmer Paris in good condition there. In Tel Aviv I had a band, he said. We used to sit around on Fridays listening to new records all night long, learning about John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, making Tel Aviv jazz.

His body heat trickled into her. She was overcome by a paralyzing awe of the burning boy leaning on her arm. She wouldn’t mind if this went on for a while, even until morning, even a whole day. I want to help him, she thought, I want to, I want to. Her body was prickling with desire, even her feet were burning. She hadn’t felt these kinds of currents for so long, and Ilan found her other hand and placed her palms on his closed eyes, and said he knew how to always be happy.

Happy? Ora choked and pulled her hand back for a second, as if burned. How?

I have a method, he said. I just break myself up into all kinds of areas, and if I feel bad in one part of my soul, I skip to another part. His breath licked at her wrists, and she felt his eyelashes tickle her palms.

I just spread out the risks that way, said Ilan, and he put his head back and gave a dry, tortured laugh. No one can hurt me, I skip, I—

In mid-sentence his head drooped and he was swallowed up, exhausted, in a deep slumber. His fingers loosened and slid down her arms until they dropped on his lap, and his head plunged forward.

Ora stood, struck a match, and lit up Ilan’s face for the first time. With his eyes closed, and within the circle of light, his face was a drop of beauty. She lit another match and he kept mumbling, fighting with someone in his dream, and he shook his head hard, and his face flinched with anger, perhaps because of the blinding light, perhaps because of what he saw in his mind’s eye. His dark, rich eyebrows coiled sternly toward each other, and Ora forgot herself as she stood there and lit up his clear forehead, the shape of his eyes, his gorgeous lips, warm and slightly cracked, which even now still burned on her own.

SHE SWORE HERSELF to silence. Anything she said would be a mistake anyway, it would give Avram further proof of her stupidity and superficiality. If only she had the strength to get herself up from his bed and go back to her room and forget him forever, and the other one.

I got on your nerves, she said.

It doesn’t matter.

But you … why did you run away? Why did you run away on me just when—

I don’t know, I don’t know. I just suddenly—

Avram?

What?

Let’s go back to my room. We’re better there.

Should we leave him here?

Yes, come on, come on …

Careful, otherwise we’ll both fall.

Walk slowly, my head is spinning.

Lean on me.

Can you hear her?

She can go on like that for hours.

I dreamed about her before. Something really frightening, I was terrified of her.

Such sobbing—

Listen, it’s like she’s singing to herself.

Mourning.

Tell me, she said later, when they were in her bed.

What?

Will you write one of your …

My limericks? My tall tales?

Ha-ha. Your stories. Do you think you’ll write about this hospital?

Maybe, I don’t know. I actually had one idea, but it’s already—

About what? Tell me …

Avram sat up with effort and leaned on the wall. He had given up trying to understand her and her reversals, but like a kitten with a ball of yarn, he could not resist a “tell me.”

It’s about a boy lying in a hospital, in the middle of a war, and he goes up onto the rooftop and he has a box of matches—

Like me—

Yes, not exactly. Because this boy, with the matches, in the middle of the blackout he starts signaling enemy planes.

What is he, crazy?

No. He wants them to come and bomb him, personally.

But why?

I don’t know that yet. That’s as far as I’ve thought.

Is he really that miserable?

Yes.

Ora thought Avram had gotten the idea from what Ilan had told him. She didn’t dare ask. Instead she said, It’s a little scary.

Really? Say more.

She thought about it and felt the rusty wheels start to turn in her brain. Avram seemed to sense them too, and waited silently.

She said, I’m thinking about him. He’s on the roof. He lights match after match, right?

Yes, he said, and stretched out.

And he looks at the sky, in all directions, waiting for them to come, the airplanes. He doesn’t know where they’ll come from. Right?

Right, right.

Maybe these are the last moments of his life. He’s terribly frightened, but he has to keep waiting for them. That’s how he is, stubborn and brave, right?

Yeah?

Yes, and to me he looks like the loneliest person in the world at that moment.

I didn’t think about that, Avram said with an awkward giggle. I didn’t think about his loneliness at all.

If he had even one friend, he wouldn’t do it, would he?

Yeah, he wouldn’t—

Maybe you could make someone for him?

Why?

So he’ll have … I don’t know, a friend, someone who can be with him.

They sat quietly. She could hear him thinking. A rustling, rapid trickle. She liked the sound.

And Avram?

What?

Do you think you’ll ever write about me?

I don’t know.

I’m afraid to talk, so you don’t go writing down all my nonsense.

Like what?

Just remember that if I talk nonsense here it’s because of the fever, okay?

But I don’t write things exactly the way they happen.

Of course, you make things up too, that’s the whole fun, right? What will you make up about me?

Wait a minute, do you write, too?

Me? No way! I don’t, no. But tell me straight—

What?

Weren’t you planning to call me Ada in the story?

How did you know?

I knew, she said, and hugged herself. And I agree. Call me Ada.

No.

What do you mean no?

I’ll call you Ora.

Really?

Ora, said Avram, tasting the name, and the sweetness poured through his mouth and his whole body. O-ra.

Something was flowing inside her, some ancient, measured knowledge: He is an artist. That’s it, he was an artist. And she knew what it was like with artists. She had experience with them. She hadn’t used it for a long time, but now it was filling her up again. And she’d get better, she’d beat the illness, she suddenly knew for sure, she had female intuition.

She closed her eyes and a slight shock of pleasure hit her as she wondered how, in a moment’s urge, she had been emboldened to lean over a strange boy and kiss him on his lips for a long time. She had kissed and kissed and kissed. And now, when she finally dared to remember without holding back, she felt the kiss itself, her first kiss, seeping into her, awakening her, trickling into each of her cells, churning her blood. What will happen now? she wondered. Which of the two will I … But her heart was surprisingly light and cheerful.

The truth is, I also write a little, she confessed to her complete surprise.

You do?

Not seriously, nothing like you, never mind, I just said that. She tried to shut up but could not. They’re not really songs, never mind, honestly, just hiking songs, for trips and camps, nonsense, you know, of the limerick family.

Oh, that. He smiled with odd sadness, retreating into a sort of politeness that pinched at her. You should sing me something.

She shook her head vigorously. No way, are you mad? Never.

Because even though she knew him so little, she could already tell exactly how she would feel when her rhymes echoed inside his head, with all his twisted, snobbish ideas. But it was that thought that made her want to sing — what did she have to be embarrassed about?

So you want to penetrate the profound hidden meaning of the lyrics? She flashed him a deliberate smile. This is something I wrote ages ago, she said. We wrote it together, Ada and I, for the last day of camp at Machanayim. We had a treasure hunt, everyone got lost, don’t ask.

I won’t, he smiled.

Then do.

What did you tell Ilan?

You’ll never know.

Did you kiss him?

What? What did you say? She was horrified.

You heard me.

Maybe he kissed me? She raised her eyebrows and wiggled them mischievously, a shameless Ursula Andress. Now be quiet and listen. It’s to the tune of “Tadarissa Boom,” d’you know it?

Of course I do, said Avram, suspicious and enchanted, squirming with unforeseen delight.

Ora sang, drumming the beat on her thigh: We set off on a treasure hunt, Tadarissa Boom,

Our counselor was a real hunk, Tadarissa Boom,

He said he’d help us find the way, Tadarissa Boom,

And not get lost or go astray—

Tadarissa Boom, Avram hummed quietly, and Ora gave him a look, and a new smile, soft and budding, lit her up inside and her face glowed in the dark, and he thought she was a pure and innocent person, incapable of pretending, unlike him. “The most innocent of its creatures,” he recalled. I am happy, he thought with wonder. I want her, I want her to be mine, always, forever. His thoughts skipped, as usual, to the brink of possibilities, a lovesick dreamer: She’ll be my wife, the love of my life—

Second verse, she announced:

We solved the clues and found the prize—

Tadarissa Boom, Avram sang in a thick voice and drummed on his own thigh, and sometimes, distractedly, on hers.

But no one cared except the guys—

Tadarissa Boom.

’Cause when the counselor looked at us—

Tadarissa Boom!

He made us swoon and blinded us!

Wait. Avram put his hand on her arm. Quiet, someone’s coming.

I can’t hear it. It’s him.

Coming here? Is he coming here from the room?

I can’t understand it. He’s barely alive.

What should we do, Avram?

He’s crawling! Listen, he’s dragging himself along with his arms.

Take him away from here, take him back!

What’s the big deal, Ora, let him sit with us for a while.

No, I don’t want to, not now.

Wait a minute. Hey, Ilan? Ilan, come on, it’s here, a little farther.

I’m telling you, I’ll leave.

Ilan, it’s Avram, from class. I’m here with Ora. Go on, tell him—

Tell him what?

Tell him something—

Ilan …? It’s me, Ora.

Ora?

Yes.

You mean, you’re real?

Of course, Ilan, it’s me. Come on in here with us, we’ll be together for a while.