Two She-Bears Read Free Page B

agility.
    I said, “Eitan.”
    He did what he hadn’t done for twelve years: he looked into my eyes.
    I asked, “Eitan, where are you going?”
    He didn’t answer.
    “Don’t worry. I won’t tell anybody.”
    Silence.
    “You want me to come with you? Do you remember how to drive? You haven’t driven in twelve years.”
    Silence. Ignition.
    He remembers, of course he remembers, I reassured myself. A man like him would not forget. Not how to drive, how to walk on the trail. Not camouflage, ambush, sharpshooting.
    “Eitan,” I said again.
    Again he looked at me.
    “I know where you’re going. I know what you’re going to do. Just know that I’m with you in this but be careful. Please.”
    The pickup moved forward, exited the gate of the nursery.
    “And come back on time,” I called out. “You hear me? We have a funeral tomorrow.”
    He drove off. Not to the right, to the main road, but left, into the fields.
    5
    I imagine: He got on the road a few kilometers later and met up with the wadi around sunset. He didn’t turn on the pickup’s headlights, kept driving slowly for another few hundred meters, up to the parallel wadi. Here he downshifted twice, and without braking or signaling he turned right onto a short dirt road that led to a pumping station at the edge of the gully. Without stopping, he expertly downshifted the sticks to second low gear and inched the pickup forward as slowly as possible, so as not to make noise or spray pebbles or leave deep tire tracks.
    I imagine: A few dozen meters before the pumping station he swung behind a stand of oak trees and came to a halt with a gentle pull on the hand brake. He switched the interior light to the off position, opened the door, extended his legs, and keeping his feet in the air he wrapped the pieces of bath mat around his boots. He tightened the cords in a diagonal pattern and stepped out of the vehicle in his covered footgear. He hung the knapsack and the spray gun on the branch of an oak, and the rifle—concealed in its blanket like a snake—on an adjacent branch, picked up some stones, and positioned them around the pickup truck, which he covered with the tarp till it vanished underneath.
    As the sunlight waned he hastened his activity. He tied the tarp to the stones he had arranged, sprayed it with diluted glue, scattered fistfuls of dirt and dry leaves, which stuck to it at once. With the rake he quickly erased any trace of a moved stone, a footprint, or tire tread, then lifted an edge of the tarp and slipped the sprayer and rake under it. He stepped back a bit and checked his handiwork, then hoisted the knapsack on his shoulder, picked up the rifle wrapped in the blanket, emerged from the oak trees, and headed up the wadi.
    For years he hadn’t walked like this, on a narrow, dark, and rocky trail, not cleared by pickax and bulldozer or leveled by steamroller but blazed by the paws of animals and the shoes of humans and the hooves of time. But his feet instantly remembered the art of quiet, confident nighttime walking that left no imprint except upon his face: an old, inscrutable smile, slightly askew, of facial muscles that for twelve years had not smiled nor kissed nor spoken, just ate a bit and drank a bit and clenched one jaw to another.
    I know the route. I’ve walked it more than once. After a kilometer and a half, at the third bend of the wadi, he climbed southward to the lower shelf of the ridge, lay down a moment on his belly, listened and looked, proceeded in a slow diagonal crouch, and went down the slope. He quickly arrived at the mastic tree and the oak that grew side by side a few dozen meters above a sharp turn in the adjacent wadi. The oak is taller and its branches are wider, and the mastic is typically small and thick, its aromatic branches bunched together, kissing the ground.
    Here he stopped, set the rifle and knapsack on a nearby rock, turned to look at the big carob tree he knew well, which grew in the wadi below him. In the