Paper Popcorn

It takes her a minute to get the door open and squeeze her way through the dismantled drum kit, the crumpled papers, the sweat-soaked T-shirts, and the inside out socks. She sits down on the edge of his bed. The bed creaks under her weight. For a moment she sits beside her sleeping son, her hands resting in her lap, drawing strength—without asking permission—from his deep, quiet breathing.

Outside, it’s a beautiful late-summer day. The shutter and window are open, and the room is flooded with harsh afternoon light. On the windowsill, the small silent fan swings back and forth, endlessly surveying the scene, as if constantly refusing something. Nimrod lies in bed, limp and heavy, her presence unable to penetrate his sleep. She watches the slanted beam of light curve across the sheet covering his body, from shoulder to stomach, burning into his pale skin through the white fabric.

She shakes him gently, but these shakes have no effect. She keeps rocking her son, lying on his stomach, immersed in the patch of light. Her movements are plain and workmanlike, like kneading dough—pressing her fingers into his ribs the way you poke dough to see if it’s risen. When he doesn’t wake up, irritation rises in her and she calls out, “Nimrod, what’s going on with you?”

Then: “Yisrael, wake up!”

At last, two swollen blue eyes slowly open into narrow slits, dazzled by the light. He rubs his eyelids, drags a pale tongue across his lips, and rasps at her with a dry mouth that smells bad.

“Mom, what do you want. Enough already. Let me sleep.”

“Sleep? Are you kidding?” she snaps. “It’s already three-thirty.” She can’t help herself and adds sharply, “If the army isn’t right for you and you don’t want to work, then,” and takes a deep breath, “then at least come down and eat lunch while we’re still feeding you here.”

She regrets it immediately, but the words have already escaped her and now hang between them, in the air of the room, like baby mobiles made of rotting flesh. She hopes he didn’t register what she said and she tries to patch it up. “If we’d stayed in America a few more years, we’d have kicked you out of the house by this age. Get up.”

The bed creaks as she shifts beside him, wondering when his familiar outburst will come—the frustrated shouting: “Great, Mom! Rub it in! Why not? Now get out of my room and close the damn door!” And if he happened to be upright, which was rare these days, he’d slam the door so hard that the frame would shake and the wall would crack.

But today her son opens his astonishingly blue eyes, raises his eyebrows in mock admiration, and twists his mouth into something like a smile. “Wow, Mom. You said all that in one breath?”

So he did hear.

He mutters something else she can’t make out, and that irritates her further. Before she can lean in again, Nimrod shuts his eyes against her, against the light, against this whole fucking world, and slams his head back into the corner between the pillow and the wall. He’s been sleeping like that since he was a baby—on his stomach, face to the wall, head jammed into the corner, fists clenched—and he still pushes his head into that exact spot.

She doesn’t know why, but it’s always made him seem vulnerable to her and in need of protection, as if some hidden target were marked on his forehead, and another, even more hidden, eye were tracking him through a scope wherever he went. Even though he grew up and became strong and healthy like any other child, she always saw his fragility in that point on his head that, in sleep, longed for a defined, protected, warm place.

When he turns his face to the wall, the tattoo on the back of his neck is exposed—still stirring resistance in her every time he turns his back on her—burned into his flesh just below the hair: a large blue dragon breathing fire, with a Star of David inside it. Now, lying on his stomach, the mythical creature is distorted between the folds of pale skin, its shape skewed and blurred.

Nimrod falls back asleep. She hesitantly strokes his sweaty back, her anger softened. So what went wrong? she wonders. And when did it go wrong?

For a while now she’s been preoccupied with this question, and she’s come to see that evening—when he came back from a trip to Tel Aviv with Ido, his head shaved and his neck tattooed—as a kind of milestone, a point on the map of their lives marking the change in her son, the moment after which things never returned to what they’d been before.

Absentmindedly she bends down and starts to tidy up. She lifts one shirt after another, gathers socks, and when she lifts his jeans, three ten-shekel coins slip from one pocket, roll across the floor, and clink. She freezes mid-movement. Nimrod changes his breathing rhythm, turns onto his side, still asleep. His leg slips out from under the sheet.

She places the clothes in the wicker basket and studies his leg with concern. The wide white bandage is tight around his calf, covering the wound that hasn’t healed yet.

After the injury, she and Ruben were surprised by the number of friends who came to visit him—to cheer him up, they said—first at the hospital, then at their home. All of them upright and solid, in uniform, red berets tucked under their epaulets, rifles slung crosswise over their chests. They chatted, smoked with practiced motions, and slapped Nimrod on the back.

“It’ll be fine, bro.”

“What happened to you, man? What a shame!” said Yaron, his acne-scarred face inches from Nimrod’s, punching his arm carefully so as not to jostle the bandaged leg. A female soldier she didn’t know looked up in surprise at a sergeant standing beside her and said, “What, is this Nimrod an idiot? He seriously shot himself in the leg?”

They rained fire and brimstone on him despite his condition. “What, are you stupid? Was it that bad in the platoon? You had a beef with the company commander? Tell the truth. Or was it that asshole support officer?” They wanted to know if his profile would be lowered, and if it was, would he do everything necessary to raise it again?

They’re totally messed up. Blind, she thought. One tall, fair-haired guy in wrinkled fatigues took a long drag from his cigarette and muttered through the smoke, “And what about us, bro—are we dogs?”

Nimrod absorbed the blows, verbal and otherwise, with quiet endurance. Swallowed everything. Her heart went out to him.

When she brought them coffee, they were sitting on wicker chairs on the lawn, still complaining and teasing him. Only the dark-skinned lieutenant with sharp eyes sat off to the side, silent. She went from one to the next, offering the lemon cake and cream puffs she’d baked, astonished to see on one soldier’s arm a dragon identical to her son’s, minus the Star of David. Ruben, her husband, set his glass ashtray on the table, along with cold drinks and plastic cups, then stepped aside and watched the noisy group take over his garden.

When they left, the cigarette smoke and young voices dissipated and Nimrod grew quiet again. When he stood and limped slowly toward his room on crutches—“Leave it, Mom, I can manage on my own!”—her heart tightened. She followed him with anxious eyes.

Was he soft like his father? Had they stretched his endurance too far in the unit until it snapped? And yet she was angry with him, deep down. How dare he stir her soul like this, worry his father until Ruben’s already frequent silences hardened into a clenched, refusing mouth, until the rooms of the house filled with oppressive quiet and anxiety?

After the carpet’s cheerful colors finally reveal themselves to her, she sits down again, carefully, on Nimrod’s bed, places her hands in her lap, and looks out the window. The poplar leaves wink at her tirelessly, the blooming hibiscus bush shows off its blushing chalices, and the gray bulbul that comes to the garden every day hops along the fence at a safe distance from the male who monitors her every move. She smiles wearily at the life beyond the window. And yet, apart from what had happened with Re’ut her life has unfolded in a normal pattern, as far back as she can remember. She had a good childhood and youth, and everything that she wanted she achieved. True, she never set the bar very high for herself, and in her heart she blamed her mother for that. She had always dreamed of becoming a renowned dancer, and her mother made sure to shatter those dreams-that-lead-nowhere, until she gave up dancing and went to study “something practical.” She studied early childhood teaching strategies, cut colored cardboard, and hung it up in a second grade classroom at an elementary school in Beit Hakerem, where she did her practicum. The days passed with a certain interest and a different kind of boredom.

One day she went with a friend to Gan Hashlosha, and there she met Ruben Lavi, a sensitive student studying at the Technion, who spoke Hebrew with a soft Dutch accent and focused on packing his pipe every time she met his gaze. She no longer remembers what they talked about, only that she liked him, even though he was shorter than she was and not particularly handsome, and that she gave him her phone number, an audacious act for her back then. That evening she returned to Jerusalem and forgot about the boy with the pipe, but one day he called, and she traveled to the dorms in Haifa and stayed in his room from Thursday to Sunday.

They raised three children together. The two older ones were already on the launch trajectory of their adult lives: Assaf had signed on for a second year of permanent service in a technological army unit, and Hila had begun studying jewelry design at Bezalel instead of “something realistic” at the Technion, much to her father’s displeasure. She was already talking about marriage with the soft-eyed American boy she’d met at a party on Mount Scopus, and lately made sure to announce that she’d marry him without a rabbi. And Nimrod? He was her great promise. When he was little, a friend once told her—insensitively but without malice, because how could anyone forget Re’ut—how lucky it was that she didn’t have a child after Nimrod, because he wouldn’t have stood up to the comparisons.

A sudden gust of wind bursts into the room, sending a piece of paper flying off the table and shaking the model airplanes dangling from the ceiling on fishing lines. Nimrod built them patiently when he was in an aeronautics club and announced to everyone, “I’m going to be a pilot!” The wind also rattles the edges of the giant poster of Kurt Cobain whose violent death Nimrod had refused to accept for months. Beside it he hung several pencil sketches and oil paintings of his own, full of depth and hidden intention, which drew cries of admiration from those who were allowed to see them. He was accepted into a master class for gifted students, spent two years there before growing tired of it, and hanging up his brushes. He was her beautiful child, the one girls chased after, the child who loved to dream with his eyes open and to juggle like an acrobat on rollerblades, who saw entire worlds reflected in every shallow puddle.

And it is precisely he—who would have believed it?—who is now taking a break from the world, confused and in pain, his leg refusing, for the time being, to heal, wanting only to be allowed to pass the day with his eyes closed. Ruben cannot find a way into his heart, and she too does not know how to help the feathers of his plucked wings grow back. She’s never said it outright, but in her heart she loved him, Nimrod, more than anything. Perhaps because he was the last child still living with them at home, perhaps because of the hidden vulnerability that hovered above his head all those years that only she saw, and perhaps because he always made her feel that deep within his soul there was another layer, one he allowed no one to set foot in.

Already at his birth, when he was placed in her arms and opened his eyes, she found something mysterious and daring in their color. The name Nimrod immediately rose in her, and she knew he would have no other. She rolled it around her mouth, her voice growing louder and louder, until one of the nurses asked if everything was all right. Just as impatience welled up in her, as though she were filled to the brim, Nimrod began to whimper and twist in her arms. She was still captive to the softness of his blueish eyes when she freed her breast and filled his eager mouth with its nipple. The milk flowed from her, white and warm, and she closed her eyes in pleasure.

Suddenly her mother entered the room like an evil spirit, a bouquet of white gladioli in her hand, planted a sour kiss on her forehead, marveled at the long fingers of her new grandson—“Listen, he’ll be a famous pianist one day!”—and placed a sealed envelope on her stomach. “A gift for the child’s university studies,” she said ceremoniously, and went to put the flowers in a plastic vase she’d taken from another woman’s bedside. “Put it in a savings account for him like you did with the money I gave for the older ones. You set it aside, right?” she interrogated suspiciously, then immediately padded over to the bed, sat down beside her daughter, and fell into a silence heavy with meaning. When she could no longer restrain herself, she declared that this time she was not giving up: “You said this is your last child, so I have a request.” She placed her palm on her daughter’s shoulder exposed by the hospital gown, ignored her flinch, and said, “Call the child whatever name you and Ruben want, but add your father’s name, even if it’s only on the ID card.”

“Yes, Mom,” she obeyed, pulling her shoulder away and quickly tucking the emptied breast back into her bra. She immediately patted her baby’s back with gentle taps and drew strength from his softness and sweet smell, seething over the peace that had been disturbed, and over the closeness between the handing of the check and her mother’s desire to breathe new life into her father’s memory. “Ruben won’t object, right?”

She shrugged. What was the point? she thought bitterly. Ruben never objected to anything, at least not openly.

At the circumcision ceremony, when the mohel called out in a singsong voice, “What shall he be ca-a-alled in Isra-ael?” and lifted the baby into the air, a soft murmur passed through the family crowded into the living room, and her husband said in her stead, his face worried, “Nimrod Yisrael.” The mohel sang, “Nimrod Yisrael—what a beautiful name, such a special name,” and her mother clapped enthusiastically and wiped away a tear, as if she were watching a successful performance. On the carpet by the piano sat Assaf and Hila in festive clothes, whispering maliciously. Hila shook her light curls and said it wasn’t a nice name for a baby at all, neither the first nor the second, and who even needed another baby anyway—and the two of them laughed until their new brother suddenly screamed, and they fell silent at once.

Hila said, “What are they doing to him?”

Later she discovered that the issue of her child’s name was bigger than she had imagined, because she did not call him “Yisrael,” the name of her late father, but used it only when she was especially angry at the boy—and if she called out “Yisrael!” with the stress on the last syllable, there was nothing to discuss. One way or another, the day Nimrod learned to translate thoughts into words, he announced: “I hate my name, hate it! I hate Nimrod and I hate Yisrael! I want a name like Assi’s and Hila’s!” And when they didn’t change it, he repeated his defiance: “Then when I grow up I’ll change my name and I won’t even tell you what I changed it to!” And, of course, there was Re’ut, a delicate, fragile baby born four years after Nimrod with a rare defect in her heart, who vanished from their lives like the fading light of a comet.

Nimrod snores softly in his sleep. Maybe she really is right. Maybe it did all begin then—on that hot summer vacation day, a week after his last matriculation exam.

That morning gave no warning. She and Ruben went out early for their morning walk, showered together afterward, and went down for coffee. High in the poplar tree, a gray bird sang an entire song, and she said to Ruben, “Listen to how beautiful that is.”

That day Nimrod woke up late. His bedroom door opened and slammed shut. He came down to the kitchen barefoot, hair wild, filled a bowl with a mix of Cheerios, granola, raisins, and milk. He left the empty bowl and spoon on the table and tossed her a “Hey, Mom,” as if he’d only just noticed she was there, then skipped back upstairs. She cleared the table and loaded the dishwasher.

If only her son knew how much she longed for him. But since the day he realized in the mirror that he had grown taller than his father, something in him shifted. He redefined his freedom without words, became slippery as a goldfish. She went down to the kitchen; he went up. His father came home; he went out. She asked, “What’s going on?” He answered, “Nothing.” He ignored Hila most of the time, as if she were air, not knowing how deeply it hurt her.

After skipping upstairs, his door slammed and opened. In an instant Nimrod was back in the kitchen.

“Mom, where do we keep the big plastic bags?”

“What for?”

“We’re done with high school. I’m throwing all the junk out of the drawers. Clearing my head.”

“You don’t want to keep a few notes, notebooks, tests with teachers’ comments you liked? One day you’ll be glad you saved something from this time.”

She herself had nothing left from her youth. There had been a twelfth grade diary, letters from some red-cheeked boyfriend, and a few clever scribbles she used to reread and feel close to the girl she had been until one day they would, perhaps, lose their meaning. Her mother had thrown them all out, without asking permission.

“We’ll see,” Nimrod shrugged. “Maybe.”

She found a folded sheet of plastic, large and thick. “Nimrod, is this okay?”

“Perfect,” he said. “But don’t you think we’ll need it for the next Saddam Hussein?”

“What Saddam Hussein? He died before you were born.”

“Yeah, but you told us.”

“There won’t be a next time,” she laughed. “And if Hamas fires rockets from Gaza again, we’ll pack up and go to your family in Holland!”

Her eyes followed his blond hair as it flared for a moment while he ran up the stairs, then vanished.

His door slammed again. She sighed in resignation. The quiet upstairs was suddenly cut by Brian May’s wailing guitar. Then, she knew, one after another would follow: Extreme, Live, Pat Metheny, Sting, and the rest of his musical loves.

Not long ago he used to call, “Mom, come up to my room!” and she would drop what she was doing and go, sit cross-legged on his bed like a teenager, trying not to reveal how much she enjoyed the invitation. Nimrod would say, “Listen to this,” and blast—at a deafening volume she was too embarrassed to ask him to lower—Troubled Times by Screaming Trees, a slow piece that gradually swelled until it filled the entire room.

As she listened, Nimrod would lean back in his chair so its front legs tilted up, tapping the rhythm with his hands, knowing every note, every nuance, fully attentive, fully giving. When it ended and the guitar faded, he laughed. “Now listen to this—it’s called ‘God Smack.’ A kind of private joke by Alice in Chains.”

He smiled in delight as the speakers suddenly erupted without warning in a heavy thud followed by demonic laughter, then faded into the band’s smeared vocals, a kind of endless musical verse hummed without taking a breath, like angry hornets. She nearly closed her eyes, but Nimrod said, “That’s it, Mom, the joke’s over. It’s a different song now,” watching her expression.

“I know you don’t really like Alice,” he said mildly, “so before you go—here’s something you’ll like.”

She straightened up. That was Nimrod’s way of signaling that the grace period was over and that now he wanted to be by himself again. He played the live recording of “The Road to You” by Pat Metheny. They were both washed in the thoughtful, unmistakable melody.

“Turn it up a bit,” she asked before the pleasantness could break, feeling the sounds carry her far away. Nimrod turned it up and closed his eyes, listening too. She felt proud that it was she who had introduced him to Metheny, after falling under his spell herself.

It was good she no longer felt sadness over the day he abandoned the piano, stood up from the stool, and slammed the black lid shut. The keys had answered him with suppressed anger when he declared, “That’s it. Now I want drums.”

Just as she looked at his beautiful face and was struck by terror—What would she do if something ever happened to him?—the song ended. The live recorded audience applauded wildly. Nimrod said, “That’s it, Mom. You won’t like the next one,” and immediately blasted the speakers with a band she didn’t know.

She slipped on her sandals, stood, and kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you!” she called over her shoulder and left the room, cheeks flushed.

Nimrod spread the plastic sheet on the rug, pulled all the drawers out of his desk, and emptied them. With decisive movements he sorted piles of crumpled papers, read them, laughed, crumpled and threw them away, tore them to shreds, smoothed some and set them aside. The heap of moments meant for forgetting grew taller before him.

Then he sat at his drum kit and pounded until he tore her and the neighbors’ eardrums and stretched her patience to its limit. When silence finally fell, she heard the sprinkler rotating in the garden and ran outside to shut off the tap.

Nimrod showered for a long time and came downstairs in jeans and a white T-shirt that proclaimed in oversized block letters: Equal conscription for all! In his hands he carried the transparent plastic sheet, gathered like a bag full of paper popcorn.

“Mom, give me a hundred shekels,” he asked. “Ido and I are taking the 2:05 train to Tel Aviv.”

Ido was Nimrod’s best friend since kindergarten. She went to the kitchen, took her wallet from the drawer, and gave him two hundred.

“Just tell me what for?” she teased.

“What do you mean what for? To have fun and to get a haircut.”

“You’re both getting haircuts?”

“Of course. I told you, Ido’s getting drafted earlier.”

She went to the small desk in the corner of the living room and said to Ruben, “Nimrod’s getting a haircut.”

He looked up from the computer screen and smiled. “Good timing,” he said, and returned to gnawing on his pipe stem and tapping at the keyboard.

Nimrod went to throw the plastic bundle in the trash. She followed with her eyes the transparent bag, through which she saw the crumpled paper balls and torn notes—everything written on them soon forgotten by her son and never read by her: jokes passed in class, clever sayings he’d written and received, love letters, scraps of thoughts and philosophical questions—all the road signs of his growing up, not yet complete.

She watched the bundle with a tight heart, feeling a strange yearning awaken in her.

The doorframe shook. Nimrod was back. He immediately called Ido. She and Ruben both looked at the abundance of his King David curls, light and springy, untouched by scissors for two years, maybe more. Like this, in his soft hair and solid back, he resembled his childhood photos more than ever: a tall, handsome boy, now a stubborn, determined, incurable rebel.

Even with his hair, he refused to fall in line. For three or four years, the latest fashion had ruled the heads of all the high school boys: gelled, spiky hair, an exaggerated style that seemed ridiculous to him—not in form, but in its “uniform uniqueness,” as he mocked it. Her son had enough critical sense to notice that every student on the uphill road to school wore a hairstyle with a standard approval mark.

“So I’m not playing,” he declared, and grew his hair until it was a halo of fire around his head. She respected the decision and secretly admired his blooming beauty.

“Don’t cut it too short,” she begged.

Nimrod shrugged. “If not me, the army barber will butcher me ten times worse, right?”

When the phone rang, she heard his confident voice. “So what’s up, Ido? Great. Yeah, we’re heading down. I’ll be at your place in five minutes. Walking to the train, obviously. Forget buses. So we’re set. Bye.”

Before he left the house he tossed over his shoulder, “See you tonight. So yeah, I’m getting a haircut and giving you a surprise!”

Late that evening, as she and Ruben sat watching a program about global warming, the door opened and someone who looked like Nimrod entered the house. He spread his arms wide, and announced, “Taa-daa!”—presenting his shaved head.

Her body stiffened. Tears rose to her eyes.

“Come on, Mom.” He dropped his arms, seeing her distress and his father’s open mouth. “What, don’t you like it?”

They stared at the almost-bald head as he approached them, and barely recognized their son. She didn’t know what to say. She had never seen his scalp with such short stubble, or the shape of his head, suddenly egg-like, the uneven skull bones with dips and ridges like valleys and craters on a celestial body. Like this, his shiny head looked even more vulnerable to her.

For the first time in years she saw the old, crooked scar on his left temple, from the time he’d run straight into a barbed-wire fence.

“Well?” Nimrod asked.

They kept staring.

“Dad? Mom?” he pleaded, then protested. “Why are you looking at me like I fell from the moon? Is it really that bad?”

He rubbed his head with both hands. The hesitation on his face shifted into restored confidence. “Stop being so heavy, both of you. It’s not a big deal.”

She stroked his bald head with her eyes and murmured, “Maybe. It takes getting used to. Good thing hair grows back.” Then, cautiously, “That was the surprise?”

“Oh no,” his eyes lit up. “The surprise is way cooler.”

He again spread his arms theatrically, turned around, and called out, “Nimrod on the front, Yisrael on the back!”

At first silence dug in and refused to lift. Nimrod blinked angrily. “Well. . . ?”

It was the kind of silence that collapses bridges between people with a loud crash. Seconds passed before she and his father found words, and when they did, they came out soaked in fuel and were blown at Nimrod’s nape without mercy.

“What were you thinking, a tattoo like that on your body?” she protested angrily, barely hiding her disgust. “We swallowed all your high school craziness quietly—drums, earrings, ripped clothes, bad grades, what else? Thai boxing, nipple piercing, a room that looks like a garbage dump most of the time, but this is too much!”

“And what about your grandmother’s feelings? What will she say? Bald and tattooed like a skinhead?”

And all his beauty ruined, she thought. Where are my son’s golden curls? 

Nimrod furrowed his brow and stared at them as if he’d never seen them before. “Oh my God,” he defended himself. “I never would’ve believed you’d react like this. Neo-Nazi? That’s what you’re saying? What an exaggeration. And what does Grandma Anneliese have to do with it?”

“You know very well what she has to do with it.”

Nimrod fell silent. His father opened the pouch of tobacco in his lap, pinched out some, carefully packed the pipe, and tried unsuccessfully to light it. He sniffed once, twice, then looked at his wife, gripping the unlit pipe tightly.

“Good thing I paid for it myself. It cost way more than a hundred shekels,” Nimrod squirmed before them. “And besides, what business is it of yours how I look? In three weeks and two days I become army property, and that’s that! Bottom line—it’s done. Fact of life. It doesn’t wash off. Like Grandma says, What’s done can’t be undone.”

“That’s exactly why it’s worse,” his father scolded quietly, on behalf of his elderly mother.

Nimrod clenched his teeth. He did love them and hadn’t imagined the tattoo that he and Ido had gotten, amid shouts of joy and pain, would hurt them so deeply. His grandmother, he admitted to himself, hadn’t crossed his mind at all.

“When I’m discharged,” he tried to mend things, “I’ll grow my hair back and no one will ever see it again. Satisfied?”

They stared at him in silence. His mother said, “Go tell that to your grandmother.”

Nimrod chuckled. When he saw his father’s look, the chuckle died on his lips. They both turned away and resumed staring, faces sealed, at the flickering television screen.

Yisrael remained standing, grinding his heel into the step between the dining area and the living room. Finally he said, tiredly, “Just one more thing about this. You know my friends who are already full of fear in Gaza are tattooing dragons and skulls twice the size of mine? So what’s better?”

Nimrod turns in bed until he’s lying on his back, hands resting on his chest, chewing in his sleep, his face twisting as if he’s eaten something spoiled in a dream. Like this, the tattoo disappears into the pillow. She looks at him with compassion—his limp body, the bandaged wound, his closed eyes.

Dragons. Skulls. Do they think these will protect them?

She thinks of his friends from the youth orchestra who are a year older and already serving in the West Bank or on the Lebanese border: Ido, Rotem, Schwartzman’s youngest son. And Kako—the one everyone has long forgotten the name his parents gave him—who was killed by friendly fire.

Suddenly she’s struck with horror: How had it never occurred to her that maybe Nimrod was afraid; that he went and tattooed his neck out of fear? Now, after the leg incident, she’s glad he’s home recovering and out of danger. But she can’t bear the defeat he carries all day in his limp, as if a sign were hanging from his back to humiliate him.

To her credit, she had supported withdrawal from Gaza years earlier, in previous rounds, marching two or three Fridays a month at noon with signs at the city’s northern entrance. She did that long before she could imagine him at the induction base, saying a hurried goodbye, hoisting his backpack, walking upright toward the bus, hair cropped, a blue dragon breathing a Star of David on his nape.

This wasn’t how she wanted to see her son—idle and bitter, dulled and drowsy, lost, barely standing on his feet.

Yes. The leg.

“Nimrod.” She shakes him again, pushing words into the remnants of his consciousness like coins into a broken vending machine. “Get up. Don’t you remember that you have an appointment for your leg?”

He doesn’t answer. His head lolls to the right, his body limp like noodles lifted from boiling water, his hands now folded beneath his neck.

She sighs and lets him sleep a little longer. She notes his pallor, the bluish-green stain spreading in the crook of his arm. She bends close, probing the swollen skin with her fingertip. Nimrod doesn’t stir.

She clenches her teeth, silently cursing Batsheva. I told him not to let her stick him with the needle, she thought. I told him she’s a terrible nurse. Even after twenty years in the job, kids still scream like calves before slaughter when she digs into their veins.

What an ugly bruise, she thinks. But, she consoles herself that if the doctor hasn’t called, then the test results must be fine. The danger of sepsis has passed. His fever dropped long ago.

For a moment a fear creeps into her heart, one she can barely drive away: Maybe the ugly inflamed mark isn’t from the test. She hardly knows him anymore.

She scans the room anxiously. Quietly opens the drawers one by one—two are completely empty except for dust. In the third drawer there are three notebooks and a stack of sheet music. When Nimrod turns in his sleep again, she quickly closes the drawer. She knows she won’t find anything in the wardrobe either.

Suddenly she’s flooded with guilt for entertaining such a foolish thought. Despite everything that’s happened to Nimrod, she believes with all her heart that he won’t cross that line.

But what does she really know about him? About this son who began slipping away from her long before he shot himself in the leg. Even the phrase, “shot himself in the leg,” is still hard for her to utter.

Sometimes she thinks he’s blurring, and sometimes he’s disappearing altogether. No matter how much she looks for him, she can’t find him, not even his outline. And even a shadow has contours. Lately he presses his head into the corner of the bed even harder, and it frightens her terribly.

Or maybe she’s exaggerating. Maybe instead of reaching out to him, she’s asking him to reach out to her.

The envelope. She remembers the envelope.

She shifts her body sideways, slips her hand into her pocket, and pulls out the brown military envelope that arrived that morning. She lays it on her knees, smooths its edges as if it’s been traveling too long, stares at it as though her pupils could drill through the paper.

Finally she props it against the white mug holding broken  pens and pencils, printed with the words, Not all those who wander are lost.

He doesn’t know yet, but now he’s discharged. He won’t hold a weapon anymore. The leg will heal.

And his soul? What about his soul? And his friends? She thinks tearfully of Rotem and Ido, of Schwartzman’s youngest, of Kako—the one whose real name no one remembers anymore.

Her phone, which she silenced when she entered his room, vibrates on the table. A message from Rona, Efrat’s mother. What does Rona want? They’d both served on the parents’ committee for three years, from tenth to twelfth grades, but once school ended, the connection faded. Maybe because Efrat had turned Nimrod’s head months before, and he’d clung to her like a puppy, but she dumped him abruptly just before he was drafted.

She sighs and opens WhatsApp anyway.

How terrible. Ido Bergmann was killed this morning, along with another soldier, in the north. Ido’s funeral is today at five. Please pass it on.

Her body shakes. A short scream escapes her mouth.

Her son yawns and rubs his blue eyes until they redden. He takes a deep breath, then sees his mother. He studies her curiously, his face beautiful. Her eyes glaze over.

“Mom,” he smiles weakly, “what are you doing here? Have you been sitting here a long time?”

“No,” she answers with effort, the muted phone still in her hand. “I just came in.”