And him? she asked. How did he feel?

“The thing is,” he said, “that I can’t remember. And the more time passes, the more I feel I need to know what it seems I will never know: whether I was relieved, whether I understood at that moment that that chicken had saved my life, too, or whether I was no longer even an animal, and had become a machine.”

3

It was the late afternoon now, and they were driving away from Freedom, a fact that wasn’t lost on either Rafi or her. She’d had boyfriends one after another before marrying, and then after a decade of marriage she’d gotten divorced, and after that she’d been with a younger man for a long time, until now at last, for the first time in twenty years, she wasn’t attached to any man at all. It was a lack that had first produced in her a sense of terror that went so far back that she couldn’t identify its source. At the start of what had become a nightmarish period, she had met a friend for lunch who’d said to her, “There is no woman, however loved, who isn’t terrified of abandonment,” and for a very long time she’d tried to work out what that meant. Was it only because the friend was much older, shaped by a time in which women had little or no access to the avenues that might lead to self-sufficiency and independence, that she believed that? When she herself thought about it, there was very little left that a man could give her that she really needed, aside from sex, which was easy enough to find. After six months of panic attacks, unremitting insomnia, and depression, the fear of being alone, without the life support of a man, had at last receded and been replaced with a feeling of quiet euphoria.

As for Rafi, a year earlier he and his wife had decided to open their relationship of twenty-three years. They had a good and loving marriage, the heat between them had remained, and still they had arrived at the decision together, with the desire for growth and new discoveries. At first Rafi was unsure if he would ever want another woman. He thought he might be like his father, for whom his mother had remained the main force in his life, and to whom his father had remained entirely dedicated. And then, while at a residency abroad, Rafi slept with a much younger dancer from Korea, with whom he thought he was in love, until he met another from Thailand who blew his mind. When he returned home, the Thai woman broke things off from Bangkok, and after some weeks of pain, there was a very young French woman, then two or three Israelis. Meanwhile, during that time, his wife went to the beach with their children, and while they played in the waves with the dog, she met and fell in love with a man fifteen years younger than her.