She turns away from the window in time to see Iris hold her cousin in the air to sniff his bottom. She has always tried to instill in Iris the conviction that she doesn’t need to get married, doesn’t need the stability of the conjugal life to ground her. But to look at her daughter now, her nose in the baby’s bum, it seems more likely that Iris, davka, will be married by twenty-five, and remain so until she is surrounded by grandchildren at her dying husband’s bedside, rubbing his cold feet. Tamar turns back to the window and watches the blue waves roll in from far away. What is the good of expansiveness if one doesn’t expand? What is the good of so much possibility if one only feels it as a widening in the chest while driving down a country road at dusk, or when, standing still in the rooms of the house when the children are shared out at their father’s, one suddenly becomes aware of a silence so pure that it raises the hairs on the back of one’s neck?

I’ve got it! Iris shouts. Everyone turns to her. How about Rafael? He’s a perfect Rafael! she exclaims, holding up the baby so that all can look at him in this new light. Her uncles exchange a thoughtful look. Shlomi still likes Micah, but Dan wants to stay away from the Bible and its implications. He stands looking at the baby with his hands on his hips, the empty carrier slung across his shoulder where twenty years ago there hung a machine gun.

What about Tom? he asks. Sandor came up with it the other day, and I have to say that it’s stuck.

It’s the first time Tamar has heard anyone utter the Husband’s name. The first time, in fact, that anyone has mentioned him since she arrived in Israel. She’s half begun to wonder, despite the toothbrush and the smell of cologne, whether as part of some elaborate ploy they’ve made him up altogether.

Doesn’t he look like a Tom? Dan asks.

He looks like an Eli, is what he looks like, her mother insists.

I like Tom, Remy offers.

Iris turns the baby back to herself, to study his features once more.

Actually, me too, she agrees.

Shlomi gives a look that suggests he doesn’t disagree, and all eyes turn expectantly to Tamar. But what she’s really being asked, what it is that she would be agreeing to, she can’t exactly say. And so she sighs and turns back to the sea, as if there was something out there, something coming from far off, that requires her presence to receive it.

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