On the only night they ever slept together in a bed—they were in the middle of a forest, he had no choice—he asked her if she minded if he said the Lord’s Prayer. He had just flipped her over, pinned her arm hard against her back, and leaned his two hundred pounds into her. Now they were lying peacefully, her back against his stomach, his long arms around her. “Vater unser im Himmel, geheiligt werde dein Name,” he whispered. “Dein Reich komme; dein Wille geschehe, wie im Himmel so auf Erden.”

Freedom

1

That same summer—the summer her boys were thirteen and ten, and she was sleeping and not sleeping with the German Boxer—she’d been driving with her friend Rafi back from the moshav where he’d grown up, outside of Tel Aviv. The name of the moshav was Freedom, though it sounded better in Hebrew, less remarkable, but all the same that was the place he was born and had grown up, and as they approached on a dusty road that wound through the fields of orange trees, their children shouting in the back seat, he told her that when he’d at last begun to see a therapist at the age of forty-two, he’d asked aloud, almost to himself, in the way that one can ask unanswerable questions aloud in the presence of such people, “What do I want? What is it that I really want?” To which the therapist had answered, “What you’ve always wanted: Freedom.”

It was Saturday, and they’d left Tel Aviv early that morning. Rafi had texted her when she woke to ask what she was doing with the kids, and to suggest that they go somewhere all together. Where? she’d written back. To the fields of my childhood, he replied. Their children, all boys, got along well enough that they usually wandered off to kick a ball or climb something, leaving her and Rafi alone to talk. Rafi was a dancer, had been one since the age of three, when he’d begun in his mother’s dance studio. Everything always began and ended for him with the body, whereas she had spent many long years in her mind (or so it felt to her), and had only fully emerged into her body after she’d borne one child and then another, after she’d fulfilled the commands of her biology, and having done with it, at last took up true residence in her body, and started to dance at the age of thirty-five. Sometimes they talked about this, and sometimes they talked about their relationships, or the things they still wanted from life. The boys ran wildly around the playground where Rafi had lost his virginity. He’d had sex everywhere around there, he told her—in that building once abandoned, behind that shed, up on that dry, grassy hill.