Don't climb too high. Don't climb too high. Ayelet knew the rule. Her older sister Vered yelled it at her every day from across the playground, as Ayelet pulled herself up on the climbing bars. Each day she climbed a bit higher, twisting and stretching like a sunflower reaching for the sun; someday she would stand at the top.
Vered was seventeen. Ayelet was a baby of five. If their brother Ohad had lived, he would have been almost twenty, but while waiting for a bus on a deserted highway he had been attacked by two Palestinians with a knife, and left to bleed out the last moments of his life alone. Two grim-looking officers and an army psychiatrist had arrived one evening at the door with the news.
Ayelet had cried and thrown herself into her mother's arms, but Vered had remained silent, observing her family's grief like an outsider. As her parents wept in the front room, Vered stood with her forehead pressed to the back window and looked to the little scatter of blockhouses in the distance that was the Arab village of El Wassah. She wondered if her brother's murderers were eating dinner now somewhere.
T
he summer of Ohad's death was scorching. The desert settlement of Neve Matmon, deep in the occupied territories on the wrong side of the Green Line, home to Vered and Ayelet and seven hundred others, steamed like new fertilizer; the white houses cracked and sweated in the sun. In the afternoons, Vered sat by herself under a tree by the playground and watched her sister climb. Gonen came one day and sat by her.
Gonen was strong and handsome. As one of Ohad's best friends, he had practically lived at Vered's house for years, lounging on the porch or helping himself to sandwiches from the refrigerator. His eyes were a smoky shade of blue-gray, like tiny chips of sky; Vered had loved him since she was nine.
Now he turned to her, under the tree, and said awkwardly, by way of conversation, "Can you believe the heat?"
Vered expelled an exaggerated breath in agreement.
Gonen cleared his throat and stretched his legs out in front of him. Vered smiled inwardly.
She looked up into his tanned face. A tiny pale spider scrabbled along his shoulder; Vered resisted the urge to brush it away.
Gonen turned to her again. "I want to tell you, Vered," -- he cleared his throat a second time and shifted uneasily -- "I intend to do something about Ohad."
Vered stared at him, uncomprehending.
"The police did nothing, the army did nothing!" Gonen continued, his voice rising higher with each angry syllable. "Vered, look at me for a moment. You know those . . . those animals who did that to Ohad are still free, somewhere. Gil said we can't just sit here."
Ayelet was coming now across the grass, sandals slapping hard on the ground. Vered gathered her into her arms and kissed the warm brown head; she closed her eyes and missed Ohad. Gonen was talking again, low and insistent. Vered listened, letting the words flow by her, hearing them as if from far away, breathing in the sweet baby scent of Ayelet's hair.
"The police did nothing," Gonen repeated, "can you believe that? Nothing. And Ohad buried while those . . . they are laughing at us."
Vered made no response, hearing not individual words but only the flow of his voice. Gonen leaned back against the tree now, and examined her face. Her eyes were still closed, but he knew they were a deep green. Her eyebrows were straight and serious; a constellation of freckles sprayed over the bridge of her nose. "We're going to go into El Wassah tonight, some of us," Gonen said. "Gil and I - and I won't say anymore names. Just to get a little back. A little honor. For Ohad. And for you, because I know why you keep so quiet. Gil says he loves you, Vered, but I'm the one who knows you."
Though Vered still sat unmoving and silent, Gonen knew that she had heard him. She looked away for a long time, past the grass and the playground and the trees toward the desert.
The white box houses of El Wassah cast square shadows down the rocky white and green slopes. Vered closed her eyes and saw Gil, mouth tight with grief and rage, determinedly slipping a magazine into his belt. He and his friends setting out as the sun dipped, all guns and boots and swaggering bravado, tramping as far as the hill directly above El Wassah. She saw them, sitting heavily on the rocky earth. There was some talking then, and a few angry threats shouted. They drank, Gil sobbing drunkenly over the fast emptied bottle. And then, not killers - boys - they came home again, each sliding into his own restless sleep, the full magazines locked again in the drawer.
Vered saw all this in a single moment, as the sun dipped behind the horizon, extinguishing itself in a flare of orange and scarlet light. Gonen would not go with Gil that night; she saw him, here beside her in the abandoned playground, carefully tracing the line of her jaw with his lips, the sky in his eyes gone gravel-colored with hunger. She saw him still here, when the summer faded, as winter passed and Ayelet grew. She saw them side by side, holding Ohad between them like a napkin at a wedding, hanging him on the wall of their home like a ketubah.
Gonen watched Vered open her eyes. The blurred frenzied grief that had darkened her face the past month was smoothed out. He reached out pinned her to him, cradling her soft frame within his own firm one.
Ohad blew by them in the first cool breeze that summer had seen.