Ilana becomes Gideon’s caregiver

Ilana becomes Alexander Gideon’s caregiver not through a declaration or reconciliation, but through the accumulation of intimate daily tasks: helping him dress and eat, managing his medicines, and staying beside him when he wakes in fear. At the family property in Zikhron Yaakov, her care gives practical form to a renewed closeness between them, while the letters she addresses to Michel Sommo preserve the unresolved tensions of her marriage and her past with Alexander.

The House and the Decision to Stay

Alexander’s dependence takes shape in a house being remade around a communal life. Boaz Brandstetter and the eight young people staying there have cleared weeds and planted vegetables where Alexander’s father once cultivated roses. The restored marble pool holds carp rather than goldfish; Ilana makes scarecrows, and Yifat waters the beds. Alexander, now walking with a stick made by Boaz, comes down to the garden and sits with Ilana. They exchange only necessary words, though he notices her dress and hair, forms of attention he admits he had not offered during their marriage.

The sounds of the house also change. Boaz has made chimes from suspended bottles, whose bleak, repetitive music carries in the sea wind. Three weeks before Ilana describes her nursing routine, Alexander abruptly asks Boaz to remove them and move his belongings into his mother’s old bedroom. There he hangs the remains of his mother’s sandals, recovered from beneath a loose floorboard, on a rusty nail. He places her damp-stained photograph on the table, without the candlesticks and everlasting flowers that his father once set around it. The room gathers the remnants of his childhood as his present life narrows around illness and dependence.

Ilana moves into that room too, putting a mattress at the foot of his bed so she can care for him at night. She describes the move as being there to look after him, not as a reunion between former spouses. When Alexander wakes in panic, mumbling confused orders as though continuing a nightmare, she gets up, gives him herbal infusion from a thermos and pills, and holds his hand until he settles again. His interrupted breathing, rather than any declaration between them, sets the rhythm of their new proximity.

The Work of Care

The care extends through the ordinary acts that make a day possible. Each morning Ilana shaves Alexander with a battery-operated razor, combs what remains of his hair, dresses him, puts on his shoes, and ties the laces. She settles him at the table, puts on a bib, feeds him a soft-boiled egg and yogurt or cornflakes softened into mush, and wipes his mouth and chin. When he needs the toilet, she must help him with everything; she compares the demanding process to changing a baby. The reversal is stark: the man who once looked down on others now relies on another person for basic bodily care.

His needs do not remain constant. At times he is quiet, speaking mainly to ask for help. At others he gets up and obsessively puts the room in order: folding Ilana’s clothes, returning cards to their box, clearing empty glasses, straightening his blanket, and scolding her for leaving a comb on the table. His repeated walk between the wall and the door, tapping with his stick along the same route, makes the limits of his room visible as both a physical routine and a confinement.

The day has a practical schedule. Around midday Ilana feeds him mashed potatoes or rice pudding and gives him carrot juice, then goes downstairs to work in the kitchen or storerooms and deal with the dishes and laundry. Alexander continues his measured walk until twilight. Boaz has made him a daybed from eucalyptus branches, where he sits close to the fire, wrapped in blankets, listening to the young people in the kitchen or watching Boaz study grammar. He sometimes sleeps there peacefully. When he wakes, Ilana feeds him again and gives him his pills; he listens to guitar music as the household winds down.

At night Boaz carries Alexander upstairs and lays him on the bed. Ilana arrives with the thermos and medicines, turns the kerosene heater, closes the shutters Boaz has repaired, wraps Alexander in blankets, and sings lullabies. If he thinks she has sung carelessly, repeated herself, or stopped too soon, he complains to his mother. When pain brings sweat to his forehead, Ilana wipes it and runs her fingers over his face and thinning hair. She changes his pajama trousers and the bottom sheet without getting him up, having spread oilcloth over the mattress and become practiced at the task.

Dependence and Remaining Agency

The narrative does not present Alexander as simply emptied of intention. His condition includes confusion and dependence, but also unpredictable flashes of capacity. He sometimes asks Ilana to undress, summons old acquaintances in the defense establishment through an urgent message, or gives a lucid, frightening lecture about a future Arab victory over Israel. At other moments, a sly look and a wolfish smile suggest to Ilana that he may know more than his helpless performance implies, and may be choosing, at least sometimes, to let her play nurse. Her care therefore takes place amid uncertainty about how much of him is lost and how much remains deliberately concealed.

Their games make that uncertainty part of daily life. They play checkers and several card games through the morning. Alexander beams when he wins; when Ilana wins, he stamps his foot and complains to his mother that she cheated. She manipulates the games so he nearly always wins, but challenges him if he tries to return a captured piece to the board or deal himself an extra card. She may stand as if to leave, and he pleads and promises to behave. The small contest lets her protect his pleasure without surrendering every boundary: she accommodates him, but can still refuse his cheating.

Earlier Care and Old Resentments

Ilana’s nursing of Alexander takes place against other scenes of care that complicate any simple account of sacrifice. Earlier, Michel Sommo had begun finding a way toward Boaz after money and the Sommo family’s connections helped resolve the young man’s troubles. Michel brought Boaz to Jerusalem, and the two competed for Yifat’s attention; after the Sabbath they shared a meal and went to the cinema. Ilana watched their growing ease with amusement, an image of family life that differs sharply from the strained relations of her earlier marriage to Alexander.

A visit to Haifa had already exposed the resentment Ilana felt around domestic responsibility. While she was away, Michel discovered that Yifat had an ear infection, canceled a long-awaited meeting with the deputy minister of defense, took the child to a clinic, and spent the day nursing her. When Ilana returned, she responded with irritation rather than gratitude, questioning why he had not called relatives and whether his devotion was meant to make her feel guilty. Her anger was directed at the feeling that one day of care could be treated as heroic when she felt confined to the work of home and child-rearing for a lifetime. That episode does not make her later care of Alexander equivalent to Michel’s care of Yifat, but it gives her caregiving history a pointed contrast: intimate labor can be both necessary and a source of grievance.

A Late, Unsettled Intimacy

Ilana’s care for Alexander is also framed by the letters she writes to Michel, sometimes secretly, while he sleeps. She continues to address Michel even as her nights are organized around Alexander’s body. In one letter she anticipates Michel’s silence and imagines that he may respond through his brother, invoking her supposed forfeiture of rights to the child. Her care does not settle the dispute between them or erase the injuries of their marriage; it unfolds under the pressure of that unresolved address.

Alexander’s dependence can bring moments of tenderness without producing a clear reconciliation. Near one in the morning, he stirs and asks to dictate something. Ilana uncovers the Baby Hermes typewriter and waits, but he hesitates, coughs, and tells her it is not important and that she should sleep because she is tired too. He curls into his blanket. Later, he makes brief comments in his sleep-darkened room, including an observation about her Bedouin dress and a grim correction about the nature of a battle. Ilana remains awake knitting: a sweater, hat, and scarf for him, and gloves and a cardigan for Yifat. She plans a white sweater with stripes for Michel as well, a domestic gesture that keeps her divided attachments visible rather than resolved.

The caregiving arrangement thus makes closeness concrete while leaving its meaning unsettled. Ilana feeds, cleans, comforts, and watches over Alexander, and Boaz carries him between the kitchen and the attic room. Alexander sometimes meets her care with a lucid exchange or a flash of mischief; more often, he needs help or falls silent. The routine does not restore their former marriage, nor does it answer Michel’s absence from the room. It leaves Ilana beside Alexander through the night, sustaining a fragile intimacy through labor, memory, and the recurring acts his dependence requires.