To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  Ora accompanied the film shoots for three weeks as driver, caterer, and water girl, and not infrequently as the furious sheepdog who ran around after the unruly actors, Ofer’s peers, who constantly ditched rehearsals and shoots. And when they finally deigned to appear, they would argue with Ofer with an arrogance and rudeness that drove her mad. She would leave as soon as an argument broke out. He was still smaller and shorter than most of his classmates and slightly excluded and hesitant, and Ora could not stand the sight of his bowed head and his downcast look and the tremble in his lower lip. Still, he stood his ground: making his presence known, his shoulders stretched almost to his ears, his face an uncontrollable assemblage of pain and insult, but not giving an inch.

  She also acted in the film, cast in the role of an annoying and nosy teacher. Ilan passed by in the background, too, on a motorcycle, waving hello and disappearing. There was a nice credit at the end: “And thanks to Mom and Dad, who contributed their shadows.” Now she wonders if Avram might think the film had a uniqueness, or a spark, or a “one-off”-ness—all his words—and she heard the old tune of those words, as when she and he and Ilan used to come out of a movie or a play that had moved him, and he would caress the word that electrified him most of all, “greatness,” with a hoarse, excited whisper full of awe: Greatnesssss! accompanied by a broad, kingly sweep of the arm. He was around twenty then. Or twenty-one? The same age Ofer is today, which is hard to believe. And it’s even harder to believe how arrogant and pretentious he was, how she could even stand him, with the silly goatee he cultivated …

  She walks on, trapped in a poisonous dialogue with herself, because she finally recognizes how important it is to her that Avram should love Ofer—yes, love him, fall in love with him right then and there without any reservations or criticism, fall in love with him despite himself, just the way he once fell in love with her, in whom there was not even a single drop of greatness, and when he fell in love with her she was nothing but a broken vessel—ill and bedraggled, drugged up and bleeding all day and night, and Avram was in that state, too. It was the optimal state for falling in love with me, she thinks, and weakly slows her pace. And perhaps it is true, as he himself joked years later, that it was the only way a yiddeneh’s id could meet a yid’s id. Her strength is sapped, and she stands panting in pain, pressing her fingers between her eyes. All these thoughts—where have all these thoughts come from? And who needs them now?

  Avram sees her swaying and quickly skips over to catch her a moment before she falls. How strong he is, she thinks again, surprised, as her knees buckle. He gently lays her on the ground, quickly takes off her backpack and places it under her head. He removes a sharp stone from under her back, takes off her glasses, pours some water into his palm, and softly caresses her face. She lies with her eyes closed, her chest rising and falling heavily, her skin covered with cold sweat. “See how the mind works,” she murmurs. “Don’t speak now,” he says, and she does as she is told. She finds his concern pleasing, and his hand on her face, and the quiet command in his voice.

  “I remembered,” she says later, her hand holding his wrist limply, “that you once told me about a radio play, or a story. It was about a woman whose lover leaves her, and you hear her talking with him on the phone but you can’t hear him.”

  “Cocteau. La Voix Humaine.”

  “Yes, Cocteau,” she whispers, “how do you remember …” She feels the water slowly drying on her face. She can see a mountainside covered with bushes and a very blue sheet of sky. A sharp scent of sage enters her nostrils. His hand is as soft as it was then—how can the gentleness and softness still be there? She closes her eyes and wonders if it is possible to reconstruct him from so little. “You were in your French period back then, and your radio play–writing period. Remember? You had a whole theory about the human voice. You were convinced that radio would beat out television. You built a little recording studio at home.”

  Avram smiles. “Not at home. In the shed outside. It was a real studio. Days and nights I sat there recording, cutting, splicing, mixing.”

  “And I thought,” Ora whispers, “after Ilan left me, the first time, after Adam was born, I used to talk with him on the phone sometimes, and I must have sounded like her, like the woman from your Cocteau play, pathetic like her, and so forgiving and understanding about his difficulties, his difficulties with me, the son of a bitch …”

  Avram’s hand moves away from her forehead. She opens her eyes and sees his face withdrawn, closed off.

  “He left me right after Adam was born, didn’t you know?”

  “You didn’t say.”

  Ora sighs. “You really don’t know anything. You’re an ignoramus when it comes to my life.”

  Avram stands up and looks out into the distance. A falcon glides in circles high up in the sky above his head.

  “It’s terrible how much of a stranger you are,” she murmurs. “What am I even doing here with you?” She lets out a bitter laugh. “If I weren’t so afraid to go home, I would get up this minute and leave.”

  Perhaps because he is standing above her, she remembers: Ofer was a year old. She was lying on her bed, rocking him on her upturned feet and arms in a game of airplane. He laughed and his whole body quivered, and his fine halo of hair softly fell and rose as he sailed. The sunlight coming through the window shone through his ears, and they were orange and translucent. They stuck out from his head, just as they do today. She moved him into the light and saw a delicate braid of veins and soft twists and bumps. She became quiet and focused, as if someone were about to tell her an indescribable secret. Her face must have changed, because Ofer stopped laughing and looked at her gravely, and his lips lengthened and protruded in a wise, even ironic old man’s expression. She marveled at the precision in each of his limbs. A sweetness filled her. She spun him slowly on the soles of her feet, moved him this way and that, catching the entire wheel of the sun in one of his ears.

  The wound was as deep as a fist, and it discharged an endless stream of thick pus. It was very close to the spine, and the doctors were unable to heal it for months. There was something terrifying and hypnotizing about the never-ending flow, as though the body itself were ridiculing the abundance that had always streamed from Avram. For many months, almost a year, the wound was the focal point of concern for Ora and Ilan, and for a succession of doctors. The word “wound” was uttered so often that it sometimes seemed Avram himself was fading away, leaving only the wound as his primary being, while his body became merely the platform from which the wound produced the fluids it needed to survive.

  For the hundredth time that day, Ilan dipped a gauze bandage in the pus, carefully twisted it in the crater of flesh, soaked up the fluids, and threw it away. Ora, sprawled on a chair near Avram’s bed, looked at the precise movements of Ilan’s hand, and wondered how he was able to dig into the wound without causing pain. Later, when Avram fell asleep, she suggested they take a short walk for some fresh air. They meandered through the paths among the little buildings and talked, as usual, about Avram’s condition, his upcoming surgery, and his complicated financial dealings with the Ministry of Defense. They sat on a bench near the X-ray center, with some distance between them, and Ora talked about Avram’s balance problem, whose cause the doctors had not yet determined. Ilan murmured, “We need to look into his ingrown toenail, that could drive him crazy. And I think the Novalgin is giving him diarrhea”—and she thought, Stop, stop with that now, and turned to him and jumped over the void and kissed him on the mouth. It had been such a long time since they’d touched each other that Ilan froze, then hesitantly took her in his arms. For a moment they moved cautiously against each other, as if they were covered in shattered glass, amazed at the force with which their bodies ignited as though they had only been waiting for someone to come to them for comfort. That night they drove to Avram’s empty house in Tzur Hadassah, where they had been living since he was released from the POW prison, and which they had turned into a sort of priva
te headquarters for all matters concerning his treatment. There, in his boyhood room, with the sign on the door from when he was fifteen, saying Only the Mad May Enter, on a straw mattress on the floor, they conceived Adam.

  She doesn’t know how much Avram remembers of the period when he was hospitalized, operated on, rehabilitated and treated, and periodically investigated by agents of the Shabak and Field Security and Military Intelligence, who tormented him relentlessly with their suspicions about information he might or might not have given away as a POW. He was indifferent to it all and devoid of any volition, yet still, from the depths of his absence, he consumed her and Ilan like a baby, and not just because of the many complications, medical and bureaucratic, that resulted from his situation and that only they could handle for him. It was his actual existence—empty, hollow—that devoured them constantly, so she felt at the time, and sucked the life out of them. Almost without moving, he turned them into shells, like he himself was.

  Adam’s birth, she says. They are sitting side by side in a rocky hiding place above the valley, surrounded by a yellow sea of acacia and spiny broom whose blossoms make the bees frantic. The lichen-covered rocks glisten red and bright purple in the sun, and she knows that she can talk with greater ease about Adam. She can even tell him about Adam’s birth and ostensibly start from a distance.

  “I had a difficult labor with him. It was long and hard. I was in Hadassah Mount Scopus for three days. Women came and gave birth and left, and I lay there like a rock. Ilan and I joked that some women who were barren had already come in and had babies, and I was still lying there waiting. Every doctor and resident had checked me and looked at me and measured me, and there were regular medical staff meetings around me, and they kept arguing over my head about whether or not to induce labor, and how I would respond to this or that. They told me I should walk around. They said the movement would induce labor. So we walked together, me and Ilan, two or three times a day. Me with the Hadassah robe and a belly like a whale, walking arm in arm and hardly talking. It was nice. There was a pleasantness between us, or so I thought.”

  Start from a distance. She smiles to herself and remembers that on the night she and Avram first met, as teenagers, he sailed in large circles around the room where she lay in the dark, in the isolation ward, coming closer and then receding, as if he were secretly practicing routes for getting nearer and farther away from her.

  “After the birth, Ilan drove us home in the Mini Minor—you remember it, my parents bought it for me when I started going to university. When you were in rehab, I sometimes used to drive you around Tel Aviv.”

  She gives him a sideways glance and waits, but if he does remember he gives no sign, and it’s as if all those endless, dreamlike drives never existed. He needed them in order to “believe,” he had explained laconically. Hours of driving in circles to look at streets, alleyways, squares, people, people. And the suspicion and doubt that were constantly in his eyes, in his furrowed brow. And the city, which seemed to be going out of its way to convince Avram of its existence, its reality.

  “We put Adam in a car seat with padding all around, and Ilan drove all the way home on eggshells and did not say a word. I didn’t stop talking. I was in seventh heaven. I remember how happy I was, and proud, and positive that from now on everything would start to fall in place for us. And he drove silently. At first I thought it was because he was so focused on the road. You see, I felt that the whole world had completely changed from the moment Adam was born. Everything may have looked the same, but I knew everything was different, that some new dimension had been added—don’t laugh—to everything and everyone in the world.”

  I didn’t laugh, Avram thinks, and leans his head back. He tries as hard as he can to see them in the little car. He tries to remember where he was back then, when Ora and Ilan had Adam. Don’t laugh, she’d said. Nothing could be further from him now than laughter.

  “And I remember that I looked at the street and thought, Silly people, blind, you don’t even know how different everything is going to be now. But I couldn’t tell Ilan that, because I’d already started to feel his silence, and then I fell silent, too. All of a sudden I was incapable of uttering a word. Even when I wanted to talk, I couldn’t. I felt completely smothered, like something was grabbing my throat. And it was you.”

  He glances at her, his forehead upturned.

  “You were with us in the car. We felt you sitting there in the back next to Adam’s seat.” She pulls her knees into her stomach. “And it was impossible to bear. It was intolerable in the car, and all my happiness burst like a balloon and splattered over me. I remember that Ilan sighed loudly, and I asked, ‘What?’ And he wouldn’t say and wouldn’t say, and finally he said he hadn’t imagined it would be so difficult. And I thought about how this wasn’t the drive I’d pictured when I dreamed about the trumpets that would sound when I went home with my first child.

  “Look,” she says a moment later in surprise, “I haven’t thought about that for years.”

  Avram says nothing.

  “Should I go on?”

  I’ll take that as a yes, she tells herself, that jerk of the head.

  The closer they got to home, to Tzur Hadassah, the more tense and nervous Ilan grew. She noticed that from a certain angle his chin looked weak, evasive. She saw the damp marks his fingers were leaving on the wheel—Ilan, who almost never sweated. He parked the car opposite the rusty gate, took Adam out, and handed him to her without looking in her eyes. Ora asked if he wanted to carry Adam into the house himself, for the first time, but he said, “You, you,” and pushed the baby into her arms.

  She remembers the short walk down the paving stones through the garden, the lopsided little house with its sharp textured walls dotted with cement spots. It was a “Jewish Agency house” that Avram’s mother had inherited from a childless uncle and lived in with Avram since he was ten. She remembers the neglected garden, which became overgrown with weeds and tall thistles during the years when Ora and Ilan could only tend to Avram. She even remembers thinking that as soon as she recovered she would go into the garden and introduce Adam to her beloved fig and grevillea trees. And she remembers the feel of her crooked steps as she duck-walked painfully around her stitches. She talks softly. Avram listens. She sees that he’s listening, but for some reason she feels as though it is mostly herself she is talking to now.

  Ilan walked quickly ahead of her up the three uneven steps, opened the door, and stood aside to let her go in with Adam. There was something chilling and hurtful in his courtesy. She made a point of taking the first step in on her right foot, and said out loud, “Welcome home, Adam”—she felt, as she did every time she said or thought his name, a secret caress of Ada inside her—and carried him to his room, where his crib was already set up. Although he was sleeping, she turned him around in all directions to show his translucent eyelids the bureau, the chest of drawers with a changing pad, the box of toys, and the bookshelves.

  Then she discovered a piece of paper taped to the door: Hello Baby-o, it said. Welcome. Here are a few instructions from the hotel management.

  She placed the baby in his crib. He looked tiny and lost. She covered him with a thin blanket and stood gazing at him. Something prickled at her back, causing unease. The paper taped to the door seemed full of words, too many words. She leaned over and stroked Adam’s warm head, sighed, and walked back to the door to read it:

  The hotel management asks that you respect the peace and quiet of the other lodgers.

  Remember: the proprietress belongs solely to the hotel owner, and your use of her is limited to her upper portion only!

  The hotel management expects guests to leave when they reach the age of 18!

  And so on and so forth.

  She crossed her arms over her chest. She suddenly felt tired of Ilan and his wisecracks. She reached out and ripped the paper off and crumpled it tightly.

  “You didn’t like that?” Ilan piped up, sounding annoyed. “I
just thought … Never mind. It didn’t work. Want to drink something?”

  “I want to sleep.”

  “And him?”

  “Adam? What about him?”

  “Should we leave him here?”

  “I don’t know … Should we take him into our room?”

  “I don’t know. Because if we’re asleep and he wakes up here, alone …”

  They looked at each other awkwardly.

  She tried to listen to her instincts and couldn’t hear anything. She had no desire, no knowledge or opinion. She was confused. Deep in her heart she had hoped that when the baby was born she would immediately know everything she needed to know. That the baby would infuse her with a primal, natural, and unimpeachable knowledge. Now she realized how much she had looked forward to that throughout the pregnancy, almost as much as to the baby itself—to the acuteness of knowing the right thing to do, which she had lost completely in recent years, since Avram’s tragedy.

  “Come on,” she said to Ilan, “we’ll leave him here.”