To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  “Sometimes. Depends,” he says.

  She watches his appetite in astonishment. She herself can’t put a bite in her mouth. In fact, she realizes that her stomach has locked up since she left home. Even at the feast in the house of the laughing woman, the baby’s mother, she could hardly swallow the food. Maybe one good thing has come of this trip after all. Then, as quick as she can, like someone pickpocketing herself, she reaches out to the notebook and opens it.

  I’m afraid to forget him. His childhood, I mean. I often get confused between the two boys. Before they were born I thought a mother remembers every child separately. Well that’s not exactly how it is. Or maybe with me it’s especially not that way. And stupidly, I didn’t keep a notebook for each boy, with their development and all the clever things they did since they were born. When Adam was born I didn’t have the mind for that with everything that was going on, when Ilan left us. And when Ofer was born I didn’t either (again because of all the complications back then—apparently every time I give birth there’s something going on). And I thought that maybe now, on this hike, I would write down a few things I still remember. Just so they’ll finally be written down somewhere.

  The stream runs in the distance. Evening gnats hum, and crickets chirp madly. A branch cracks in the fire, flicking charred specks over the notebook. Avram gets up and moves the backpacks away from the fire. She is surprised: his movements really are more confident, lighter.

  “Coffee, Ofra?”

  “What did you call me?”

  He laughs, very embarrassed.

  She laughs too, her heart pounding.

  “So, coffee?”

  “Can you wait? I’ll just be a minute.”

  He shrugs his shoulders, finishes eating, and arranges Ofer’s sleeping bag like a pillow. He sprawls out, crosses his arms behind his neck, and looks up at the sheltering branches and hints of dark sky. He thinks about the woman with the crimson thread walking all the way down the country. He sees the procession of exiles. Long lines of people with bowed heads come out from every populated area, from the cities and the kibbutzim, to join the main line, the long one, which moves slowly down the spine of the land. When he was in solitary confinement in Abbasiya Prison and thought Israel no longer existed, he saw the picture in detail—the babies on shoulders, the heavy suitcases, the empty, extinguished eyes. But the woman walking with the crimson thread gives some comfort. You could imagine, for example, he thinks, sucking on a piece of straw, that in every town and village and kibbutz there was someone stealthily tying his own thread to hers. And that way, secretly, a tapestry was being woven all over the country.

  Ora bites the tip of her pen and clicks it against her teeth. His slip of the tongue a moment ago confused her, and she has to make an effort to get back to where she was.

  Ofer was born in a routine delivery, nothing difficult, and very quick. Maybe twenty minutes from when Ilan got me to the hospital. It was Hadassah Mount Scopus. We got there at around seven a.m., after my water had broken at six or so, in my sleep.

  Not exactly sleep, she writes, and gives Avram a sideways glance, but he’s still pondering the sky, lost in a thought that jerks the length of straw in his mouth this way and that. There was something going on and my water broke in bed. And when I realized that’s what it was, I mean, that nothing else made sense under the circumstances, we got organized quickly. Ilan had already prepared bags for me and for him, it was all arranged, written instructions, phone numbers, phone tokens, etc., Ilan being Ilan. We phoned Ariela to come and stay with Adam and take him to day care later. He slept all night and never knew a thing.

  Ofer was born at seven twenty-five a.m. It was a very easy, quick delivery. I got there and gave birth. They hardly had time to prepare me. Gave me an enema and sent me to the bathroom. I felt strong pressure in my stomach, and as soon as I sat down on the toilet, I could feel him coming out! I yelled for Ilan, and he came in and just picked me up the way I was, and put me down on a bed in the corridor, and shouted for a nurse. Together they pushed me, running, to the large delivery room, which by the way was where I had Adam (in the same room!), and three more pushes, he was out!

  Her face glows, and she smiles generously at Avram. He responds with a questioning smile.

  Ofer weighed three kilos six hundred. Pretty large, based on my limited sample. Adam was barely two kilos (minus three grams!). They’ve come along nicely since then, the two of them.

  That’s it. That is exactly what she wanted to write down. She takes a deep breath. Just for that it was worth lugging the notebook all this way. Now she’s ready to eat. A sudden hunger gnaws at her. But she sucks on the pen for a moment longer, wondering if there’s anything else to add about the birth. She shakes out her strained wrist. A high school kind of pain, she thinks: How often do I find myself writing by hand?

  The midwife was called Fadwa, I think, or Nadwa? From Kfar Raami anyway. I met her another few times during the two days I spent there, and we chatted a little. I was interested to know who this girl was, whose hands were the first to touch Ofer when he came into the world. A single woman. Strong, a feminist, really sharp, and very funny, she always made me laugh.

  Ofer’s feet were slightly blue. When he was born he hardly cried, just made one short sound and that was it. He had huge eyes. Exactly Avram’s eyes.

  She turns on a flashlight and reads what she’s written. Maybe she should be more detailed? She reads it again and finds she likes the style. She knows what Ilan would say about it, and how he would erase her exclamation marks, but Ilan will probably never read it.

  But maybe there is room for a little more detail? Facts, not embellishments. What else happened there? For some reason she goes back to Adam’s birth again, a long and difficult delivery, and to how she kept trying to make the midwife and the nurses like her, wanting them so badly to admire her endurance and to praise her when they talked in the nurses’ room and compare her to the other mothers, who screamed and wailed and sometimes cursed. How much effort she put into ingratiating herself at the most important moments in her life, Ora thinks sadly. Her legs are starting to lose their feeling. She tries sitting on a different rock, then another, and eventually goes back to the ground. These are no conditions for writing an autobiography, she thinks.

  And after a few minutes they laid Ofer on me. It bothered me that he was wrapped in a hospital blanket. I wanted to be naked with him. Everyone else in that room except the two of us was completely unnecessary for me. And Avram wasn’t there.

  She gives him a cautious glance. Maybe she should erase the last few words. Maybe she’ll want Ofer to read this one day? Maybe she and Ilan will—

  In her gut she begins to feel disquiet. Who is she writing this for? And why? There are almost two pages now. How has she produced two pages? Avram lies on his back on the other side of the fire, which by now is only a heap of glowing embers. He faces the sky. His beard looks disheveled. Someone should tidy up his beard. She studies his face: at twenty he started going bald, from the forehead back, the first in his age group, but by that time he’d grown an impressive head of strong, wild hair, and he had thick sideburns down to the middle of his cheek, which made him look even older than he already did, and gave him—as he once wrote to her in a letter—the face of a moist-lipped, avaricious, Dickensian landlord. As usual, his description was right, and there was no point arguing with him. He always had picturesque depictions, so cruel and captivating—particularly the way he described his own appearance and personality. It was thanks to these descriptions—she only now realizes—that he was able to seduce everyone else into seeing him through his own eyes, and perhaps that was how he protected himself from any overly autonomous gazes that might have caused real pain. Ora smiles at him furtively, with amused appreciation, as though discovering after the fact that someone had played a clever and incredibly successful trick on her.

  And perhaps also from gazes that are too loving, she adds in the notebook without thinking, and l
ooks at the words with some surprise. She quickly crosses them out with one sharp line.

  Later, when all the doctors and midwives and nurses and the guy who stitched me up had left, I unwrapped Ofer and held him to my bosom.

  That last word sends a warm tremor through her body. What does that tremor remind her of? What is it bringing back to her now? To my bosom, she whispers inside, and her body replies sweetly: Avram. He used to lick the tiny hairs on her cheeks, beneath her temples, and murmur, “the segment of thy temples,” or “feathery down.” As he held her and dreamily whispered, “the curvature of your hips,” or “the silk behind your knees,” she would smile to herself and think: Look at him working up his heart with words. She quickly learned that when she overcame her shyness and repeated into his ear, “feathery down,” “you against my bosom,” and other such phrases, he hardened inside her.

  The way Ofer touched me, right from the first moments, from the minute he was born, was the most comforting, simple, smooth touch anyone had ever given me. Ilan once said that Ofer seemed, from the beginning, like a person who was at peace with his position. A person perfectly adapted to his life. And it was so true, at least when he was a child, not so much later. We went through all sorts of periods with him. Difficult things, too. In fact recently, in the army, we had a complicated situation with him. For me, mainly. Because they, the three of them, got over it very nicely.

  Maybe I shouldn’t write this, but because of that tranquillity Ofer had at first, I always had the illusion, or some sort of faith, that with him I could guess the future with some certainty (and by the way, Ilan admitted it too, so it’s not just my notorious naïveté). I mean, I thought that with him we could guess, more or less, what kind of person he would grow up to be, and how he would act in all sorts of situations and that we could know there would be no surprises along the way. (Talking about surprises, I forgot to mention that I’m in the Galilee now, in some valley, and his father Avram (!) is lying not far from me (!!), dozing, or watching the stars.)

  She takes a deep breath, only now truly grasping that she is here, far away from her life. Her heart surges with gratitude for the darkness full of whistling and chirping crickets, for the night itself, which for the first time since she left is taking her in with a tender generosity, agreeing to hide her away from everything at the bottom of this remote ravine, and even giving her the trees and the bushes, whose scents waft sweetly but sharply toward the nocturnal butterflies.

  I’m going back a little, to just after the birth: Ilan stood next to us and watched. He had a strange look on his face. There were tears in his eyes. I remember that, because when Adam was born Ilan was completely cool and functional (and I didn’t realize that those were actually the signs of what was starting to bubble up inside him). But with Ofer he cried. And I thought that was a good sign, because throughout the pregnancy I was afraid he was going to leave me again after the birth, and those tears reassured me a little.

  Her lips are slightly open and her nostrils widen. She stays with the momentum: With Ilan, it’s when he laughs that he looks sad, even a little cruel sometimes (because his eyes somehow stay distant), and when he cries he always looks as if he’s laughing.

  And I suddenly realized that Ilan and I were completely alone with the baby. I remember that it got very quiet suddenly, and I was afraid he would try to crack a joke. Because Ilan, when he’s tense, he has to force a joke out, and that was so wrong for me. I didn’t want anything to grate on our first moments together.

  But Ilan was clever this time, and he didn’t say anything.

  He sat down next to us and didn’t know what to do with his hands, and I saw that he wasn’t touching Ofer. Then he said, “He has an observant look.” I was glad that those were the first words he said about him—or that anyone in the world said about him. I never forget those words.

  I took Ilan’s hand and placed it on Ofer’s. I could tell it was hard for him, and I felt Ofer respond immediately. His whole body tensed up. I interlaced my fingers with Ilan’s, and together I stroked Ofer with him, back and forth along his body. I had already decided to call him Ofer. I’d considered other names while I was pregnant, but as soon as I saw him, I knew they weren’t right. Not Gil or Amir or Aviv. They had too many I’s, and he looked more like an O, calm and even a little grave (but with a drop of thoughtful distance, sort of observing, like an E). I said to Ilan: “Ofer.” And he agreed. I realized I could have named him Melchizedek or Chedorlaomer and Ilan would agree, and I didn’t like that, because I know Ilan, and obedience is not his strong suit, and besides, I was suspicious.

  So I said, “Call him.” Ilan murmured a slightly faded “Ofer.” I said to Ofer: “That’s your dad.” I felt Ilan’s fingers freeze in my hand. I thought it was all coming back. Now he’ll get up and leave, it’s some sort of reflex with him, to leave me when I give birth. Ofer fluttered his eyelids a few times, as though he was goading Ilan to talk already! And Ilan had no choice at that point, so he smiled crookedly and said, “Listen, pal, I’m your dad and that’s that, no arguments.”

  She looks up at Avram and smiles distractedly, though with a glimmer of distant happiness, and sighs.

  “What?” asks Avram.

  “It’s good.”

  Avram props himself up slightly. “What’s good?”

  “To write.”

  “So I hear,” he says dismissively and turns away.

  He, who wrote all his life, right up to the last minute, until the Egyptians came and more or less took the pen out of his hand. From six in the morning until ten at night, every day. And he wrote more than ever after he met Ilan and their bond was forged. She knows that that was when his engine was really started, because there was finally someone who truly understood him and competed with him and stimulated him. She thinks about everything that poured out of Avram in the six years after he met Ilan in the hospital—well, Ilan and her. Plays, poems, stories, comedy sketches, and mostly radio plays, which he and Ilan wrote and recorded on the clunky Akai reel-to-reel in the shed in Tzur Hadassah. She remembers one series—it had at least twenty episodes; Avram liked horribly long epics—about a world in which all human beings are children in the morning, adults at noon, elderly in the evening, and back again. And there was a serial play that described a world where humans only communicate honestly and openly in their sleep, through dreams, and know nothing about it when they awake. One of their more successful series, in her opinion, was about a jazz fan who is swept into the ocean and reaches an island inhabited by a tribe that has no music at all, not even whistling or humming, and he gradually teaches them about what they lack. Avram and Ilan created a world in almost everything they did. Avram usually came up with the ideas, and Ilan would try to anchor him to reality as much as he could. Ilan collaborated on the writing and added “musical embellishments” on his saxophone, or with the help of his many albums. A Sambatyon River of ideas and inventions burst out of Avram—“My Golden Age,” he called it once, after he had dried up.

  For his twentieth birthday, she bought him his first idea book. She was sick of watching him turn the house upside down and his pockets—and hers—inside out as he desperately searched for his scraps of paper. A constant foliage of notes whirled around his head wherever he went. She scribbled a limerick on the first page of the notebook: “There was a young man who could write / Like a spring he gushed out, day and night. / All day long he would wander / Imagine and ponder / This notebook will be his delight.” Within two months he’d filled up the entire thing and asked her to buy him a second one. “You inspire me,” he said, and she laughed, as usual: “Moi? A bear of little brain like me?” She honestly could not understand how she could inspire anyone, and he looked at her warmly and said that now he knew what Sarah’s laugh had sounded like, when she was told at the age of ninety that she would give birth to Isaac. He added that she didn’t understand anything, about him or about inspiration. After that, Ora always bought his idea books. They had to be small enoug
h to fit in the back pocket of his jeans, and he took them everywhere. He slept with them too, and kept at least one pen in every bed he slept in, so he could jot down nocturnal ideas. He wanted the notebooks to be very simple, no bells and whistles, although he did like the fact that she varied the colors and styles. The most important thing to him was that they came from her. They had to come from her, he stressed, and looked at her with such gratitude that it churned her insides. She felt ceremonious whenever she went to buy a new notebook. She browsed in different stationery shops, first in Haifa and then, after her army service, in Jerusalem, her new city, looking for a notebook that would be just right for the particular period, for the specific idea he was writing about, for his mood. She moans distractedly, tightens her legs together, and her stomach excites at the open pleasure with which he used to hold her notebooks: she liked to see him weigh the new notebook in his hand, feel it, smell it, flip through the pages quickly and greedily, like a card player, to see how many pages it had—how much pleasure was in store for him. A titillating, exposed, shameless pleasure. Once he told her—she never forgot it—that every time he wrote a new character he had to understand its body, that’s where he started. He had to wallow in the character’s flesh and saliva and semen and milk, feel the makeup of its muscles and tendons, whether its legs were long or short, how many steps it took to cross this or that room, how it ran for a bus, how tight its ass was when it stood facing a mirror, and how it walked, and ate, and how exactly it looked when it took a shit or danced, and if it climaxed with a shout or with modest, prudish moans. Everything he wrote had to be tangible and physical—“Like this!” he yelled, and held up one cupped hand, fingers spread, in a gesture that from anyone else would look rude and cheap, but from him, at least at that moment, was an overflowing basin of fervor and passion, as though he were palming a large, heavy breast.