To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  In the morning Adam got up and saw Ilan there and asked Ora, “Is that the man from the shed?”

  Ilan said, “Yes, and you’re Adam,” and he held out his hand.

  Adam clung to Ora, hid his face in her dressing gown, and from behind her leg he said, “I’m mad at you.”

  “Why?”

  “ ’Cause you didn’t come.”

  “I was very silly, but now I’m here.”

  “Will you leave again?”

  “No, I’ll stay here forever.”

  Adam thought for a long while and looked at Ora for help. She smiled encouragingly, and he said, “And you’ll be my daddy?”

  “Yes.”

  Adam thought some more, his face turning red with the effort to understand, and finally he let out a sigh that tugged at Ora’s heart, the sigh of a hopeless old man, and said, “Well, make me some cocoa, then.”

  That afternoon Ilan went to see Avram in Tel Aviv and came back a whole year later—that’s how it felt to Ora—dejected and gray. He hugged her with all his body and mumbled that everything would be all right, maybe, or maybe not. She asked what happened, and he said, “Never mind, everything happened, we went through all possible situations. Bottom line, he doesn’t want us in his life. You or me. Our story with him is over.”

  She asked if there was any chance Avram might be willing to meet with her, even for a few minutes, at least to say goodbye properly. “No chance,” Ilan said, with an impatience that she did not like. “He doesn’t want anything to do with life, that’s what he said.”

  “What?” Ora whispered. “Is he talking about suicide?”

  “I don’t think so, he just doesn’t want anything to do with life.”

  “But how can that be?” she shouted. “How can he turn his back like that and erase everything?”

  “Do you really not understand him? Because I do. I so understand him.” He grunted at Ora as though she were to blame for something or as though he envied Avram for now having an unshakable excuse to cut off his ties with human beings.

  “Then why did you come back? Why do you even want to come back?”

  He shrugged his shoulders and looked at her belly, and she exploded inside but said nothing, because what could she say?

  That night they got into bed, he on his side and she on hers, as though years had not gone by without this routine and their familiar gestures, the shower, the brushing of teeth together, his sounds in the bathroom, the way he sat on the bed with his back to her, naked and glorious, and quickly put on his sweatpants, then lay down and stretched his body out with a pleasure she found jarring. Ora waited for him to quiet down and asked in the calmest voice she could produce whether he was only coming back to her for Avram—she motioned with her chin at her stomach—or because he loved her, too.

  “I never stopped loving you even for one day. How is it possible not to love you?” he replied.

  “Well, obviously it’s possible. Avram doesn’t love me anymore, and I don’t really love myself.”

  Ilan wanted to ask, what about him—how did she feel about him? But he said nothing, and she understood, and said she didn’t know. She didn’t know what she felt. He nodded to himself, as though he enjoyed hurting himself with her words. She saw the color drain from his bronzed temple and from the cheek that faced her, and again, as always, she was amazed to discover how precious and important she was to him, yet how he constantly withheld the simple security of that knowledge from her.

  “It’s one hell of a job, this life,” he said.

  As if from within a dark mine, she said, “That’s how I’ve felt for years. Since the war, since Avram, I’ve felt like I was crawling through the dark, digging. But tell me more, what happened with him, what did you talk about?”

  “Listen, he literally begged us to leave him alone. To forget that he even existed.”

  Ora laughed. “Forget Avram. Yeah, sure. Did you talk about this?” She hinted at her belly.

  “He almost hit me when I tried to say something. He just goes berserk, physically, it drives him mad to think that he will have a child in the world.”

  And Ora thought: That he’ll have something to hold him here.

  Ilan murmured, “It’s like he was on his way out, and his sleeve caught on a nail in the door.”

  Ora briefly felt as though there really was a nail in her womb.

  She turned the light off and they lay there quietly, feeling the vapors of the previous night’s untamed happiness dissipate. Their mouths filled with the metallic taste of what was and always would be irredeemable.

  “I actually thought it would make things easier for him,” Ora said, “rescue him even, you know, connect him with life again.”

  “He doesn’t want to hear about it.” He was quoting Avram and the hardness in his voice again. “He doesn’t want to hear or see or know anything about this kid. Nothing.”

  “But what do you want?”

  “You.”

  She had many more questions that she did not dare ask, and she did not know if he understood what he was getting himself into, and whether he might not regret it the next day. But there was something unfamiliar in his determination, a molten thread that suddenly glowed in him, and it occurred to her that perhaps Ilan could tolerate it better this way, with the complications. Perhaps he could only tolerate it this way.

  “And I promised him,” Ilan said, hinting. “He really begged me—”

  “What?” Ora lifted up on one elbow and examined his face in the dark.

  “Never to say anything.”

  “To who?”

  “Anyone.”

  “You mean, not even—”

  “No one.”

  A secret? The thought of raising a child with a secret weighed on her. She lay back, feeling as though someone were trying to erect a transparent, cold partition between her and the little creature in her stomach. She wanted to cry, and she had no tears. She saw images of those close to her, the people she would have to hide the secret from, the people she would lie to for the rest of her life. With each of them, the lie and the concealment had a different painful taste. She felt the mine branching out into more and more tunnels and caves, and she was suffocating.

  “I won’t be able to keep a secret like that for even one day, you know what I’m like.”

  Ilan shut his eyes tight and saw Avram, the pleading in his face, and said, “We owe him this.” And Ora heard: Take a hat, put two identical slips of paper in it.

  Ilan reached out and put his arm around her shoulders, but they did not move closer to each other. They lay on their backs and looked at the ceiling. His arm was under the back of her neck, lifeless, and they both knew that what had happened the night before in the shed would not happen again until after the baby was born. Perhaps not then, either. Adam, in his room, delivered a tempestuous monologue in his sleep, and they listened. Ora felt how much coldness had built up behind her eyes. She could feel that the secret and the hiding were already starting to distort her.

  Then Ilan fell asleep and breathed very quietly, leaving not a scratch in the air. She felt some relief. She got up quietly and went into Adam’s room and sat down on the floor, leaning against the chest of drawers opposite his bed. As she listened to his restless sleep, she thought about the three years of raising him on her own and about what they had meant to each other in those years. She hugged her body and felt the blood coursing through her veins again. She would have time to figure out everything that was happening, she thought. She didn’t have to solve it all tonight. She got up and fixed Adam’s blanket and stroked his forehead until he calmed down and slept peacefully. Then she went back to bed, lay there, and thought about the little creature and how she would change everyone’s life, would maybe even manage to change Avram’s life, just by existing. She felt sleepy. Her last thought was that now Adam and Ilan would have to learn to be father and son again. A moment before she fell asleep, she smiled: Ilan’s toes were poking out from the bottom of the
blanket.

  She comes back from the dark bushes in a hurry, pebbles flying under her feet. Avram looks at her, and she goes straight for the notebook, signaling to him that she’s remembered something.

  She writes.

  A minute after he came out of me, even before they cut the umbilical cord, I closed my eyes and told you in my heart that you had a son. I said, “Mazel tov, Avram, you and I have a son.”

  I’ve often wondered where you were at that moment. What exactly were you doing? Did you feel something? Because how could you not feel anything, or not even know, with some seventh or eighth sense, that this was happening to you?

  She bites the pen. Hesitates, then spurts out onto the page: I want to know if it’s possible to feel nothing, or know nothing, when your son is, say, getting hurt somewhere?

  A cold wave hits the bottom of her gut.

  Stop, stop, what am I even doing here? What is this writing? It’s better not to think about it.

  Automatic writing they call it, I think. Like automatic fire. In all directions. T-t-t-t-t-t-t.

  I feel that I haven’t told you enough about what happened after the birth.

  About two hours after the delivery, when the whole team was gone and everyone had really finally left us alone, and Ilan had gone to tell Adam, I talked with Ofer. I just said everything. I told him who Avram was, and what he meant to me and to Ilan.

  The pen flies over the page now as though she’s chopping a salad. Her teeth bite her lower lip.

  It surprised me how simple the story was when I told it to him. That was the first time (and probably the last) that I was able to think about us that way. The whole complication that was us, Avram and Ilan and me, all of a sudden became one little unequivocal child, and the story was simple.

  Avram pours coffee into the mugs and hands her one. She stops writing and smiles a thank-you. He nods, You’re welcome. They briefly emit the calm, kettlish hum of a couple. She looks up with distracted confusion, then back to the notebook.

  I was alone with him in the room, and I talked into his ear. I didn’t want a single word to escape into the open air. I gave him an infusion of his history. He lay in total silence and listened. He already had huge eyes. He listened to me with his eyes open and I spoke into his ear.

  She feels the warmth of that virginal touch with her lips. Her mouth on the delicate oyster.

  If you had been there, if you had only seen us there, everything would have been different. I’m certain. For you, too. It’s silly to think that way, I know, but there was something in that room—

  I don’t even know how to put it. There was such health there. Within all the complication there was health, and I felt that if you would only come and stand with us for a moment, or sit next to us on the edge of the bed and touch Ofer, even just his toes, you would instantly be healed and finally come back to us.

  They flow and flow, the words flow out of her. The sensation is sharp, sturdy, focused: when she writes, Ofer is safe.

  If you had come and sat on the edge of my bed in the hospital, you could have told Ofer exactly what Ilan said to him: “I’m your dad and that’s that. No arguments.” It wouldn’t have confused him. He would simply have been born into it like a child is born into two different languages and doesn’t even know he’s supposed to adapt to something.

  She tastes the coffee, and it’s lukewarm. Gone cold. She smiles at Avram with encouragement, with thanks, but he notices the tiny quiver of her mouth, and he takes the mug away and empties it and pours her a new one from the boiling finjan. She drinks. It’s good, now it’s very good. Her eyes, above the lip of the mug, run over the lines she has written.

  And I told him all the things it was important for him to know, everything he had to hear once in his lifetime—even when he dozed I talked to him. I told him how I met Ilan and Avram, and that I was more or less a girlfriend to both of them since we met, Ilan’s girlfriend and Avram’s friend (although I occasionally got confused with that division). And I told him how I finished my army service while they stayed on for one more year in regular service and another year in the standing army, and I was already living in Jerusalem, on Tiberias Street in Nachlaot, and I was in my first year studying social work, and I really loved my studies and my life. He lay on me and listened with his eyes open.

  I also told him about the lots they asked me to draw, forced me to, and what happened afterward in the war, and how Avram came back from there, and about the treatments and the hospitalizations and the interrogations, because for some reason the Shabak was convinced he’d given the Egyptians the most vital state secrets. Of all the people, they picked him to harass, and maybe they really did know something, you could never tell with Avram, after all, with his parallel-dimension games and plot twists, and the way he had to be loved by everyone, everywhere, and everyone had to know that he was special, that he was the best. So maybe they did know something.

  I told him how we took care of Avram, we were the only ones there to take care of him, because his mother had died when he was in basic training and he had no one in the world except the two of us. And I told him how Ilan and I made Adam when Avram was still in the hospital, almost by accident we made him, almost unconsciously, I swear, we were so I-don’t-know-what that we clung to each other and made him, we were just two frightened children, and Ilan left me right after the birth, he said it was because of Avram, but I think he was also afraid to be with me and Adam, he was simply afraid of what we could give him, it had nothing to do with Avram.

  And I talked a bit about his brother, Adam, so he’d get to know him, so he’d know how to behave with him, because you needed an instruction manual for Adam. And in the end I told him that about two and a half years after Adam, I had made him with Avram, and I even told him it was “the negative of a fuck,” just like Avram had whispered in my ear while we were doing it. So he’d know his father-language right from the start.

  She’s warming up now. Really, who knew it was so good to write! Tiring, even more exhausting than walking, but when she writes she doesn’t have to keep walking and moving. Her whole body knows it: When she writes, when she writes about Ofer, she and Avram don’t need to run away from anything.

  When I finished telling him everything, I gave him a little tap with my fingertip under the nose, in the indentation of his lip, so he’d forget everything he’d heard and start over fresh and innocent.

  And then he burst out crying, for the first time since he was born.

  She lets go of the notebook, which falls between her legs, propped open like a little tent on the ground. Ora has the feeling that the words will hurry away from the lines and slip into the cracks of the earth. She turns the notebook up. She cannot believe that all those words came out of her. Almost four pages! And Ilan says she needs a few drafts just to write a grocery list.

  “Avram?”

  “Hmmmm …”

  “Let’s sleep a bit.”

  “Now? Isn’t it early?”

  “I’m beat.”

  “Okay. Whatever you want.”

  They cover the embers with dirt and stones. Avram rinses the utensils in the stream. Ora gathers up the leftovers and packs them in her backpack. Her motions are slow, contemplative. She thinks she detected some forgotten breeze in his voice, but when she replays his last few lines, she assumes she was wrong. The night is warm and there’s no need to set up the tents. They spread their sleeping bags out on either side of the extinguished fire. Ora is so tired that she falls asleep immediately. Avram stays awake for a long time. He lies on his side looking at the notebook with Ora’s hand resting on it. Her beautiful hand, he thinks, her long-fingered hand.

  Shortly after midnight she awakes, and her fear for Ofer leaps up inside her like an evil jack-in-the-box. It is a frantic, noisy fear that rattles its limbs, flashes a crazy look, and cackles loudly: Ofer will die! Ofer is already dead! She sits up, stung, and looks with wild eyes at Avram snoring heavily beyond the ashes.

  How
can he not feel what’s happening?

  The same way he didn’t feel it when Ofer was born.

  She can’t trust him. She’s alone with this.

  Their gloom as a pair falls upon her again, and the sadness of their lonely presence here, at the end of the world. What was she really thinking when she dragged him here? What is this foolishness? These sorts of sweeping, dramatic gestures are unlike her. They were right for the old Avram, not for her. She’s only an imposter, pretending to be tempestuous and daring. Just go sit at home, bake your pies, wait for the news about your son, and start getting used to life without him.

  She jumps up out of the sleeping bag, grabs the notebook, and in the dark writes Ofer Ofer Ofer, line after line, dozens of times, in large, crooked letters, and mumbles his name half out loud and aims and transmits his name in the darkness straight to Avram. So what if he’s asleep? This is what needs to be done now, this is the most effective antidote she has to the poison that might be consuming Ofer at this very minute. She shuts her eyes and imagines him, note for note, and wraps him in protective layers of light. She swaddles him in the warmth of her love and plants him, plants him over and over again in the sleeping consciousness beside her. Then, in the dark, guessing her way, without seeing the lines, she writes:

  I think, for example, about how he discovered his feet when he was a baby. How he enjoyed chewing and sucking them. I just think of the way he must have felt—that he was chewing something that existed in the world, that he could see it right in front of his eyes, but that it was also somehow arousing sensations within him. And maybe while he was sucking his toes, he started to grasp the very very edge of what is “me” and what is “mine.”