To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  And that sensation started flowing around the circle he’d drawn between his mouth and his feet.

  Me-mine-me-mine-me-mine-me

  It’s such a huge moment, and I hadn’t thought about it until now. How? Where was I? I’m trying to imagine where in his body he felt most “me” at that moment, and I think it’s exactly in his center, his pee-pee.

  I can feel it too now, when I write. Only with me it’s also very painful.

  So much of mine is no longer me.

  I wish I knew how to write more about that moment. There should be a whole story about that moment, when Ofer sucked his toes.

  Once, when he was about eighteen months old, he had a fever, maybe after a vaccination (What did they vaccinate against? Was it the triple one? Who can remember? I only remember that the nurse couldn’t find a fleshy enough spot on his bottom, and Ilan laughed and said Ofer needed an anti-triple vaccine). Anyway, he woke up in the middle of the night and was burning up, and he was talking to himself and singing in a high-pitched voice. Ilan and I stood there, two o’clock in the morning, dead tired, and we started to laugh. Because all of a sudden we didn’t recognize him. He was like a drunk, and we just cracked up, I think because now we saw him from a certain distance, and we both felt (together, I think) that he was still a bit foreign, like every baby that arrives from somewhere out there, from the unknown.

  But he really was a little foreign. He was Avram’s. He was at greater risk of foreignness than any other baby.

  She stops and tries to read what she’s written. She can barely see her writing on the page.

  I was so relieved when Ilan picked him up and said, “It’s not nice to laugh at you, you poor sick thing, and you’re a little inebriated, too.” I was so grateful to him for saying “It’s not nice to laugh at you,” rather than “at him.” All at once he cut through that foreignness, which had almost reared its head between us. And it was Ilan who did that.

  And just so you know—she looks at the sleeping Avram—so you don’t have any doubts, he was a wonderful father, to both boys. I really think fatherhood is the best thing about him.

  Then she turns to a new page and writes over its entire width, pressing hard so the pen almost tears through the page: Fatherhood? Not couplehood?

  She stares at the three words. She turns to the next page.

  But Ofer didn’t calm down. On the contrary—he started singing at the top of his lungs, really yodeling, and we got the giggles again, but now it was something completely different between us and there was a feeling that we were allowing ourselves to let loose a little, perhaps for the first time since the pregnancy, and also because it was suddenly clear to both of us that this time Ilan was staying. This was it, we were finally starting our life, and from now on we were a regular family.

  She breathes deeply, stilling her mind.

  You’re sleeping, snoring.

  What would you do if I came over and lay down next to you?

  I’ve been gone from home for almost a week.

  How did I do such a thing? How did I run away at a time like this? I’m insane.

  Maybe Adam’s right. Unnatural.

  No, you know what? I really don’t feel that way.

  Listen: so many feelings and nuances came to me with the children. I don’t know how much of it I understood at the time. If I even had a minute to stop and think. All those years now seem like one big tempest.

  That evening, with the fever and the yodeling, we gave Ofer a cold bath to bring his fever down. Ilan didn’t have the heart to do it. I put him in the bath. A diabolical invention, but an effective one. You just have to overcome the fear of stopping his breath in the first second. And I was convinced that he was turning blue in front of my eyes. His lips were shaking, and he screamed, and I told him it was for his own good. His fingers were around his tiny chest, and his heart beat almost without any gaps, and he shivered from the shock and probably also from my betrayal.

  Another time when I did that, Adam saw it and screamed at me that I was torturing Ofer. “You get into that water yourself!” he shouted. I said, “You know what? You’re right!” And I really did get in with him, and then the whole thing instantly turned into a funny game. Adam was the wisest of children.

  She holds her head in her hands. Cut by the pain of the wheel that cannot turn back. She sits and rocks herself. A uniform, persistent rustle comes from the bushes behind her, and a few seconds later two hedgehogs, perhaps a couple, march past in single file. The smaller one sniffs at Ora’s bare feet as she sits motionless. The hedgehogs pad away and disappear down the channel, and Ora whispers thank you.

  Look, Avram, about Ofer. I don’t know if I was a good mother to him. But he grew up pretty okay, I think. He is without a doubt the most stable and solid of my children.

  I lacked self-confidence when they were little. I made mistakes left and right. What did I know?

  Earlier you shouted at me, “You?” when I said I may not have been the best mother in the world. When I dared to destroy your—your what? Your illusion of the ideal family? Of the perfect mother? Is that how you thought about us?

  When it comes to the most important things, you’re such an illiterate.

  She looks up. Avram sleeps peacefully. Curled up in himself, maybe smiling in his sleep.

  The bottom line is that I think we were actually a pretty good family. Most of the time we were even, excuse the expression, pretty happy together. Of course we had our problems, the usual miserable troubles, the unavoidable ones. (What did you write to me once when you were in the army? “All happy families are miserable in their own way.” How did you know?) But still, I can say without reservation that since Ofer was born and up until the whole episode in the army, in Hebron, about a year ago, we were very happy together.

  And in a very uncharacteristic way for us, Ilan and I knew that even at the time. Not just in retrospect.

  She looks over at him. A lost and irrelevant leaf of joy hovers in her eyes.

  We had twenty good years. In our country, that’s almost chutzpah, isn’t it? “Something the ancient Greeks would be punished for.” (You said that once, but I don’t remember the context.)

  Twenty years we had. A long time. And don’t forget that six of those years covered the two boys’ army service (there was a five-day gap between Adam’s discharge and Ofer’s enlistment). And they both served in the Territories, in the lousiest places. The fact that we somehow managed to walk between the raindrops without really getting splattered even once, from any war or terrorist attack, from any rocket, grenade, bullet, shell, explosive device, sniper, suicide bomber, metal marbles, slingstone, knife, nails. The fact that we just lived out a quiet, private life.

  Do you get it? A small, unheroic life, one that deals as little as possible with the situation, God damn it, because as you know, we already paid our price.

  Sometimes, once every few weeks—

  Once a week or so, I would wake up with a panic attack and say quietly into Ilan’s ear: “Look at us. Aren’t we like a little underground cell in the heart of the ‘situation’?”

  And that really is what we were.

  For twenty years.

  Twenty good years.

  Until we got trapped.

  AT THE TOP of Keren Naphtali mountain, on a bed of poppies and cyclamens, they lie sweaty and breathless from the steep incline. They agree that this was the hardest climb so far, and gobble down some wafers and biscuits. “We have to get some food soon,” they remind each other, and Avram gets up to show her how much weight he’s lost over the past few days. He’s impressed at having slept through the night for the first time, four hours straight without a sleeping pill—“Do you know what that means?” “This trip is good for you,” she says, “dieting and walking and fresh air.” Avram agrees, although he sounds surprised: “I really do feel pretty good.” Then he says it again, like someone taunting a sleepy predator from a place of safety.

  Chiseled stone ruins sprawl behin
d them, remnants of an Arab village or perhaps an ancient temple. Avram—who happened to flip through an article not long ago—believes the stone is from the Roman era, and Ora welcomes his theory. “I can’t deal with Arab village ruins now,” she says. But a momentary illusion in her mind, composed instantaneously from the ruins, projects a tank roaring down a narrow alleyway, and before it can trample a parked car or ram the wall of a house, she moves her hands in front of her face and moans, “Enough, enough, my hard drive is overloaded with this stuff.”

  Broad Atlantic terebinths spread their branches and sway meditatively in the breeze. Not far away, antennas protrude from a small fenced-in military post, and a handsomely chiseled Ethiopian-born soldier stands motionless at the top of an observation tower, surveying the Hula Valley below, perhaps stealing a glance at them to spice up his guard duty. Ora stretches her whole body out and lets the breeze cool her skin. Avram sprawls in front of her, leans on one arm, and sifts dirt through his fingers.

  “It happened just before he turned four,” Ora tells him now. “Two or three months before, while I was making him lunch one day. I was already studying physiotherapy at the time, it was my last year, and Ilan had just opened his law firm, so it was a really crazy period. But at least I had two days a week when I finished school early and I could pick him up from day care and make him lunch. Is this really interesting to you, all this—”

  Avram chuckles and his eyelids blush. “I’m … it lets me—”

  “What? Tell me.”

  “I’m peeking into your lives.”

  “Yeah? Well, don’t peek: look. It’s all open. Ofer asked me what was for lunch. So I told him this and that, rice, let’s say, and meatballs.”

  Avram’s mouth moves distractedly, as though chewing the words. Ora remembers how he loved to eat, and to talk about food, man’s best friend, and how she had longed to cook for him all these years. At big family meals, at dinner parties, on holidays, every year at Seder night, she would set aside a big, full plate for him in her heart. Now she has the urge to tempt him with a dish of eggplant in tomato sauce, or lamb with couscous, or maybe one of her rich, comforting soups—he doesn’t even know what a good cook she is! Probably all he remembers are burned pots in her student apartment in Nachlaot.

  “Ofer asked me what meatballs are made of, and I mumbled something. I told him they were round balls, made of meat, and he thought about it and asked, ‘Then what’s meat?’ ”

  Avram pulls himself up into a seated position and hugs his legs.

  “To tell you the truth, Ilan always said he was just waiting for Ofer to ask that question, from the minute he started talking. From the minute we saw what kind of boy he was, really.”

  “What do you mean, ‘what kind of boy he was’?”

  “Wait, I’ll get there.”

  Something has been gnawing at her for several minutes, trying to get her attention. Something that was left on—a faucet in the house? A light? Her computer? Or maybe it’s Ofer? Is something happening to Ofer now? She listens in, clearing a path through her whispers and conjectures, but no, it’s not Ofer.

  “Ora?”

  “Where was I?”

  “You saw what kind of boy he was.”

  “So I said to Ofer that it was nothing, you know, just meat. I said it in the most casual voice: It’s nothing special, it’s just meat. You know, like we eat almost every day. Meat.”

  She sees it: thin little Ofer, her lovely child, starts padding from one foot to the other, like he always did when he was troubled or frightened—she gets up and demonstrates for Avram. “And he used to tug his left earlobe over and over again. Like this. Or he’d walk sideways, back and forth, quickly.”

  Avram doesn’t take his eyes off her. She comes back and sits down with a sigh. Her soul longs for that Ofer.

  “I stuck my head in the fridge and tried to avoid him, that look on his face, but he wouldn’t let it go. He asked who they took that meat from. And you should know that he really loved meat back then, beef and chicken. He hardly ate anything else, but he loved meatballs and schnitzel and hamburgers. He was a real carnivore, which made Ilan very happy. And me, for some reason.”

  “What?”

  “That he loved meat. I don’t know, some kind of primal satisfaction. You can understand that, can’t you?”

  “But I’m a vegetarian now.”

  “So that’s it!” she cries out. “I noticed the other day, on the moshav, that you didn’t touch—”

  “Three years already.”

  “But why?”

  “I just felt like cleansing myself.” He stares intently at his fingertips. “Well, you remember, there was a time when I didn’t eat meat for a few years.”

  When he came back from the POW prison. Of course she remembers: he used to gag every time he walked by a steak house or a shawarma stand. Even a fly burning in an electric bug trap nauseated him. And she suddenly remembers how her own stomach turned, many years later, when Adam and Ofer jokingly explained—it was a Shabbat dinner on a white tablecloth, with braided challah and chicken soup—what they thought “MBT” really stood for. Adam drove an MBT in the army, and then Ofer was a gunner, and later a commander, in the same tank. They rolled around laughing: “No, it’s not main battle tank! Where did you come up with that? It’s mutilated body transporter.”

  Avram continues. “But after a few years, five or six, I got my appetite back, and then I ate everything, and you know how much I love meat.”

  She smiles. “I know.”

  “But about three years ago, I gave it up again.”

  Now she gets it. “Three years ago exactly?”

  “Plus a few days, yes.”

  “A sort of vow?”

  He throws her a sly sideways glance. “Let’s say, a bargain.” And after a minute—her neck is flushed now—he adds, “You think you’re the only one who can make them?”

  “Make those bargains with fate, you mean?”

  Silence. She draws short lines in the dirt with a twig and puts a triangle over them—a roof. Three years of abstinence from meat, she thinks, and every evening he crossed off one line on the wall. What does that say? What is he saying to me?

  She went on. “Ofer thought about it some more, and asked if the cow that you take the meat from grows out new meat.”

  “Grows out,” Avram repeats with a smile.

  “I squirmed, and I said, ‘Not really, that’s not exactly how it works.’ Ofer paced around the kitchen again, faster and faster, and I could see that something was starting up inside him, and then he faced me and asked if the cow got a boo-boo when you took its meat. I had no choice, so I said yes.”

  Avram listens, every cord of his soul suddenly fascinated by the picture. By Ora talking with her child in the kitchen, and the little boy, thin and serious and troubled, darting around the narrow room, tugging on his earlobe, looking helplessly at his mother. Avram unwittingly holds his hand up in front of his face to ward off the domestic particles being hurled at him with intolerable abundance. The kitchen, the open fridge, a table set for two, steaming pots on the stove, the mother, the little boy, his distress.

  “Then he asked if they take the meat from a cow that’s already dead so it doesn’t hurt her. He was really trying to find some dignified way out of the mess, you see, for me, but somehow also for all of humanity. I knew I had to make up a white lie, and that later, with time, once he grew stronger and bigger and had enough animal protein, the time would come to tell him what you once called ‘the facts of life and death.’ Ilan was so furious with me afterward for not being able to come up with something, and he was right, he really was!” Her eyes grow fiery. “Because with kids you have to cut corners here and there, you have to hide things, soften the facts for them, there’s just no other way, and I wasn’t … I was never able to, I couldn’t lie.”

  Then she hears what she is saying.

  “Well, apart from … you know.”

  Avram does not dare to ask with
words, but his eyes practically spell out the question.

  “Because we promised you,” she says simply. “Ofer doesn’t know anything.”

  There is a hush. She wants to add something, but finds that after years of silence, of contracting the large muscle of consciousness, she cannot talk about it even with Avram.

  “But how can you?” he asks with a wonderment that confuses her. She thinks she hears a tone of condemnation.

  “You just can,” she whispers. “Ilan and I together. You can.”

  She is flooded by the warmth of the covenant they made together, which had only deepened around the large open pit of secretive silence, through the tenderness that emanated from the two of them on its brink, the cautious way they held on to each other so as not to fall in but not get too far away either, and the bitter knowledge, which also held a hint of special sweetness, that their life story was always being written in inverted letters too, and that no one else in the world—not even Avram—could read it. Even now, she thinks, even apart, we have that, that definitive thing of ours.

  She clenches her jaw and pushes deep back inside her what had dared to peer out into the light for a moment, and then, through the force of almost twenty-two years of practice, she transposes herself back onto the straight track, the simple one, from which she was displaced a moment ago, and she wipes the last few minutes off her slate—the memory of the vast and ungraspable anomaly of her life.

  “Where was I?”

  “In the kitchen. With Ofer.”

  “Yes, and Ofer of course got even more stressed out by my silence, and he was flying around the kitchen like a spinning top, back and forth, talking to himself, and I could see that he wasn’t even capable of putting into words what he suspected. Finally, I’ll never forget it, he bowed his head and stood there all tense and crooked”—with the subtlest of gestures, she becomes him in her body, in her face, in his torn look that peers out of her eyes, and Avram sees it, he sees Ofer: Look, you’re seeing him, you’ll never forget now, you won’t be able to live without him—“and then he asked me if there are people who kill the cow so they can take her meat. What could I say? I said yes.