To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  They stand up and linger. Avram thinks about the story he wrote when he was serving in Sinai and up until he was taken hostage. It had a subplot whose power he discovered only when he was a POW, and he used to dive into it over and over again to revive himself a little. It was about two seven-year-old orphans who find an abandoned baby in a junkyard. Lots of people were getting rid of their children and babies at the time, and the two kids, a boy and a girl, find the baby, crying and hungry, and decide that he is a God-baby, the afterthought child born to an elderly God, who also apparently wanted to get rid of his child and so he threw the baby into this world. The two children vow to raise the baby themselves and bring him up to be completely different from his cruel, bitter father, so that he will fundamentally change what Avram called simply, long before he was taken hostage, the ill fate. And so in between tortures and interrogations, every time he found a drop of energy within himself, Avram delved into the lives of the two children and the baby. Sometimes, mostly at night, he would manage for several minutes to merge completely with the little baby. His broken, tortured body would melt into the innocent, whole creature, and he would remember, or imagine, how he himself was once a baby, and then a little boy, and how the world was one clear circle, until his father got up one evening from the dinner table, overturned the pot of soup on the stove top, and started beating Avram’s mother and Avram himself with an outpouring of fury, almost tearing them to shreds, and then walked out and vanished as though he’d never existed.

  Avram touches her arm gently. “Come on, Ora. Let’s keep going, so we’ll find it before—”

  “Find what?”

  “The notebook, no?”

  “Before what?”

  “I don’t know, before people get there, you don’t want anyone—”

  She follows him, weak and parched. That whole era pushes its way up inside her. The nightmarish mornings, the decontaminated, censored sandwiches she made—only after, of course, dressing him meticulously as an armed cowboy—the vegetarianism on the one hand, and that murderousness on the other, she now realizes in astonishment. And the suspicious way he checked his sandwich several times, the sour expression of a customs official that came over his little face, the haggling over what time she would pick him up from the preschool of carnivores, and his desperate clinging to her back—she rode him there on a bike—as they got closer to the preschool and heard the children shouting happily. And his wild delusions—that’s how she had preferred to think of them at the time—that the children kept touching him on purpose, spitting hot-dog spit on him.

  Day after day she abandoned him, left him stuck to the chain-link fence with iron diamonds imprinted on his cheeks, his face smeared with tears and snot as he sobbed loudly. She would turn her back on him, slip away and keep hearing him bawl for many more hours, and as she got farther away from the preschool, she heard him shout louder and louder. And if when he was four she did not know how to help him—powerless against what she felt raging inside him—what good can she do for him now, on this silly, pathetic journey? What good are her chattering with Avram and her baseless bargain with fate? She walks on, and her heavy feet barely obey her. It’s good to get away from the news, that man said, especially after yesterday. What happened yesterday. How many. Who. Have they informed the families yet. Run home, run, they’re on their way.

  She walks almost without looking. Falls through the expanses of an infinite space. She is one human crumb. Ofer is also one human crumb. She can’t slow his fall by even one second. And though she gave birth to him, though she is his mother and he came out of her body, now, at this moment, they are merely two specks floating, falling, through infinite, massive, empty space. What it all comes down to, Ora senses, is randomness in everything.

  Something makes her zigzag, a slight arrhythmia of the feet, and then comes a painful spasm where her thigh meets her groin.

  “Wait, don’t run.”

  Avram seems to be enjoying the quick descent down the hill, the wind slapping his face, cooling it down, but she stops to lean against a pine tree and holds on to the trunk.

  “What’s up, Ora’leh?”

  Ora’leh, he called her. It just slipped out. They both glance quickly at each other.

  “I don’t know, maybe we should slow down.”

  She takes small, cautious steps, avoiding as best she can the tormented iliacus muscle. Avram walks beside her, as Ora’leh skips between them like a cheerful kid goat.

  “Sometimes I used to fantasize that you came in disguise, or sat in a cab by the playground when I was there with him, and watched us. Did you ever do anything like that?”

  “No.”

  “Not even once?”

  “No.”

  “No temptation to know what he looked like, what he was?”

  “No.”

  “You just cut him out of your life.”

  “Stop, Ora. We’ve run our course with this.”

  She swallows a double dose of bile over the “run our course” that somehow rolled from Ilan to him. “Sometimes I would get this feeling in my back, something between a tickle and a prick, here”—she points—“and I wouldn’t turn around, I would force myself not to turn around. I would just say to myself quietly, with an insane sort of calmness, that you were there, around me, looking at us, watching us. Come on, let’s stop for a minute.”

  “Again?”

  “I don’t know. Look, it’s not right. To go back down, to go back, it’s not good for me.”

  “The downhill is hard for you?”

  “Going back is hard for me, retracing our steps—in my body. I feel all crooked, I don’t know.”

  His arms hang by his sides. He stands waiting for her instructions. At such moments, she feels, he annuls his own volition. In the blink of an eye he steps out of his own being and covers himself with an impenetrable coating: nothing to do with life.

  “Listen, I think—I can’t go back.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Me neither.”

  “But the notebook—”

  “Avram, going back is not good for me.”

  As soon as she says it, the knowledge is as strong and clear as a compulsion. She reverses direction and starts going up the mountain, and it’s the right thing, she has no doubt. Avram stands there for a moment, sighs, then uproots himself and follows her, grumbling to himself, “What difference does it make?”

  She walks, suddenly light-footed against the incline and against the weight of the man who is probably sitting on her rock right now, at the bottom of the valley, reading her notebook. The man she will probably never see again, who begged her with his eyes to let him help her—his lips like a ripe, cleaved plum—and from whom she now parts with a slight twinge of sorrow. She could do with his cup of coffee, but she has felt the bite of home, and she cannot go backward.

  “Even before Ofer was born, ever since the war, since you came back, I’ve lived with the feeling that I’m always being watched by you.”

  There. She’d told him what for years had embittered and sweetened her life at the same time.

  “Watched how?”

  “In your thoughts, in your eyes, I don’t know. Watched.”

  There were days—but of course she will not tell him this, not now—when she felt that at each and every moment, from the second she opened her eyes in the morning, through every motion she made, every laugh she laughed, when she walked and when she lay in bed with Ilan, she was acting a part in his play, in some mad sketch he was writing. And that she was acting for him perhaps more than for herself.

  “What is there to understand here?” She stops and suddenly turns around and unwillingly hurls at him: “It’s something Ilan and I felt all the time, all those years—that we were acting out a play on your stage.”

  “I never asked you to be my play,” Avram mutters angrily.

  “But how could we feel otherwise?”

  They both get sucked back, absorbed into one moment, two boys and
a girl, almost children: Take a hat, put two pieces of paper in it. But what am I drawing for? You’ll find out only afterward.

  “And don’t get me wrong. Our lives were completely real and full, with the kids and our work, and the hiking and nights out and trips abroad and our friends”—the fullness of life, she thinks again in Ilan’s voice—“and there were long periods of time, years, when that look of yours in our back, we hardly felt it. Well, maybe not years. Weeks. Okay, maybe a day here and there. Overseas, for example, when we went on vacation, it was easier to be free of you. Although that’s not accurate either, because in the most beautiful places, the most tranquil spots, I would suddenly feel the jab in my back—no, in my stomach, here, and Ilan would feel it too, at the same second, always. Well, it wasn’t that hard to feel, because the minute we said anything that sounded like you, or one of your jokes, or just a sentence that begged to be said in your voice, you know. Or when Ofer folded his shirt collar with your exact movement, or when he made the spaghetti sauce you taught me how to make, or a thousand and one other things. And then we’d look each other in the eye and wonder where you were at that moment, how you were doing.”

  “Ora, don’t run,” Avram groans behind her, but she doesn’t hear.

  And that was part of life too, she thinks with some surprise. Part of the fullness of our lives: the void of you, which filled us.

  For one moment her entire being is the look she used to give Ofer sometimes, when she gazed deep inside him as if through a one-way mirror, into the place where she saw in him what he himself did not know.

  And maybe that’s exactly why he stopped looking you in the eye? Maybe that’s why he didn’t come to the Galilee with you?

  She can no longer contain what wells up inside her. She has reached some sort of peak, and something inside her crumbles and melts and relaxes and loosens with an internal surprise mingled with warm sweetness. Tall, strong, and Amazonian she stands on a rock above Avram, hands on her hips, and scans him with a penetrating look. Then she laughs. “Isn’t this nuts? Isn’t it crazy?”

  “What?” he asks breathlessly. “What, out of all that?”

  “That first I run away to the edge of the world, and now I suddenly can’t take half a step farther from home?”

  “So that’s what this is? You’re running home?”

  “I was aching before, my whole body, when I started getting farther away.”

  “Oh.” He massages his hip, which hurts from the last few minutes’ sprint.

  “You must be thinking, This madwoman has kidnapped me.”

  He looks up at her with a large, sweaty face and smiles. “I’m still waiting to hear what to offer as ransom.”

  “That’s easy.” She leans down to him with her hands on her knees, and her breasts round into the opening of her shirt. “The ransom is Ofer.”

  They set off—she likes feeling the words pulse: setting off, two friends set off on their way, off we go—and the path is effortless, and they are too, and for the first time since starting the walk, their heads seem less bowed and their eyes are not simply staring at the path and the tips of their shoes. They go uphill and downhill with the path, which becomes a broad gravel road, then they climb over a security fence and lose the markers in a thicket of growth. A field of tall green thistles covers everything, so they decide to trust their nascent travelers’ intuition and walk bravely and quietly for another few hundred meters through the thistles, without a clue which way to go, without a grasp—like a baby’s first steps, Ora thinks—and her anxiety for Ofer rouses in her, and she feels that she is not helping him now, that the thread she is tying around him is suddenly loosening. Still there is no sign of the path, and their steps grow heavy, and they stop every so often to look around while other pairs of eyes watch them: a lizard pauses to scan them suspiciously, another darts by with a grasshopper in its mouth, and a swallowtail hesitates briefly before laying a pale yellow egg on a fennel stalk. All these creatures seem to sense that something in the general rhythm has gone awry, someone has lost his way. But then they spot an orange-blue-and-white marker glimmering on a rock, and they both point at it, delighting in the sweetness of their small victory. Avram runs over and scuffs his sole on the rock, a male marking his territory, and they both confess to their worry and praise themselves for having managed to keep it to themselves and not burden each other. The markers become frequent again now, as though the path is seeking to compensate its walkers for having tested them.

  “I remembered something,” Ora says. “When Ofer was born, when we brought him home from the hospital, I stood over his crib and looked at him. He was sleeping, tiny, but with that big head, and the scrunched-up red face with capillaries visible on his cheeks, from the effort of being born, and his fist was clenched next to his face. He looked like a little boxer, tiny and furious, as if he was focused on an anger he had somehow dragged into this world. But mainly, he looked lonely. As though he had fallen from a planet and the only thing he knew was that he had to defend himself.

  “And then Ilan came and stood next to me and hugged my shoulders and looked at him with me, and it was so different from when we brought Adam home.”

  Avram watches the three of them, then quickly looks away and quotes the sign Ilan had stuck on the door to Adam’s room: “The hotel management expects guests to leave when they reach the age of 18!”

  “And Ilan said that when he was in the army and they used to send him to a new base where he didn’t know anyone and didn’t want to, the first thing he would do was find himself a bed in the farthest corner, and spend his first few hours napping, just to allow himself to adjust to the place unconsciously, in his sleep.”

  Avram smiles distractedly. “That’s right. Once they spent half a day looking for him on the base at Tassa. They thought he’d flipped out on the way.”

  Ora remembers how she’d elbowed Ilan next to Ofer’s crib as he slept with his fist clenched and said emphatically, “Here you are, my darling, I’ve made another solider for the IDF.” Ilan had quickly given the requisite reply that by the time Ofer grew up there would be peace.

  So, she thinks, which one of us was right?

  They walk side by side, each within himself, yet woven together. Capillary channels burst through Avram constantly as Ora speaks. Where was I when they stood over Ofer’s crib? What was I doing at that moment? Sometimes, when he tries out a new medication, he wakes up with an unfamiliar pain and lies awake, his face flushed with cold sweat, listening inside as a stream of infected blood makes its way into an internal organ whose existence he has never been aware of. That’s how he feels now, except the fear is completely different, both concealed and alarming, and the channels seem to be drawing a new map as they emerge.

  Ora’s backpack suddenly feels almost weightless, as though someone has quietly come up to support her from behind. She feels like singing, shouting in joy, dancing through the field. The things she is telling him! The things they’re saying to each other!

  “Ora, you’re running.”

  She’s not sure if he’s referring only to how fast she’s walking.

  She starts to squeak out a laugh. “And do you know what Ofer always says he wants to do when he grows up?”

  Avram molds his face into a question mark, holds his breath, amazed at her reckless incursion into the future.

  “He wants”—she doubles over, snorting, unable to speak—“he wants a job where they’ll do experiments on him while he sleeps.”

  There you go again smiling, she thinks at Avram. Be careful, otherwise it might stick. Incidentally, I do appreciate your smiles, don’t hold back. At home I didn’t see much of them from my three wiseacres. Because mostly what those three are good at is making jokes. They’re not nearly as good at laughing, especially not at my jokes. They have some sort of screwed-up team spirit, which makes them refuse to laugh at my cracks. “But how do you expect anyone to laugh at your jokes when you hog all the laughter from the get-go?” Ilan had once won
dered.

  She wants to tell him: You know, Ofer has a laugh exactly like yours. Like a kookaburra in rewind. She hesitates. Your laugh? That one you used to have? She doesn’t even know how to phrase it. She almost asks: Do you still laugh that way sometimes, until tears run from your eyes? Until you lie down on your back and twitch your hands and legs? Do you laugh at all? Is there anything that can make you laugh?

  The girl, the one he used to mention, the young one. Does she make him laugh?

  They come across a tiny lake, and after some hesitation they take a dip, Ora in her underwear—a compromise between several convoluted, conflicting wishes and fears—and Avram fully clothed, then after a few minutes, wearing only his pants. And there is his body, glisteningly pale, dotted with scars and wounds, fleshier than she remembered, but also more solid than she imagined, and it is when he is nude that he emits a surprisingly brawny power. And he of course, as always, chooses to see only the “fleshy” that passes before her eyes, and apologetically pinches a fold of flesh, presenting it for her to study, and shrugs his shoulders with a this-is-all-I’ve-got sort of grief. But what she remembers is how he used to whisper when he saw her naked body, “Oh God, Ora’leh, such resplendence.” Apart from Ada, no one she knew had ever used that word, which had existed only in poetry. Or he would swing his heavy head over her and neigh like a horse, or roar like a lion, or, like old Captain Cat in Under Milk Wood, bellow: “Let me shipwreck in your thighs!”

  She goes under the shallow water and can dimly sees his froggish body faltering nearby, and an old pain resurfaces, the memory of the moments when that thick, creased, careless body would light up and stretch into a blazing thread, and she would hold his face with both hands and force him to look in her eyes, to stay as open as he could, and she would study his eyes and see a gaze with a distant edge that was entirely open, endless, and she would know that there was one place where she was entirely, unconditionally loved, where all of her was gratefully, happily accepted.