To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  Perhaps there really was no point. She leafed through the letters and notes. Every so often she pulled one out and read from it. Usually her voice died down after a few lines, and then she read to herself and laughed again, struck by how Avram, at the age of sixteen and a half, used to describe his dates with other girls—“Don’t worry, they’re only pale imitations of you, and this is only until you decide to lift the passion embargo you’ve imposed on me and give yourself to me wholly, including the holy sites”—and his failed courtships, and the mishaps. Above all, he described the ridiculous, humiliating mishaps. Ora had never met anyone who reported with such glee on his own failures and shortcomings. One evening, after seeing a movie with Chayuta H., he had walked her to Peterson Street, where she lived. He pulled her into a yard and they started making out. When he reached into her pants, Chayuta stopped him and said, “No, I’ve got the curse,” and Avram, who didn’t realize what she meant, was overcome with compassion. He consoled her and encouraged her and tried to rescue her from this surprising, exciting self-loathing, which he would never have imagined existed in lighthearted Chayuta. Chayuta listened silently as he prattled on, and since she was so quiet, for the first time that evening, Avram felt that he was finally reaching a pure spot in her cynical, socialite soul, and when he went so far in his eager consolations as to rival Gregor Samsa and the Brothers Karamazov, Chayuta cut him off and grinningly explained to him what exactly she had meant.

  He described the episode to Ora with merciless precision, and she laughed from the bottom of her heart and wrote how much she hated that ugly euphemism for menstruation. With rare courage, she added that when she gets her period—I had a medical problem for a few years after Ada, but now it’s all right, she explained—she actually feels extremely feminine. He replied immediately that the fact that she had chosen to tell him something like that meant she had already made up her mind to be only his friend, and that he must be like some sort of male girlfriend to her, and in his opinion that’s what she had really decided about him right from the start, when they met in the hospital, and it killed him, but that seemed to be his permanent fate, to suffice with the leftovers of her love, or of any love.

  Hundreds of notes and letters were stuffed into that shoe box, written in his crowded, frenetic handwriting, which shuddered sometimes with a tension that could not be released even in words. The pages were covered with doodles, charming illustrations, arrows, asterisks, and footnotes. He overflowed with inventions and puns and tricks and little traps, meant to test her attention to all his details and minutiae. On the backs of the envelopes she read: “Hilik and Bilik, Ltd., Accessories and Auxiliary Equipment for Dreams and Nightmares.” Or, “S. Bubari, Pharmacological Consultant for Cuckoldry Troubles.” On each envelope, next to the official stamp, he stuck his own private stamps, on which he drew himself and her, and, of course, her with Ilan, and with their three, five, seven future children. He cut out funny or rude newspaper clippings for her, and copied engravings from tombstones in Jerusalem (“This one reads, ‘Dispirited by Torments’—it’s like they were thinking of me!”). He sent detailed knitting patterns for an elf’s hat made of thick wool with red tassels, and his own recipes for hamantaschen, quiches, and cakes, which she never dared to bake because simply reading the recipes made it clear that too many conflicting flavors were doing battle.

  Avram groaned in his sleep and his lips moved. Ora held her breath. He mumbled something incoherent, squirmed with pain, and sighed. She wet his lips with a washcloth and wiped the sweat from his face. He relaxed.

  He had started writing to her the morning after their last night together in isolation. “I feel as though we’ve been surgically separated,” he wrote. “I am wounded, bruised, and desolate, now that you’re uprooted from me.” Another wave of wounded soldiers had arrived, and Ora, Ilan, and Avram had been moved to different hospitals. He wrote to her daily for three weeks, even before he got hold of her address, and then he sent the first twenty-one letters in a decorated shoe box. After that, for six years, he never ceased producing missives of five, ten, or twenty pages, covered with limericks and poems and quotations and excerpts from radio plays. He sent telegrams too—he called them yellegrams—and sketches of stories he would one day write and swirling footnotes and erasures that intentionally revealed more than they concealed. He gave her his whole heart, and she always read his letters with a voyeuristic lust, slight suspense, raw nerves, an almost physical longing for Ada, and a vague sense of guilt at betraying her. In the first months of their correspondence, she had a half-formed snicker ready and waiting at the corner of her mouth each time she opened a letter—a snicker that sometimes, as she read, turned into a sort of pre-crying spasm.

  And in each letter he interjected something about Ilan. To pique her curiosity or to torture himself—she wasn’t sure.

  “Today, Ora,” she read to him in a whisper and leaned in closer to his face, which was cut to the bone, “I am mired in lonesome sorrow, and I walk by myself, like Rudyard Kipling’s cat (do you know him?). The only character I commune with is Ilan, he that is maimed in his privy parts. As you know, we habitually discuss the female species, or rather, I discuss it, particularly you, of course, and Ilan does not respond. But it is his silence that makes me think he is not completely indifferent to you, although it’s obvious to me that he has yet to make what I have termed, in consultation with my friend Søren Kierkegaard, ‘the leap of love.’ On the other hand, he does insist on maintaining total indifference to the herds of fair girls—and some unfair ones too—who inundate him and seek his favors (!?). For the most part, I am the one who advises him, due to his lack of experience and utter numskullery in his relations with women. I do this, of course, with complete neutrality, as a person now observing exclusively from the margins, without any personal stake in the subject—a.k.a., you. You wouldn’t believe the enthusiasm with which I attempt to convince him that you are his intended one. You must be asking yourself why I do this. It is because integrity dictates that I do so, and because I can plainly see that even though I am intended for you, you are, unfortunately, not intended for me. That is the bitter truth, Ora, and that is the law of my love for you: I shall bring you only heartache and complications, and so, precisely because I care so deeply about you, and precisely because of my total and un-egotistical love, I must fan the flames of Ilan in your direction, open his bedaubed eyes, and remove the foreskin of his heart—isn’t it nuts of me?

  “Get cracking and write quick, lest I sprain my heart with longings!”

  But in the P.S. of that same letter he cheerfully reported his intricate and unfortunate affairs with other girls, who were, as always, only a cheap and available substitute, and only because she, in the depths of her heart, insisted—he was convinced—on loving the forlorn Ilan, he of the Kafkaesque joie de vivre, who was utterly unwilling to acknowledge her existence, and because she refused to wed Avram and move into a chamber (preferably one with maid service) with him.

  During the first few weeks she replied with short, cautious letters whose timidity embarrassed her. He did not complain. He never kept score with her over the number of pages or the meagerness of their content. On the contrary: he was always enthusiastic and grateful for every sign she sent. Then she grew bolder. She told him, for example, about her older brother, the rebellious Marxist who was making her parents’ lives miserable, doing only what he felt like, which made her angry but also jealous. She wrote about her loneliness among her friends, and her anxiety before competitions—she had almost abandoned other athletics and was focusing on swimming; the transition from dry to wet made her feel instantly better; there were days when she felt like a burning torch hitting the water. And she wrote to him about Ada, missing her in writing as only he could understand. Every so often—actually, in every letter—she could not resist asking him, in a P.S., to send Ilan her warm regards. Although she knew it pained him, she could not help it, and in the next letter she would be unable to hold back from
asking if he’d given the regards.

  Of this correspondence, of this new friendship, and of the maddening heartache caused by thinking about Ilan, she told none of her friends. Since coming home from her hospitalization in Jerusalem, Ora knew that what had happened to her there all those nights was too precious and rare to be handed over to strangers, and this was all the more true of what was happening to her with them now, with both of them; the duality presented a mystery she did not even try to decipher. It had snuck up on her secretly and struck her, like lightning or an accident, and all she could do was adapt to the consequences of the strike. But from day to day it grew more obvious, until she knew with unimpeachable certainty: they were both necessary to her. They were essential, like two angels who ultimately fulfill the same mission: Avram, whose presence was inescapable down to the very last thread, and Ilan, who was entirely absent.

  Almost without her noticing it, writing to Avram became a sort of diary she kept. But since she could not write to him about how much she missed Ilan, day and night, and about the physical longing that burned in her, she wrote about other things. More and more she wrote about her parents, mainly her mother. She filled pages upon pages about her and had never imagined she could have so much to say. At first, when she read her own words, she would be shocked at the treachery, yet unable to keep from saying these things, and in any case she had the peculiar feeling that Avram knew everything about her, even what she might try to hide. She told him about the constant, exhausting efforts to guess the reasons for her mother’s anger and for the implied accusations that were concealed in the space of the house like dense, inescapable netting. She revealed the well-kept family secret of her mother’s attacks: every few days she would shut herself up in her room and beat herself cruelly. Ora found out by accident, when she was ten and hiding, as she often did, in the linen chest in her parents’ closet. She saw her mother come into the room quickly and lock the door, and then she started to hit herself silently, scratch her own stomach and chest, then scream in a whispered voice: “Garbage, garbage, even Hitler didn’t want you.” At that moment Ora made up her mind that she would have a wonderful family of her own. It was a determined, crystalline decision, not the kind of fantasies little girls often entertain. For Ora, it was a life decision. She would have her own family, with a husband and children—two, no more—and their house would always be full of light, even in its farthest corners. She could see it vividly in her mind’s eye: a house flooded with light and free of shadows, in which she and her husband and her two small children sailed happily, transparent and open, so that there would never be any surprises in it like this one. She still pictured it when she was fifteen, and twenty. She would have at least one person, or two, or three, of all the people in the world, of all the mysterious and unexpected strangers, whom she could really know.

  As she wrote the letters, she gradually found that dim and burdensome things became clear when she laid them out on paper. She was somewhat surprised to discover that she could write with such clarity and precision—she had always thought she was best as a reader of the really good writers—and then she started to feel that she wanted, needed, to write, and that, no less than that, she wanted Avram to read what she had to say and to tell her more and more of what he saw in her.

  And warm regards to Ilan.

  Once he wrote: “You are my first love.”

  She was dumbstruck for two weeks. Then she wrote that she was not ready to talk about love yet. That she felt they were both too young and immature and that she wanted to wait a few years before discussing matters of love. He said that now, after having written it explicitly, and after having told Ilan, he was completely certain of his love for her, and that she held his fate in her hands. He enclosed a stamped envelope for her reply. She asked him vehemently to stop talking about his love for her, because it introduced anxiety and unhealthy feelings to their beautiful, pure relationship. He replied: “A: In my opinion love is the healthiest, loveliest, purest feeling there is. And B: I can no longer stop talking about my love for you, my love for you, my love for you …” He filled the whole page.

  “It was not love at first sight,” he wrote in a telegram he sent a few hours after the letter—but which reached her one week sooner—“because I loved you long before that stop before I met you stop I love you backwards too stop even before I existed stop because I only became me when I met you stop.” She sent a short letter saying it was difficult for her to keep corresponding with him now, she had a lot of exams and competitions coming up and she was very busy. As evidence, she enclosed an article from Maariv Youth that described a high-jump meet at the Wingate Institute in which she had participated. He sent back the letter with the article’s ashes and did not write for three weeks. She almost lost her mind with anticipation, and then he started writing again as if nothing had happened:

  “Last night I was at a jazz show with Ilan, RIP (who, amazingly, sends his regards this time and keeps trying to peek over my arm at what I’m writing, even though he continues to insist that he’s not interested in you!). Anyway, last night we were at Foos-Foos. It was extremely wonderful, and I had full-on experiences with all sorts of lovely women who exchanged looks with me, but unfortunately not phone numbers. With the music in the background, I was able to pull together some of the opinions I’ve been gathering about girls lately, and I came up with some well-founded and interesting theories about them, and mainly about you. I believe that, ultimately, you will not tie your fate with mine but with some other dude, Ilan or someone of his ilk, the point is, a guy who will definitely not tickle your navel with giggles like I do, and won’t drive your mind wild with sharp observations like I do, and make every organ of your body tremble with pleasure like I do. But the thing is, he’ll be hunkier, much hunkier, and calmer and more solid, and mainly more understandable to you than I am (and your mother will love him at first sight, I’m positive!). Yes, yes, treacherous Ora, such are the thoughts that came to me as I sat in that damp little grotto that was aromatic of hashish (!!!), surrounded by the angels climbing up and down the harmonic scales of Mel Keller, and I lost my train of thought …

  “Yes: that in the end you’ll mate for life with some gorgeous, grave-looking, silver-haired alpha male, a guy who may not know to ask if your viscera pullulate at the sight of a beautiful sunset, or upon reading a lipless poem by David Avidan, but your future by his side will be secure and solid forever and ever. For I suspect, my duplicitous Ora, that deep in the depths of your light-filled and beautiful soul (which, I do not need to tell you, I love very much) lies a minuscule recess (like the ones in some corner stores, where they keep the old preserves?) that is, forgive me, slightly narrow-minded in matters of love. Of true love, I mean. And that is why you will probably make the choice you will make and doom me to misery for the rest of my life, and of this (the misery) I have no doubt, and I treat it now, in a purely philosophical mode, as a permanent state, like a chronic illness from which I will suffer for the rest of my life, and therefore you can stop reacting so hysterically every time I talk about it!

  “On the way back from the jazz club I discussed it with Ilan-long-legs (and they’re not the only thing that’s long …), and I expounded upon my theory about him and you, and of course I lamented my bitter fate at being destined to be indentured to a woman who scorns the gifts of my love, and having to suffice with cheap substitutes for the rest of my life. Ilan, as usual, said maybe you’d change your mind and grow up and offered other foolish consolations, and I explained to him again why I thought he was much more suitable for you than I am, being an alpha male etc., and that it is only for his sake that I am willing to vacate the space in your heart to which I still cling tooth and nail in the most pathetic manner, and he reiterated that you’re not his type at all, and that he doesn’t really know you anyway, and then he repeated that on that night when the three of us talked in the hospital he was completely blurry, but that didn’t reassure me, because I do feel that something power
ful happened between the two of you that night, precisely because of his blurriness, and yours, something happened there, and it kills me that you won’t confirm or deny that for me, and it’s like the two of you were together in some place I couldn’t get into (and probably never will), and I can only eat my heart out over the fact that it didn’t happen to you with me, that revelation of love (because love is a revelation!!), because I was so close (fuckit, hissed the defeated Avram as he poured out his wrath), and that’s also something I feel quite a lot in my life, the almost-happened, and I only hope it won’t be the guiding principle of my life, the main tenet of all the guiding principles of my life.

  “Yours, Dispirited by Torments.”

  She was then finally able to overcome her cowardice and the paralyzing confusion that had seized her and told him with simple words that grew increasingly complicated that she really thought she was in love, but unfortunately not with him, and she hoped he could forgive her, it wasn’t something she could control, and she liked and loved him like a brother, and would always like and love him, but in her opinion he didn’t really need her—and here her hand shook wildly, to her amazement; the pen jumped around on the page like a horse trying to throw off its rider—because he was, after all, such a brimming person, a thousand times wiser and more profound than she was, and she was positive that once he got used to this idea he would have many other beloveds, she was really convinced, and they would be much more suitable for him than she was, whereas she believed that the boy she loved needed her “like air to breathe, and I’m sorry, but in this case it’s not a cliché at all. That’s really the way I feel.” She added that it was a love that had troubled her and crazed her for months, almost a year, in fact, because it was very clear to her that it was senseless and hopeless, and she wished she understood why this had happened to her, and so on and so forth. Avram sent a rushed telegram: “Do I know him question mark is it Ilan question mark just say his name and I will murder him exclamation point.”