To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  “And what about Adam?”

  “Adam, yes”—she thinks of how he keeps coming back to Adam—“of course Adam was also welcome in these games, it’s not that he wasn’t.” She tightens her arms over her chest. “It’s just so complicated …”

  Because when Adam was with them, she always had the feeling that Ofer and Ilan held back a little, toned down their wildness and cheerfulness to tolerate Adam’s incessant chatter, his flood of speech, which often turned into a frightening display of physical rowdiness, a tempest of hitting and kicking, aimed at them both, over some silly little excuse or an imaginary insult. Sometimes he would throw himself down in a tantrum and pound the floor with his hands and feet, and even his head—Ora remembers the thuds with horror—and then Ilan and Ofer would try as hard as they could to calm him, to appease him, to flatter him. “It was really touching to see Ofer, all of two years old, caressing Adam, sitting next to him, leaning over him and making wordless murmurs of comfort.

  “It was such a difficult period, because Adam couldn’t understand what was going on, and the more he tried to get close to them, the more they seemed to pull back. And then he’d get even more anxious and turn up his volume, because what could he do? He only had one tool to express everything he wanted, he only had what Ilan had taught him.” She shakes her head angrily. Why hadn’t she intervened more? She’d been so weak, so green. “In fact, now I think he was simply begging Ilan to come back to him, to reaffirm their covenant. I also think about Ilan, about how he just let Ofer be himself and loved everything about him. He even gave up his damned judgmentalism, just so he could absolutely love everything Ofer was, without any inhibitions.”

  And when he did that—she knows this, though she cannot say it out loud—he turned his back on Adam. There’s no other way to describe it. She knows that Avram also understands exactly what happened. That Avram can hear the half sounds and the silences.

  Ilan didn’t do it on purpose. She knows that. He probably never wanted it to happen. He loved Adam very much. But that’s what happened. That’s what he did. Ora felt it, Adam felt it, maybe even tiny Ofer felt something. It had no name, this act of Ilan’s, the surreptitious, subtle, terrible shift, but during that period, the air in their home was thick with it—with a breach of trust so profound, so convoluted, that even now, twenty years later, when she tells Avram about it, she cannot call it by its explicit name.

  • • •

  One morning when Adam was about five, Ilan was feeding him eggs and toast, and Adam licked his lips in between bites and said, “Toast is what I like most.”

  This had been their favorite game for a while, before Ofer was born, and Ilan responded immediately: “Better than pot roast.”

  Adam laughed gleefully, thought for a minute, and said, “Scarier than a ghost!”

  They both laughed. Ilan said, “You’re good at this, but now you have to get dressed so we won’t be late.”

  “For a very important date.”

  As Ilan was dressing him in a shirt, Adam said, “Into the sleeves, like green leaves.”

  Ilan smiled. “You’re the greatest, Adamon.”

  When Ilan tied his shoes, Adam said, “Put my shoes on my feet, like a blanket on a sheet.”

  “I see you’re full of rhymes.”

  “Go eat some limes.”

  On their way to kindergarten, they passed the Tzur Hadassah playground, and Adam observed that there was a bride on the slide and a king on the swing. Ilan, whose mind was preoccupied with other matters, mumbled something about how Adam was becoming a poet, and Adam replied, “You know it.”

  When Ora came to pick Adam up later that day, the teacher grinned and told her that Adam was having a very special day: he was talking to the class and the teacher only in rhymes, and had even infected a few of the other children, although not all of them were as good at rhyming as Adam was. “The kindergarten was full of rhymes today! We had a school full of little poets today, didn’t we, children?”

  Adam furrowed his smooth brow and said in a slightly angry voice, “Girls and boys, make some noise. And play with toys.”

  As they rode home on Ora’s bike, he squeezed her waist tightly with an unfamiliar strength and answered all her questions in rhyme. Her patience for these games of his and Ilan’s was limited to begin with, so she asked him to stop. He said: “With a skip and a hop.” Ora decided he was just doing it to aggravate her, so she said nothing.

  He kept it up at home. Ora threatened that she’d stop talking to him until he could behave, and he shouted, “Brave, save, wave!” He sat watching Pretty Butterfly on TV, and when Ora looked, she found him hunched forward, his hands in fists on his lap, and his lips moving after each sentence uttered by the characters on the show. She realized he was answering them in rhyme.

  She took him for a drive, thinking the excursion would refresh him and make him forget the strange rhyming compulsion. They drove to nearby Mevo Beitar, and she showed him roofers fixing tiles on a roof, and he said, “Miles, piles, woof, hoof.” When they drove past the store, he shouted out, after some moments of distress: “Snore.” She stopped to let an old dog cross the road and heard a heavy silence from the backseat. When she looked in the mirror she saw his lips moving quickly and his eyes brimming with tears because he could not find a rhyme for “dog.” “Fog,” she said softly, and he breathed a sigh of relief. “And log,” he quickly added.

  “Now tell me how your day was at school?” she asked when they sat in a hiding place they both liked, on the way to the Ma’ayanot River. “Cool, fool,” he blurted. She put her finger on his lips and said, “Now don’t talk, just listen to what I have to say.” He looked at her fearfully and mumbled, “Way, hay.” Ora suddenly grew concerned at the sadness and desperation in his eyes. He seemed to be begging her to be quiet, for the whole world to be quiet, not to make a single sound ever again. She gathered him in her arms and held him close, and he buried his head in her neck, his body taut and rigid. She tried to calm him, but every time she forgot herself and said even one word, he was compelled to answer with a rhyme. She took him home, fed him and bathed him, and noticed that even when she was completely silent, he made rhymes for the sounds of the water in the bath, and a distant door slamming, and the beeping of the hourly news update on the neighbors’ radio.

  The next day, when she woke him up—in fact she asked Ilan to wake him, but he suggested that she go, and she went into the room with fictitious merriment and said to Ofer and Adam cheerfully: “Good morning, my dears!”—she heard Adam mumble into his pillow, “Fears, tears.” His eyes quickly sharpened out of sleepiness, and his face turned dark with terror.

  “What’s wrong with me?” He sat up and asked her with a distant voice, and even before she could answer, he said, “Be strong with me, sing a song with me.” He reached out for her to hug him. “I don’t even want to speak,” he shouted. “Leak, weak, sneak.”

  Ilan stood in the doorway. There was shaving cream on his face, and Adam pointed to him feebly and whispered, “Saving, waving.”

  “Je ne sais quoi faire,” Ora whispered to Ilan.

  “Bench, wrench,” Adam murmured, and Ora was relieved for a moment, but her heart sank when she realized he was finding rhymes for “French.”

  “What’s the matter, honey?” Ilan said severely.

  “Money, funny,” Adam sighed and buried his face in Ora’s neck, seeking shelter from Ilan.

  “This went on for maybe three months,” Ora tells Avram. “Every sentence, every word, whatever anyone said to him and whatever sounds he heard. A rhyming machine. A robot.”

  “What did you do?”

  “What could we do? We tried not to say anything. Not to make him nervous. We tried to just ignore it.”

  “There was that movie,” Avram says, “we saw it once at the Jerusalem Cinema, the three of us.”

  “Yes, David and Lisa. ‘What do you see when you look at me?’ ”

  Avram replies: “ ‘I see a girl who
looks like a pearl.’ ”

  “Three months,” she repeats, astounded. “Every sound in the home had a rhyme.”

  With all her strength she pushes down a moan of sorrow over what is now awakening in her—the desire, the urge, the passion to go back and talk about it with Ilan, to try to understand what Adam was going through, to chew it over with him again and again in one of their kitchen conversations, or sitting on the living-room sofa hand in hand in the dark, facing a muted television, or on one of their evening walks along the village paths.

  There’s no Ilan, she reminds herself sternly.

  But for a moment, as it does every morning when she opens her eyes and reaches a probing hand to her side, it hits her with all its initial force: She has no partner. There’s no rhyme for her.

  “From morning to night it went on this way, day after day, and at night, too. And then it somehow stopped, almost without us noticing. Like with all sorts of other crazy phases they had, he and Ofer. That’s how it goes.” She struggles to laugh. “You’re convinced that’s it, they’re stuck on some crazy notion forever. That Adam will talk in rhymes forever, or that Ofer will spend the rest of his life sleeping with a monkey wrench in his bed so he can beat up the Arabs when they come, or that he’ll wear his cowboy costume until he’s seventy, and then one day you notice that for some time now, that thing that was making the whole household crazy, that was depressing us for months on end, has just—poof—vanished into thin air.”

  “Beat up the Arabs?”

  “Well, that’s another story,” she says, laughing. “Your kid had an overactive imagination.”

  “Ofer?”

  “Yes.”

  “But why … why Arabs? Did something happen to him with—”

  “No, no.” She waves her hand dismissively. “It was all in his head.”

  They walk past the Mount Meron Field School, and Avram runs to fill their water bottles at a tap. Ora sees the water overflowing from the bottle and gushing down and discovers that he is looking out at the grove they’ve just emerged from and is smiling gently. When she follows the thread of his smile, she sees the golden bitch standing by the trees, panting. Ora fills a dish with water and puts it down not far from the dog. “It’s your dish,” she reminds her and fills it for her again and again until she is sated. At a nearby snack stand—only after the owner agrees to turn off his radio—they buy three hot dogs for the bitch and some food and candy for themselves. Then they continue their ascent up the mountain. The loudspeaker on the nearby army base emits constant calls for technicians, drivers, antenna operators. This human presence thickens and fills them with nervousness. They avoid encountering or conversing with other couples hiking on their trail—who look pretty much like us, Ora thinks with a moment’s jealousy: people around our age, friendly yuppies who’ve taken off work for a nature day, a little escape from the job and the kids; they probably think the same thing about me and Avram. He was really alarmed when I mentioned Ofer’s fear of the Arabs. What button did I press?

  On the peak of Mount Meron they stand at a lookout point: “Restored by the family and friends of First Lieutenant Uriel Peretz, of blessed memory, born in Ofira on the 2nd of Kislev, 5737 (1977), fell in Lebanon on the 7th of Kislev 5758 (1998). Scout, soldier, devoted to Torah and to his country,” Avram reads—and they look north, to the purple-misted Hermon, and to the Hula Valley and the green Naphtali mountain range. They once again pat themselves on the back with proud modesty, trying to estimate how many kilometers they have traversed. A new and unfamiliar power diffuses their bodies. Knots of strength have amassed in their calves, and when they take off their backpacks, they feel as though they are floating on air.

  “So, should we sleep up here?”

  “It’ll be cold. Maybe we should go a bit farther down. Let’s follow the path downhill?”

  “I’d like to go all the way around the peak first”—Avram stretches and shakes out his arms—“even though it’s not on the path.”

  “Then let’s do it,” she says happily. “We don’t have to stick to the path.”

  They circle the peak on a loop, and the dog runs ahead for the first time. Every so often she pauses to look at them, waiting and urging them on with her gaze, then runs on. The air is soaked with the scents of loose earth and blossoms. Ivy climbs up tree trunks, and sudden flames of colorful redbuds ignite among the oak and hawthorn trees. Thin branches erupt from the roots of a massive arbutus tree, like fingers from a huge open palm, and its body is bare of bark, almost embarrassing in its colors and textures, like human nudity, like a woman’s body.

  Ora stops suddenly. “Listen, I have to tell you something. It’s been eating at me the whole time, but I couldn’t do it. Do you want to hear?”

  “Ora,” he says, scolding.

  “Look, when I said goodbye to him, to Ofer, when I took him to the army meeting place, there was a TV crew there. They filmed us.”

  “Yes?”

  “The reporter asked him what he wanted to tell me before he left, and Ofer sort of smiled and asked me to make him all kinds of dishes, I don’t remember exactly what, and then he whispered something in my ear, right in front of the cameras and everything.”

  Avram stops and waits.

  “And what he said was”—she takes a deep breath, pursing her lips—“that if, if he …”

  “Yes?” Avram whispers. He wants to give her strength, but his body unwittingly responds as though a blow is about to land on it.

  “That if something happens to him—do you hear me?—if something happens to him, he wants us to leave the country.”

  “What?”

  “ ‘Promise me you’ll leave the country.’ ”

  “That’s what he said?”

  “Word for word.”

  “All of you?”

  “I guess so. I didn’t even have time to—”

  “And did you promise?”

  “I don’t think so, I can’t remember, I was so stunned.”

  They keep walking, their bodies hunched now. “If I’m killed,” Ofer had whispered, “leave the country. Just get out of here, there’s nothing here for you.”

  “And what’s most depressing is that it’s obvious to me that it wasn’t something he just said on the spur of the moment. He’d thought about it ahead of time. He’d planned it.”

  Avram tramples the ground heavily as he walks.

  “Wait, slow down.”

  He rubs his face and head roughly. A cold sweat breaks out. Those three words that had come out of her mouth: If I’m killed. How could she say them? How could they get through her throat?

  “When Adam was in the army, he once said that if anything happened to him he wanted us to erect a bench in his memory opposite the Submarine.”

  “What submarine?”

  “The Yellow Submarine. It’s a music club, in Talpiot, where he plays sometimes with his band.”

  They walk on in silence, without noticing the other hikers they occasionally pass. Near an ancient winepress carved out of rock, they sit down. The first of the salamanders swim in the pool of rainwater in the press. Clumps of green weeds chewed by wild boars are strewn around. They both sit silently, gathering strength.

  “And somehow, in all these days … what can I say … in the moments I cannot repress, I feel that the whole time I’m walking, I’m also saying goodbye to the country.”

  “You won’t leave,” he says firmly, almost panicking. “You can’t.”

  “I can’t?”

  “Come on. Let’s go.”

  His jaw is tightly clenched, crushing thoughts and words. He wants to tell her that only here, in this landscape, in the rocks, the cyclamens, in Hebrew, in this sun, does she have any meaning. But it sounds sentimental and ungrounded, and he says nothing.

  Ora straightens up. It suddenly occurs to her that Ofer guessed something about Avram. That he was almost saying: If it happens to me too, if it passes down to the next generation, you have nothing to keep you here. �
�But in any case,” she says quietly, “if I do, it won’t be just the country.”

  “Ora—”

  “Forget it. Forget that now, why ruin the view?” Her mouth trembles. She bites her lip hard.

  Avram, by her side, drags his feet and a terrible, leaden heaviness fills him with every step. Perhaps that’s why she’s telling me about him, he thinks, so there’ll be someone here to remember him.

  “Avram.” With her last remaining strength she pulls herself out of the muddy silence.

  “What, Ora’leh?”

  “Do you know what I feel like?”

  “What do you feel like?” He smiles distractedly through his gloom. All you have to do is ask, he thinks, his feelings rushing at her.

  “Tomorrow or the next day, I want to give you a haircut.”

  “What’s wrong with the way it is?”

  “Nothing’s wrong. It’s just an urge I get in high mountains.”

  “I don’t know. We’ll see. Let me think about it.”

  The air is clear and sharp. Cistus bushes abound in pink and white on both sides of the path. He thinks: She’s always jumping from one thing to another. She’s always in everything.

  “Who usually cuts your hair?” She throws out the question with measured lightness.

  “Once, a long time ago, I had a barber friend on Ben Yehuda, and he’d do me a favor.”

  “Oh.”

  “But in the last few years it’s usually Neta, about once every six months.” He fingers his long, sparse hair, which flaps in the wind. “Maybe you really should straighten it out a bit.”

  “You won’t feel it, it won’t hurt.”

  Empty acorn caps crunch under their feet. A cool breeze laps around them. The grove is dotted with red, blue, and purple anemones. A new intimacy shakily hovers between them.

  “You know,” Ora says, “since the day before yesterday, since we both came out of our shock a bit, when I felt that you were doing better too—that was around the day before yesterday, wasn’t it?”