To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  They are constantly scheming. In every corner of the yard and garden they set traps for androids, which Ora usually falls into, and they create fantastical creatures from painted cardboard rolls and thin wooden rods and nails. They build futuristic vehicles out of cardboard boxes and develop satanic weapons meant to annihilate the bad guys, or all of humanity, depending on Adam’s mood. In a special lab they grow plastic soldiers inside sealed glass jars full of water, with faded flower petals floating around. Every soldier in this sad phantom army has a name and a rank, a detailed biography that they can recite by heart, and a deadly mission that he will be required to carry out when the order is given. For days on end they busy themselves building cardboard fortresses for dragons and Ninja Turtles, designing battlefields of dinosaurs, drawing knightly seals in venomous black, yellow, and red. Here too Adam is usually the inventor, the fantasizer, the Dungeon Master, while Ofer is the elf—the enchanted, obedient imp, the implementer. In his slow, deliberate way, he explains to Adam the limitations of feasibility and wisely constructs the solid bricks from which his brother’s air castles will be built.

  “But it wasn’t just that,” says Ora, who eavesdropped and looked in on them whenever she could. “Because Ofer learned from Adam, but he also learned him.”

  “What do you mean?” asks Avram.

  “I don’t know how to explain it, but I could see it happening.” Ora gives an embarrassed laugh. “I could see Ofer realize that he could figure out how Adam’s mind worked, how Adam could leap from A to M in one thought, and how he flipped ideas over midway, playing with absurdities and paradoxes. At first Ofer mimicked Adam, simply parroting his brilliant ideas. But then he learned the principle, and when Adam talked about a step walking down a staircase, Ofer would come up with an apartment moving a house, coins buying money, a path going on a hike. Or he would invent a paradox: a king who orders his subjects not to obey him. It was so lovely to see how Adam molded Ofer, but also taught him how to act with someone like him, someone special and sensitive and vulnerable. He gave Ofer the secret key that opened him, and to this day Ofer is the only one who has that key.” Her face softens and glows: she doesn’t know if there’s even any point in telling all this to desolate Avram, or whether he can understand her that far, all the way to that bend in her soul. After all, Avram was an only child, and from a very young age he didn’t even have a father. But he had Ilan, she realizes. Ilan was a brother to him. “And you should have heard those two talking. Their endless, hallucinatory conversations. If I happened to be around, I could have—”

  But the pair of little faces look up at her gravely, with exactly the same resentment: “Mom, stop it! Go away, you’re bothering us!”

  The blades of insult and delight dig inside her simultaneously: She’s in their way, but they already have an “us.” She feels both cut in two and multiplied.

  “And there were lots of other things, but there’s one thing I really have to tell you, which happened to us with Adam and with Ofer. Just tell me when you get tired.”

  “Tired?” He laughs. “I’ve slept enough.”

  “We had this episode, just before Adam’s bar mitzvah, something I still can’t really explain.”

  The dog turns around and grunts, her fur stranding on end. Ora and Avram quickly look back, and Ora has time to think: It’s him, the notebook man, he’s chasing me. But a few yards away, near a raspberry bush, stand two heavy, bloated wild boars, watching them with beady eyes. The bitch howls, lowers her body to the ground, and takes a step back, almost touching Ora’s leg. The boars sniff and flare their nostrils. For a moment or two there is no movement. A songbird on a nearby tree screeches. Ora feels her body respond to the wildness in the boars. Her skin quivers, and whatever flows through her is sharper and more animalistic than what she had felt when the dogs attacked them. Suddenly the boars take off, grunt angrily, and run away with victorious glee, their thick bodies dancing lightly.

  “Did you notice his twitches?” Ilan had asked one night in bed.

  “Adam’s? With his mouth?” She murmured and nestled her head in the round of his shoulder. (Later, when she fell asleep, Ilan would gently turn her over and snuggle against her back; every night she sleepily returned to the sweet journey, in her father’s arms, from the living room couch to her bed.)

  “And did you see the way he touches his fingertip to the spot between his eyes?”

  She opened her eyes. “Now that you mention it.”

  “Should we ask him? Say something?”

  “No, no, let’s not. What good would it do?”

  “Yeah, it’ll pass. I’m sure it will.”

  Two days later she noticed that Adam was breathing into his cupped hand every few minutes, like someone smelling his breath. He turned around and let out quick, short exhalations, as though trying to banish an invisible creature. She decided not to tell Ilan, for the time being. Why worry him needlessly? The whole thing would pass in a few days anyway. But the next day there was more: every time Adam touched an object, he blew on his fingertips, and then on his arms, up to the elbows. He rounded his lips like a fish before he said anything. She started to find his overflowing creativity a little worrying and was reminded of something her mother used to say: There’s no end to trouble’s ideas. Finally, after he got up from lunch three times with various excuses, sneaked into the bathroom, and came back with wet hands, she phoned Ilan at the office and described the latest symptoms. Ilan listened quietly. “If we make a big deal out of it,” he eventually said, “it’ll only make it worse. Let’s just try to ignore it, and you’ll see, he’ll calm down.” She had known this was what he would say. That was exactly why she had called him.

  The next day she found that if Adam happened to touch any part of his body, he quickly blew on it. The new rule, which he apparently had to obey categorically, was rapidly turning him into a tight knot of gestures and counter-gestures, which he tried very hard to hide, but Ora saw. And Ilan saw.

  Strange, thinks Avram, why didn’t they take him to see someone?

  “Maybe we should take him to someone,” she told Ilan at night, in bed.

  “Who?” Ilan asked tensely.

  “I don’t know. Someone. A professional, to have a look.”

  “A psychologist?”

  “Maybe. Just to have a glance.”

  “No, no, it’ll only make it worse. It will be like we’re telling him he’s—”

  “What?”

  “Not right.”

  But he isn’t, she thought.

  “Let’s wait a bit. Give him some time.”

  She tried to nestle into his shoulder, but her head could not find its place. She felt hot and sweaty. There was no peace in her body, or in his. For some reason she remembered something Avram had once said: if you look at someone for a long time, at anyone, you can see the most terrible place they might reach in their lifetime. She didn’t sleep that night.

  The next weekend they went to the beach at Beit Yannai. From the moment they arrived, Adam was constantly busy cleaning. He washed his hands over and over again and scrubbed his inflatable beach mattress with damp cloths. He even turned it over every few minutes to clean “the bit that touched the sea.”

  At sunset, Ora and Ilan sat in deck chairs, Ofer played and dug in the sand, and Adam stood waist-high in the water, turning in circles, blowing in every direction, touching every joint and knuckle in his hands and feet. A tall, tan elderly couple walked arm in arm on the beach and stopped to look at Adam. From a distance, with the sunset’s blush on his back, he looked enmeshed in a poetic fairy dance, one movement following the other, each born from its predecessor.

  “They think it’s Tai Chi,” Ilan hissed, and Ora whispered that it was starting to drive her mad. He put a hand on her arm. “Wait. He’ll get sick of it. How long can he keep this up?”

  “Look at how totally indifferent he is to people watching him.”

  “Yes, that’s what worries me a little.”

  “
A little? Adam? In front of everyone?”

  She thought about Ilan’s father, who during his final days in the hospital had lost all shame and would undress in front of everyone to show yet another place on his body where the growth had spread.

  “And look how Ofer keeps peeking at him, all the time,” Ilan said.

  “Think about what it must do to him, to see Adam like that.”

  “Has he talked to you about it?”

  “Ofer? Nothing. I tried to ask him this morning, when we were alone on the beach. Nothing.” She forced a smile. “Well, he’s not going to collaborate against Adam.”

  Adam kissed his fingertips and showered light touches on his waist, thighs, knees, and ankles in the water. He straightened up, spun around in a circle, and blew in all four directions.

  “What’s going to happen when school starts in September, I want to know.”

  “Wait. There are almost two months to go. It’ll pass by then.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  “It will, it will.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  “How could it not?”

  Now she pulls her knees in to her chest, holds her breath, and looks at Avram for a long time. Avram feels that he can’t sit still for much longer. Ants are crawling all through his body.

  Adam seemed to grow more distant day by day. Bad thoughts congregated, and Ora sensed that they had been lying in wait for some time. During the day they hovered like shadows in her head. At night, she sleepily banished them until she was exhausted, and then they descended. Ilan woke her and caressed her face and held her close to him and told her to breathe with him, slowly, until she calmed down.

  “I had a nightmare,” she said. Her face was buried in his chest. She would not let him turn on the light, afraid he might read in her eyes what she had seen: Avram walked past her on the street, dressed in white and looking very pale, and when he came close he murmured that she should buy the newspaper today. She tried to stop him, to ask how he was and why he insisted on being estranged from her, but he pulled his arm away from her grip in disgust and left. The newspaper headline said that Avram was planning to go on a hunger strike outside her house until she gave in and delivered one of her sons to him.

  Adam needed new gym shoes for the school year, and she kept putting off the shopping expedition. He asked her repeatedly to take him to the mall so he could choose a gift for Ofer, and while only two weeks earlier she would have been filled with excitement by such a request—“And after we finish shopping, can I take you out to a café?”—she now avoided him with such feeble excuses that he seemed to understand, and he stopped asking.

  Every day brought new symptoms. He quickly pulled his arms away from his shoulders and to the sides before talking. He pulsed his fists open and closed before he said “me.” The washing and rinsing became more and more frequent. In the course of a single meal he was capable of getting up to wash his hands and mouth five or ten times.

  After a Shabbat spent at home, during which Ilan saw Adam for a whole day, including three meals, he told Ora, “Let’s call someone.”

  As predicted, Adam refused even to hear about it. He hurled himself on the floor and screamed that he wasn’t crazy and they should leave him alone. When they tried to persuade him, he locked himself in his room and pounded on the door for a long time.

  “We’ll wait a bit,” said Ilan, as they both tossed and turned in bed. “Let him get used to the idea.”

  “How long? How long can you wait with this?”

  “Let’s say, a week?”

  “No, that’s too long. A day. Maybe two, but no more.”

  There was something paralyzing about watching Adam in the days that followed. Her child was turning into a process. During the hours she spent at home with him—when she could not find an excuse to go out for some fresh air, to absorb the smooth, harmonious movements of other people like an elixir, and to suck up some bitter jealousy at the sight of Adam’s peers having fun on their summer vacations—in those hours with him she witnessed his entire existence being chopped up into separate parts, whose connection was growing more and more tenuous. At times it seemed that the gestures—the “phenomena,” as she and Ilan called them—were themselves the tendons and nerves that now sustained the affinity between the parts of the child he used to be.

  “It all happened so close,” she says, whether to Avram or to herself. “It happened inside our home. You could reach out and touch it, but there was nothing to hold on to. Your hand closed in on emptiness.”

  “Aha,” says Avram faintly.

  “Tell me if you don’t feel like hearing this.”

  He gives her another look that says, Stop talking nonsense.

  She shrugs as if to say, How am I supposed to know? I’ve spent so many years getting used to being silent with you.

  They set up their little camp at the spring of Ein Yakim in the Amud River wadi, next to a Mandate-era pumping station. Ora spreads the cloth on the ground and lays out food and dinnerware. Avram gathers wood, makes a circle of stones, and builds a fire. The dog crosses the skinny river back and forth, shaking her wet fur off in thousands of sprays, and looks at them playfully. Before sitting down to eat, they wash socks, underwear, and shirts in the spring water and lay them on bushes to dry when the sun rises. Avram digs through his backpack and finds a large, white Indian shirt and fresh sharwal pants. He changes his clothes behind a shrub.

  The next day, when she was alone at home with Adam, he told her about something in his favorite computer game, and he seemed happy and full of excitement. She tried to focus on what he was saying and share his happiness, but it was hard: now he marked the ends of his sentences with exhalations, too. And after certain letters—she thought it was the sibilant consonants, but this rule may have had exceptions that demanded their own penalties—he sucked in his cheeks. Sentences that ended with question marks incurred a new tic: he folded back his upper lip toward his nose.

  She stood in the kitchen with him and fought a malicious urge to stick her lips out at him in a crude imitation. So at least he’d know how he looked. So he’d understand what people saw when they looked at him, and how hard it was to tolerate. She managed to stop herself only when she realized that was exactly what her mother had done to her after Ada. She’d had her own little physical quirks, though far less severe than these.

  But when she saw Adam’s piercing, knowing look, she had a sudden impulse to wrap her arms around him. It had been weeks since she’d hugged him. He wouldn’t let anyone touch him, and she’d stopped trying, averse to touching his alien body. Perhaps she had the vague feeling that her touch would not find warm skin but a hardened shell. Now she kissed his cheek and forehead. She’d been so foolish to avoid it, to collaborate with his aversion, when perhaps all he needed was a simple, strong hug. And indeed, in one large wave, he suddenly emerged from captivity, leaned his whole body into her, and put his little head on her chest. She responded fervently and felt her own power again, her vivacity. How could she have agreed to give up on all that? How had she even considered letting her child be treated by a stranger before she herself had given him this simple, natural thing? She swore that from this moment on she would give him everything she had, empty her healing powers into him, her vast experience of treating bodies and giving calming massages. How had she withheld all this from him?

  She shut her eyes and gritted her teeth above his head so as not to falter on the trip wire of tears gathering inside her and remembered what Ilan had once explained: he always hugged the boys a little less than he wanted to, because that was always a little more than they needed. Oh well, Ilan and his calculations. She kissed Adam’s forehead again, and he looked up at her with a sweet can-I-have-a-special face, which made her incredibly happy. The “special” was an old childhood tradition between her and the boys. It had been years since either of them had agreed to it, but now Adam puckered his lips, and she laughed with embarrassed delight—after all, he was
almost thirteen, with the dark shadow of a moustache. But he seemed to need it so much that nothing embarrassed him, and he kissed her warmly, first on her right cheek, then on her left, and on the tip of her nose, and on her forehead, and Ora rejoiced: she would show him the way home with kisses. He smiled and lowered his gaze, indicated that he wanted another round, and kissed her on her right cheek again, then her left, then the tip of her nose and her forehead. Ora said, “Now my turn,” and Adam grunted, “Just one more time.” He tightened his hands around her face and the back of her neck stiffened. He showered sharp pecks on her right cheek and left cheek, the tip of her nose and her forehead. She struggled to pull her face away and he grasped her with sharp fingers until she shouted: “Stop it, what’s the matter with you?” He grimaced, at first with a lack of comprehension, then with deep insult, and they faced each other for a moment, standing between the kitchen table and the sink, and Adam quickly touched the corners of his mouth and the spot between his eyes, then blew on his hands, first right then left, and his eyes kept filling with murky, thick liquid, and then he walked backward away from her, monitoring her suspiciously, as if fearing she would pounce on him, and she remembered: this was exactly the look Ofer had given her when he found out that she ate meat. That same flash of recognition—the possibility of rapaciousness—which had passed between them then, which had flickered across his cerebral cortex like an ancient drawing. How could she explain this to Avram? This moment between a mother and her child. Yet she does explain it, right down to the last detail, so he’ll know, so he’ll hurt, so he’ll live, so he’ll remember. Adam’s eyes widened and almost filled his entire face, and he kept backing away from her, still watching, and before leaving the kitchen he gave her one last sober, awful look, and she thought he was wordlessly saying, You had the chance to save me, and now I’m leaving.