To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  She sighs deeply, and the dog looks up and comes to sit next to her.

  “What?” Avram asks tenderly. “What did you remember?”

  “Wait.”

  She, whose mother always had compared her to others, even in front of total strangers, and almost always to her detriment. She, who had sworn at a very young age that when she had her own children she would never, ever …

  “Ora?” Avram asks carefully. “Listen, we don’t have to …”

  “No, it’s okay. Just give me a minute.”

  Of course she and Ilan had often compared the boys to each other. How could they not?

  “At first, what was difficult in the first few years with Ilan, what I found really intolerable, was the way he looked at the boys. You know how he is, with his exact, objective definitions.”

  “Oh yeah, I know that. I know all about Ilan and his onslaughts of rationalism.”

  “Yes, that’s exactly it.” She laughs and scratches the dog’s head.

  Ilan’s definitions, in which he summarized Adam’s and Ofer’s personalities, their virtues and their shortcomings, seemed to determine their fate for all eternity without any possibility of appeal or even the change and development that come with age. Only years later—she finds that she can talk about this now with Avram; she thinks he understands—only years later had she learned that she could contradict those definitions of his with statements that were no less thoughtful and lucid, with a sober and different perspective that always illuminated the boys in a brighter, more generous light. When she did so, she found how relieved and even happy Ilan was to agree and adopt her position. It sometimes even appeared as though she had redeemed him from something in himself.

  “Why is he like that, can you tell me?” she asks Avram. “You knew him so well”—she almost says, You knew him better than I did—“so you tell me, why does he always fight himself? His softness, his gentleness. Why must he always be such a clenched fist?”

  Avram shrugs his shoulders. “With me, he wasn’t like that.”

  “I know. He really wasn’t.”

  They sit quietly as the cicadas around them go berserk. Ora wonders if she is doomed to keep trying to understand Ilan and his illusions for the rest of her life, or whether the day will come when she can simply be herself, with none of his echoes inside her. But the idea offers no relief or gladness, and her yearnings descend in full force.

  She thinks back to the way she and Ilan used to talk about the boys. The talking was such an enjoyable part of the labor of family, and they did so much of it. And she often thought it might be thanks to Avram that she and Ilan had been able to talk like that. Had they not met him, had he not tutored them when they were still teenagers, they might have remained far quieter and more shy. So thank you, she tells him silently. Thank you for that, too.

  More than anything, they liked to talk about the boys on their evening walks, after the bedtime ritual. Without asking Avram whether he wants her to, she takes him straight there, to the boys’ messy bedroom, roiling with the tumultuous preparations for the difficult, complicated sail into the night, with its shadows and foreignness, and the exile it imposes upon every child in his little, separate bed. After giving them one last hug, another cup of water, pee-pee again, and one more nightlight, and another kiss for the teddy bear or the monkey, and after Adam and Ofer had finished chattering and finally fallen asleep …

  At first, when they still lived in Tzur Hadassah, they would walk the path to Ein Yoel. They passed by the plum and peach orchards of Mevo Beitar, and the remnants of quince, walnut, lemon, almond, and olive groves in the Arab villages that had ceased to exist—every so often Ora told herself she had to at least find out their names—and sometimes they walked to the Ma’ayanot River, down in a wadi full of gushing water and little gardens where the villagers of Hussan and Battir planted eggplants, peppers, beans, and zucchini. When the first intifada started and they were afraid to walk in that part, they chose a wooded area near a fork in the road—“in autumn, there are crisscrossing meadows of crocuses and cyclamens; maybe I’ll take you there one day; remind me”—and when they moved to Ein Karem, even before locating the nearest grocery store, they sought out a walking path that was not too capricious but not boring either, not remote but not too popular, a path where a couple could walk and talk calmly and sometimes hold hands or kiss. Over the years they found other paths, less open ones, in wadis and among olive groves, near sheikhs’ tombs and the ruins of houses and ancient watchmen’s huts. They walked these paths whenever they had time, which was sometimes early in the morning, but that was only when the kids were older and more independent, and Ofer could make fancy omelets and sandwiches for school, for both himself and Adam. Even during Ilan’s busiest times, he never gave up their daily walk: “Our walk.”

  Avram listens and sees Ora and Ilan. A couple. Ilan’s sideburns might be gray by now, and Ora is almost entirely silver-haired, wearing glasses. Perhaps Ilan has glasses, too. They walk along their hidden path, at the same pace, very close to each other. Every so often her head turns to him. Sometimes their hands find each other and link. They talk in soft voices. Ora laughs. Ilan smiles his three-wrinkled smile. Suddenly Avram misses Ilan. Suddenly he is horrified to realize that he has not seen Ilan for twenty-one years.

  “We have this way of talking, where I almost always know what he’s going to tell me. From the way he breathes before he starts a sentence, I know the direction he’ll take and which words he’ll use. And I’m so happy it’s that way, that we can guess what the other is thinking.”

  But apparently Ilan found it annoying, she tells Avram. “It bored him that he could guess my mind by the way I breathed before I spoke or laughed or before I told a joke. Or maybe he just needed a break from me. That’s what he said. I guess I’m hard work.” She shrugs her shoulders. “But I started telling you something else—what was it? I’m so scattered. It’s wrong, and it’s not true either, it’s really not the whole truth, he doesn’t deserve it.”

  She and Ilan on the path, in the evening, breaking the day into pieces and then tasting them together, holding them in their mouths, comparing impressions, adding more and more details to the big picture of their life, laughing at this and that, embracing, separating, arguing, consulting each other about work. Ilan didn’t understand much about her business, she tells Avram, and she didn’t expect him to. After all, how exciting can it be to hear about rubbing a sprained ankle or resetting a dislocated shoulder? But she was disappointed that he didn’t get as excited as she did over the little dramas she heard while releasing a bad back or a face whose musculature had gone wrong. She, on the other hand, had become his confidential advisor over the years, his secret jury, his final adjudicator. In his office it was an open joke: “Ora hasn’t confirmed it yet”; “Ilan is waiting for the supreme court decision.” She blushes—it’s a good thing it’s dark—and notes that he really did have complete confidence in her, utterly amazing confidence in her instincts, her intuitions, her wise heart (“Ilan said that,” she adds apologetically), even though she wasn’t really interested in the convoluted legal aspects of intellectual property, confidentiality agreements, non-compete contracts, trademarks for an irrigation system or a generic drug, or the question of when exactly an idea contained that slippery, mysterious thing that Ilan liked to call, with glimmering eyes, the inventional spark. And truth be told, she had never been attracted to the complex process of patent registration in Israel, or in the United States or Europe, nor in all of Ilan’s persuasive tricks that were meant to cause wealthy people to invest in a young doctor from Karmiel who had developed a medical camera that disintegrated in the bloodstream after use, or in a biochemist from Kiryat Gat who had discovered a cheap way to produce diesel from oil. “And Ilan, being Ilan …” She laughs. “That man, I’m telling you, he should have been a chess champion, or a politician, or a Mafia consigliere. You never knew that side of him, it only started developing after you.”

 
; On their path, in the evening, Ora and Ilan easily and generously divvied up the next day’s chores. “We never fought over who would do what, you know? We were such a good team.” They quickly settled household affairs, bills, repairs, shuttling the kids, finances, and a few burning foreign and domestic topics, like finding an old-age home for her mother, or what to do about their lazy, lying, manipulative cleaning lady, whom neither of them had the courage to fire for years—even Ilan was afraid. Only their separation had put an end to her regime.

  And more than anything else, they would circle above and around their children, constantly amazed at the two joyous young people sprouting up between them day by day. They quoted to each other things Adam had said and replayed things Ofer had done, and watched in astonishment, and compared them to who they had been years ago, or even weeks ago, amazed at how much they could change in such a short time—“Oh God, they’re growing up so fast!” They delighted in fragments of memories and inconsequential moments that grew between him and her, to be mighty and shining, because only to the two of them were they so precious, the riches of their lives.

  “Ofer, too?” Avram asks softly. “Was Ofer also … I mean, for Ilan—Ofer, too?”

  She smiles at him, her eyes full of light. Avram can see it even in the dark, and he takes a big sip of his boiling tea, burning his tongue and the roof of his mouth, and he holds the burn in his mouth with strange pleasure.

  When she and Ilan walked and talked, they could feel the flowing force of life itself, the glory of life that lifted up their two little boys and carried them to their futures. Time after time they marveled at the strong bond between the boys—“they have some kind of secret; to this day there’s a secret between them”—and without ever saying it out loud, they both sensed that this connection between Adam and Ofer might be the central axis of their home and was probably the strongest and most solid and alive of all the currents—hidden and visible—that held the four of them together.

  Avram listens and recites: remember, remember it all. Sometimes Ilan and Ora tilt their heads toward each other as they walk. They lean on each other and dare to guess—cautiously, keenly aware of how fragile things are—what the future will bring for the boys and where their lives will lead them. They wonder if Adam and Ofer will continue to sustain their precious enigmatic couplehood.

  She sits alone one evening in Ilan’s study, staring at the legal books on the shelves, unable to do a thing. Adam has had two therapy sessions in the past week with a very experienced elderly female therapist who seems pleasant and tranquil. He said nothing to her either, and he hid the “phenomena” from her, too. But she was not worried. She told Ora and Ilan that these sorts of symptoms were not unusual at Adam’s age, just before physical maturation began, and added that something in Adam’s eyes told her he was a fundamentally strong young man. Just in case, and to reassure them, she referred him to a prominent specialist for neurological tests. He cannot see them for another three weeks, and while Ilan has tried to pull strings and get an earlier appointment, Ora feels that she is losing her mind.

  Adam and Ofer are in the kitchen, engaged in a deep conversation about rhinos. She sends her usual maternal sonar waves out to them every few seconds and processes the returns almost unconsciously. Only after several minutes does she vaguely realize that she hasn’t heard this sort of talk between them for a long time. Adam’s tone of voice sounds lighter this evening. He is even helping Ofer with a project for his summer “creativity day camp.” He invents a water rhinoceros with two big fins and a curly rhino and then a pearly rhino—“he’s an unendangered animal,” he dictates to Ofer, “who sits looking at himself in the water for hours. And there’s also a girly rhino.” They both roll around laughing. “But the girly one is invisible,” Adam warns. “Then I’ll just draw his footprint!” Ofer says. He cheers. “Give it to me, I’ll draw it for you.” Their chatter flows on, and Adam heartily goes through all his rituals. Ora can hear the rhythmic breaths, the lip-sucking, the faucet turned on for quick rinses. She sinks back into herself, but perks up when she hears Ofer’s thin voice asking very calmly, “Why do you do that?”

  She doesn’t know what Ofer is referring to, but a subterranean wave rolls through the kitchen and all the way to her chair, wraps itself around her, and squeezes.

  “What?” Adam asks suspiciously.

  “Wash your hands and all that.”

  “No reason. I just feel like it.”

  “Are you dirty?”

  “Yes. No. Stop it, you’re bugging me.”

  “But what from?” Ofer asks in that same calm, lucid voice, the balanced and matter-of-fact tone she wishes she could have, especially in these moments.

  “What from what?”

  “What d’you get dirty from?”

  “I don’t know, okay?”

  “Just tell me one more thing.”

  “What now?”

  “When you … when you wash like that, then do you get clean?”

  “Kind of. I don’t know. Now shut up!”

  Silence. Ora does not dare move. She thinks of how Ofer has held it in all these weeks and not asked Adam anything. Something in his voice, in his persistence, hints that he has planned in advance what to ask, chosen the circumstances well, and perhaps carefully primed Adam’s mood for this moment.

  “Adam—”

  “What now?”

  “Will you let me, too?”

  “Let you what?”

  “Do one instead.”

  “One what?”

  Ora can feel Ofer’s arc of boldness and audacity grating on her nerves. She does not twitch an eyelid. She wonders what risky, daring game he is playing.

  “One of these.”

  “Hey!” Adam makes an effort to laugh, but Ora can hear his embarrassment. “Are you crazy?”

  “Just one, what do you care?”

  “But why?”

  “So you’ll have to do one less.”

  “What?”

  “Stop it, you’re getting water on my drawing!”

  “What did you say?”

  “That if I do one, then you’ll have one less to do.”

  “You’re crazy, you know that? Totally nuts. Anyway, this doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

  “Whaddayacare? Just one. A loaner.”

  “Which one?”

  “Whatever you say. This one, or like that, or—”

  She hears a chair flung aside and quick steps. She guesses Adam’s little steps around himself on his way to the faucet, his eyes now scurrying in panic.

  “Adam—”

  “I’m gonna beat the crap out of you. Shut up!”

  A long silence.

  “Come on, Adam, just one.”

  She hears steps and a thud. Panting and bodies falling to the floor. A chair turned over. Stifled grunts. She realizes that Ofer is holding back his shouts so she won’t come in to separate them and ruin his plan. She stands up.

  “Give in?”

  “Just let me do it once.”

  “You’re such an annoying kid!” Adam screeches. “Don’t you have any friends, you midget? Pest!”

  “Just once and that’s it, I swear.”

  She hears the slaps, one and two, and Ofer’s deep, stifled yelp. Without realizing it, she is biting her fists.

  “Now d’you understand?”

  “Whaddayacare, just once each time.”

  Adam lets out a high-pitched giggle of amazement.

  “I’ll do it so you won’t even know,” Ofer groans.

  Adam sucks his lips, blows on the backs of his hands, and spins around. Finally, he says quietly, “No. I think I have to do them all. The whole thing.”

  “Then I’ll just do them next to you.”

  The faucet is turned on. A quick rinse. Blows. Silence. Then the faucet again, a little longer this time, and different blowing, stronger and slower.

  “Did you do it? Okay, now get lost.”

  “Let me do one every time,” Of
er says with an assertiveness that amazes Ora. Then she sees him run out of the kitchen with a serious, focused look on his face.

  Over the next few days, Ofer and Adam spend all their free time together. They seldom leave their room, and it’s hard to know what’s going on. When she listens behind the door, she hears them playing and blathering the way they used to when they were seven and four. They seem to be returning, together, to an earlier era, as if drawn instinctively to some moment in time when they were both little children.

  One morning, after she wakes them up and lets them lie chattering in bed for a while, she walks by and hears Adam ask: “How many today?”

  “Three for me, three for you.”

  “But which three?” Adam’s voice sounds so submissive and soft that she hardly recognizes him.

  “You do the water and the feet and the turning, and I’ll do all the rest.”

  “Can I do the mouth, too?” Adam whispers.

  “No, I’m doing the mouth.”

  “But I have to …”

  “I already have dibs on the mouth. That’s it.”

  She places both hands on her temples. Ofer must have dropped an anchor inside Adam. She has no other words to describe it. He’s already there, working in the depths of Adam with that same calm determination with which he builds giant LEGO castles or dismantles old televisions.

  “Aren’t I allowed any today?” Adam asks at the breakfast table, out in the open, in her presence.

  Ofer thinks about it and decrees, “None. Today I’m doing them all.” Then he comes around: “You know what? You can do the one with the lip. When you fold it.”

  “And everything else is you?” Adam asks. His voice is childish and obedient, and it horrifies her.

  “Yes.”

  “But d’you remember to do it?”

  “All the time.”

  “Are you sure, Ofer?”

  “I never missed any till now. Come on, let’s go to the room.”

  She practically runs to her post behind the closed door. Her body, she notes to Avram, remembers that station very well from childhood, when she used to eavesdrop on her parents from behind the closed door of her own room, trying to pick up hints, voices, giggles. Human traces. Forty years have gone by—declares the tight-lipped judge in her mind—and what has madam done in those four decades? I’ve changed sides at the door, your honor.