To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  Ora listened. It was late in the evening, the boys were in their room, and she and Ilan were lying together on the couch. His fingers played with the fine hair on the back of her neck, and her face cuddled against his. She said, “But you’re so much a part of bringing them up. I don’t know many fathers who are so involved in their kids’ lives.”

  “Yes, but when I heard you in the kitchen, I don’t know—”

  “I mean, the whole way they think, their sense of humor, all the things they know, and their sharp wit, it’s so you.”

  “Maybe so, I don’t know, I’m sure it’s both of us. I guess it’s the combination of us.” He felt for her hand and his fingers grasped hers. “Because I always feel that whatever I give them, they would have somehow gotten it anyway, from life, from other people. But what you give them”—the fingers of his other hand made an uncharacteristic movement, like the kneading of dough.

  Avram looks at her fingers as they replay Ilan’s kneading motion, and he is grateful to her for allowing him to be with them there, and to touch the soft, maternal dough of their day to day.

  Ora wrapped Ilan in her arms and thrust her knee between his legs to make him feel good, and they lay entwined for several minutes. Then Ilan smiled over her head. “Still, I would have stopped his acting up a lot sooner.”

  Ora laughed into his neck. “I’m sure you would have, my love.”

  HE SIGHED DEEPLY, and she reached her foot out and touched his, to encourage and comfort him. They’d been lying in bed, awake and silent, almost the whole night. Every so often one of them would sigh, and the other’s gut would tighten. This time he repaid her with a touch, his toes in the concave of her foot. She moaned softly, he sniffled, she voiced a thin syllable, he softly cleared his throat, and she began the clumsy operation of turning herself over and moving her giant hump of a stomach to the other side. Then she pushed herself closer to him, edging forward like a sea lion on the sand, until she placed her head in the round of his shoulder and asked, “Why aren’t you asleep?”

  “I can’t,” Ilan replied.

  “You’re anxious.”

  “Yes, a little. Aren’t you?”

  She did not move from her nest in his body, but she was no longer there. “Just tell me, you’re not by any chance planning another little escape, are you?”

  “No, of course not!”

  “I just want you to know that if you leave this time, you won’t have anywhere to come back to. It won’t be like last time.”

  Adam mumbled in his sleep from the next room, and Ilan thought about how her voice always used to be cheerful with him; no one rejoiced at his arrival like that anymore, with the happiness and innocence and trust of a child. When he used to bask in her welcoming expression, he had felt that he was almost the person he wanted to be, and moreover, he’d believed that he could be that person, simply because Ora believed he already was. He murmured, “I’m staying, Ora, I’m not going anywhere. Why would you even think that?”

  As if she hadn’t heard him, she went on in the same knotted voice. “Because you can pull that same trick on me again, I can take it, but Adam will fall apart. It will finish him, and I won’t let you.”

  Ilan repeated that he was staying, but he stopped caressing her shoulder, and Ora lay still and measured the distance between her skin and his hand, which hung limply above her. Ilan thought: Caress her, touch her. Ora waited some more, then heavily gathered her body and turned over.

  Later, in the next wave of fear, they found themselves embracing again, his stomach against her back, his head buried in the back of her neck.

  “I’m afraid of him,” he murmured into her hair. “Do you understand? I’m afraid of an unborn baby.”

  “What, tell me, talk to me.”

  “I don’t know, I feel like he already has a fully formed personality. A mature one.”

  “Yes.” Ora smiled inside. “I feel that way, too.”

  “And that he knows everything.”

  “About what?”

  “About me. About us. About what happened.”

  Her fingers tightened on his forearm. “You haven’t done anything bad to him. All you ever did for Avram was good.”

  “I’m afraid of him,” he whispered and hugged her more tightly. “I’m afraid of what I’ll feel when I see him for the first time, and I’m afraid he’ll look like him.” Or worse—that he’d somehow look like both of them. A mixture of her and him. And that every time he’d look at him, he’d see how alike they actually are.

  She thought about little Adam, who didn’t resemble her or Ilan. Oddly, there was something of Avram in his face and expressions sometimes.

  “Ora,” he whispered into her neck, “don’t you think we should tell him a bit about his dad? So he’ll know where he came from?”

  “I tell him all the time.”

  “How?”

  “When I can’t fall asleep.”

  “You talk to him?”

  “I think to him.”

  “About what?”

  “About Avram, about us. So he’ll know.”

  His fingers dug through her hair, and she arched her head into the palm of his hand. The sharp smell of her scalp had intensified during the pregnancy. Ilan loved the smell, even though it was slightly unpleasant, or perhaps because of that, because it was unprocessed, peasantlike, the simple aroma of her body. This is home, he thought, with a slight flutter at his root.

  She smiled quietly and pressed her buttocks against him. “In the eleventh grade, I think, I wrote to him that even if we weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend, a couple, like he wanted, I felt we’d still be together forever, no matter how, but we would be. And he sent me a telegram, you know those yellegrams of his”—Ilan laughed into her nape—“saying that ever since he got my letter he was walking around with a rose in his lapel, and when people asked him what the occasion was, he said, ‘Yesterday I got married.’ ”

  “I remember, a red rose.”

  They said nothing. She stroked his fingers gently. Since Avram’s return, even fingernails were not something to be taken for granted.

  “I want us to live, Ilan.”

  “Yes.”

  “Our lives, I mean. Yours and mine.”

  “Of course, yes.”

  “I want to get out of this coffin already.”

  “Yes.”

  “Both of us.”

  “Yes.”

  “You and me, I mean.”

  “Yes, obviously.”

  “And for us to start living.”

  “Ora—”

  “You can’t spend your whole life paying for one moment.”

  “Yes.”

  “And for a crime we didn’t commit.”

  “Yes.”

  “We didn’t commit any crime, Ilan.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You know we didn’t.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Why don’t I believe you?”

  “Slowly. It will come, slowly.”

  “Hold me hard, carefully …”

  She took his hand and placed it on her belly. His hand pulled back at first, but then climbed up the belly and reached higher than it had meant to. Ora lay motionless. She felt that she had sprouted giant breasts in the last few months, tremendous fruits, hippopotamus-like. She felt uncomfortable with him touching them. Her skin was stretched painfully. If he pressed, the breast would crack open. She moved his hand back to her stomach: “Feel here.”

  “That?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that really him?”

  His long fingers roamed carefully over her stomach. Since they had slept together in the shed, since he had come back to live with her and Adam, he couldn’t make love with her. She hadn’t pushed him; she found it comfortable that way, too.

  “What’s this?”

  “A knee, maybe an elbow.”

  How will I be able to love him? he thought desperately.

  “Sometimes I don’t know whe
ther I’ll have enough love for him,” she said. “Adam fills me up so much, I don’t know how I’ll have room in my heart for another child.”

  “He’s moving …”

  “He always does that. Won’t let me sleep.”

  “He’s tough, eh? Full of strength.”

  “He’s full of life.”

  They talked carefully. Through all the months of the pregnancy they had not said these simple things to each other. Sometimes, through Adam, they talked about the “baby in the belly,” and guessed things about him. Privately they said almost nothing, and the due date had come and gone nine days ago.

  In fact, Ilan thought—this notion had come to him every night in recent months—there’s a concentrated, condensed little Avram in bed with us, and from now on he’ll be with us forever. Not just like a shadow, the way we’re more or less used to, but a real little Avram, alive, with Avram’s moves and his walk, maybe his face, too.

  Your father, Ora thought at the fetus floating inside her, and distractedly moved Ilan’s hand around and around on her stomach, once told me that at twelve he vowed that every moment in his life would be full of interest and excitement and meaning. I tried to tell him that was impossible, that no life could be only climaxes and peaks all the time, and he said, “Mine will be, you’ll see.”

  We both liked jazz, Ilan remembered and smiled onto Ora’s neck. We used to go to Bar-Barim in Tel Aviv, to hear Arale’ Kaminsky and Mamelo Gaitanopoulos, and then, on the bus back to Jerusalem, we’d always sit in the back row and scat sing our way through the whole session, and people would get annoyed but we didn’t care.

  I only knew your dad from the age of sixteen, Ora thought. Now maybe I’ll know what he was like as a child.

  They lay there for a long time, close to each other, and talked silently to Ofer.

  One day, when he was about five—Ora writes in a leftover page of the blue notebook—Ofer stopped calling us “Mom” and “Dad” and started calling us “Ora” and “Ilan.” I didn’t mind, I even liked it, but I could see that it really bothered Ilan. Ofer said, “How come you’re allowed to call me by my name, and I’m not allowed to call you by yours?” And then Ilan said something to him that I remember to this day: “There are only two people in the whole world who can call me ‘Dad.’ Do you know how great that is for me? And think about it: Are there that many people in the world who you can call ‘Dad’? Not really, right? So do you want to give that up?” I could see that Ofer was listening, and that it spoke to him, and ever since then he really did always call him “Dad.”

  “What are you writing?” Avram asks, propping himself up on one arm.

  “You scared me. I thought you were asleep. Have you been watching me for a long time?”

  “Thirty, forty years.”

  “Really? I didn’t notice.”

  “So what were you writing?”

  She reads it to him. He listens, his heavy head tilted. Then he looks up: “Does he look like me?”

  “What?”

  “I’m asking.”

  “If he looks like you?”

  And for the first time, she describes Ofer to him in detail. The open, large, tanned face, the blue eyes that are both tranquil and penetrating, and the eyebrows so fair you can hardly see them, just like she used to have. The wide, lightly freckled cheeks, and the slight, ironic smile that dispels the severity of the rounded forehead. The words tumble out of her, and Avram swallows them up. Sometimes his lips move, and she realizes that he is memorizing her words, trying to make them his, but it occurs to her that they will never really be his until he writes them down himself.

  She is embarrassed by her fluent gush of speech, but she cannot stop because this is exactly what she needs to do now: she must describe him in minute detail, especially his body. She must give a name to every eyelash and fingernail, to every passing expression, to every movement of his mouth or hands, to the shadows that fall on his face at different times of day, to each of his moods, to every kind of laughter and anger and wonderment. This is it. This is why she brought Avram with her. To give a name to all these things, and to tell him the story of Ofer’s life, the story of his body and the story of his soul and the story of the things that happened to him.

  She holds up a finger. “Wait. What did I just think of? Umm …” Her fingers play in the air, trying to birth a vague spark from it. “It was something of yours that I remembered. What was it? Oh, of course!” She laughs. “You once had this idea, you wanted to write a story, in the army, just before you started the one about the end of the world, remember?”

  “About my body.” He smiles, then snickers, quickly belittling, dismissive.

  But Ora won’t let him off the hook. “You thought of writing a sort of autobiography, where every chapter is about a different part of your body—”

  “Yes, an autobodyography. It was silly …”

  “And you let me read the chapter about your tongue, remember?”

  He waves both hands in protest. “Leave it, really, such nonsense.”

  “It was horrible. It was slander, not autobiography. Honestly, Avram, if you ever need a character witness, don’t invite yourself.”

  He laughs an unpleasant, dishonest laugh, as if wanting to appease her without really acquiescing. Something jackal-like flashes in the depths of his eyes, reminding her of how twisted and cruel he could be with himself when the evil spirits tormented him. And she suddenly yearns for him, an unbearable yearning, a sharp, blazing longing for him, for all of him.

  He says: “Look at us, we’re two old people now.”

  “Just as long as we don’t grow old before we grow up.”

  He looks at her for a long time, reading her thoughts. His gaze is steady and strange, with no ill intentions. On the contrary. It seems to her that he has only kind, tender thoughts for her now. “Ora.”

  “What?”

  “Can I join you for a bit?”

  “Where?”

  “No, never mind.”

  “Wait! You mean …?”

  “No, only if you—”

  “But are you … Wait, now?”

  “No?”

  Her body starts to agitate and flutter in the sleeping bag. “You mean …”

  He nods with his eyes.

  “My place or yours?”

  Avram wriggles out of his sleeping bag and stands up, and she opens her zipper and spreads her arms out to him: “Come, come, don’t say anything, just come here already. I thought you never would.” He collapses into her sleeping bag, heavy and dense, and their bodies are stiff and stammering, wrapped in too many layers of clothes and awkwardness. Their hands stutter and bump and pull back, and it’s not working, that much is already clear, it’s not right, it’s a mistake, they shouldn’t even go back to that place, and she’s afraid of what will happen if she forgets Ofer for a moment, if he is suddenly abandoned without protection, and she knows exactly what is going through Avram’s mind: the criminal returning to the scene of the crime—that’s what is in his twisted brain right now. “Don’t think,” she moans into his ear, “don’t think anything.” She presses her fingers on his temples, and Avram is on top of her, his heavy bones, his flesh, and he rams his body against hers with immense force, as if fighting to break through himself even before he can break into her, but she isn’t ready yet, either. “Wait, wait.” She moves her mouth away from his wandering lips. “Wait, you’re crushing me.”

  For several moments they are like two people who have struck up a conversation and are trying to remember—not who the other person is, but who they themselves are. But then, here and there, behind an opened button, an unhooked clasp, their scents rise, tongues taste, fingers slip between a shirt and pants, and suddenly skin, warm and alive, skin against skin, skin in skin, and here is a mouth, an eager and sucking and sucked-on mouth, and Avram moans: her mouth, her beloved mouth, and only then does he remember, and his tongue touches her lips lightly, probing, testing, wondering. Ora freezes: It’s
nothing, she reminds him silently, just two millimeters. But something does feel more wilted. He licks and sucks lightly, carefully, gently. Something has fallen asleep there, that’s all, but it’s warm, and it’s hers, it’s the pain imprinted on her, and his healing powers rise up. It’s her, with everything she now is.

  The dog scampers around them and yelps, trying to shove her face in between them, sniffing longingly. Then, shoved away, she sprawls nearby with her back to them, and a shivering furrow of insult plows through her fur. Avram’s hand, spread wide, supports Ora’s back and tightens and gathers her into him. “Wait, slowly now, give me your hand, give me.” A hand on a breast, softer and larger than it was. Yes, they both feel it, she knows through his hand. “Your sweet breasts,” he whispers into her ear, and she interlaces her fingers with his and wanders around her body with him. “Feel it, feel this,” and everything is broader and fuller, a woman, “touch, feel how soft,” yes. “You’re velvet, Ora’leh.” “Suckle on me.” A long silence. But it is then that they are both transported, and Neta flies through Avram’s head: Where are you, Nettush, we have to talk, listen, we have things to talk about; and Ora for an instant is with Ilan, the touch of his hands, the bones of his wrist, their tanned skin, the power contained in them. She used to run her finger over his wrists and feel as though she were touching a heavy iron key, the secret of his masculinity. But then the Character, Eran, also pops up in her mind, with his lips that turn pale with passion for her, with his feverish, crazed pleas: Now wear this, now put this on—how dare he show up here? And then, to her surprise, two long thumbs smooth over her body, full lips flutter, dark, plum-like, and where did they even come from, and she tightens her whole body toward Avram, “Come, you, you,” and Avram responds immediately, back from his wanderings, she remembers him by the signs, the tight grip, his head burrowing in the round of her neck, his hand softly cupping her head as though she were a baby—Ora whose head must be protected—and his other hand strokes her stomach, clinging to it with excited fingers, and she smiles, his hunger for the belly of a woman, soft, large, full (she always felt it in his fingertips, and could almost guess by the way his fingers touched her stomach, could almost draw the figure of the fantasy woman he truly desired), and now she can finally give him something of that, not just the taut, boyish drum skin she had back then. He is grateful, she senses it immediately, his entire flesh exalts her funny little stomach, which has found a use after all, and his mouth is hungry for hers, and his fervor, it’s all familiar and beloved, a huge wave of longing breaks between them. We, she wails in her head, a she-wolf of many udders and nipples, and Avram sucks on them all. Here we are! she rejoices, squirming beneath him. This is how we are, and always have been, and this is how we put thigh to thigh, and our feet interlace, and our hands, and all the corners of our bodies, even the most remote, elbows, ankles, behind the knees, carnivalesque excitement, and Ora whispers something in his ear, and then reaches the tip of her tongue to the tip of his tongue, a sting of moisture from within her, and they both ignite, and his blacksmith’s arms carry her, and her head drops back as though decapitated, and together they thrash the earth beneath her, and he is at her neck, his teeth on the artery, grunting and groaning, and she, “Don’t stop, don’t stop,” let him gallop and bellow and drum her with his loins to the earth, and he is one and he is with her, there is no other woman with them, only he and she now, a man and a woman going about their business—that’s what he used to tell her: “Now we’re a man and a woman going about our business,” and he would tempt her with the madness of his strange, formal language, and the way he turned his back on the whole world, and with one thrust he would release her from the torture of thinking about Ilan, just a man and a woman going about their business. Now too, there is no world outside their body, no breath outside their breath, no Ilan, no Neta, no Ofer, no Ofer, no Ofer, yes, yes there is an Ofer, if Avram and Ora are like this then there is an Ofer, there is, there will be, there will be an Ofer, leave Ofer now, release him for one minute …