To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  “Scare them,” she said cunningly, as though she were trying out a new theory of warfare. “Slap them, punch them, anything, just don’t shoot them!”

  “We aim at the feet,” he explained calmly, with that same amused superiority she knew from Adam and Ilan and the military analysts on television and the government ministers and the army generals. “And don’t worry about them so much. The most a rubber bullet can do is break an arm or a leg.”

  “And if you miss and take someone’s eye out?”

  “Then that someone won’t throw stones again. Let me give you an example: one of our guys shot three boys throwing stones at the pillbox this week, bang-bang-bang, broke their legs, one each, very elegantly done, and believe me, those kids won’t be back there again.”

  “But their brothers will! And their friends will, and in a few years their children will!”

  “Maybe you should aim so they’ll never have any children,” Adam suggested as he walked by, quiet and shadowy.

  The boys laughed with slight embarrassment and Ofer glanced awkwardly at Ora.

  She grabbed his hand and dragged him into Ilan’s study and stood facing him. “Now! I want you to promise me right now that you will never shoot someone to hurt them!”

  Ofer looked at her and the anger began to rise. “Mom, khalas, stop it, what are you … I have instructions, I have orders!”

  Ora stomped her feet. “No! Never, do you hear me? You will never shoot to hurt a human being! For all I care, aim at the sky, aim at the ground, miss in every direction, just don’t hit anyone!”

  “And if he’s holding a Molotov cocktail? If he has a gun? Huh?”

  They’d already had this conversation, or one like it. Or maybe that was with Adam when he started his service. She knew all the arguments, and Ofer knew them, too. She had sworn to herself that she’d keep quiet, or at least be very careful. She was always afraid that at the decisive moment of battle, or if he were taken by surprise, ambushed, her words would enter his mind and fail him, or delay his reaction for a split second.

  “If your life is in danger then okay, I’m not saying that. Then you try to save yourself any way you can, I’m not arguing about that, but only then!”

  Ofer crossed his arms over his chest in Ilan’s broad, relaxed posture, and widened his grin. “And how exactly am I supposed to know whether my life is in danger? Maybe I could ask the guy to fill out a declaration of intent?”

  She was trapped in the loathsome feeling she always got when he—when anyone—played with her, exploited her well-known lack of debating skills, the rickety assertions that came to her in such moments.

  “Really, Mom. Wake up. Hello! There’s a war going on there! And anyway, I didn’t think you were exactly crazy about them.”

  “What difference does it make what I think of them?” she screamed. “That’s not the point. I’m not arguing with you now about whether we should even be there or not!”

  “Well, for all I care, we can get out of there today and let them live their fucked-up lives on their own and kill each other. But at this point in time, Mom, when I have the lousy luck of having to be there, what do you want me to do? No, tell me. D’you want me to lie there and spread my legs for them?”

  He had never talked to her that way before. He was burning with rage. Her spirits fell. There must be a winning argument that would counteract all these claims of his. Her fingers spread in a mute scream next to her ears. Wait a minute. She exhaled and tried to gather her ragged thoughts. Soon she’d get it together and clarify to herself exactly what she wanted to say. She’d arrange the words along the right thread, the simple one. “Listen, Ofer, I’m not any smarter than you” (she wasn’t) “or any more moral than you” (even the word scared her; secretly she felt she didn’t really understand its true meaning, unlike everyone else, who apparently did), “but I do have—and this is a fact!” (she shrieked this in a slightly cheap way) “I do have more life experience than you!” (Really? Suddenly this too melted away: Do you really? With everything he’s going through in the army? With everything he sees and does, with everything he faces every single day?) “And I also know something that you simply cannot yet know, which is—”

  Which is what? What? She could see the flash of amusement in his eyes, and swore she would not react to it. She would focus on the main point, on saving her child from the barbarian standing opposite her.

  “That in five years—no, not five: one year! One year from now, when you get out, you’ll look at this situation in a totally different way. Wait! I’m not even talking about whether or not it’s just, I’m only talking about how one day you will look back at what happened there”—she heroically ignored his sniffle and the smirk spreading over his lips—“and you’ll thank me,” she said stubbornly; she was a little stuck, and they both knew it, stuck and desperately searching for the elusive winning argument. “You’ll see that you’ll thank me one day!”

  “If I’m still alive to thank you.”

  “And don’t talk to me like that!” she screamed, her face turning red. “I can’t stand those kinds of jokes, don’t you know that?”

  Dad’s jokes, they both knew.

  Tears of fury came to her eyes. She had almost grasped a brilliant answer in her mind, a logical, organized point, but as usual she lost her train of thought, dropped the stitch, and so she just reached out and held his arm pleadingly and looked up at him: a final argument that was in fact a plea for mercy, if not charity. “Promise me, Ofer, just don’t try to hurt someone intentionally.”

  He shook his head, smiled, and shrugged his shoulders. “No can do, Mom. It’s war.”

  They looked at each other. Their estrangement terrified them. A memory flashed in her mind. That same cold burn of terror and failure from almost thirty years ago, when they took Avram from her, when they nationalized her life. She felt the same old story again: this country, with its iron boot, had once again landed a thundering foot in a place where the state should not be.

  “Okay, Mom, enough. What’s up with you? I’m just joking. Stop, enough.” He reached out to hug her, and she was seduced—how could she not be? A hug of his own initiative. He even held her whole body to him, until she felt the mechanical signal on her back: thwack-thwack-thwack.

  And throughout the squabble, she tells Avram with her gaze lowered, she actually did have one crushing argument, which of course she didn’t tell Ofer, and which she is never allowed to use. Because what was really raging in her was not the eyes or the legs of some Palestinian kid, with all due respect, but rather her absolute certainty that Ofer could not hurt a human being, because if that happened, even if there were a thousand justifications, even if the guy was about to detonate an explosive device, Ofer’s life would never be the same. That was it. Quite simply, and irrefutably, he would have no life after that.

  But when she took a step back and looked at him, at the strength of his body, at that skull, she wasn’t even certain about that.

  Now, in the kitchen, he tells them he hasn’t changed his clothes or even showered for a week. His speaks tightly, hardly moving his lips, and Ora and Ilan strain to decipher his words. Ora watches Ilan surreptitiously move to the balcony, to close a window or open a door, or just stand there on his own for a moment. She leans over the damp, sticky, greasy pile that has tumbled out of Ofer’s backpack and gathers up uniforms, stiff socks, a military belt, undershirts, underwear. When she picks up the mess, sand leaks from pockets, and one bullet and a crumpled bus ticket fall out. She shoves the clothes into the machine and turns the dial to the most vigorous cycle. When the machine buzzes and the drum starts spinning, she feels the first sense of relief, as though she has finally revved up the process of domesticating this stranger.

  And he sits at the table laid out for him, his head buried in the newspaper, and he can’t find the strength to talk. He hasn’t slept for thirty-some hours. There was lots of activity this week, but he’ll tell them later. They quickly concur:

&n
bsp; “Of course, yes, the main thing is that you’re here,” Ora says, “we almost lost our minds waiting.”

  “Mom’s been cooking for you all morning.”

  “Don’t exaggerate! Dad’s exaggerating as usual, I haven’t had time to make anything at all. It’s a good thing I baked the brownies yesterday.”

  “Oh come on,” Ilan moans, and presents his argument for Ofer to judge: “She was out shopping all afternoon yesterday. Robbed the greengrocer, looted the butcher. By the way, how’s the food over there?”

  “Better, there’s a new cook and we don’t have rats in the kitchen anymore.”

  “Are you with the same guys from training?”

  “More or less. A few new ones came from another battalion, but they’re all right.”

  “And did everyone go home this weekend?”

  “Please, Dad, let’s talk later. I’m dead tired now.”

  A strange silence falls on them. Ilan squeezes oranges and Ora heats up the meatballs. A strange boy with a strange smell sits at the kitchen table. Long threads untangle behind him all the way to a place that is difficult to see and hard to think about. Ilan is telling her something. Some minutiae about a deal he’s been working on for two years between a Canadian venture-capital fund and two young guys from Beersheba who are developing a way to prevent drunk driving. Everything was ready to be signed, almost a done deal, and then at the last minute, when they took their pens out …

  The words fail to penetrate her. She cannot act out her role in this play, all of whose actors are real. Her lines are familiar, but the space in which the play is staged—the shell of Ofer’s tired, depressed silence—makes everything ridiculous and broken, and eventually Ilan also ebbs away and stops talking.

  Standing over the sink, Ora shuts her eyes for a stolen moment, concentrates, and says her usual prayer—not to an exalted God, but the opposite. A pagan at heart, she makes due with little gods, day-to-day icons, and small miracles: If she gets three green lights in a row, if she has time to bring the laundry in before it rains, if the dry cleaner doesn’t discover the hundred-shekel note she left in her jacket, then … And of course there are her usual bargains with fate. Someone rear-ends her bumper? Excellent: Ofer just won immunity for a week! A patient refuses to pay a two-thousand-shekel debt? Penance! Another two thousand credits for Ofer are recorded somewhere.

  From within the unpleasant silence a new round of domestic chatter starts up.

  “Where’s the onion left from the salad?”

  “Do you need it?”

  “I was thinking of frying some up with the meatballs.”

  “And put black pepper on it, he likes black pepper, don’t you, Ofer?”

  “Yes, but not too much. Our cook is Moroccan, his shakshuka sets my mouth on fire.”

  “So you eat shakshuka?”

  “Three times a day.”

  And the strand thickens furtively, slyly, weaving back and forth, and then Adam calls and says he’s two seconds from home, he’s just stopping to buy the paper and some snacks and they shouldn’t start eating without him. The three of them exchange grinning looks—Adam, operating us all by remote control. Ilan and Ora blather on about everything that’s changed in the house in the weeks since Ofer left. “He was always involved in all the goings-on at home,” she tells Avram on a path near Tzippori that cuts through an open field covered with thousands of brown-orange woolly-bear caterpillars squirming in unison inside their silk cocoons, so that the entire field seems to be dancing. “He always wanted to know about every piece of furniture we were thinking of buying and demanded that we report to him whenever an appliance broke and how much it cost to fix and what the repairman was like. He made us swear we would never, God forbid, throw out any broken appliance, or even the old parts, until he could examine them. When he started the army he even asked us to keep minor repairs for him to do when he was on leave—electrical work, plumbing, stopped-up drains, broken blinds, and yard work, of course.” But it seems to Ora that he’s a little tired of that now. The mundane defects of the house no longer concern him.

  The table is set and the food is ready, and Ilan says something that manages to bring the first spark of a smile to Ofer’s face, which they both treat as though it were an ember they have to breathe life into. Ofer tells them they have a cat with two kittens in the pillbox, and he’s decided to adopt the mother. He blushes slightly: “I was thinking, you know, just so I’d have something maternal there.” He gives an embarrassed laugh, and Ora hovers over the frying pan odors, and here is Adam, finally home. “Everything’s cold,” she complains, but everything’s still steaming hot, and the boys hug, and the sounds of their voices mingle, and they laugh together, a sound unlike any other. “Sometimes, here, on this journey,” she tells Avram, “I dream about that sound, and I can really hear the two of them laughing.”

  Ofer’s face lights up when he sees Adam, his eyes follow him wherever he goes, and only now does he seem to understand that he’s home, and he begins to awaken from his three-week slumber. And when Ofer awakes, they do, too. The four of them come to life, and the kitchen itself, like a reliable old machine, joins them in tracking Ofer’s movements, loyally running in the background, humming with the quiet commotion and the jingle of its unseen pistons and wheels. Listen to the soundtrack, she thinks. Believe in the soundtrack. This is the right tune: a pot bubbles, the fridge hums, a spoon clangs on a plate, the faucet flows, a stupid commercial on the radio, your voice and Ilan’s voice, your children’s chatter, their laughter—I never want this to end. From the pantry comes the rhythmic whirr of the washing machine, now augmented by the sound of metal clicking; probably a belt buckle, or a screw left in a pocket, but not, Ora hopes, another misplaced bullet, which will suddenly explode and fly at us all in the third act.

  One day about a year ago she asked the secretary at her clinic to cancel her next patient. She’d had a rough day, hardly slept all night—“the stuff at home had already started,” she says, and Avram listens tensely: there is something in her voice—and she thought she might pop over to one of the boutiques on Emek Refaim to buy a scarf or a pair of sunglasses or something to cheer her up. She walked down Jaffa Street toward the parking lot where she left her car every day. The street was uncharacteristically still and the eerie silence disquieted her. She wanted to turn around and go back to the clinic, but she kept walking, and noticed that people on the street were walking quickly, without looking one another in the eye. A moment later she herself began to act the same way, lowering her eyes and avoiding people, except to steal secret glances, to scan and sort. Mostly, she looked to see if they were carrying anything, a package or a large bag, or if they looked nervous. But almost everyone looked somehow suspect, and she thought perhaps they saw her that way, too. Perhaps she should let them know that she posed no danger? That they could be calm around her and save themselves a few heartbeats? On the other hand, maybe she should not disclose that sort of information so casually here. She pulled back her shoulders and forced herself to straighten up and look right at people’s faces. When she did, she saw in almost every person a note that hinted at some latent possibility—the possibility of being a murderer or a victim, or both.

  When had she learned these movements and these looks? The nervous glances over her shoulder, the footsteps that seemed to sniff out their path and make their own choices. She discovered new things about herself, like symptoms of an emerging disease. It seemed as though the others, walking around her, everyone, even the children, were fitfully moving to the sounds of a whistle that only their bodies could hear, while they themselves were deaf to it. She walked faster, and her breath grew short. How do you get out of this? she wondered. How do you get away from here? When she reached a bus stop, she halted and sat down on one of the plastic seats. It had been years since she’d waited at a bus stop, and even this act of sitting on the smooth yellow plastic was an admission of defeat. She straightened up and slowed her breath. In a minute she would get up
and keep walking. She remembered that in the first wave of suicide bombings, Ilan had gone with Ofer—Adam was in the army by then—to scout out safe walking routes from his school downtown to the stop where he got the bus for home. The first route was too close to where a terrorist had blown himself up on the 18 bus, killing twenty passengers. When Ilan suggested that Ofer could walk up the Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall, Ofer reminded him of the triple explosion on the mall, where five people were killed and a hundred and seventy injured. Ilan tried to outline a slightly longer route, which would go around the back and come out near the Mahaneh Yehuda market, but Ofer pointed out that this was exactly where a double suicide bombing had occurred: fifteen dead and seventeen injured. And anyway, he added, all the buses from town to Ein Karem go past the central bus station, where there had also been a bombing—the 18 again, twenty-five dead and forty-three injured.

  And so the two of them roamed from street to street—as she recounts the story to Avram, she has the horrifying thought that Ofer may still have his orange spiral notebook where he writes the numbers of dead and wounded—and the streets and the alleyways where there hadn’t yet been a bombing seemed so foreordained and vulnerable that Ilan was amazed nothing had happened on them yet. Finally he gave up, stopped in the middle of a street, and said, “You know what, Oferiko? Just walk as fast as you can. Run, even.”

  And the look Ofer gave him—he told Ora later—he will never forget.

  As she was contemplating all this, a bus stopped at the station. When the door opened, Ora dutifully got up and stepped in, and only then realized she had no idea what the bus fare was or which route she was on. She hesitantly held out a fifty-shekel note, and the driver growled at her for change. She dug through her purse but couldn’t find any, and he hissed a curse, handed her a handful of coins, and hurried her in. She stood looking at the passengers, most of whom were older and had weary, gloomy faces. Some were on their way back from the market, propping crammed baskets between their feet. There were a few high school students in uniform who were strangely quiet, and Ora looked at them all with bewilderment and muted compassion. She wanted to turn around and get off—“I never meant to take the bus,” she tells Avram—but someone behind her pushed her farther in, and Ora padded a few steps ahead. Since there were no vacant seats, she stood holding the overhead bar, leaned her cheek on her arm, and watched the city through the window. What am I doing here? she thought. I don’t have to be here. They passed the jumble of shops on Jaffa Street, the Sbarro restaurant, and then Zion Square, where a booby-trapped refrigerator had blown up in 1975, killing, among many others, the artist Naftali Bezem’s son, whom she’d known in the army. Ora wondered if Bezem had been able to paint after his son’s death. At the YMCA stop, a few seats opened up, and she sat down and decided she would get off at the next stop. She stayed on as they passed Liberty Bell Park and Emek Refaim, and when the bus drove past Café Hillel she said, half out loud, Now you’re getting off and going in for a cup of coffee. And she kept going.