To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  Ora bellowed, “Support for what? Support for what?” even though she wanted to yell, Support for whom? Because she really wasn’t sure anymore.

  Ilan softened his voice. “Support for your son. Listen, you’re his mother, right? You’re the only mother he has, and he needs you unconditionally now, do you understand? You’re his mother, you’re not some Mother for Peace, okay?”

  Ora was dumbfounded: Where had he come up with that? What did she have to do with Mothers for Peace? What did she have to do with those leftist women and their supposedly neutral checkpoint observations? She didn’t even like them! There was something defiant and annoying and unfair about them and the whole idea, coming to harass soldiers while they worked. How could you blame those kids, who’d been stuck there to man those checkpoints for three years? Instead of doing that, why didn’t they go and demonstrate at the military compound, or go and shout outside the Knesset? She’d always sensed a slightly grumbling weakness about them, with their excessive self-confidence and their total lack of reverence when they faced officers at the checkpoints or debated senior commanders on television panels. If not reverence, she thought, at least they should show a little gratitude, just a tiny bit, for the people who were doing our dirty work and eating all the Occupation shit for us, to keep us safe. As she conducted this confused dialogue with herself, Ilan kept talking softly: “Yes, there was a screwup. It really is awful, I agree with you. But Ofer isn’t to blame, get that into your head. There were twenty soldiers in that building and in the periphery. Twenty. You can’t saddle this whole case on him. He wasn’t the commander there, he isn’t even an officer. Why do you think he has to be more righteous than everyone else?”

  “You’re right,” Ora murmured. “You’re a hundred percent right, but”—and again the question dislodged itself against her will. It had been like that for weeks, she had no control over it, as though her body was independently producing the toxic compound that hiccupped out of her at regular intervals. Ilan was still in control of himself. It was amazing how all the people around her controlled themselves while she was falling apart. Sometimes she even suspected that the three of them were able to control themselves precisely because she was crumbling and that in some strange way, upholding some hidden and complicated home economics, she was even conducting her embarrassing, shameful collapse instead of them, and perhaps for their sake. Ilan reminded her for the thousandth time that as early as Thursday morning, roughly at four-thirty a.m., nine hours after the old man was put in the room—“was put,” he said; she noticed that the three of them had started using the passive voice: “was put,” “was left,” “had been forgotten”—Ofer had actually asked his commander what about the guy in the room downstairs, and he was told that Nir, the company commander, must have sent someone to take him out by now. At six that evening he’d asked Tom, the operations sergeant, and they’d told him over the walkie-talkie that there was no way someone hadn’t let the man out by now.

  And then he didn’t ask anymore, Ora thought. And Ilan said nothing. Ofer himself had told them he’d somehow forgotten, he had other fish to fry, and Ora realized that perhaps there comes a moment when you can no longer ask that kind of question, because you begin to fear the answer.

  Avram listens and thrusts his head lower and lower between his shoulders. She cannot see his eyes at all.

  Ilan took a deep breath and said, “What do you want, Ora? Up to now, in all the investigations, the army has even cleared Nir and Tom, because of all the chaos going on around them.”

  “I don’t want anything, and I hope they really do clear all the guys. But still, just explain to me how for two whole days Ofer didn’t think to go down and check for himself—”

  They’d had this argument many times during the last month, reciting their lines over and over again with growing desperation, and now Ilan yelled, “Enough with this already! Listen to yourself, what’s gotten into you? You’ve become a crazy woman!” And he hung up on her. After a few minutes he called to apologize. They never hung up on each other, and he’d never burst out at her like that before. “But you’re really getting on my nerves with this,” he said in a weary voice, and she could hear his desire for reconciliation and knew he was right and that they had to unite to get through this together. If matters were not handled sensibly and calmly, the case could deteriorate into a court-martial, rather than just the comprehensive inquiry being held in the battalion and the brigade. And if that happened, it was only a matter of time before it got into the news, as Ilan often reminded her, and those assholes were just looking for an excuse to dig up some dirt. You also had to remember, Ora recited to herself, that ultimately no one had died in that meat locker, and no one had been wounded or even starved, because there were cows and sheep and goats hanging on the meat hooks, and the old Palestinian man had managed to remove the gag they’d tied on his mouth so he wouldn’t shout. And thanks to the frequent power cuts mandated by the army in the killing zone, the man didn’t even freeze, and in fact at times he was kind of cooking down there—they boiled him and then froze him, then thawed him out again, as she had gradually understood from Ofer’s fellow soldiers with whom she was able to talk. Naked and reeking and covered with animal blood, he had rolled around on the floor when they’d finally opened the meat locker’s door—Ofer was home by then. “That Friday, at six p.m., he’d been sent home,” she murmurs to Avram. “Do you understand? He wasn’t even there.” And after they opened the door, he started to twitch and convulse on the sidewalk, and it was as if he performed a strange dance for the soldiers as he lay there, banging his head on the sidewalk. He pointed at the soldiers and at himself and cackled horribly, as though for the two days he was locked up he had kept hearing a tremendous joke, and soon he would get his act together and tell it to them. They ordered him to get up and he refused, or maybe he could not stand up. He just stumbled and squirmed at their feet and kept banging his head on the sidewalk and crowing his crazy laugh. Ora resisted telling Ofer’s friends, or Ilan and Adam, and Ofer himself, what was on the tip of her tongue: that perhaps going out of his mind was the only way a Palestinian could get through all the checkpoints and the permits and the physical examinations. But that thought was foreign to her too, and it seemed to have been created by her brain against her own will, and for a moment she wondered what would happen if she started having more and more of these outbursts, left-wing Tourette’s attacks, and she quickly pulled herself together. After all, she reasoned, you should be grateful to Ilan for being so supportive of Ofer. He had studied the details of the case and reconstructed with Ofer every single minute of those two days, and prepped him carefully before each interrogation and questioning. He’d also talked to a couple of people he knew in the army and elsewhere and had gently pulled a few strings to bring the matter to a quick conclusion, by limiting it to the internal inquiry in the brigade. Ora swore that from now on she would try to control her big mouth. All was not yet lost, and now that she’d had her say, she could finally resume her natural place in the family and once again be mama bear protecting her cub. It was so clear, after all, that she could not keep enflaming this fight for even one more day. Cracks and slits were widening and appearing everywhere, and whenever she looked at Ilan she knew he felt the same way, that he was just as alarmed and no less paralyzed by what was happening to them.

  Avram listens and wraps his arms tightly around himself. He feels a frost descend on him in the midst of the blinding light-blue shades of the Tzippori River—the frost of a dark confinement cell, a forehead slammed against stone. Ora, her lips drained of blood, tells him how she and Ilan used to wake up and lie silently next to each other during those nights. They felt that their family was coming apart with remarkable speed; a trampling force that seemed to have been lurking all those years had now burst out and lunged at them with incomprehensible fervor, even with an oddly gleeful vengefulness. Avram contorts his face with intolerable pain and shakes his head, No, no.

  With ju
st a little restraint and coolheadedness, she could still stop the deterioration, she thought as she drove and listened to Ilan softly try to placate her. It depended only on her now, on one kind word from her, on her giving up this poison that was bubbling inside her and killing her, too. But suddenly she pounded the steering wheel with both hands and shouted at the phone from the depths of her heart: “How could he not remember? A man in a meat locker!”—she slammed the wheel to the rhythm of her words, and Avram pulled back as though he were the one being hit—“A night and a day, and another night and day—how could he not remember? He remembers every single thing that has to be done, doesn’t he? Every leaky faucet, every door handle. He’s the most responsible kid in the world, yet he can forget a human being for a whole night and day and night—”

  “But why are you picking on him?” Ilan had groaned painfully, and she felt that she had finally managed to penetrate a shield. Ilan muttered, as if to himself, “Did he initiate it? Did he want something like this to happen? Did he decide to put that man in there?” Only now did Ora notice that two police cars were flashing their lights behind her and to her left, and the policemen were signaling for her to drive onto the shoulder. Suddenly frightened, she sped up. God knows what she’d done now; she’d only gotten her license back two months ago, after a six-month revocation. “And do I have to remind you again that there was a big operation going on there?” Ilan went on. “There were wanted men, and shooting, and Ofer hadn’t slept for forty-eight hours, and only by chance his guys were sent to do a job they weren’t even supposed to do and weren’t trained for, so what are we even arguing about?”

  “But he was there in the building, three floors up, and he ate and drank there and went up and down the stairs.” She slid onto the muddy shoulder and drove quickly, hoping somehow to outrun the police. She finally stopped when they closed in on her. “And he talked over the radio at least twenty times with Chen and with Tom, and he had twenty opportunities to ask if they’d let the old man out already, and what did he do?” Ilan did not answer. “Tell me, Ilan, what did he do, our child?” Ora roared hoarsely. She heard Ilan straining to hold his breath and not explode again. Three policemen got out of the two cars and approached. One of them was talking on his walkie-talkie. Ilan said, “You know he meant to go down there and see.” She scoffed—an alien, loathsome scoff. “Meant to, yeah, sure. For two whole days he kept meaning to go down, but just when he was most meaning to, they came to tell him there was a ride leaving for Jerusalem, right? And then we all went out to the restaurant, right? And he forgot, right?” She let out an amazed guffaw and held her head in both hands, as though she was only now, for the first time, finding out the true story. “And that whole evening in the restaurant, he didn’t remember! Oops, sorry, slipped my mind! Doesn’t that incense you?” Ora roared and the veins on her neck swelled. “Tell me, Ilan, doesn’t that make you crazy?” “Ora, you’re losing your mind,” Ilan said, retreating into his sobering tone, the one that observed her with amused wonder, the one he used when they fought, when he let her wallow alone in her bitterness, in the filth that burst out of her. “Just please be careful and keep your eye on the road,” he added with that same tone of lawyerly advice. Ora locked the Punto’s doors from inside and ignored the cops rapping on the windows, their faces pressed up against the glass. One of them ran a scolding finger over the half of the front windshield that was caked with drops of muddy rain, and Ora laid her head on the steering wheel and murmured, “But it’s Ofer, do you understand that, Ilan? It happened to us. It’s our Ofer. How could Ofer, how could he?”

  AT FIVE-THIRTY in the morning, at the point where Mount Carmel begins to rise, Ora and Avram disentangle from each other. He folds the tents and the sleeping bags and packs up their two backpacks, and Ora goes to buy some food at a nearby grocery store.

  “We haven’t been apart for a long time,” she says, coming back to wrap herself around him.

  “Should I come with you?”

  “No, stay here with the stuff. I’ll only be a few minutes.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  “And I’ll be back,” she adds, sounding uncertain. “I don’t know what I’m suddenly afraid of,” she murmurs into his embrace.

  “Maybe that you’ll see what civilization is like and you’ll want to stay.”

  She is uneasy. An obstinate embolus moves inside her body like the undigested remnants of a dream. She stretches her arms and holds Avram back to look at him, engraving him in her memory. “Now I can see that I didn’t give you a good haircut. I’ll snip that straggler off today.”

  He fingers the stray lock.

  “And maybe you’ll let me shave you, too?”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t know, it’s annoying to see you with a beard.”

  “Oh, that.”

  “Yes, that.”

  “Okay.”

  “Maybe just a trim. We’ll see. We’ll just take a little off.”

  “Don’t you think I’m off enough as it is?”

  They look at each other. The spark of a smile in their pupils.

  “Buy some salt and pepper. And we’re almost out of oil.”

  “And we need batteries for the flashlight, right?”

  “And bring some chocolate, I could go for something sweet.”

  “Anything else, my dear?”

  A soft hand travels inside them on its fingertips. Avram shrugs. “I’ve gotten used to you.”

  “Watch out, you’ll get addicted.”

  “What’s going to happen, Ora?”

  She puts a finger to his lips. “First let’s finish the trail, and then we’ll see what works for us.” She kisses him on each eye and turns to leave. The dog looks from Ora to Avram, unsure whether to join her or stay with him.

  “Wait, Ora, hold up.”

  She stops.

  “It’s good for me to be with you,” he says quickly and lowers his gaze to his hands. “I want you to know that.”

  “Then say it. I need to be told.”

  “The way you let me be with you like this, and with Ofer, and with all of you.” His eyes redden. “You don’t know what you’re giving me, Ora.”

  “Well, I’m just giving you back what belongs to you.”

  They cling to each other again—since she’s taller than he, she has to hold her feet slightly apart; it’s always been that way—and for some reason she remembers how every time she was about to go and see him in Tel Aviv, during those years when he agreed to meet, Ofer always sensed it. He used to grow restless and gloomy and sometimes run a high fever, as though trying to sabotage their meeting. When she got back he would sniff her out like an animal, demanding to know exactly what she’d been doing. And he always asked, with transparent slyness, whether Ilan knew where she’d been.

  Avram holds her to his body, cups her buttocks with both hands, and mumbles that there’s nothing like her gluteus maximus and her gluteus medius. “Take care of yourself there, in the store,” he says into her hair, and they both hear what he has not said: Don’t talk with anyone too much. If the radio is on, ask them to turn it off. Do not under any circumstances look at the papers. Avoid the headlines.

  She walks away and pauses a few times to turn around and give him a movie star’s long, lingering wave and blow him a kiss. He smiles, his hands on his waist, the white sharwals flapping around his body, and the dog sits erect beside him. He looks good, Ora thinks. The new haircut and Ofer’s clothes are good for him, and there’s something refreshing in the open way he stands and in his smile. “He’s coming back to life,” she tells herself out loud. This walk is bringing him back to life. What does that say about me? What place will I have in his life when the journey is over, if I have any place at all?

  Wait, she thinks, suddenly troubled—why isn’t the dog coming with me? But even before she can finish the thought, Avram leans down and pats the dog on her butt, urging her to run along.

  An hour later Ora silently unloads her purchases fro
m the Kfar Hasidim supermarket’s plastic bags—labeled “Strictly Glatt Kosher”—and divvies them up between the two backpacks: biscuits, crackers, canned goods, packets of bouillon. Her movements are quick and sharp.

  “Did something happen, Ora’leh?”

  “No, what happened?”

  “I don’t know. You seem …”

  “I’m fine.”

  Avram licks his upper lip. “Okay, okay.” And after a moment, “Ora—”

  “What is it?”

  “Did you hear the radio down there? Did you see a newspaper?”

  “There’s no radio there, and I didn’t look at the paper. Come on, let’s go. I’m sick of this place.”

  They hoist up their backpacks, pass the playground at Kibbutz Yagur, and choose a path with red markers. They soon replace it with a blue one that leads to the Snake River, recently renamed Ma’apilim River, and start climbing up the mountain. The day is still swathed in morning mist, indulging itself and lazily putting off its brightening. The climb soon grows steep, and the two of them and the dog are all breathing heavily.

  “Wait a minute,” he calls after her, “did someone tell you something there?”

  “No one told me anything.”

  She practically runs up the incline. Stones spark from her heels. Avram gives in and stops to wipe the sweat off. At the same moment, without looking at him, Ora also stops and stands like an angular exclamation point one rocky step above him. Through oak trees and the milky morning vapors, they can see the Zevulun Valley, the suburbs of Haifa, and the Yagur Junction as it comes to life. The pair of towers at the oil refinery in the bay emit plumes of white steam that slowly curl and mingle with the mist. Avram wants to give her something, to quell the sudden irritation bristling around her. If only he knew what to give. Glimmering cars fly by on the roads leading to the junction. A distant train sends out rhythmic sparks of metal and light. But here on the mountain the silence is broken only by the occasional truck horn or the stubborn wail of an ambulance.