To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  Ora cried out sharply, as though stabbed with a needle. What happened? Avram asked softly, infected by her pain. Nothing, she said. It’s nothing. She secretly stared at him, trying to penetrate the darkness and finally see who he was.

  • • •

  Somehow, in a super-avian effort, he flew to Room Three and landed on the edge of his classmate’s bed, and he too was trembling and sighing and scratching in his sleep. It’s so quiet here, Avram murmured. Have you noticed how quiet it is tonight? There was a long silence. Then the other boy spoke in a hoarse, broken voice: It’s like a tomb in here, maybe we’re already dead. Avram contemplated. Listen, he said, when we were alive, I think we studied in the same class at school. The boy said nothing. He tried to lift his head to look at Avram, but could not. After a few minutes he moaned, When I was alive, I basically didn’t study anything in any class. That’s true, said Avram with a thin, admiring smile. When I was alive there really was a guy in my class who basically didn’t study anything. A guy called Ilan. Unbelievable snob, never talked to anyone.

  What could he possibly have to talk to you guys about? A bunch of babies, pussies the lot of you, clueless.

  Why? asked Avram quietly. What do you know that we don’t?

  Ilan let out a short, bitter snort of laughter, and then they sat quietly, sinking into turbulent sleep. Somewhere in the distance, in Room Seven, Ora lay in bed and tried to figure out if these things had really happened. She remembered that not long ago, a few days ago, when she was walking back from practice at the Technion courts, she had passed out on the street. She remembered that the doctor at Rambam had asked whether she had been to one of the new army camps set up in preparation for the war, and if she’d eaten anything or used the latrines. She was instantly uprooted from her home, then exiled to a strange city and trapped in total isolation by the doctors, on the third floor of a tiny, miserable, neglected hospital in a city she barely knew. She was no longer sure if her parents and friends were really forbidden to visit her or if in fact they had visited her while she was sleeping, had stood helplessly around her bed trying to revive her, had spoken to her, called her name, then walked away, turning back to give her one more look: What a shame, such a good girl, but it can’t be helped, life goes on and you have to look ahead, and now there’s a war and we need all our strength.

  I’m going to die, Ilan mumbled.

  Nonsense, Avram said, shaking himself awake. You’ll live, another day or two and you’ll be—

  I knew this would happen, said Ilan softly. It was obvious from the beginning.

  No, no, Avram said, scared now. What are you talking about, don’t think that way.

  I never even kissed a girl.

  You will, said Avram. Don’t be scared, it’s okay, things will work out.

  When I was alive, Ilan said later—maybe a whole hour later—there was this kid in my class who only came up to my balls.

  That was me, Avram laughed.

  He could never shut up. It’s me.

  Always made such a fuss.

  It’s me, it’s me!

  I used to look at him and think, That guy, when he was little, his dad used to beat the crap out of him.

  Who told you? Avram asked, alarmed.

  I see people, Ilan said, and fell asleep.

  Agitated, Avram spread his wings and flew down the curved corridor, banging into walls until he finally landed in his spot on the chair next to Ora’s bed. He closed his eyes and slept fitfully. Ora was dreaming about Ada. In her dream, she was with Ada on that same endless white plain where the two of them walked almost every night, silently holding hands. In the early dreams, they talked all the time. From afar they could both see the rock looming over an abyss. When Ora dared to glance at her from the side, she saw that Ada no longer had a body. All that was left was a voice, quick and sharp and alert as it always used to be. The feeling of clasped hands was also still there, the fingers desperately clutching. The blood inside Ora’s head pounded: Don’t let go, Don’t let go, Don’t let go of Ada, not even for a minute—

  No, Ora whispered, and woke up in a start, bathed in cold sweat, I’m so stupid—

  She looked at the place where Avram was sprawled in the dark. The vein in her neck started to throb.

  He woke up. What did you say? He tried to steady himself on the chair. He kept sliding down toward the floor, a despotic force pulling him to lie down, to rest his unbearably heavy head.

  I had a friend who talked a bit like you do, she murmured. You still here?

  I’m here, I think I fell asleep.

  We were friends since first grade.

  But not anymore? Ora tried in vain to control her hands, which suddenly shook wildly. It had been more than two years since she’d spoken to anyone about Ada. She hadn’t even said her name out loud. Avram leaned forward a little. What’s the matter with you? Why are you like that?

  Listen—

  What?

  She swallowed and said quickly, In the first grade, on the first day, when I walked into the classroom, she was the first girl I saw.

  Why?

  Well, Ora giggled, she was a redhead, too.

  Oh. Wait, are you?

  She laughed out loud, and her laughter, again, was healthy and musical. She was so surprised that anyone could be with her and talk with her for such a long time, three nights, without knowing she was a redhead. But I don’t have freckles, she quickly clarified. Ada did, all over her face, and on her arms and legs. Does this even interest you?

  On her legs, too?

  Everywhere.

  Why did you stop?

  I don’t know. There’s not much to tell.

  Tell me what there is.

  It’s a little … She hesitated for a moment, unable to decide if she could tell him the secrets of the fraternity. You should know that the first thing a redheaded kid does is find out if there are any other redheads around.

  To be their friend? Oh, no, the opposite. Right?

  She smiled admiringly in the dark. He was smarter than she thought. Exactly, she said. And also so they never stand next to them or anything.

  That’s just like how I—I look for the runts first.

  Why?

  That’s the way it is.

  Are you … Wait, are you short?

  I’m willing to bet I don’t reach your ankles.

  Hah!

  Seriously, you have no idea what kind of offers I get from circuses.

  Tell me something.

  What?

  But be honest.

  Go on.

  Why did you come to me yesterday and today?

  Don’t know. I just did.

  Even so.

  He cleared his throat and said, “I wanted to wake you before you started singing in your sleep, Avram lied.”

  What did you say?

  “I wanted to wake you before you started singing in your sleep again, lied the ever-scheming Avram.”

  Oh, you’re—

  Yes.

  You’re adding in what you—

  Exactly.

  Silence. A secretive smile. Wheels spinning rapidly, on both ends.

  And your name is Avram?

  What can I do? That was the cheapest name my parents could afford.

  And that would be like my saying, for example, “He’s talking to me as if he were a theater actor or something, thought Ora to herself”?

  “You’ve got it, Avram praised Ora, and said to himself, Dear soul, I believe we’ve found—”

  “So now be quiet for a minute, said Ora the genius, and delved into thoughts deeper than the ocean itself.”

  “I wonder what she’s thinking thoughts deeper than the ocean itself about, Avram speculated nervously.”

  “She’s thinking to herself that she really wants to see him, just for a minute—and then Ora, sly as a fox, revealed to him that apart from a chair, she had also today prepared this.”

  A scratch, and another scratch, a flare, and a spot of light shin
es in the room. A long, fair, slender arm reaches out, holding a matchstick torch. The light sways on the walls like liquid. A large room with many empty, naked beds, and trembling shadows, and a wall and a doorframe, and in the heart of the circle of light is Avram, shrinking back a little from the glare of the match.

  She lights another and holds it lower, as if not wanting to embarrass him. The flame reveals a young man’s thick, sturdy legs in blue pajamas. Surprisingly small hands grasp each other nervously on the lap, and the light climbs up to a short, solid body and cuts a large round face out of the darkness. Despite the illness, the face contains an almost embarrassing lust for life, curious and intense, with a bulbous nose and swollen lids, and above them a wild bush of black hair.

  What astounds her more than anything is the way he presents his face for her perusal and verdict, closing his eyes tightly, strenuously wrinkling all his features. For a moment he looks like someone who has just tossed a very fragile object into the air and is now waiting fearfully for it to shatter.

  Ora gasps with pain and licks her burned fingertip. After a moment’s hesitation, she lights another match and holds it with severe candor in front of her own forehead. She shuts her eyes and quickly runs the light up and down in front of her face. Her eyelashes flutter, her lips protrude slightly. Shadows break on her long, high cheekbones and around the defiant, swollen ball of her mouth and chin. Something dark and imbued with sleep hovers over this lovely face, something lost and unweaned, but perhaps it’s just the illness that makes it look that way. Her short hair glistens like burnished brass, and its brilliance glows in Avram’s eyes even after the match goes out and the darkness once again envelops her.

  HEY—

  What, what?!

  Avram?

  What?

  Did you fall asleep?

  Me? I thought you did.

  Do you really think we’ll get better?

  Of course.

  But there must have been a hundred people in isolation when I got here. Maybe we have something they don’t know how to cure?

  You mean—both of us?

  Whoever is left here.

  That’s just the two of us, and the other guy, from my class.

  But why us?

  Because we have the complications of hepatitis.

  That’s just it. Why us?

  Don’t know.

  I’m falling asleep again—

  I’m staying.

  Why do I keep falling asleep?

  Weak body.

  Don’t sleep, watch over me.

  Then talk to me. Tell me.

  About what?

  About you.

  They were like sisters, she told him. People called them “the Siamese twins,” even though they looked nothing alike. For eight years, ages six to fourteen, first grade to the end of the first trimester in the eighth grade, they sat at the same desk. They didn’t part after school either, always together, at one or the other’s house, and in the Machanot Olim youth movement, and on hikes—Are you even listening?

  What …? Yes, I’m listening … There’s something I don’t get—why aren’t you friends anymore?

  Why?

  Yes.

  She isn’t—

  Isn’t what?

  Alive.

  Ada?!

  She heard him flinch as though he’d been hit. She folded her legs in and wrapped her arms around her knees and started rocking herself back and forth. Ada is dead, Ada’s been dead for two years, she said to herself quietly. It’s all right, it’s all right, everyone knows she’s dead. We’re used to it now, she’s dead. Life goes on. But she felt that she had just told Avram something secret and very intimate, something only she and Ada had really known.

  And then, for some reason, she relaxed. She stopped rocking. She began to breathe again, slowly, cautiously, as if there were thorns in her lungs, and she had the peculiar notion that this boy could carefully remove them, one by one.

  But how did she die?

  Traffic accident. And just so you know—

  An accident?

  You have the same sense of humor.

  Who?

  You and her, but exactly the same.

  So is that why—

  What?

  Is that why you don’t laugh at my jokes?

  Avram—

  Yes.

  Give me your hand.

  What?

  Give me your hand, quick.

  But are we allowed?

  Don’t be stupid, just give it to me.

  No, I mean, because of the isolation.

  We’re infected anyway.

  But maybe—

  Give me your hand already!

  Look how we’re both sweating.

  It’s a good thing.

  Why?

  Imagine if only one of us was sweating.

  Or only one was shaking.

  Or scratching.

  Or only one had—

  What?

  You know.

  You’re gross.

  It’s true, isn’t it?

  Then say it.

  Okay: shit—

  The color of whitewash—

  And with blood, loads of it.

  She whispered: I never knew I had so much blood in my body.

  What’s yellow on the outside, shakes like crazy, and shits blood? There, now you’re laughing … I was getting worried …

  Listen to this. Before I got ill I thought I didn’t have any—

  Any what?

  Blood in my body.

  How could that be?

  Never mind.

  That’s what you thought?

  Hold my hand, don’t leave.

  APART FROM THE COLOR of their hair, they were very different, almost opposites. One was tall and strong, the other short and chubby. One had the open, glowing face of a carefree filly, and the other’s was crowded and worried, with lots of freckles and a sharp nose and chin, and big glasses—like a young scholar from the shtetl, Ora’s father used to say. Their hair was completely different too: Ada’s was thick, frizzy, and wild, you could barely get a comb through it. I used to braid her hair, Ora said, in one thick braid, and then I’d tie it around her head like a Sabbath challah, that’s how she liked it. And she wouldn’t let anyone else do it.

  Ada’s head was truly red, much redder than Ora’s, and it always stuck out in acclamation. Ora curled up on the bed now and saw it: Ada, like a match head, like a blotch of fire. Ora peeked at her, peeked and closed her eyes, unable to face the fullness of Ada. I haven’t seen her that way for a long time, she thought, in color.

  She always walked on this side of me, Ora told Avram as she grasped his hand in both of hers, because Ada could hardly hear out of her right ear, from birth, and we always talked, about everything, we talked about everything. She fell silent suddenly and pulled her hands away from his. I can’t, she thought. What am I doing telling him about her? He isn’t even asking anything, he’s just quiet, as if he’s waiting for me to say it on my own.

  She took a deep breath and tried to find a way to tell him, but the words wouldn’t come. They pressed on her heart and could not come out. What could she tell him? What could he even understand? I want to, she thought to him. Her fingers moved and burrowed into her other palm. That was how she remembered them together, she remembered the togetherness, and she smiled: You know what I just remembered? It’s nothing, just that a week before she—before it happened—we were doing a literary analysis of “The Little Bunny.” You know, the nursery rhyme about the bunny who gets a cold.

  Avram shook himself awake and smiled weakly. What, tell me. Ora laughed. We wrote—actually Ada wrote most of it, she was always the more talented one—a whole essay about how dreadful it was that the plague of the common cold had spread to the animal kingdom, even to the most innocent of its creatures …

  Avram whispered to himself: “Even the most innocent of its creatures.” She could feel him taste the words in his mouth, run his tongue ove
r them, and suddenly, for the first time in ages, her memory was surprisingly lucid: She and Ada. It’s all coming back, she thought excitedly. Endless discussions about boys who did or did not have an “artistic personality,” and heart-to-hearts about their parents—after all, almost from the start they were more loyal to each other than to their family secrets. Now she thinks that if not for Ada she would not even know that it was possible, that such closeness was allowed between two people. And there was the Esperanto they started learning together but never finished … On the annual school trip to Lake Kinneret, she told him, on the bus, Ada had a stomachache and announced to Ora that she was going to die, and Ora sat next to her weeping. But when she really did, you know, I didn’t cry, I couldn’t. Everything in me completely dried up. I haven’t cried even once since she died.

  One small road and an alley separated their houses in the Neveh Sha’anan neighborhood. They walked to school together, and together they walked home, always holding hands when they crossed the street; that was their habit since the age of six, and that is how they did it at the age of fourteen. Ora remembered the one time—they were nine, and they had fought about something that day, and she didn’t hold Ada’s hand when they crossed, and a municipal van came around the bend and hit Ada, tossing her high up—

  She could see it again: her red coat opening up like a parachute. Ora was only two steps behind, and she turned back and ran to hide behind a row of bushes, where she kneeled on the ground with both hands over her ears, shut her eyes tightly, and hummed loudly to herself so she wouldn’t see or hear.

  And I didn’t know it was only a dress rehearsal, she said.

  I’m no good at saving people, she added later, perhaps to herself, perhaps to warn him.

  And then it was Chanukah break, she said as her voice grew smaller. My parents and my brother and I were on vacation in Nahariya, we went there every year, to a guesthouse, for the whole holiday. The morning after vacation I went to school and waited for her by the kiosk where we used to meet every morning, and she didn’t come, and it was getting late so I walked on my own, and she wasn’t in the classroom, and I looked in the playground by our tree, in all our places, and she wasn’t there, and the bell rang and she hadn’t come, and I thought maybe she was sick, or maybe she was late and she’d be there soon. And then our homeroom teacher came in and we could see that he was confused, and he stood with his body kind of leaning sideways and said, Our Ada … And he burst into tears, and we didn’t understand what was going on, and a few kids even laughed, because he let out this kind of sob, from his nose …