To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  And how do I know how to be a mother partridge? she thinks. An utterly natural mother partridge.

  A car honks behind them, and then another. The policeman sniffs. Something is bothering him. Something isn’t right. He is about to ask another question, but Sami, with acrobatic swiftness, beats him to it. He laughs heartily, jerks his head back at Ora, and says to the cop, “Don’t worry, buddy, she’s one of ours.”

  The policeman curls his lip in slight revulsion, moves his flashlight around, and waves them through. The little interrogation had lasted for only a few minutes, but Ora’s body is bathed in sweat—her own and the boy’s.

  “An IR?” she asks later, when she regains her voice and Sami starts accelerating toward the Ayalon freeway. “You employ workers from the Territories?”

  Sami shrugs. “Everyone has workers from the Territories. Them ones are the cheapest, the dafawim. You think I can afford a plasterer from Abu Ghosh?”

  She sits back more comfortably. The boy, too. Ora wipes off his sweat and her own. She keeps looking to her side, thinking she can still see the policeman’s finger on her window ledge, pointing at her. She doesn’t think she will ever be able to go through a roadblock experience like that one again. “And what you said to him about me being ‘one of ours’?”

  Sami smiles and licks his lower lip. Ora knows the gesture: he is savoring a good quip even before it comes out. She smiles to herself and massages her neck and stretches her toes. For a moment it feels as though they are putting the house back in order after a rampage.

  “ ‘One of ours,’ ” says Sami, “means ‘even though you look like a lefty.’ ”

  The boy relaxes a little and falls asleep again. Ora puts his head on her lap. She leans back and breathes slowly. This may be her first quiet moment of the day.

  Since Sami has always been a sort of distant extension of Ilan for her, and more recently a connecting thread to him, she begins to feel homesick. Not for the house she rented in Beit Zayit after the separation, nor for the house in Tzur Hadassah that she and Ilan had bought from Avram. The home she misses achingly is the last home she and Ilan had in Ein Karem, an expansive old two-story house with thick, cool walls, surrounded by cypress trees. It had big arched windows with deep ledges, and decorative floor tiles, some of which wobbled. Ora had seen it for the first time as a student. It stood there, empty and closed up, and it was love at first sight. With Avram’s encouragement she wrote a love letter. “My dear, despondent, lonesome house,” she began, then proceeded to tell the house about herself and explain how well suited they were for each other. She promised to make it happy. In the envelope she placed a photo of herself with long, curly, copper hair, wearing orange sweats and laughing as she leaned on a bike. She sent it with a note to the owners saying that if they ever decided to sell—and they did.

  She and Ilan had become increasingly affluent, even becoming wealthy over the years—Ilan’s office flourished: leaving his job twenty years ago to focus on the slightly esoteric field of intellectual property was a hugely successful gamble. Since the mid-eighties the world had filled with ideas, patents, and inventions that needed protection, requiring knowledge and swift action wherever legislation and legal loopholes were concerned in various countries; new computer applications, inventions in communication and encoding, genetic medicine and engineering, all kinds of World Trade Organization treaties and agreements; Ilan was there one minute before everyone else—and although they could afford to renovate and beautify and build and design whatever they wanted to, Ilan let her nurture and tame the house as she wished, and so she allowed it to be itself, to grow at its own pace, and happily mount into a plethora of disparate styles. For several years there was a huge glass-doored refrigerator in the kitchen, an extremely efficient eyesore that Ora had bought at a liquidation sale from a man who sold equipment to supermarkets. She got the dining-room chairs for a steal at the Jerusalem café Tmol Shilshom, because Adam once mentioned in conversation how comfortable they were. The shadowed living room was a lair of thick rugs, huge cushions, and pale bamboo furniture, with overflowing bookshelves covering three walls. The massive dining table, the hostess’s pride and joy, which could seat fifteen guests without elbows touching, was carved and adorned by Ofer as a surprise for her forty-eighth birthday. Ofer made it round: “That way, no one ever has to sit at a corner.” The house itself was finely attuned and responsive to Ora’s moods. It carefully, hesitantly shed its age-old gloominess, stretched its limbs, and cracked its stiff joints, and when it realized that Ora was permitting it to retain the occasional pocket of charming abandon and even some healthy neglect, it grew into a comfortable unkemptness, until at times, when a certain light hit, it almost looked happy. Ora felt that Ilan was also content in the house, with the collegiate mess she created in it, and that her taste—meaning, her assortment of tastes—was to his liking. Even when things suddenly went bad between them, and their togetherness emptied out with alarming speed, she believed that his affection for the home she had made for them still pulsed inside him. And she remains convinced that beneath the layers in which he began to cloak himself—his impatience and grumbling and constant criticism of everything she did and said, of everything she was; beyond his back-turning, beyond his polite concern and insulting shell of decency toward her, beyond the small and large denials with which he tried to repudiate her and their love and their friendship, and despite his claim that he’d run his course with the relationship—that despite all this he still remembered and knew that he had no better wife or friend or lover than she, and that even now, as they both approach fifty and he has traveled to the far corners of the earth to get away from her, he knows deep in his heart that only together can they continue to bear everything that happened to them when they were young, practically children.

  She remembers the way Ilan’s face lit up—it was in the army, in Sinai, when they were nineteen and a half and Ilan still dreamed of making movies and music, and Avram was still Avram—when he told her how moved he was every time he read in the book of Kings of how the great woman of Shunem told her husband they should prepare a resting place for the Prophet Elisha. Let us make, I pray thee, a little chamber on the roof, Ilan read to her from the little army-issue Bible. And let us set for him there a bed, and a table, and a stool, and a candlestick; and it shall be, when he cometh to us, that he shall turn in thither.

  They were lying on a narrow cot in his room on the base. Avram must have been at home on leave. His empty cot faced them, and on the wall above it was a line handwritten in charcoal: It is not good that man should be … The quote trailed off without bothering to include the last word, alone. Her head rested in the depression of Ilan’s shoulder. He read to her until the end of the chapter, slowly running his long musician’s fingers through her hair.

  As it turns out, they are not going to South Tel Aviv but to Jaffa, and not to a hospital but to an elementary school that Sami locates only after driving around for a long time. Yazdi, who has recovered slightly, sits with his face pressed to the window and laps up the streets and scenes. Every so often he turns to Ora with a look of disbelief that such things can truly exist. Behind Sami’s back the two of them make up a game: he looks at her, she smiles, he looks back at the window and then peeks at her again over his shoulder. When they drive along the waterfront promenade, Sami says to Yazdi, “Shuf el bahr”—look at the sea. The boy puts his head and shoulders out of the window, but beyond the streetlamps the sea is just a dark mass with a few frothy mounds. He murmurs, “Bahr, bahr,” and spreads his fingers out. Ora asks, “Haven’t you ever seen the sea?” He does not answer, and Sami laughs: “This one, where’s he gonna see the sea? At the promenade of the refugee camp?” A breeze carries a whiff of saltwater, and Yazdi’s nostrils widen as he sniffs and tastes. His face has a strange, almost tortured expression, as if its features cannot tolerate the happiness.

  Then the illness bears down on him again. His arms and head begin to jerk, and he looks like some
one trying to avoid things being thrown at him. Ora keeps mopping his sweat with tissues, and when they run out she uses a rag she finds under the front seat. There is a plastic bag there too, with his underwear, a pair of socks, a Ninja Turtles T-shirt that used to belong to Ofer and was passed on to Sami’s kids, a screwdriver with spare blades, and a clear globe with a tiny dinosaur inside. Yazdi is thirsty and his tongue flicks around in his mouth. The water bottle is empty, but Sami is afraid to stop for water at a kiosk. “On a day like this, an Arab at one of these kiosks, it’s not a good idea,” he explains drily. Soon, perhaps because of Sami’s nervous driving and the circuitous ambling around the maze of Jaffa’s alleyways, Yazdi starts to vomit.

  Ora feels his body seize up, his ribs spasmodically rise and fall, and tells Sami to stop the car. Sami gripes that he can’t pull over here: a police van is parked on the opposite sidewalk. But when he hears another fitful gargle from the back, he speeds up as if he’s lost his mind. He runs red lights, looking for a dark corner or an empty lot, and yells at Yazdi in Arabic to hold it in. He threatens the boy, and curses him and his father and his father’s father. A projectile of vomit erupts from the boy’s mouth. Sami yells at Ora to aim Yazdi’s head at the floor, away from the upholstery, but the boy’s head jerks in all directions like a balloon with its air let out, and Ora is sprayed all over her feet, pants, shoes, and hair.

  Sami’s right hand reaches back like lightning, feels around, touches something, and pulls back in disgust. “Gimme his hand!” he screeches in a thin, feminine voice. “Put his hand here!” Ora mechanically obeys the urgency in his voice, dimly hoping he might know some instant cure or Palestinian-Shamanic trick, and she holds Yazdi’s limp hand on the fake-wood space between the two front seats. Sami, without even looking, slams down on the hand with his heavy sledgehammer of a fist. Ora screams as though she is the one who’s been hit, and reaches to pull back Yazdi’s hand, but Sami, who doesn’t see what is happening, lands another blow on her arm.

  A few minutes later they reach the school. They stop outside a locked gate and a young bearded man, who was waiting in the shadows inside, emerges and looks in all directions, then motions to Sami to follow him along the fence. They walk with the fence between them. At a dark corner the young man holds open a broken part of the fence and comes out to Sami, and the two men whisper quickly, glancing around. Ora gets out of the taxi and inhales the damp night air. Her left arm is burning, and she knows the pain will get worse. In the light of the streetlamp she sees that she is covered with vomit stains. She tries to shake herself off. The bearded man holds Sami’s arm and walks him back to the taxi. They look at Yazdi lying inside, and Sami examines the upholstery with grieving eyes. They both ignore Ora. The young man gives some sort of signal over a cell phone, and three boys come running out of the dark school. Not a single word is uttered. The three pull Yazdi out of the taxi and carry him inside quickly, through a side gate. One of them holds Yazdi’s shoulders, and the other two hold his legs. Ora looks at them and thinks, This is not the first time they’ve carried someone inside like that. Yazdi’s head and arms droop, and his eyes are closed, and it is somehow clear to her that this is not his first time, either.

  When she starts walking after them, the bearded man turns to her and then looks at Sami. Sami goes up to her: “Maybe it’s better if you stay here.”

  Ora gives him a piercing look. He gives in, walks back to the bearded man, and whispers something to him. Ora assumes he is telling him it’s all right; perhaps he even said, “She’s one of us.”

  Inside, the school is completely silent and dark, illuminated only by the moon and the streetlamp. Sami and the bearded man disappear, swallowed up into one of the rooms. Ora stops and waits. When her eyes grow accustomed to the dark, she sees that she is in a fairly large auditorium, with a few corridors leading out of it. Empty window boxes are placed here and there, and posters promoting quiet, neatness, and cleanliness hang crookedly on the walls. She can smell children’s sweat and a distant odor of locker rooms and above all the stench of vomit from her own clothes. She wonders how she will find Sami and Yazdi but is afraid to call out to them. She walks carefully through the darkness, taking small steps, with her arms out in front of her, until she reaches a round supporting column in the middle of the auditorium. Her gaze orbits the walls. She sees pictures of faces she cannot make out, possibly Herzl and Ben-Gurion, or perhaps the prime minister and the chief of staff. A small memorial made out of a heap of rocks sits in the corner opposite her, beneath a large picture that seems to be of Rabin, with black metal letters affixed to the wall above. Ora slowly walks around the column, touching it with one hand. The rotation awakens in her the sweet dizziness she used to summon as a child, with a slight sensation of burning in her fingertips.

  As though gathering images while she circles, she begins to see shadowy figures of men, women, and children dressed in rags, silent, submissive, dusted with refugee ash. They are standing some distance away, along the walls, watching her. Ora freezes in terror. They’re coming back, she thinks. For a brief deceptive moment she is convinced that her motion has made real the nightmare that always flickers in the distance. A young woman walks up to Ora and whispers in broken Hebrew that Sami said she could wash her clothes in the bathroom.

  Ora follows the woman. The hallways rustle with shadows and the sounds of quick steps. Dim shapes hurry past. She hears almost no voices. The woman silently points to the girls’ bathroom and Ora goes in. She understands that she must not turn on the light, that the entire place must remain dark. In one of the doorless stalls she sits down and pees into the small toilet. Then she washes her face and hair in the sink, scrubs the vomit off her clothes as best she can, and runs cold water over her aching left arm. When she is done, she stands with both hands on the stainless-steel counter, shuts her eyes, and succumbs to an overwhelming weariness. But with weakness comes a sharp pang of fright, again, as though she has left her post.

  What have I done.

  I took Ofer to war.

  I brought him to the war myself.

  And if something happens to him.

  And if that was the last time I touched him.

  At the end, when I kissed him, I touched his cheek on the soft spot where there’s no stubble.

  I took him there.

  I didn’t stop him. I didn’t even try.

  I called a cab and we went.

  Two and a half hours on the road, and I did not try.

  I left him there.

  I left him for them.

  With my own hands, I did.

  Her breath stops. She is afraid to move. Paralyzed. It’s a feeling she has, a sharp, real knowledge.

  Be careful, she thinks at him without moving her lips, and look behind you.

  Then, of its own accord, her body begins to move very gently, almost imperceptibly. Shoulders, hips, a slight shift of the waist. She has no control over her limbs. She only feels that her body is communicating to Ofer how he should move to get out of some danger or trap over there. The peculiar involuntary motion continues for a long minute, and then her body quiets and returns to her, and Ora breathes and knows everything is all right, for now. “Ahh,” she sighs to her little abdomen reflected in the low mirror.

  Sometimes I think I can remember almost every moment I had with him, from the second he was born. Yet at other times I find that entire phases are lost to me. “My friend Ariela gave birth prematurely, in her second trimester,” she tells a heavyset older woman in a floral scarf who has come into the bathroom and stands quietly to the side. She watches Ora with kind eyes and seems to be waiting for her to recover from whatever is paining her.

  “They gave her an injection,” Ora says softly. “An injection that was supposed to kill the fetus in her womb. He wasn’t right, he had Down syndrome, and she and her husband decided they couldn’t raise a child like that. But the child was born alive, do you see? Do you understand me?” The woman nods and Ora continues. “There must have
been a mistake in the amount of stuff they injected, and my friend asked them to let her hold the child for as long as he was alive. She sat up in bed, her husband walked out, he couldn’t take it”—Ora flashes her eyes at the woman and thinks she sees a spark of understanding and comradeship—“and for fifteen minutes he was alive in her arms, and she kept talking to him, she hugged him and kissed him all over, it was a boy, and she kissed each of his fingers and fingernails. She always says he looked like a perfectly healthy child, except tiny, and translucent, and he moved around a little and had facial expressions, just like a baby. He moved his hands and his mouth, but he didn’t make any sound.” The woman listens with her arms folded over her chest. “And very slowly, he simply ended. He just went out like a candle, in total silence and without making any trouble about it, he twisted a little and folded in, and that was that. And my friend remembers those moments even more than the other three childbirths, before and after, and she always says that in the short time she had with him, she tried to give him as much life as she possibly could, and all her love, even though she was actually the one who killed him, or shared the decision to kill him.” Ora murmurs and runs her hands stiffly over her head and temples and crushes her cheeks between her hands, and her mouth opens briefly in a silent scream.