To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  The woman bows her head slightly and says nothing. Now Ora notices that she is very old, and that her face is furrowed with deep wrinkles and covered with tattoos.

  “And what do I have to complain about?” Ora continues in a cracked voice. “I held my child for twenty-one years—wakhad wa-ashrin sana,” she says in the tentative Arabic she remembers from high school. “But they went by so quickly, and I barely had time for anything with him, but now that his army is finished we could have really started.” Her voice breaks but she pulls herself together. “Come on, ma’am, let’s get out of here, please take me to Sami.”

  It isn’t easy to find him. The old woman does not know Sami and seems not to understand what Ora wants. Still, she willingly leads her from room to room, pointing inside each one, and Ora peers into the dark classrooms. In some of them she sees people, not many, three here, five there, children and adults, huddled around a cluster of desks whispering, or sitting on the floor and warming up dinners on little gas cookers, or asleep in their clothes on desks and chairs joined together. In one room she sees someone lying on a long bench, with several people bustling around him quickly but silently. In another a man kneels down to bandage the foot of a man sitting on a chair. A young woman cleans the wound of a man with a bare chest and a grimace on his face. From other rooms she hears stifled moans of pain and murmurs of comfort. There is a sharp smell of iodine in the air.

  “And in the morning, what happens?” Ora asks in the hallway.

  “Morning,” the old woman repeats in Hebrew and smiles broadly, “in the morning kulhum mafish—they’re all gone!” She mimes a bubble bursting.

  Ora finally finds Sami and Yazdi. There is no light but the moonlight and the room is utterly silent. She stands in the doorway and looks at the little chairs turned upside down on the desks. A huge cardboard cutout of a seal hangs on the wall, with the caption Recon-seal-iation. Each of its parts is a conflict that has to be reconciled: Ashkenazim and Sephardim, left wing and right wing, religious and secular. Sami and the bearded man stand a few steps away, next to the blackboard, talking quietly with an older man who is short, solid, and silver-haired. Sami nods slightly at Ora, but his face is impervious. Something in his posture and the way he cuts through the air as he makes hand gestures is new to her and very foreign. Three little children, two or three years old, discover Ora and start running around her, excitedly pulling her by the pants without any embarrassment. They also make almost no sound, to Ora’s surprise: they too are well-trained partridge chicks. She follows them to the corner of the classroom, near the window. A little circle of women tightens around someone in the center. Ora glimpses between the women’s heads and sees a large woman sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall with her bare feet stretched out in front of her. She is breast-feeding Yazdi. His mouth is attached to her nipple and his feet hang over her lap. He is wearing different clothes: a brown-and-white-checkered shirt with black pants. For the first time since Ora met him, his face looks serene. The breast-feeding woman watches him with deep concentration. She has a strong, wild face and bony, slightly masculine cheeks, and a full white breast. The women look hypnotized, all strung on one thread. Ora stands on her tiptoes, drawn inside the circle—after all, she has some part in Yazdi too, or perhaps she just wants to touch his hand one last time, to say goodbye. But when she tries to squeeze her way through, the women tighten up against her as one, and she withdraws and stands behind them.

  A hand touches her shoulder. Sami. Pale and exhausted. “Come on, we’re done here.”

  “What about him?” She motions at Yazdi with her eyes.

  “It’ll be okay. His uncle will come soon to get him.”

  “And who is that?” She looks at the wet nurse.

  “A woman. The doctor told her to give him milk. Milk his body doesn’t throw out.”

  “There’s a doctor here?”

  Sami arches his eyebrows at the short, silver-haired man.

  “What is a doctor doing here? What is this place?”

  Sami hesitates. “These, these people,” he says halfheartedly, “from all over town they come here at night.”

  “Why?”

  “At night it’s the IRs’ hospital.”

  “Hospital?”

  “For all the ones that get hurt on the job, or the ones that get beat.”

  As though there’s some permanent quota of beatings, Ora thinks.

  “Yalla,” says Sami, “we’re out of here.”

  “Why here?”

  But Sami has left her in the room with the question echoing. She follows him down the corridor. She finds it difficult to leave the place and its secretive, beneficial murmur. And it is also Yazdi—why deny it—or whatever he aroused in her when he leaned against her, when she cleaned up his vomit, when they played peek-a-boo, when she comforted him in her arms after Sami hit them both. She feels that these small gestures have awakened in her a precious, obsolete trait, which she herself had almost forgotten. She thinks of turning back to sneak another look at the great woman breast-feeding him, to see once again the look of utter concentration on her face, and the slight tremor in her forehead. How gently she signaled to him not to bite, Ora thinks. Such natural maternity, and he isn’t even her child.

  Women and children are washing the floors of the auditorium, and she remembers that years ago Sami told her he could never understand the Jews’ logic: “During the day you’re always checking us and following us and going through our underwear, and at night you suddenly give us the keys to your restaurants and your gas stations and your bakeries and your supermarkets?”

  “Wait,” she calls out, chasing after Sami. “Don’t the neighbors notice anything?”

  He shrugs. “After a week or two, sure they do.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then what? They go somewhere else. Always that way.”

  They stand outside and Ora looks back. She wonders if one can seek political asylum with refugees, because she feels completely willing to hide out here for the next month. To be the IRs’ IR. At least she’d do some good for someone.

  Ofer, Ofer, she thinks, where are you? What are you going through now?

  For all you know he might be running into the younger brother of that woman, or the son of that guy.

  When they reach the taxi, three cheerful little girls jump out holding rags and a little bucket and brushes. They stand aside, giggling and stealing looks at Ora. Sami checks the backseat and sighs deeply. Ora sits down next to him.

  Instead of starting the engine, Sami jingles his heavy set of keys. Ora waits. He turns to her, struggling with his potbelly. “Even if you forgive me for before, for hitting, I don’t forgive me. I would cut my own hand off for what I did to you.”

  “Drive,” she says wearily. “Someone’s waiting for me.”

  “Wait, I really need this from you.”

  “What do you want?”

  Eyes dart opposite eyes, like dogs chained to either side of a fence. A friendly face, a loved one even, suddenly looks completely foreign. The kind you don’t even want to make the effort to decipher, she thinks, to make it yours.

  Sami holds his gaze and swallows. “Just that Mr. Ilan won’t know anything about this.”

  A vague stench of vomit still lingers in the taxi, and it occurs to Ora that everything is meshing together, including the “Mr.” he suddenly attached to Ilan. Mister Ilan and Missus Ora. She pauses. She’d been expecting this request, and had already decided what her price would be. Ilan would be proud of me, she thinks bitterly. “Drive,” she tells Sami.

  “But what … what do you say …”

  “Drive,” she commands, surprised by the trickling sensation of something she has never felt toward him before: the sweetness of power. A slight, tingling burn of her own arbitrary authority. “First drive, then we’ll see.”

  DAYLIGHT BURGEONS as they lie on the edge of a field, bright shades of green unfurl as far as the eye can see, and they wake from a nap, sti
ll blanketed with a gossamer of dreams. They are the only two people in the world, there is no one else, and the earth steams with a primeval scent, and the air hums with the rustle of tiny creatures, and the mantle of dawn still hangs overhead, lucent and dewy, and their eyes light up with little smiles of not-yet-fear and not-yet-themselves.

  Then Avram’s eyes clear. He sees Ora sitting facing him with her back against a huge backpack, beyond which are a field, a grove, and a mountain. With surprising swiftness he jumps up: “What is this place?”

  Ora shrugs. “Somewhere in the Galilee. Don’t ask me.”

  “The Galilee?” His face rounds into infinite astonishment. “Where am I?” he whispers.

  “Wherever he dumped us last night.”

  Avram runs a hand over his face. He rubs, scrubs, crushes, and rocks his head back and forth. “Who dumped us, the cabby? The Arab?”

  “Yes, the Arab.” She reaches out a hand for him to help her up, but he seems not to comprehend the gesture.

  “You were yelling,” he remembers. “I was asleep. You were shouting at him too, weren’t you?”

  “Forget about that, it doesn’t matter now.” She hoists herself up with a groan, encountering hostile joints. And rightly so, she thinks as she scans the list of her sins: lugging Avram’s entire weight on her poor back down four flights of steps, then the nightmarish drive, and the two of them walking aimlessly through the fields. She’d fallen a few times on the way, and finally they’d collapsed on the edge of this field and spent a sleepless night on the ground. I’m too old for this, she thinks.

  “Those pills knock me out,” Avram mumbles. “Prodomol. I’m not used to them. I couldn’t do anything.”

  You did plenty, Ora thinks to herself with a sigh. “What a day I had with him—don’t ask.”

  “But why on earth did he bring us here?” Avram gets worked up again, as if he has only just grasped what has been done to him. “And what now? What do we do, Ora?” More and more fears crowd into him by the minute, and they no longer have space in his body.

  Ora brushes her behind and shakes off some earth and dry leaves. Coffee would help, she thinks, and quietly mumbles, “Coffee, coffee,” to silence the questions that dart wildly inside her. What do I do with him now? And what exactly was I thinking when I dragged him here? “We’re leaving,” she pronounces, without daring to look at him.

  “What do you mean leaving? Where to? Ora! What do you mean leaving?”

  “I suggest,” she says, though she cannot believe the words are coming out of her own mouth, “that we pick up our backpacks and explore. Just walk. See where we are.”

  Avram stares at her. “I have to be at home,” he says slowly, like someone explaining a simple fact of life to a mentally handicapped person.

  Ora hoists the backpack over her shoulders, sways under its heft, and stands waiting. Avram does not move. The hems of his sleeves tremble. “That’s yours,” Ora says, pointing to the other backpack, the blue one.

  “How could it be mine?” He stumbles away, as though the backpack is a sly beast about to pounce on him. “It’s not mine, I don’t recognize it,” he murmurs.

  “It’s yours. Let’s start walking, we’ll talk on the way.”

  “No,” Avram insists, and his unkempt beard bristles a little. “I’m not moving until you explain what—”

  “On the way,” she interrupts, and starts marching. Her shoulders are hunched and her whole body looks as though an unskilled puppeteer is pulling her strings. “I’ll tell you everything on the way; we can’t stay here anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “I mustn’t,” she replies simply, and as she utters the words she knows she is right, and that this is the law she must now obey: not to stay in one place for too long, not to be a sitting target—for people or thoughts.

  Terrified, he watches her walking away toward a path. She’ll be back soon, he thinks, she’ll be right back. She won’t leave me like this. She wouldn’t dare. Ora keeps walking without looking back. His lips tremble with anger and insult. Then he stomps his feet and lets out a short, bitter screech that might be her name and might be fuck-you-you-bitch and who-the-hell-do-you-think-you-are and you-psycho and mommy-wait-for-me all in one breath. Ora walks on. Avram weakly lifts up the backpack, slings it over his left shoulder, and starts after her, dragging his feet on the ground.

  The path winds through fields and groves. Poplars whiten, and wild mustard towers on both sides of the path in fragrant yellow clusters. It’s lovely here, Ora thinks. She keeps walking. She has no idea where she is or where she is going. She can hear his stuttering steps behind her. She peeks over her shoulder: lost and frightened, he feels his way along the open space. She realizes that he moves in light the way she does in darkness, and she recalls the way he looked last night, a hunched, slow shadow in the depths of a dark apartment.

  When he opened the door after she’d knocked and kicked for several minutes, she realized that he was in the habit of not turning any lights on. The bell had been yanked out of its casing. There wasn’t a single bulb in the stairwell. She’d felt her way up the four flights of steps along crumbling walls and a greasy stone banister, through various stenches that lingered in the air. When he finally opened the door—she quickly removed her glasses, which were new to him—she saw a lump. In the darkness he looked hugely broad, so much so that she wasn’t sure it was him at first, and she said his name dubiously. He did not answer, and she said, “I’m here,” and searched for more words with which to fill the deepening chasm in her stomach. She was frightened by the darkness in the apartment behind him and by the sense that he was coming out to her like a bear from its den. She boldly reached a hand into the apartment, felt along the wall, and found a switch. They were both flooded with murky yellow light, and their eyes immediately exchanged unmerciful information.

  She, ultimately, had been better preserved. Her short-cropped curly hair had turned almost entirely silver, but her expression was still open and innocent and it went out to him—he could feel it even in his dim state—and her large brown eyes still held a constant, serious question. Nevertheless, something in her was slightly dried up and dulled, he could see, and there were a few faint lines, footprints of a bird in the sand, around her lips. Something about her posture was diminished, that upright boldness she’d always had, like a foal. And the generous, laughing mouth, Ora’s great mouth, now seemed limp and skeptical.

  He had lost a lot of hair in the last three years, and his face had swelled and looked less open. Week-old stubble covered his cheeks and chin. His blue eyes, which used to make her feel parched, had darkened and seemed smaller and sunken. He still did not move, almost blocking the doorway with his body, his thick penguin arms held stiffly at his sides. He stood there in a faded T-shirt from which his body was bursting and grunted to himself and sucked his lips with such irritability that she had to demand: “Aren’t you going to let me in?” He walked into the apartment, dragging his bare feet, grunting and growling to himself. She shut the door and followed him into a smell that was an entity unto itself, as if she were entering the folds of a thick blanket. It was the smell of the inside of suitcases and closed drawers and unaired linen and socks under beds and clumps of dust.

  And there they were: the heavy breakfront with the peeling polyurethane lacquer, the bald fraying rug, and the awful red armchairs whose upholstery had been ripped and worn even thirty-five years ago. It was his mother’s furniture, his only possessions, which he still moved around as he roamed from one apartment to the next.

  “Where were you?” he grumbled. “You said you’d be here in an hour.”

  She hit him with the offer immediately, in a loud and anxious voice, with the defiance and awkwardness of someone who knows exactly how inappropriate her words are, but must somehow nail down her fancies and see what happens. He seemed not to hear her at all. He did not look at her, either. His head, bowed to his chest, moved right and left in delayed little jerks. “Wait, don�
��t say no yet,” she said. “Think about it for a minute.”

  He looked up at her. All his movements were very slow. In the light of the bare bulb she again saw what the last few years had done to him. He spoke heavily: “Regretably, I can’t do it now. Maybe another time.”

  If it hadn’t been so sad, she would have burst out laughing. Regretably, he said, like a beggar wallowing in trash and sticking his pinky up while drinking tea from a can.

  “Avram, I—”

  “Ora, no.”

  Even this monosyllabic speech was beyond his strength. Or maybe it was the taste of her name in his mouth. His eyes suddenly turned red and he looked as though he were sinking even deeper into his flesh.

  “Listen to me.” She berated him with a new aggression that drew on her confrontation with Sami. “I can’t force you to do anything, but hear me out and then make up your mind. I’ve run away. Do you understand? I cannot sit there and wait for them to come.”

  “Who?”

  “Them.” She peered deep into his eyes and saw that he understood.

  “But you can’t sleep here,” he mumbled angrily. “I don’t have another bed.”

  “I don’t want to sleep here. I’m going to keep traveling. I came to get you.”

  He nodded for a long time, even smiled slightly, with the politeness of a tourist in a land whose customs he did not understand. She could see: he wasn’t taking in the words at all. “Where’s Ilan?” he asked.

  “I’m going up north for a few days. Come with me.”

  “I don’t know her, what’s the matter with her? Why is she even—”

  To her amazement, he spoke his thoughts out loud. Once, years ago, this had been one of his tricks: “Ora doesn’t want me anymore, thinks Avram forlorn and wishes he were dead,” he would say to her, and grinningly deny that he’d said it, even accuse her of invading his private thoughts. But this was different, troubling, a private, internal conversation that hiccupped from him uncontrollably. He sought out the armchair and collapsed into it, leaning his head all the way back to reveal a thick, red, stubbly throat. “Where’s Ilan?” he asked again, half pleadingly.