To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  “There’s a cab waiting for me downstairs. I want you to come with me.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know, we’ll go up north. The main thing is not to be here.”

  One of his fingers moved weakly, as if conducting a tune that played in his mind. “What are you going to do there?”

  “I don’t know, don’t ask me. I have a tent and a backpack and food for the first few days. I have everything for you, too. It’s all packed, even a sleeping bag, so come with me.”

  “For me?” His face reappeared, moonlike and red. “She’s mad,” he muttered, “totally lost her mind.”

  Ora was horrified by this exposure of his deepest thoughts and hardened her heart. “I’m not going home until the whole business there is over. Come with me.”

  He sighed. “What does she think, that I can just pick up and—” He motioned ineffectually across the apartment and at himself, presenting her with evidence and extenuating circumstances.

  “Help me,” Ora said softly.

  He sat silently. He did not, for example, say that they wouldn’t come looking for him. That they had no reason to look for him. That he had nothing to do with them. He did not say that it was her problem. And that silence of his, with the traces of decency she imagined she saw in it, was a glimmer of hope. “But maybe they won’t come at all,” he tried halfheartedly.

  “Avram,” she said, almost warning.

  He took a deep breath. “Maybe nothing will happen to him.”

  She leaned down right into his face, stared into his eyes, and the murkiest sliver of darkness darted between them, the covenant of their bitter knowledge, the worst of all possible worlds. “Give me two days. You know what? Give me one day, that’s all, twenty-four hours, I promise, and tomorrow night I’ll bring you back here.” She believed what she was saying. She thought she needed to get through the first day and night, and then, who knows, maybe it would all be over and she and Avram could each go back to their lives. Or perhaps after one day and night she herself would wake up from the fantasy, pull herself together and go home and do what everyone else did—sit and wait for them. “So what do you say?” When he did not answer, she groaned, “Help me, Avram, just to get through the first few hours.”

  His head swayed, he furrowed his brow, and his face grew stern and focused. He thought about what she had done for him and what she had been to him. “What a piece of shit I am,” he thought, “I can’t even give her one day.” She heard him. “I have to buy time. Just another few minutes and I won’t be able to …” Ora kneeled in front of him and placed her hands on the armrests on either side of him. It was becoming intolerable. He turned his head away. “She’s hysterical,” he thought grumpily, “and there’s something wrong with her mouth.” Ora nodded and her eyes filled with tears. “I wish she would just leave,” Avram thought out loud and squirmed in his seat. “Just go, leave me. What’s she doing here anyway?”

  Something prickled on the outskirts of her brain. She demanded to know what he meant when he said in another few minutes he wouldn’t be able to …

  He smiled crookedly, his heavy swollen eyelids barely open, exposing red crescents: “I took a pill. A minute from now I’ll be knocked out. It’ll be morning by the time—”

  “But you knew I was coming!”

  “If you’d come sooner …” His voice was thickening. “Why didn’t you come sooner?”

  She hurried into the little bathroom. The bulb over the mirror was burned out. She moved her fingers over the sink as if trying to pull in threads of light from the living room. There was rust on the taps and the drain and around the screws that held the shelves to the pink porcelain tiles. To her surprise there was virtually no medicine on the shelves. Confused, she thought back to the stash of medication he used to keep around. He liked to give her detailed accounts during their rare meetings, before Ofer enlisted: “Numbon, Zodorm, Bondormin, Hypnodorm,” he would mumble, “they give them names that sound like notes on a toy xylophone.” All she could find now were packets of antihistamines, probably for his hay fever, and a few Assivals and Stilnoxes scattered around, but it was mostly natural sleeping aids. That’s good, she thought, he must have cleaned himself up. Finally one good thing. She crammed the tablets into a plastic bag she found in the laundry closet and left the room. But then she went back: on a separate shelf on one side were a large silver earring in the shape of a spur, a bottle of vanilla-scented deodorant, and a hairbrush covered with short, purple hairs.

  Seeing the pantry full of cardboard boxes stuffed with empty beer bottles, she assumed he made part of his income by returning bottles for their deposits. When she went back to him, she found him in a deep slumber. His arms and legs were splayed out and his mouth was open. She put her hands on her hips. What now? Only then did she notice large charcoal drawings on the walls around her: godlike figures, or prophets, a woman breast-feeding a crane whose large human eyes had long eyelashes, and babies who looked like floating goats, their fine hair spread like halos around their heads. One of the prophets had Avram’s face. The breast-feeding woman was actually a young girl with sweet, gentle features and a mohawk. Along one whole wall was an improvised desk—a wooden door on sawhorses—covered with heaps of junk of all sizes. There were tools, tubes of glue, nails, screws, rusty cans, ancient faucets, clocks in various stages of disrepair, old keys, and piles of tattered books. She opened an old photo album that was torn and moldy around the edges, and the odor of trash came at her in a wave. It was empty. All it contained were photo corners stuck on the pages, and slanted captions in unfamiliar handwriting: Father and me, Odessa, Winter ’36. Grandma and Mother and Abigail (in utero), 1949. Guess who’s Queen Esther this year?

  Avram groaned and opened his eyes and saw her standing there. “You’re here,” he mumbled, and felt her fingernails digging into his forearms. He couldn’t figure out how these things were connected. He shook his head. “Tomorrow, come tomorrow, it’ll be fine.”

  She held her face very close to his again. He started sweating. She yelled into his ear, “Don’t run away on me now!” The voice unraveled inside him into empty syllables and sounds. She saw his tongue move around his mouth and leaned over him again. “Come asleep, come unconscious, but come! Don’t leave me on my own with this.”

  He gurgled with his mouth open. What about Ilan, he thought, why hadn’t Ilan come with her—

  Later, he wasn’t sure if it was a minute or an hour later, he strained to open his eyes again, but she was gone. For a minute he thought she’d left, let him be, and wished he’d asked her to help him get into bed. His back would ache tomorrow. But then, terrifyingly, he heard her moving around in his bedroom. He tried to get up, to get her out of there, but his arms and legs were like water skins. He heard her feeling around the walls for a light switch, but there was no bulb in there. “I forgot to change it,” he mumbled. “I’ll put one in tomorrow.” Then there were footsteps again. She’s coming out, he thought with relief. Then the footsteps stopped and there was a long silence, and he froze in the armchair. He knew what she was looking at. “Get out of there,” he groaned silently. She cleared her dry throat a couple of times, went to switch a light on in the hallway, and walked back to the bedroom, probably to get a better look. If he’d been capable, he would have got up and left the apartment.

  “Avram, Avram, Avram,” her voice again and her warm breath on his face. “You can’t stay here alone,” she whispered, and there was something new in her voice, even he could sense it. Not the panic from before, but some knowledge that worried him even more. “We have to run away together, you don’t have a choice, I’m such an idiot, you don’t have a choice.” And he knew she was right, but warm threads were already tying themselves slowly around his ankles, he felt them crawling up, wrapping themselves with maternal devotion around his knees and thighs, enveloping him tightly in a soft cocoon where he could pupate for the night. He hadn’t taken Prodomol for a few years now—Neta forbade it—and the eff
ect was stunning. His legs were already melting away. Soon another exhausting shift of awakeness would be over, and he’d be rid of himself for five or six hours.

  “You’re wearing socks and shoes now,” said Ora, straightening up. “Come on, give me your hand and try to stand.”

  He breathed slowly, heavily, with his eyes closed and his face strained. If only he could concentrate, if only she would be quiet for a minute. He was almost there, just a matter of seconds, and she must have known that too, because she wouldn’t give in. She was chasing him all the way there—how could she be allowed in there? Calling his name over and over, shaking him, rocking his shoulders, such strength she had, she’d always been strong, thin and strong, she used to beat him at arm wrestling. But he mustn’t think, mustn’t remember, because beyond her shouting he could finally feel the blurry dizziness waiting, and there was an indentation in the shape of his body, as soft as a palm, and a cloud would cover everything.

  Ora stood facing the man asleep in the armchair. Three years I haven’t seen him, she thought, and I didn’t even hug him. Sprawled out with his chin pressed to his chest, the patches of stubble protruded around his mouth and made him look like a drunken troll, and it was hard to decide if he was kindly or bitterly cruel. “Look at something weird,” he’d said to her once, standing naked before her, when they were twenty-one. “I’ve just noticed that I have one good eye and one bad eye.”

  “Stop,” she said now to the fallen heap of his flesh. “You have to come. It’s not just for me, Avram, it’s for you too, isn’t it? You understand that, don’t you?”

  He snored softly, and his face grew calmer. In his bedroom she’d seen weird scribbles in black pencil all over the wall above his bed. At first she thought it was a childish sketch of train tracks or an infinitely long fence that twisted back and forth along the width of the wall and came down from the ceiling in rows, zigzagging all the way down to the bed. The fence poles were joined at their midpoints by short, crooked beams. She cocked her head to one side and examined it: the lines also looked like the long teeth of a comb or a rake, or some ancient beast. Then she discovered little numbers scattered here and there and realized they signified dates. The last one, right by the pillow, was the day that had just come to an end, and it had a little exclamation point next to it. Ora stood there and looked back and forth at the lines and could not stop until she had verified that each of the many vertical lines was crossed out with a horizontal one.

  A shock of cold water slapped his face, and he opened a pair of stunned eyes. “Get up,” she said. His temples started to pound. He licked the water off his lips and strained to lift a hand up to protect his face from her gaze. It scared him to be looked at by her eyes in this way. Her stare turned him into an object, a lump whose size and weight and center of gravity she was examining, planning how to move him from the armchair to a place he did not even dare to imagine. She put the toes of her shoes up against his, placed his limp hands on her shoulders, bent her knees, and pulled him toward her. She let out a moan of pain and astonishment when he fell on her with his full weight. “There goes my back,” she announced to herself. She shuffled back with one foot, afraid she would tumble down with him at any moment. “Come on, let’s go,” she squeaked. He snorted into her neck. One of his arms hung down her hunched back. “Don’t fall asleep,” she croaked in a stifled voice. “Stay awake!” She felt her way across the room, rocking with him in a drunkard’s dance. Then she pulled him through the doorway like a huge cork and slammed the door shut. In the dark stairwell she searched for the edge of the step with her heel. He mumbled again for her to leave him alone and expressed certain opinions about her sanity. Then he went back to snoring and a strand of his saliva dribbled down her arm. In her mouth she held the plastic bag with his sleeping tablets and toothbrush, which she’d grabbed from the top of a bureau, and she was already regretting not having taken some clothes for him. Through the plastic bag, with gritted teeth, she spoke and grunted at him, fighting to awaken him, to pull the edge of him out of the dark mouth that was swallowing him up. She panted like a dog, and her legs shook. She was trying to do it the right way, reciting to herself silently as she did during a particularly complicated treatment: the quadriceps extend, the gluteus contracts, the gastrocnemius and Achilles extend, you’re doing it, you’re in control of the situation—but nothing was working right, he was too heavy, he was crushing her, and her body could not take it. Finally she gave up and simply tried to hold him up as much as she could, so the two of them wouldn’t roll down together. As she did so—and she had no control over this either—she began to emit fragments that had not passed her lips for years. She reminded him of long-forgotten things about him and herself and Ilan and told him a pulverized yet complete life story over sixty-four steps, all the way to the building entrance. From there she dragged him down a path of broken tiles and trash and shattered bottles, all the way to the taxi where Sami sat watching her through the windshield with impassive eyes, and did not come out to help her.

  She stops and waits for him, and he comes over and stands one or two steps behind her. She waves her hand over the broad plain glowing in bright green, glistening with beads of dew, and over the distant, mauve mountains. There is a hum, and not just of insects: Ora thinks she can hear the air itself teeming with a vitality it can barely contain.

  “Mount Hermon,” she says, pointing to a pure white glow in the north. “And look here, did you see the water?”

  “Do me a favor,” Avram spits out, and walks on with his head hanging.

  But there’s a stream here, Ora thinks to herself. We’re walking alongside a stream. She laughs quietly at his back as he recedes. “You and me by a stream, could you have imagined?”

  For years she had tried to get him out of the house, to take him to places that would light up his soul and bathe him in beauty, but at most she’d managed to drag him to dull meetings in cafés he chose, a couple of times a year. It had to be one he chose, and she never argued, even though the places he picked were always noisy, crowded, mass-produced (his word, the old Avram’s), as if he enjoyed seeing her aversion, and as if through these places he was confronting her, for the thousandth time, with his distance from her and from who he used to be. And now, in a completely unexpected way, it’s just the two of them and the stream and trees and daylight.

  On his body the backpack looks shrunken and smaller than hers, like a child clinging to his father’s back. She stands looking at him for a moment longer, with Ofer’s pack over his shoulders. Her eyes widen and brighten. She feels the first rays of sun slowly smoothing over her bruised wings.

  Mist rises from the fragrant earth as it warms, and from the large, juicy rolls of excrement left by the cows that preceded them. Elongated puddles from the recent rains reply to the dawn sky, emitting modest signals, and frogs leap into the stream as they walk by, and there is not a human being in sight.

  A moment later they come up against a barbed-wire fence blocking the path, and Avram waits for her. “I guess that’s it, then?”

  Ora can hear how relieved he is that the hike is over relatively quickly and painlessly. Her spirits fall—what is a fence doing in the middle of the path? Who would put a fence in a place like this? Her Moirae gather to determine her fate, to circle her in a dance of mockery and rebuke—for her ungainliness, her appliance dyslexia, and her user-manual illiteracy—but as she wallows in their juices, she notices some thin metal cylinders on the ground. She takes her glasses out and puts them on, ignoring Avram’s look of amazement, and realizes that part of the fence is in fact a narrow gate. She looks for the tether that secures it and finds a twisted, rusty wire.

  Avram stands next to her without lifting a finger, either because he hopes she will not be able to open it or because he is once again too weak to understand what is going on. But when she asks for his help he pitches in immediately, and after she explains what needs to be done—namely, to pick up two large stones and pound the wire on either
side until it gradually gives way and breaks—he studies the tether for a long time, hoists the loop over the fence post in one swift motion, the barbed wire falls to the ground at their feet, and they walk through.

  “We have to shut it behind us,” she says, and Avram nods. “Will you do it?” He locks the gate, and she notes to herself that he needs to be constantly activated and have his engine started; he seems to have given up his volition and handed the keys to her. Nu, she thinks in her mother’s voice, it’s the blind leading the blind. After they go a little farther, something else occurs to her, and she asks if he knows why there was even a fence there. He shakes his head, and she explains about the cows and their pasture areas. Since she knows very little, she talks a lot, and is unable to determine how much of it he is taking in, or why he is listening with such stern concentration—whether he hears what she was saying or is simply lapping up the sounds of her voice.

  She notices that he is becoming irritable again, throwing nervous glances behind him and jumping every time a crow caws. After losing focus on him for a moment, she turns to find that he has stopped walking and is standing a ways back, staring at the earth. She walks over and finds the rotting corpse of a little songbird at his feet. She cannot identify it, but it has black feathers, a white stomach, and brown glassy eyes. Ants, white maggots, and flies are swarming all over it. She calls Avram’s name twice before he snaps awake and follows her. How much farther am I going to be able to drag him, she wonders, before he erupts or falls apart? What am I doing to him? What did I do to Sami? What’s happening to me? All I do is cause trouble.

  The path curves sharply and plunges into the stream. Ora stands close to the water and spots the path emerging on the opposite bank in a charming, innocent-looking zigzag. When she was planning the trip with Ofer, she had read something about how, in spring, “you’ll need to wet your feet in the streams once in a while.” But this is a torrent, and there is no other visible path. She cannot turn back—this is another new rule, a trick against her persecutors: she must not reverse her tracks. Avram stands next to her and stares at the glistening green water as though it were a huge mystery bustling with clues. His thick arms hang by his sides. His helplessness suddenly angers her, and she is angry at herself too, for not looking into what to do in such a situation before the hike. But before the hike she’d had Ofer. Ofer was supposed to navigate and lead, he would build bridges over the water for her, and now she is here alone with Avram. Alone.