To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  She edges closer to the stream, careful not to slip. A large leafless tree is growing out of the water, and she leans in as far as she can and tries to break off a branch. Avram does not move. He stares hypnotically at the current, horrified when the dry branch snaps and Ora almost falls into the water. She angrily sticks the branch into the streambed, then pulls it out and measures it against her body. The ring of water reaches up to her waist. “Sit down and take off your shoes and socks,” she says. She sits down on the path and takes off her own shoes, sticks her socks in a side pocket on the backpack, ties the shoelaces together after threading them through a loop on top of the pack, and rolls her pants up to her knees. When she looks up, Avram is standing over her, looking at her feet the way he stared at the stream.

  “Hey,” she says softly, a little surprised, and wiggles her pink toes at him. “Yoo-hoo!”

  He sits down quickly to take off his shoes and socks. He rolls his pants up to the knees, exposing thick, pale legs that are slightly bent but look surprisingly powerful. She remembers those legs well—the legs of a horseman, and also, as he himself once said, the legs of a stretched-out dwarf. “Hey,” he growls. “Yoo-hoo.”

  Ora looks away and laughs, excited by the flicker of old Avram from within his flatness, and perhaps also by his suddenly bared flesh.

  They sit and watch the water. A translucent purple dragonfly flits by like an optical illusion. There was a time, Ora thinks, when I was at home in his body. And then there were years when I was in charge of it: I washed and cleaned and dried and clipped and shaved and bandaged and fed and drained and whatever else.

  She shows him how to tie his shoes to the backpack, next to Ofer’s pair, and suggests that he empty out his pockets so his money and other stuff won’t get wet.

  He shrugs.

  “Not even an ID?”

  Avram mumbles: “What do I need it for?”

  She walks down to the water first, holding the branch, and lets out a yelp when she touches the cold torrent. She wonders what she will do if Avram gets swept away and thinks perhaps he shouldn’t even walk into a current like this in his condition. But she decides, of her own accord, by unanimous proclamation, that it will be all right, because there is simply no choice. She puts one foot in front of the other, fighting the flow of water that reaches up to her stomach now and is so powerful that she is afraid to lift her feet off the bottom. But Avram will be fine, she determines again, frightened. He will walk into this water and nothing will happen. Are you sure? Yes. Why? Because. Because for the last hour, really the last day and night, she’s had a continuous resolve, desperate yet determined, and she has used it countless times to force people and events to proceed exactly as she wished, because she needs them to, because she has no leeway for bargains or compromises, because she demands blind obedience to the new rules that her mind is constantly legislating—the regulations of this emergency state that has befallen her. And one of the rules, quite possibly the most important one, is that she has to keep moving, has to be constantly in motion. Besides, she must keep moving because the water is freezing her entire lower half.

  Her feet grope pebbles and silt, and slippery weeds float around her ankles. Every so often her toes grasp a little stone or rock. They examine it, hypothesize, draw conclusions, and a primeval fishlike sensation flutters in her spine. A long thin branch floats by near the surface and suddenly whips into a twist and slithers away. Droplets of water spray her glasses, and she gives up wiping them off. Every so often she dips her swollen left arm into the water and delights in the cold relief. Avram wades in behind her, and she hears his gasp of pained surprise when the water envelops him with its coolness. She keeps going, already halfway across. Torrents of water flow and part around her body and lap against her thighs and waist. The sun warms her face, and a field of blue and green rays dances in her eyes and in the drops on her glasses, and it feels good to stand in this transparent bubble of the moment.

  She climbs up the opposite bank through deep, doughy mud that enfolds her feet and sucks at them with its quivering lips, and clouds of gnats rise from the indentations left by her soles. Another few steps and she is on dry land, where she collapses against a rock with her backpack. She feels a new lightness; in the water, in the current that surged through her, she’d felt as though a stone had been rolled from the mouth of a well she thought was dry. And then she remembers: Avram. Stuck in the middle of the stream with half-closed eyes and a face distorted with fear.

  She quickly walks back through the dark, rich mud, stepping in the dimples of her own footprints, and holds the branch out to him. He presses his head down between his shoulders and refuses to move. Over the rush of the water she shouts that he can’t keep standing there—who knows what might be swimming in that water—and he instantly obeys her commanding tone, inches forward, and reaches for the branch. He moves slowly, and she takes tiny steps backward, then sits down on one rock and plants her feet against another, and pulls him out with all her strength. “Come on, sit down and dry off,” she says, laughing. But he stands frozen in the mud, lost, his body reenacting his Tel Hashomer Hospital days, with the catatonic stares and the fossilized rigidity. With a panicked realization that he might fall back in, she rushes over to him. She fears that what she is doing to him might destabilize him. But he seems to be finding things easier now: after all, he did follow her for half an hour without collapsing. Perhaps over the years he has managed to acquire a certain strength, even a modicum of existential solidity (that was one of his idioms, the old Avram’s), and she no longer needs to bend each joint to activate it—ankles, knees, and thighs—the way she did back in those days, like a sculptor of one body. She used to go to his physiotherapy sessions, in exercise rooms or in the pool, and sit watching and memorizing, jotting down notes on what she observed. She forced him to work with her, secretly, in between the professional sessions, during sleepless nights. Nine months passed before his body learned to mimic the positions she molded it into. He once introduced her to a doctor on the ward as his choreographer, a disclosure that let her know that there was still just a little bit of Avram inside the shell.

  He lets out a long exhalation and begins to defrost his limbs. He stretches his arms, back, shoulders, elbows, wrists. Everything is working, Ora thinks as she watches surreptitiously: broad, diagonal movements, the large muscle groups. He looks at the stream without believing he really crossed it, and when he smiles awkwardly at Ora, a fraction of the old charm flashes through. She feels a pang as she looks at him: Oh, my old, suspended lover. She returns a measured smile, very careful not to flood him. This is another piece of wisdom she’s learned in her long life among the tribe of men: the wisdom of not flooding them.

  She shows him where to sit and how to put his feet on the rock so they’ll dry faster, and from a side pocket in the backpack she takes some crackers, processed cheese, and two apples. She holds them out to him and he munches heavily and methodically, glancing around with his suspicious, studious look. He gets stuck again on her long, narrow feet, which have turned very pink from the cold water, and he quickly looks away. Then he slowly straightens his neck and spreads his arms out from his body, with cautious movements, like a huge dinosaur chick erupting from its egg. As he looks contemplatively at the opposite bank, Ora realizes that now, having crossed the stream, he is beginning to grasp that he has left behind what used to be, and that from here on there will be a new reality.

  She starts talking, to distract him before he can get scared. She shows him how to peel off the large cakes of mud drying on his legs and slaps her own legs lightly to get the blood flowing. Then she puts her socks and shoes back on, ties her shoelaces the way Ofer taught her—she likes to feel that even from afar he is zipping and fastening her up with his embrace—and wonders whether she should try to tell Avram that Ofer, when he showed her the double knot, had said he was positive that no future invention could ever replace man’s ingenuity when it came to the simple act of tying shoelace
s. “No matter what they invent,” he’d said, “we’ll always have that, and that’s how we’ll remember every morning that we’re human.” Her heart had filled with pride, perhaps because he’d said “human” so naturally, with such humanness. She had quoted Nahum Gutman, who wrote in his Path of the Orange Peels that every morning when he put on his shoes, he whistled excitedly, “because I am glad of the new day breaking.” And of course they both brought up Grandpa Moshe, her father, who had worn the same pair of shoes for seventeen years, explaining that he simply “walked lightly.” Ora had not been able to resist telling Ofer—she thought he’d probably heard the story before, but she risked it anyway—that when he was about eighteen months old and she’d put his first pair of shoes on, she’d accidentally put the left shoe on the right foot and vice versa. “And to think that for half a day you walked around with your shoes on the wrong feet, just because I decided that was the right way. It’s terrible how parents can determine their—Wait, have I already told you this story?” “Let’s see,” Ofer had said, laughing, and punched in a calculation on his phone. They had endless such conversations, full of laughter and mutual potshots. An awkward warmth flowed between them, with soul-penetrating glances. In recent years this was diminishing, much as everything between them was diminishing. It seemed that ever since the two of them started to mature, he and Adam, they’d moved more into Ilan’s domain, and sometimes she thought they’d been transferred into a different magnetic field, with its own laws and sensibilities, and mainly its own impermeabilities, where she flailed in a tapestry of wires that tripped her up and made her falter ridiculously with each step. But it was still there, she convinced herself repeatedly. What existed between them must still exist somewhere, it’s just that it was slightly subterranean now, especially while he was serving in the army, and it would come back after he finished, and it might even be richer and fuller. She sighs loudly and wonders how it happened that her expertise in recent years was to look for signs of life in people.

  Avram gravely observes Ora’s hands as she ties her laces, but he gets mixed up when he tries to follow, and she sits down next to him to show him. She notices that the water has washed the sharp smell of urine off him, and that she can now stand next to him without gagging. And then Avram himself suddenly says, “I wet myself yesterday, huh?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  “Where did it happen?”

  “Never mind.”

  “I can’t remember anything.”

  “It’s better that way.”

  He examines her face and decides to let it go, and she wonders if she’ll ever tell him about that night with Sami.

  Only when she’d walked with Avram on her back right up to the taxi door had he deigned to get out of the cab, irate and begrudging, and the two of them together had managed to shove the sleeping Avram into the backseat. That was when it occurred to Ora that Sami hadn’t even known up until this moment that they were picking up a man. For a few months now he’d lurked in his subtle, polite way, hoping to find out whether she had anyone new. This isn’t really someone new, she’d thought. In fact he’s someone very old. It’s secondhand Avram, maybe even third. She stood by the taxi catching her breath, her shirt wrinkled and damp with sweat, her legs still shaking.

  “Drive,” she said when she sat down next to Sami.

  “Where to?”

  She thought for a moment. Without looking at him, she said, “To where the country ends.”

  “For me it ended a long time ago,” he hissed.

  Every so often, as they drove, she felt him throw her a questioning, hostile, and somewhat frightened look. She did not turn to face him, did not know what he saw, and felt that something about her was already different. They passed Ramat HaSharon, Herzliya, Netania, and Hadera, turned toward Wadi Ara, drove by the kibbutzim of Gan Shmuel and Ein Shemer, and the Arab villages of Kfar Kara, Ar’ara, and the city of Umm al’Fahm, crossed Megiddo Junction and HaSargel Junction, and took a wrong turn and got lost in Afula, which had presumptuously installed the new traffic patterns of a big city. They bounced from one traffic circle to the next, but finally they escaped Afula and drove past Kfar Tavor and Shibli, north on Route 65 all the way to Golani Junction, and farther north past Bu’eine and Eilabun to Kadarim Junction, which was also called Amud River Junction, and Ora thought to herself, It’s been years since I hiked the Amud River. If I was with Ofer I would convince him to do it, but what am I doing here with Avram? They turned onto Route 85 and drove to Ami’ad Junction, and Ora, whose anger at Sami had imperceptibly faded away, just as it always did—she was quick to heat up and quick to cool down, and sometimes simply forgot she was angry—pointed out that there was a nice little café around here. “On a good day you could see the Kinneret, and on any day you can see the beautiful woman who owns the place.” Ora smiled appeasingly, but Sami did not respond and refused the apple and squares of chocolate she offered. She stretched out and rubbed the body parts that ached and remembered that she hadn’t even finished the story she’d started telling him—that afternoon? Was it only that afternoon?—about her father’s glaucoma and the surgery he finally had to save his one seeing eye. It bothered her that the story had been truncated, although she knew that from their current positions there was probably no way back to the tone of voice that would allow the story to end. But it was good that she’d remembered it, she thought as she sat back comfortably and closed her eyes, because through it she could be with Ofer, who had insisted on staying with her father in the hospital the night after the operation and had taken him home with Ora, driving with a tenderness that had filled her with joy. She remembered how he walked the old man carefully from the car to the house, supporting him down the path through the apartment complex’s garden, and her father had pointed wondrously at the lawn and the plants. After fifteen years of almost total blindness, his mind had confused the colors, and shadows looked like real things. Ofer realized immediately what was happening and translated the sights for him, and the different shades, reminding him gently: blue, yellow, green, purple. Her father had pointed at various things and recited the colors with Ofer. Ora had followed them and listened to Ofer and thought to herself, What a wonderful father he will make. He led her father up the stairs to the apartment with an arm around his shoulders, efficiently removing any obstacles in his way, and inside the apartment her mother had fled into the pantry. Ofer saw and understood and kept walking her father, holding his hand, to see the photograph of his grandchildren on the sideboard for the first time. Then he walked him through the rooms and showed him the various pieces of furniture purchased during his years of blindness. Still her mother did not show herself, and then Ofer had an idea. He took her father into the kitchen and they stood peering into the refrigerator together, and her father was amazed: “The fruits and vegetables are so colorful! In my day it wasn’t like this!” He told Ofer with astonishment about every new thing he noticed, as if he wished to give him the gift of this primordial sight. And all that time her mother fussed around in the other rooms, and her father did not ask about her, and Ofer did not say anything, until finally, through the little window shared by the pantry and the bathroom, she presented her face to his eyes. Ofer gently smoothed his hand over his grandfather’s back and signaled to his grandmother to smile.

  Sami turned the radio on. Galei Tzahal, the military station, had a special news edition, and the prime minister was speaking. “The government of Israel is determined to shatter its enemies’ cult of death, and in moments such as these we must remember that in the struggle against an enemy that has no moral reservations or considerations, we too are entitled, in order to protect our children—”

  Sami quickly switched to an Arabic station and listened to a newscaster read an impassioned manifesto against a background of military music. Ora swallowed. She would not say anything. It was his right to listen to whatever he wanted. She should at least allow him that privilege. Avram was sprawled heavily in the back, snoring with his m
outh open. Ora shut her eyes and imposed moderation and tolerance upon herself, trying to flood her sight with soft circles of color, which soon erupted into rows of dark, armed men, marching toward her with sparks flying from their eyes, humming a bloodthirsty tune that beat through all the spaces of her body. How can he not understand what I’m going through? she thought. How can he be incapable of thinking about what I’m going through now, with Ofer there? She sat motionless and riled herself up as she listened to the provocative music. Rapidly scanning the day’s events, she could not grasp how she had gotten herself mixed up with this annoying and infuriating man, who had hung from her neck like a weight all afternoon and then, with unbelievable nerve, had mired her in his own private complications with Yazdi and his IR, creating in her a sense of unease and guilt, when all she wanted was to implement her extremely modest plans, to employ his services in the most decent and unsoiled way, and in the end he had taken control of her agenda and messed it all up!

  “Please turn off the radio,” she said with quiet restraint.

  He did not respond. She could not believe this was happening. He was ignoring her explicit request. The men were thundering with their rhythmic calls and throaty breaths, and a vein in her neck started to throb painfully.