To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  As he did whenever he thought about himself honestly, he simply found it difficult to comprehend why he was still alive. What made life hold on to him and preserve him? What was there in him, still, that justified such persistent effort on life’s part, such stubbornness, or perhaps just vengefulness?

  He closed his eyes and tried to conjure up the figure of a boy. Any boy. Recently, as Ofer’s discharge date had grown closer, he would sometimes pick out a boy at the right age in the restaurant where he worked, or on the street, and observe him stealthily, even follow him for a block or two, and try to imagine how he saw things. He allowed himself more and more of these hallucinations, these Ofer-guesses, these shadows.

  A thick nocturnal silence enveloped him. Soft breezes passed silently over him, plowing furrows through all of space. From time to time a large bird called out, sounding very close. Ora, in her tent, felt it, too. She listened as something seemed to flitter over her skin. Thousands of cranes made their way through the night sky heading north, and neither of them saw or knew. For a long time there was a huge invisible rustle, like the sighing of waves on a beach full of shells. Avram leaned against the tree with his eyes closed and saw the shadow of Ofer’s back slip away in the image of young Ilan—for some reason it was Ilan who popped up, walking half a step in front of him and leading him through the paths of the despised army base where he’d had to live with his father, winking at the whitewashed graffiti on the walls of the stone huts. Then Avram tried to imagine a male version of the young Ora, but all he could see was Ora herself, long and fair, with red curls that bounced on her shoulders. He wondered if Ofer was also a redhead, like she used to be—she did not have even a drop of red left now—and he was surprised that this was the first time he’d ever entertained the utterly logical possibility that Ofer was a redhead. He was even more surprised that he was daring to indulge in such fantasies, more than he ever had before. Then, in a flash, he saw an image of Ofer that looked like him, like the twenty-one-year-old Avram, and the seventeen-year-old, and the fourteen-year-old. In a heartbeat he skipped among his various ages—for her, he thought feverishly, with prayer-like devotion; only for her—and saw the twinkle of a round, red-cheeked face that was always alert and eager. He felt a springy, agile dwarfishness that he hadn’t felt for years, and the heat of a constant blaze coming from the tangled head of hair, and the glimmer of a sluttish wink, and then he was repelled, thrown from the spectacle, from his own self, as if tossed out by a rough bouncer. He sat panting, bathed in sweat, and for a few more moments his heart beat wildly and he was as excited as a young boy, a boy wallowing in forbidden fantasies.

  He listened: total silence. Perhaps she’d finally fallen asleep, her torments lifted. He tried to understand what exactly had happened between her and Ilan. She hadn’t explicitly said it was Ilan’s fault. In fact she’d denied that. Perhaps she was the one who had fallen in love with someone else? Did she have another man? If so, why was she here alone, and why had she chosen to take him along?

  She’d said that the children, the boys, were grown up now, and that they would decide who they wanted to live with. But he’d seen her lips tremble, and he knew that she was lying and could not figure out why. “Families are like calculus for me,” he sometimes told Neta. Too many variables, too many parentheses and multiplications of products by powers, and just the whole complication of it—this is what he grumbled whenever she raised the topic—and the constant need to be in a relationship with every other member of the family, at every moment, day and night, even in dreams. When she turned gloomy and withdrew, he would try to appease her: “It’s like being subjected to a permanent electrical shock, or like living in an eternal lightning storm. Is that what you want?”

  For thirteen years he had not tired of telling Neta that she was wasting her youth, her future, and her beauty on him and that he was only holding her back, blocking her view. She was seventeen years younger than he. “My young girl,” he called her, sometimes affectionately and sometimes sorrowfully. “When you were ten,” he liked to remind her with strange glee, “I’d already been dead for five years.” And she would say, “Let’s bring the dead back to life, let’s rebel against time.”

  He avoided her again and again with the age excuse. “You’re much more mature than I am,” he would say. She wanted children, and he laughed in terror: “Isn’t one enough? You have to have multiple children?” Her narrow devilish eyes glimmered: “Then one child, okay, like Ibsen and Ionesco and Jean Cocteau were the same child.”

  Lately it seemed he had gotten through to her, because she hadn’t been around or even called for a few weeks. Where was she? he wondered half silently, and stood up.

  Sometimes, when she made some money from her strange jobs, she just up and left. Avram could sense it approaching even before she could: a murky hunger started to surround her irises, a shadowy negotiation in which she apparently lost, and so had to travel. Even the names of the countries she chose scared him: Georgia, Mongolia, Tajikistan. She would call him from Marrakesh or Monrovia, nighttime for him, for her still day—“So now,” he’d point out, “on top of everything else you’re another three hours younger than me”—and with strange, dreamlike lightness she would recount experiences that made his hair stand on end.

  He started walking around the tree. He tried to think, finally to ask himself when exactly he’d last heard from her, and found that it had been at least three weeks. Or more? Maybe it really had been a month since she’d disappeared. And what if she’d done something to herself? He froze and remembered her dancing with a ladder on the railing around the rooftop of her apartment building in Jaffa, and he knew that her potential in this area had been nagging at him for days now, and that his fear for her had existed alongside his profound confidence in her. He finally acknowledged how much the nerve-racking anticipation of Ofer’s release must have scrambled the rest of his mind and even caused him to forget about her.

  He sped up his circles around the tree and calculated again. The restaurant had been closed for renovations for a month now. And it was roughly since then that she hadn’t been around. I haven’t seen her or heard from her or looked for her since then. What was I doing all that time? He remembered long walks on the beach. Street benches. Beggars. Fishermen. Waves of longing for her that he forcefully repressed by beating his head against the wall. Alcohol in quantities he was not used to. Bad trips. Double doses of sleeping pills, starting at eight p.m. Bad headaches in the morning. Whole days of one album, Miles Davis, Mantovani, Django Reinhardt. Hours of digging through the garbage dumps of Jaffa looking for junk, work tools, rusty engines, old keys. There were a few days of occasional work that had generated some decent income. Twice a week he shelved books in the library of a college in Rishon LeZion. Once in a while he served as an experiment subject for pharmaceutical and cosmetic companies. In the presence of friendly, polite scientists and lab technicians, who measured and weighed him and recorded every detail and gave him various forms to sign and finally handed him a voucher for coffee and a croissant, he swallowed brightly colored pills and slathered himself with creams that may or may not ever be used. In his reports, he invented physical and emotional side effects that the developers had never imagined.

  For the past week, as Ofer’s release date approached, he had not left the house. He stopped talking to people. Answering the phone. Eating. He felt that he needed to reduce the space he occupied in the world as much as possible. He hardly moved from his armchair. He sat waiting and diminishing himself. And when he got up and walked around the apartment, he tried not to make any fast movements, so as not to rip, not to disturb the gossamer thread from which Ofer now hung. And on the last day, when he thought Ofer was done, he sat motionless by the phone and waited for Ora to call and tell him it was over. But she didn’t call, and he froze up more and more and knew that something bad had happened. The hours went by, evening fell, and he thought that if she did not call right now he would never be able to move again. With
his last remaining strength he dialed her number and heard what had happened and felt himself turning to stone.

  “But where was I for a whole month?” he moaned, and the sound of his own voice startled him.

  He hurried over to Ora, almost running, just at the moment she called out to him.

  She was sitting huddled in her coat. “When did you get up?”

  “I don’t know, a while ago.”

  “And where did you go?”

  “Nowhere, I just walked around a bit.”

  “Did I disturb you when I cried?”

  “No, it’s okay. You can cry.”

  Dawn slowly opened its eyes. They sat quietly and watched the night bleed out its blackness.

  “Listen,” she said, “and let me finish saying this. I can’t go on this way.”

  “What way?”

  “With you not saying anything.”

  “I’m actually talking a lot.” He forced a laugh.

  “Yes, you’ll get hoarse if you keep it up,” she said drily. “But I just can’t stand that you won’t even let me talk about him.”

  Avram made a not-that-again gesture, and she slowly inhaled and then said, “Listen, I know it’s difficult for you to be with me, but I’m losing my mind with this, too. It’s worse than if I was on my own. Because then at least I could talk out loud to myself, about him, and now I can’t even do that, because of you. I was thinking, what was I thinking”—she stopped and studied her fingertips; she had no choice—“that soon, when we reach the highway, we can try to get a ride to Kiryat Shmonah, and then we’ll put you on a bus to Tel Aviv and I’ll stay here and go on a bit farther. What do you say? Can you make the trip home on your own?”

  “I can do anything. Don’t make an invalid out of me.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “I’m not an invalid.”

  “I know.”

  “There’s nothing I can’t do,” he said angrily. “There are only things I don’t want to do.”

  Like help me with Ofer, she thought.

  “And how will you manage here?”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll manage. I’ll just walk. I don’t even need to walk much. I’ll be happy just crossing one field, back and forth, like yesterday or the day before. What’s important to me is not where I am but where I’m not, do you understand?”

  He snorted. “Do I understand?”

  “It will be best for both of us,” she said dubiously, sadly, and when he did not answer, she continued. “You may think I can stop it, that I can just not talk about him, I mean, but I can’t. I’m incapable of holding back now, I have to give him strength, he needs me, I can feel it. I’m not criticizing you.”

  Avram lowered his head. Don’t move, he thought, let her keep talking, don’t interrupt.

  “And it’s not just because of your memory.”

  He gave her a puzzled look.

  “You know, ’cause you’ll remember everything, and my mind is like a sieve lately. That’s not why I wanted you to come with me.”

  His head nestled against his chest and his whole body was hunched forward.

  “I wanted you to come with me so I could talk about him with you, just tell you about him, so that if something happens to him—”

  Avram crossed his arms and dug his hands deep into his sides. Don’t move. Don’t run away. Let her talk.

  “And believe me, I wasn’t thinking about all this before.” Her nose was stuffed up. “You know me, I didn’t plan anything. I wasn’t even thinking about you when you called, and the truth is, you’d completely gone out of my thoughts that day, with everything that was going on. But when you phoned, when I heard you, I don’t know, I suddenly felt that I had to be with you now, you see? With you, not with anyone else.” The more she spoke, the straighter she sat and the sharper her eyes became, as though she had finally begun to decipher a secret code. “And I felt that we had to, both of us together, how can I put this, Avram—” She struggled to keep her voice steady and clean. She did not want her voice to shake. Not even a tremor. She constantly reminded herself of the allergy Ilan and the boys had to her frequent inundations. “Because really, we’re his mother and father,” she said softly. “And if we, together, I mean, if we don’t do what parents—”

  She stopped. He had stretched his arms out and up as far as he could, and his body was jerking as though ants were gnawing at his flesh. She scanned him and shook her head heavily a few times.

  “All right.” She sighed and started to stand up. “What more can I … I’m an idiot, how could I even think you—”

  “No,” he said quickly and put his hand on her arm, then pulled it away. “I was actually thinking … what do you say … maybe we could stay for another day, one day, no big deal, then we’ll see.”

  “See what?”

  “I don’t know. Look, it’s not like I’m all that, you know, it’s not like I’m suffering, is it? It’s not like you said”—he swallowed hard—“it’s just that when you pressure me with it, with him …”

  “With Ofer. At least say that.”

  He said nothing.

  “You won’t even say that?”

  He dropped his arms to his sides.

  Ora distractedly took off her glasses, folded them, and stuck them in a backpack pocket. She ran both hands firmly over her temples and kept them there for a moment, listening to a distant sound. Then suddenly she lunged at the ground and started to dig with her hands, pulling out clods of earth and stones, uprooting plants. Avram, with surprising quickness, jumped up and stood watching her tensely. She did not seem to notice him. She got up and started kicking the ground with her heel. Clods of earth flew, some of them hitting him. He did not move. His lips were pursed and his gaze was focused and stern. She knelt down, dislodged a sharp stone, and hit the ground with it. She pounded rapidly, biting her lower lip. Her thin-skinned face turned instantly red. Avram leaned over, knelt on one knee opposite her, and did not take his eyes off her. His hand rested on the earth with fingers spread, like someone about to run a race.

  The pit grew deeper and wider. The white arm holding the stone rose and fell without pause. Avram cocked his head to one side in bemusement and looked somewhat canine. Ora stopped. She leaned on her arms and stared at the broken, unraveled earth as though not comprehending what she saw, then stormed at it again with the stone. She moaned from the effort, from the fury. The back of her neck was flushed and sweaty, her thin shirt clung to her flesh.

  “Ora,” Avram whispered cautiously, “what are you doing?”

  She stopped digging and looked around for a larger stone. She pushed a short tuft of hair off her forehead and wiped away the sweat. The pit she had dug was small and egg-shaped. She sat on her knees, grasped the stone with both hands, and struck down hard. Her head jerked forward with every strike, and each time she let out a groan. The skin on her hands began to tear. Avram watched, terrified, unable to look away from her scratched fingers. She did not seem to be weakening. On the contrary: she picked up her pace, pounded and groaned, and after a moment she tossed the stone away and started to burrow with her hands. She dug up little stones and large ones and flung them away, and handfuls of damp earth flew through her legs and over her head. His face stretched and lengthened and his eyes bulged. She did not see. She seemed to have forgotten he was there. Dirt clung to her forehead and cheeks. Her beautiful eyebrows were covered with arches of earth, and sticky channels plowed their way around her mouth. With an outstretched hand she measured the little crater before her. She cleaned it out, smoothed the bottom with a gentle motion as though she were rolling dough into a baking pan. “Ora, no,” Avram whispered into his palm, and even though he knew what she was about to do, he pulled back in fear. With three quick movements Ora lay down and buried her face in the gaping earth.

  She spoke, but he could not make out her words. Her hands were palm-down on the sides of her head like grasshopper feet. Her short-cropped hair, speckled with earth and dust, trembled o
n the back of her neck. Her voice was a dim, crushed lament, like a person pleading before a judge. But it was a cruel and coldhearted judge, Avram thought, a cowardly judge, like me. From time to time she raised her head and opened her mouth wide for air, without looking at him, without seeing anything, then buried her face back in the ground. The morning flies were drawn to her sweat. Her legs, in dirty walking pants, moved and twitched every so often, and her entire body was tensed and bound up, and Avram, on the earth’s surface, began to dart back and forth.

  The Hula Valley turned golden at their feet, flooded with sunlight. The fish hatcheries glistened and the peach groves blossomed pink. Ora lay facedown and told a story to the belly of the earth and tasted the clods of soil and knew they would not sweeten, would be forever bland and gritty. Dirt ground between her teeth, dirt stuck to her tongue, to the roof of her mouth, and turned to mud. Snot ran from her nose, her eyes watered, and she choked and gargled dirt, and she beat her hands on the ground at either side of her head, and a thought drove like a nail, deeper and deeper into her mind—she had to, she had to know what it was like. Even when he was a baby she used to taste everything she made for him to make sure it wasn’t too hot or too salty. Avram, above her, breathed rapidly, twitching, and absentmindedly bit the knuckles of his tightly clenched fists. He wanted to take hold of Ora and pull her out, but he did not dare touch her. He knew the taste of dirt in his eyes and suffocation in his nose and the sting of clods thrown from above—one of them, the bearded black man, had had a shovel, and the other one had used his hands to rake piles of earth dug from the pit. Avram himself had dug it, his hands covered with blisters. He had asked them to let him wear his socks on his hands. They’d laughed and said no. He’d been digging for over an hour and still couldn’t believe they were going to do it. Three times already they’d made him dig his own grave, and at the last minute they’d laughed and sent him back to the cell. And this time, even when they tied his hands behind his back and shackled his feet and pushed him inside and told him to lie there without moving, he refused to believe it, perhaps because they were just two lowly soldiers, fellahin, and the dhabet, the officer, wasn’t even there this time, and Avram still hoped they wouldn’t go through with something like this on their own. He did not believe it even when they started throwing in handfuls of loose earth. First they covered his legs, very slowly and with strange carefulness, then they piled earth on his thighs and stomach and chest, and Avram squirmed and jerked his head back, searching for the dhabet who would order them to stop, and only when the first handful of dirt hit his face, on his forehead and eyelids—he can still remember the shocking slap of a clump landing straight on his face, the sting in his eyes, specks trickling quickly down behind his ears—only then did he realize that this time it might not be another show, another stage in the torture, but that they were actually doing it, burying him alive, and a ring of cold terror tightened around his heart, injecting paralyzing venom: time is running out, you’re running out, one moment from now you’ll be gone, you won’t be anymore. Blood burst from his eyes and from his nose, and his body convulsed under layers of earth, heavy, heavy earth, who knew it was so heavy and burdensome on the chest, and his mouth shut to keep out the dirt, and his mouth ripped open to breathe in the dirt, and the throat is dirt and the lungs are dirt, and the toes stretch to inhale, and the eyes pop out of their sockets, and suddenly inside all this like a slowly crawling translucent worm, a sad little worm of thought about the fact that strangers, in a strange land, are pouring earth on his face, burying him alive, throwing dirt into his eyes and mouth and killing him, and it’s wrong, he wants to yell, it’s a mistake, you don’t even know me, and he grunts and struggles to open his eyes to devour one more sight, light, sky, concrete wall, even cruelly mocking faces, but human faces—and then, above his head to the side, someone takes a photograph, a man stands with a camera, it’s the dhabet, a short, thin Egyptian officer with a large black camera, and he takes meticulous pictures of Avram’s death, perhaps as a souvenir, to show the wife and kids at home, and that is when Avram lets go of his life, right at that moment he truly lets go. He had never let go when he was left in the stronghold alone for three days and three nights, nor when the Egyptian soldier pulled him out of his hiding place, nor when the soldiers put him on a truck and beat him within an inch of his life with fists and boots and rifle butts, nor when Egyptian fellahin stormed the truck on the way and wanted to attack him, nor in all the days and nights of interrogations and torture, when they denied him food and water and withheld sleep and made him stand for hours in the sun and held him for days and nights in a cell just large enough to stand in, and one by one they pulled out his fingernails and toenails, and hung him by his hands from the ceiling and whipped the soles of his feet with rubber clubs, and hooked electrical wires to his testicles and nipples and tongue, and raped him—throughout all this he always had something to hold on to, half a potato that a merciful warden once snuck into his soup, or a bird’s chirping he heard or imagined every day at dawn, or the cheerful voices of two little children, perhaps the prison commander’s children, who once came to visit their father and chattered and played in the prison yard all morning; and above all, he had the sketch he wrote while he was on duty in Sinai, until the war started, with its complex plots and multiple characters, and he kept returning to a secondary plot that had never preoccupied him before he was taken hostage, but this was what saved him over and over again. It was the story of two neglected children who find an abandoned baby, and to his surprise Avram found that the imaginary characters did not fade while he was a prisoner the way the real people did, even Ora and Ilan, perhaps because the thought of the living people was intolerable, and quite simply crushed his remaining will to live, whereas thinking about his story almost always pumped a little more blood through his veins. But there, in the ugly yard next to the prison’s concrete wall, with its hedges of barbed wire, and now, with the gaunt officer who took another step closer and leaned right over Avram to capture the last moment before all of Avram was covered with earth and swallowed up in it, Avram no longer wanted to live in a world where such a thing was possible, where a person stood photographing someone being buried alive, and Avram let go of his life and died.