To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  Back and forth he walked wildly by Ora’s body, grunting and shouting and tugging at his face and beard with both hands, yet at the same time a thin voice whispered inside him: Look at her, look, she can go all the way into the earth, she isn’t afraid.

  Ora had, in fact, quieted a little, as though she had learned how to breathe in the belly of the earth. She had stopped slamming her head and beating her hands. She lay still, and very quietly told the earth things that came to her, nonsense, little bits of it, things you’d tell a girlfriend or a good neighbor. “Even when he was little, a year or younger, I tried to make sure that everything I gave him to eat, every dish I made for him, looked pretty, because I wanted things to be nice for him. I always tried to think not only of the flavors but also the colors, the color combinations, so it would be cheerful for him to look at.” She stopped. What am I doing, she thought. I’m telling the earth about him. And she realized with horror: Maybe I’m preparing her for him, so she’ll know how to take care of him. A great weakness filled her. She was on the verge of fainting, and she sighed into the belly of the earth and for a moment she was a tiny, miserable puppy snuggling into a large, warm lap. She thought she could feel the earth softening a little, because her scent grew sweeter, her deep exhalation came back to Ora. She took her in and told her how he liked to make figures out of his mashed potatoes and schnitzel, little people and animals, and then of course he would refuse to eat them because how could he, he would ask sweetly, eat a puppy or a goat? Or a person?

  Suddenly two hands took hold of her, grasped her waist, rocked her, and pulled her out. She was in Avram’s arms. It was good that he’d come with her, she knew. One minute longer and she would have been entirely swallowed up in the ground. Something nameless had pulled her down and she was willing to crumble into dirt. It was good that he’d come, and he was so strong, with one yank he uprooted her from the earth and charged away from the pit with her on his shoulder.

  He stood there, confused, and let her slide off his body so she stood opposite him, face-to-face, until she collapsed in exhaustion. She sat cross-legged, her face covered with dirt. He brought a bottle of water and sat down in front of her, and she filled her mouth and spat out doughy globs of earth, and coughed, and her eyes streamed. She wet her mouth and spat again. “I don’t know what happened to me,” she mumbled, “it just came over me.” Then she turned to look at him. “Avram? Avram? Did I scare you?” She poured water into her hand and wiped his forehead, and he did not pull back. Then she ran her wet hand over her own forehead and felt the cuts. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” she blathered. “We’re all right, everything will be all right.”

  Once in a while she checked his eyes and sensed a shadow slip away into a thicket of darkness, and she did not understand. She could not understand. He had never told her anything about that place. She kept smoothing over his forehead for several more minutes, reassuring, offering tenderness and promises of goodness, and he sat there accepting and absorbing and did not move, only his thumbs flicked back and forth over his fingertips.

  “Stop, enough, don’t torture yourself. We’ll come to a road soon, we’ll put you on a bus and you’ll go home. I should never have brought you here.”

  But the softness in her voice—Avram felt it and the blood ran out of his heart—the softness and the compassion told him that something he had deeply feared, for years, had happened: Ora had despaired of him. Ora was giving up on him. Ora had accepted the failure that he was. He let out a bitter, toxic laugh.

  “What is it, Avram?”

  “Ora.” He turned away from her and spoke in a dim, throaty voice, as if his own mouth were full of earth. “Do you remember what I told you when I got back?”

  She shook her head firmly. “Don’t say it. Don’t even think it.”

  She took his hand and pressed it between her bleeding palms. It amazed her that for the last few minutes she had been touching him so often, with such ease, and that he had not resisted, and that he had grabbed her waist and lifted her out of the ground and run with her across the field. It amazed her that their bodies were acting like flesh and blood. “Don’t say anything. I don’t have the energy for anything now.”

  When he’d come back from captivity, she had managed to get on the ambulance that took him from the airport to the hospital. He lay on the stretcher, bleeding, his open wounds running with pus. Suddenly his eyes opened and, upon seeing her, appeared to focus. He recognized her. He signaled with his eyes for her to lean down. With his last remaining strength he whispered, “I wish they’d killed me.”

  From around the bend in the path came the sound of singing. A man was singing at the top of his lungs, and other voices dragged behind him without any charm or coordination. “Maybe we should duck between these trees until they pass,” Avram grumbled. Only a few moments ago they had awoken from a slumber of total exhaustion, on the side of the path and in full daylight. But the walkers had already revealed themselves. Avram wanted to get up, but she put a hand on his knee: “Don’t run away, they’ll just walk by, we won’t look at them and they won’t look at us.” He sat with his back to the path and hid his face.

  At the head of the small procession walked a tall, skinny, bearded young man. Locks of black hair hung in his face, and a large colorful yarmulke covered his head. He danced and flung his limbs around in excitement as he sang and cheered, and ten or so men and women straggled behind him, hand in hand, zigzagging and daydreaming, mumbling his song or some feeble melody. Every so often they waved a tired foot, collapsed, bumped into one another. Wide-eyed, they stared at the couple sitting by the path, and the leader pulled his procession around the two and joined it in a loop and did not stop singing and hopping around. When he waved his arms up high, the others’ arms were drawn up in spasmodic surprise, and the whole circle collapsed and then tied itself back up, and the man grinned, and as he sang and danced he leaned over to Ora and asked in a quiet and utterly businesslike tone if everything was all right. Ora shook her head, nothing was all right, and he examined her injured, dirty face, and looked to Avram and a crease deepened between his eyes. Then he looked back and forth as if searching for something—as if he knew exactly what he was looking for, Ora felt—and saw the pit in the earth, and Ora unwittingly tightened her legs together.

  He quickly went back to his enthusiastic rocking. “A great trouble has befallen you, my friends,” he said, and Ora replied in a small voice, “You could certainly say so.” The man inquired: “Trouble from man or from the heavens?” Then he added quietly, “Or from the earth?” Ora replied, “I don’t really believe in the heavens,” and the man smiled and said, “And in man, you do?” Ora, slightly won over by his smile, said, “Less and less every day.” The man straightened up and led the fumbling circle around them, and Ora tented her eyes from the sun to turn the dancing silhouettes into people. She noticed that one of them had odd-sized legs, another’s head was strangely tilted to the sky and she thought he might be blind, and one woman’s body was bent almost to the ground. Another woman’s mouth was wide open and drooling, and she held the hand of a gaunt albino boy, who giggled with vacant eyes. The circle turned heavily on its axis, and the energetic young man leaned over again and said smilingly, “Guys, why don’t you come with me for an hour or so?”

  Ora looked at Avram, who sat with his head bowed and seemed not to see or hear anything, and she said to the man, “No thanks.”

  “Why not? Just an hour, what do you have to lose?”

  “Avram?”

  He shrugged as if to say, Your call, and Ora turned sharply to the man and said, “But don’t talk to me about the news, you hear me? I don’t want to hear a single word!”

  The man seemed to lose his equilibrium for the first time. He was about to give a witty reply, but then he peered into her eyes and said nothing.

  “And no proselytizing either,” Ora added.

  The man laughed. “I’ll try, but don’t come crying if you leave with a smile.”
r />   “I won’t complain about a smile.”

  He held his hand out to Avram, but Avram got up without touching the hand, and the man, still dancing around her, helped Ora hoist her backpack up and announced that he was Akiva. He stood Avram in the middle of the line and Ora at the end and went back to shepherd his confused herd.

  Avram held the hand of the hunchbacked old lady, and with his other he grabbed hold of the albino boy, and Ora took the hand of a bald woman with thick blue veins snaking up her legs. She kept asking Ora what was for lunch and demanded that she give her back the cholent pot. They all climbed up a little hill, and Avram kept turning his head back to check on Ora, and she would give him a shoulder-shrugging look: Beats me, I have no idea. Akiva looked back encouragingly, and sang a grating tune very loudly. They continued this way, up and down, and both Ora and Avram delved into themselves, blind to the abundant beauty around them, yellow beds of spurge, purple orchids, and terebinths blossoming in red. Nor did they notice the intoxicating nectar that the spiny-broom flowers had begun to emit in the heat of the day. But Ora knew that it was good and restorative for her to be led this way, led by the hand, without having to think about where to put down her foot for the next step. Avram knew he wouldn’t mind going on like this all day, as long as he did not have to see Ora suffering because of him. Maybe later, when they were alone, he would tell her that he might be willing, perhaps, for her to tell him a little about Ofer, if she had to. But he would ask her not to start talking about him directly, not about Ofer himself, and that she talk about him carefully and slowly, so that he could gradually get used to the torture.

  Ora looked up and a strange happiness began to gurgle inside her, perhaps because of how she had spoken into the earth—she could still taste it on her tongue—or perhaps because always, even at home, after she had these outbursts, when enough was enough, when her guys had really crossed the line, a physical sweetness always spread through her body. Ilan and the boys would still be looking at her in shock, frightened, full of peculiar awe and so eager to appease her, and she would spend several long minutes floating on a pall of satisfaction and deep pleasure. Or perhaps she was so happy because of the people in the procession, who imbued her with a dreamlike tranquillity despite their strangeness and forlornness and their broken bodies. From dust we were taken. She suddenly felt it down to the roots of her flesh. Just like that, from pure mud. She could hear the pat-pat sound of her own self being scooped out by the handful, back at the dawn of time, out of the muddy earth, to be sculpted—too bad they were stingy and did such a poor job with the boobs, and they made her thighs too thick, completely disproportionate, to say nothing of her ass, which this year, with all her desperate binge-eating, had really flourished. When she had finished denigrating her body—which was, incidentally, delightfully attractive to Akiva, judging by the glimmer in his eye, and this was not lost on her—Ora smiled to think of how Ilan had been sculpted: thin, strong, upright, and stretched out like a tendon. She longed for Ilan here and now, without thinking, without remembering or resenting, just his flesh boring into hers. She felt a sudden yearning in the sting. She roused herself quickly and thought of how Adam was sculpted, how delicately and meticulously they had worked on his face, his heavy eyes, his mouth with all its expressions. Her hand ran longingly over his thin body with the slightly hunched back that seemed almost defiant, and the cloudy shadows on his sunken cheeks, and the prominent Adam’s apple that somehow gave him a scholarly look. She also thought about her Ada, making room for her, as always, and imagined what she would look like today if she were alive. Sometimes she saw women who resembled her on the street, and she had a patient who looked like her, a woman with a herniated disc whom she treated for a whole year, working miracles on her. And only then did Ora dare to think about Ofer: strong, solid, and tall he had emerged from the lump of mud—not immediately, not in his first years, when he was small and meager, little more than a huge pair of eyes and bony ribs and matchstick limbs, but later, when he grew up, how beautifully he had risen from the mud, with his thick neck and broad shoulders, and the surprisingly feminine ankles, such a delightful finish to the oversized, powerful limbs. She smiled to herself and looked quickly at Avram, ran her eyes over his body, examined, compared—similarities, dissimilarities—and was overcome with joy in the depths of her gut. It occurred to her, incidentally, that Avram fit in with this crowd quite well, and it seemed to her that he was also finding unexpected relief, because a new smile, the first smile, was spreading on his lips, almost a smile of exaltation. But then a shock wave ran through the hobbling procession, hands pulled back and disconnected, and Ora watched with alarm as Avram’s mouth opened wide, his smile broadened, ripped open, and his eyes glimmered and his hands waved wildly, and he kicked and jumped like a horse and grunted.

  After a moment he stopped himself, buried his head back down between his shoulders, and walked on, dragging his feet and swaying from side to side. Akiva looked at Ora questioningly, and she motioned for him to keep going. Then she forced herself to walk on too, shocked by what she had seen in Avram, by the sliver of secret revealed to her from inside him, as though for an instant he had allowed himself to try out a different possibility, a redemptive one. He had looked so distorted, she thought, like a boy playing with pieces of himself.