To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  Ora thought about Ofer, and the terrible pain from last night subsided. Akiva walked through the room with a large bowl, humming a tune, and looked at her out of the corner of his eye as if he knew now why he had dragged them all this way. Her gaze was drawn to the baby, whose tiny fist kept opening and closing as he sucked eagerly, and she knew that Ofer, wherever he was, was safe and protected now. She repeatedly played through her mind what Avram had whispered, and then she understood.

  Start from a distance?

  He nodded once and looked away.

  She sat down, crushing her fingers together, suddenly feeling flustered and a little frightened. He sat down opposite her. The room bustled and hummed around them, and for a long time they both watched something out there, in a time that had no time.

  Should we stay for lunch? Ora asked Avram soundlessly, with only her lips moving.

  “Whatever you want,” he whispered, salivating at the dishes.

  “I don’t know, we just fell on them out of nowhere—”

  “Of course you’ll stay for lunch!” The housewife laughed—an unfortunately expert lip-reader. “What did you think, that we’d just let you go? It’s an honor for us to have you eat here. All of Akiva’s friends are our guests.”

  But start from a distance, he warned her, and she doesn’t know what kind of distance he needs, whether he meant distance in time or space, and besides—what is distant for him now, where he is? She walks behind him, looks at the worn heels of his ancient Converse sneakers, so unsuited for this nature walk, and resists asking when he’s planning on finally switching to Ofer’s heavy hiking boots, which dangle from his backpack. But perhaps they would be too big for him, she thinks, and perhaps that’s what worries him. He had, and still has, small hands and feet—footlets, he used to call them, my footlets and handlets—which always embarrassed him, and of course that was the reason he called himself Caligula, “little boot.” She remembers how he marveled at the way her breasts fit perfectly in his cupped hands, although today they probably would not, having been suckled by two children and the mouths of many men—but not that many, in fact. Let’s see. What is there to see? You know exactly how many, but some wicked little creature inside her has already started to count them off on its fingers as she walks: Ilan is one, Avram is two, and Eran, the Character, makes three—no, wait, four, with that Motti guy she brought home one night to the house in Tzur Hadassah, years ago, who sang in the shower at the top of his lungs. So that makes four men. Fewer than one per decade, on average. Not a monumental achievement, considering there were girls who by the age of sixteen—but forget about that now!

  The air bustles and hums. Flies, bees, gnats, grasshoppers, butterflies, and beetles hover and crawl and leap from the foliage. There is so much life inside every particle of the world, Ora thinks, and this profusion suddenly seems threatening, because why should the abundant, wasteful world care if the life of one fly, or one leaf, or one person, were to end at this very moment? The sorrow of it makes her start talking.

  In a soft, flat voice she tells him that until recently Ofer had a girlfriend, his first one, and she left him, and he still hasn’t gotten over it. “I really liked her. You could say I adopted her a bit, and she adopted me, too. We became very close, which was probably a mistake on my part, because it’s not good to get so close to your boys’ girlfriends”—well, this is really useful information for him, she thinks. “Everyone warned me, but Talia, that was her name, I just fell in love with her as soon as I saw her. And by the way, she wasn’t all that beautiful, although to me she was, she had—she has, I have to stop thinking about her in the past tense, I mean she’s still around, she’s still alive, right? So why do I …”

  For a few seconds the only sounds are their footsteps, the path crunching under their feet, and the buzzing hum. I’m talking to him, Ora thinks with astonishment. I’m telling him these things, I don’t even know if this counts as starting from a distance, but it’s the farthest from Ofer that I can be now, and Avram’s not running away.

  “And Talia’s face … how can I describe it to you”—descriptions were always your thing, she thinks at him—“a face with strength, and character. A strong nose, full of personality, and big lips, which I love, and a large, feminine bust. And she had wonderful fingers.” Ora giggles and waves her own fingers before her eyes. They used to be lovely too, until recently, when their joints grew thick and crooked.

  In her wallet, secretly, behind a little picture of Ofer and Adam with their arms around each other—it was taken the morning Adam enlisted; they both had long hair, Adam’s dark and straight, Ofer’s still golden, curly at the edges—she keeps a picture of Talia. She can’t bring herself to remove it, and she’s always afraid Ofer might find it and get angry. Sometimes she pulls it out of its hiding place and looks at it. She tries to guess what sort of children might have been born from a combination of Talia and Ofer. Occasionally she slides the photo into the empty clear plastic slot that, until six months ago, had contained a picture of Ilan, and looks from the boys to Talia and back again, imagining Talia as her daughter, and then it dawns on her: it looks so possible and natural.

  “She’s a totally levelheaded girl. She even has a bit of an old person’s bitterness. You would have liked her”—she smiles at his back—“but don’t think she was so … how should I put this? She wasn’t the easiest person. Well, what do you expect, that Ofer would choose someone easy?”

  She thinks the back of his neck grows denser between his shoulders.

  They are walking down a riverbed on a worrisome rocky slope—a double-X trail, the boys would have called it: Extra Extreme. When they started their way down and she saw Avram slip and grab on to a jutting rock, she mumbled that she hoped this was just a little deviation from the path and immediately winced at the echo of her words in his mind and wondered if someone inside him would say, in that clownish nasal voice and with a wicked trollish smile: Avram is actually quite fond of little deviations. But she felt no voice or echo of a smile in him, and his eyes did not glimmer, and perhaps there really was nothing there, no one. Get that through your head already, she told herself, and just accept it.

  Now they’re on an escarpment of slippery rocks, which pulls them deep down into a gorge, and that too is a word that once would have tickled him and prompted him to say something gorgey, gorgeous, gorging, to delight in the way his tongue touched the roof of his mouth … Stop—She cuts herself off. Let him be, he’s really not inside there anymore. But on the other hand, he clearly has been listening to her for the last several minutes as she talked about Ofer. He isn’t brushing her off the way he usually does, so maybe he really is giving her an opening, a crack. And for her, these sorts of cracks have recently become a familiar nesting spot. She is now a creature of the cracks. After living with two well-armored adolescent boys, and lately, seeing Eran, who allocates at most ninety minutes a week to her, this seems easy.

  “She became part of the family immediately,” Ora continues as they descend, and she holds back a little sigh, because something changed at home when Talia came, when she started having meals with them and staying over and even going on vacations abroad with them (all of a sudden I had someone to go to the bathroom with when we were on trips, she remembers). But how can she tell him this? How can she describe to a man like him—that apartment of his, the darkness, the solitariness—the slight shift that occurred in the balance between men and women at home, and her feeling that womanhood itself had been given, for the first time perhaps, its rightful place in the family? How can she recount something like that, and what could he, in his state, understand? And what business is it of his anyway? Truth be told, she does not yet feel ready to admit to him, to an almost stranger, how amazed she was, and how it taunted her even to see how this young woman effortlessly attained something she herself had never even tried to demand from her three men: their full recognition of the fact that she was a woman, her discrete self-definition as a woman in a house o
f three men, and the fact that being a woman was not just another of her annoying whims, nor a pathetic defiance of the real thing, which was how the three of them often made her feel. Ora quickens her steps, her lips move soundlessly, and a slight headache starts to hum, as in her high school days when she faced a page full of equations. What Talia had brought about, God only knows how, through the very light motions of her being! Ora snickers to herself, because even Nicotine, the family dog, of blessed memory, experienced a slightly embarrassing change when Talia was around.

  “I was very hurt when she left. And you know, I felt something just before it happened. I felt it before anyone else did, because she stopped coming over whenever she had a spare moment. She avoided me, and suddenly she didn’t have time to sit with me over morning coffee, or just chat on the balcony. Then she came up with the idea that maybe she wouldn’t do her army service and would go to London for a year instead, to sell sunglasses and make some money and study art and experience things. And when she said ‘experience things,’ I immediately told Ilan that something was going on. Ilan said, ‘No way, she’s just dreaming a little, she loves him, and she’s a girl with a good head on her shoulders. Where else would she find a guy like him?’ But I was nervous, I had the feeling that all of a sudden her plans did not include Ofer, or that she was getting a little tired of him, or I don’t know what”—that she’d run her course with him—“and Ofer was totally surprised when it came, he was really in shock, and I’m not sure he’s out of it yet.”

  Ora purses her lips. You saw it all, you with your eagle eye—she stabs herself and twists the knife around—the only thing you missed were the signs in Ilan. He ran his course with you.

  How happy she used to be, Avram thinks and glances at her face. She used to be such a giggler. He remembers how he came to visit her when she was in basic training, at Bahad 12. He walked along the edge of the parade ground, suddenly finding it difficult to stand proudly upright in front of all these hundreds of girls—in his fantasies, the legendary city of girls had a constant soundtrack of sighs and damp moans and longing gazes, but this one buzzed like a hornet’s nest of giggles and sneers, sideways Cleopatra eyes—and suddenly, from afar, a tall, crumpled soldier draped in a sack-like uniform, with red bouncy curls cascading under a crooked cap and cherry lips, ran toward him with open arms, legs slightly askew, laughing joyfully and calling from one end of the camp to the other, “So very very much Avram!”

  “Because I was so insulted by her,” Ora continues a sentence whose beginning Avram has missed—she ran to him so happily on the base, he remembers, and she wasn’t ashamed of him in front of all the girls—“she didn’t even call me to explain, to say goodbye, nothing. From one day to the next she was out of our lives. And the truth is that other than the insult, what hurt were the thoughts about why they broke up, why she left him. Because the whole time she was with us, I learned to rely on her judgment so much, and on her perception, and I’m trying to understand if it was something about Ofer that made her leave, something that I myself can’t see.

  “Maybe it’s because he shuts himself off,” she murmurs, thinking of the slight whiff of anger that has emanated from Ofer recently, repelling and belittling, especially toward anything and anyone who was not connected to the army. “But even before the army he was pretty closed off. Very closed off, even. And Talia made him open up, to us too; he really blossomed with her.”

  I’m talking, she marvels again, and he’s not stopping me.

  There’s this guy, a person, who is Ofer, Avram thinks strenuously, as if struggling with both hands to stick a label that says “Ofer” onto a vague and elusive picture that constantly squirms in his soul as Ora speaks. And she is telling me a story about him now. I’m hearing Ora’s story about Ofer. All I have to do is hear it. No more. She will tell the story, and then it will be over. A story can’t go on forever. I can think about all sorts of things in the meantime. She will talk. It’s only a story. One word followed by another.

  Ora tries to pick and choose what to tell Avram. She wonders why she even slammed him with this stuff about Talia—why start with that? Why did she depict Ofer in his weakest state? She has to take him quickly to more uplifting places. Maybe she’ll tell him about the birth, everyone likes hearing about births. But on the other hand—she gives him a sideways glance—what interest could he have in births? A birth would terrify him, push him even farther away, and to be honest, it’s too early for her to lie naked and unraveled before him. And she certainly won’t tell him about what preceded the birth, that dawn, the one she erased from her book of life, and every time she thinks about it she can’t believe the way she and Ilan were seized by some kind of madness, and for years that memory was mingled with fear and bitter guilt—how could she have been tempted? How could she not have protected Ofer in her belly? How could she not have had the instinct that must exist—is supposed to exist—in every normal, natural mother? For all she knows it might have caused some damage to Ofer. Maybe his childhood asthma started with that? Maybe the attack of claustrophobia in the elevator was because of that? Her mind pulls back from the memory, but the pictures maddeningly resurface, the strange fire in Ilan’s eyes, the grip that locked them into each other, the growls that escaped from them, and her belly, her earth-belly that trembled and bumped as two skinned beasts struggled and mated over it.

  “Let’s sit down, I’m a little dizzy.” She leans her head back on the rock face and takes quick sips of water, then passes him the canteen. She has to find something light and amusing, quickly, something that will make him laugh and fill him with affection and warmth for Ofer. And here it is, she’s found it: Ofer, at age three, used to insist on going to day care in his cowboy costume, which included twenty-one items of clothing and weaponry (they counted them once), and for one entire year they were not allowed to forgo even a single accessory. Her eyes brighten and the commotion in her head quiets down a little. This is exactly the sort of thing she should tell him: sweet slices of life, trivial Ofer episodes, nothing complicated or heavy, just calmly describe the mornings of that year, when Ilan and she darted around Ofer with guns and ammunition belts, and Ilan crawled under the bed to look for a sheriff’s star or a red bandana. The meticulous daily construction of a brave fighter, erected on the fragile scaffolding of little Ofer.

  But that won’t really interest him, she retorts, all the minutiae, the thousands of moments and acts from which you raise a child, gather him into a person. He won’t have the patience for it, and ultimately these details are fairly boring and dreary, especially for men, but really for anyone who doesn’t know the child in question, although there are of course some stories that are, one might say, unusual, that might draw Avram to Ofer—

  But why, for God’s sake, do I need to draw him in at all? she wonders angrily, and the headache that had subsided lunges back boldly and digs its claws into the familiar spot behind her left ear. Am I supposed to be marketing Ofer to him now? Tempting him with Ofer? She sighs, stands up at once, and starts walking briskly, almost running. How do you tell an entire life? A whole decade would not be enough. Where do you start? Especially she, who is incapable of telling one story from beginning to end without scattering in every direction and ruining the punch line—how will she be able to tell his story the right way? And what if she discovers that she doesn’t have that much to tell?

  There are an infinite number of things she can say about him, yet she suddenly panics at the thought that if she talks about him for two or three hours straight, or five hours or ten, she might cover most of the important things she has to say about him, about his life. She might sum him up—exhaust him. And perhaps this is the fear that is pressuring her brain, the discomfort that has been eating away at her for some time: she doesn’t really know him. She doesn’t really know her son, Ofer.

  The pulse in her neck beats to the point of pain. How quickly her tiny joy has faded. And what, really, will she say about him? How can you even describe and rev
ive a whole person, flesh and blood, with only words—oh God, with only words?

  She roots around inside herself, as though if she continues to be silent for even one more minute Avram may think she really has nothing to tell. But everything she feverishly digs up seems banal and marginal—agreeable anecdotes, like the time when Ofer rehabilitated a small well that had dried up near Har Adar. He opened the aqueduct and renewed the spring and planted an orchard nearby. Or perhaps she will tell him about the amazing bed that Ofer built with his own hands for her and Ilan. All right, so she’ll tell him that, so what? A well, a bed, stories that ultimately fit a thousand boys just like him, no less clever and sweet and lovely. It occurs to her that although there are lots of things about Ofer that are good and special, there may not be one truly extraordinary thing, something unique that puts him head and shoulders above everyone else. And with all her might Ora resists this loathsome thought that clings to her, this thought that is so foreign to her—how did she even arrive at such an idea? But wait, what about the movie he made for his cinema class in the tenth grade? There was definitely something there, Avram would like the idea. She glances at his head thrust deep between his slouching shoulders and thinks: Maybe not.

  There was something troubling about that film, and to this day, five years later, it nags at her. Eleven minutes shot on their home video camera, documenting an ordinary day in the life of an ordinary young boy: family, school, friends, girlfriend, basketball, parties. But the film did not show a single flesh-and-blood figure, only the shadows of the characters—shadows walking, alone or in pairs, even in groups, shadows sitting in class, shadows eating lunch, kissing, making out, drumming, drinking beer. When she asked Ofer what the idea behind the film was, or what his intention was when he made it (just as she had asked him about the empty plaster molds he cast in his own image, which he displayed at the school’s year-end exhibition, or the menacing series of photographs of his own face with a vulture’s beak sketched in charcoal over each photo), he shrugged his shoulders and said, “I don’t know, I just thought it would be nice to do.” Or, “I just wanted to photograph someone, and I was the only person in the room.” And if she insisted—“You overwhelmed him again,” Ilan told her afterward—he would impatiently shrug her off: “Does there have to be an explanation? Can’t something just happen? Does every little thing have to be analyzed to the bone?”