To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  She felt the pain of unraveling again, as she had whenever she’d had to part with Adam in the hospital. “Yes, he doesn’t need to sleep with us.”

  “But what if he cries?” Ilan asked hesitantly.

  “If he cries we’ll hear him. Don’t worry, I’ll hear him.”

  They went to their room and slept for two whole hours, and Ora woke a minute or two before Adam made a sound and immediately felt the fullness in her breasts. She woke Ilan to go and bring the baby to her. She arranged the pillows on the bed and leaned back heavily, and Ilan came in from the other room holding Adam, his face glowing.

  She breast-fed him and was once again amazed at how small his head looked against her breast. He sucked strongly, firmly, almost without looking at her, and she felt blades of unfamiliar pleasure and pain turn over clods of body and soul. Ilan stood looking at them the whole time, mesmerized, all corporeality stripped from his face. Every so often he asked if she was comfortable, if she was thirsty, if she felt the milk coming out. She pulled the child away from one nipple and moved him to the other breast and wiped her nipple with a cloth. Ilan stared at her breast, which she thought looked huge, moonlike, and webbed with bluish veins, and there was a new awe in his expression. He suddenly looked like a little boy, and she asked, “Don’t you want to take pictures of him?”

  He blinked as though awakening from a dream. “No, I don’t feel like taking pictures now. The light in here isn’t good.”

  “What were you thinking about?”

  “Nothing, no one.”

  She could see what looked like a dark spider settle down over his face. “Maybe you’ll take some later,” she said weakly.

  “Yes, of course, later.”

  But he hardly took any pictures later, either. Sometimes he would bring the camera, take off the lens cover, aim and focus, but somehow he didn’t like the lighting, or didn’t think the angle would work. “Maybe later,” he’d say, “when Adam is more alert.”

  Avram clears his throat to remind her of his existence. She smiles at him in surprise: “I got carried away. I suddenly remembered all sorts of … Do you want to keep walking?”

  “No, it’s okay here.” He leans back on his elbows, even though his entire body is bubbling with a desire to leave this place.

  They sit looking down at the verdant valley. Behind Avram, in his shadow, is a silent commotion. Ants bustle along a dry stem of fennel plant, gnawing at the wood and the crumbs of congealed honey left by last year’s bees. A tiny scepter of orchid stands tall, purple and light as a butterfly, its pair of tuberous roots in the earth—one slowly emptying out, the other filling up. A little farther away, in the shade of Avram’s right upper back, a small white deadnettle, engaged in its complicated affairs, sends out olfactory signals to insects that constantly flit between it and other plants, and it grows fertile sepals, for self-pollination, in case the insects fail it.

  “And one night, when Adam was about a month old, he woke up hungry. Ilan got up to bring him to me, but when I fed him Ilan didn’t stay with us in the room. It was strange. I called him, he was in the living room, and he said he would be right with us. I couldn’t understand what he was doing there, in the dark. I didn’t hear any noise or movement. I had the feeling he was standing by the window looking out, and I got nervous.”

  Scenes she hasn’t thought of for many years rise up before her eyes, and they are sharp and alive, more lucid than ever. She realizes that perhaps she is no less afraid to tell these things than he is to hear them.

  “When I finished feeding, I took Adam back to his crib, and then I saw Ilan standing in the middle of the living room. He was just standing there, as if he’d forgotten where he was going. I saw him from behind, and I knew straightaway that something was wrong. His face was awful. He looked at me as if he was afraid of me, or wanted to hit me. Or both. He said he couldn’t do it anymore, he couldn’t take it. That you—” She swallows. “Look, are you sure you want to hear this?”

  Avram grunts something, pulls himself up into a seated position, and rests his head on his arms. She waits. His back heaves. He does not get up and walk away.

  “Ilan said his thoughts about you were destroying him. That he felt like a murderer—‘I have killed and also taken possession,’ he said—and that he couldn’t look at Adam without seeing you and thinking about you at the stronghold, or in prison camp, or in the hospital.”

  The back of Avram’s neck contracts.

  She asked him, “What do you want us to do?” Ilan did not answer. The house was heated, but she was still cold. She stood barefoot in her robe and shivered and leaked milk. She asked again what he proposed doing, and Ilan said he didn’t know, but he couldn’t go on this way. He was starting to scare himself. “Before, when I brought him to you—” He stopped.

  “It’s not our fault,” she mumbled—that was their mantra during those years. “We didn’t want it to happen, and we didn’t invite it. It just happened, Ilan, it’s just a terrible thing that happened to us.”

  “I know.”

  “And if it hadn’t been him there, in the stronghold, it would have been you.”

  He snorted. “That’s just it, isn’t it?”

  “It was you or him, there was no other option.” She walked over to hug him.

  “Stop it, Ora.” He raised a hand to keep her away. “We’ve heard it, we’ve said it, we’ve talked about it. I’m not to blame and you’re not to blame, and Avram is certainly not to blame, and we didn’t want it to happen, but it did happen, and if I wasn’t such a nothing I would kill myself right this minute.”

  She stood silently. Everything he said she had thought of countless times before, in his voice and hers. She couldn’t gather up the strength to tell him not to talk such nonsense.

  As she tells these things to Avram now, she feels cold in the day’s intensifying heat, and her voice trembles a little from the tension. She cannot see his face. His face is hidden in his arms, and his arms embrace his knees. She has the feeling that he’s listening to her from within the depths of his flesh, like an animal in its lair.

  “And the fact that we’re living here,” Ilan said.

  “It’s just until he gets back,” she murmured. “We’re just looking after his house.”

  “I keep telling him that when I’m with him,” Ilan whispered, “and I don’t know if he even understands that we’re actually living here.”

  “But as soon as he gets back, we’ll leave.”

  Ilan sneered. “And now our kid is going to grow up here.”

  Ora thought that if Ilan didn’t come over and hold her immediately, her body would fall to the ground and shatter.

  “And I can’t see any way out of it, or any chance that anything will ever work out for us”—he was shouting now—“and just think about it, we’ll live out our lives here, and we’ll have another child and maybe another, we once talked about four, including one we’d adopt, right? To repay a kindness to humanity, didn’t we say? And every time we look into each other’s eyes we’ll see him. And all that time, through all our lives, and his; twenty, thirty, fifty years, he’ll sit there in his darkness, do you understand?” Ilan seized his head with both hands and hammered with his voice, and Ora was suddenly afraid of him. He bellowed: “There will be a child here who’ll grow up and be an entire world, and over there he’ll be a living dead, and this child could have been his, and you could have been his too, if only—”

  “And then maybe you would have been a living dead somewhere.”

  “You know what?”

  And she did.

  “Is this hard for you?” Ora asks Avram in a muffled voice.

  “I’m listening,” he answers, his jaws breaking the words up into tight syllables.

  “Because if it’s too difficult—”

  He lifts his head and his face looks as though a firm hand is crushing it. “Ora, it’s my finally hearing from the outside something I’ve been hearing inside my head for years.”
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br />   She wants to touch his hand, to absorb some of what’s overflowing from him, but she doesn’t dare. “You know, it’s strange, but it’s the same way for me.”

  • • •

  She had no strength left. She collapsed on the couch. Ilan came and stood facing her and said he had to leave.

  “Where to?”

  “I don’t know, I can’t stay here.”

  “Now?”

  He was suddenly very tall. It was as though he stretched out more and more from above and looked all stiff and his eyes glistened.

  “You mean you’re going to walk out and leave me alone with him?”

  “I’m no good here, I’m poisoning the air, I hate myself here. I even hate you. When I see you like that, so full, I just can’t stand you.” Then he added, “And I can’t love Adam. I can’t manage to love him. There’s a glass wall between him and me. I don’t feel him, I don’t smell him. Let me go.”

  She said nothing.

  “Maybe if I think quietly a bit, for a few days, maybe I’ll be able to come back. Right now I have to be alone, Ora, give me one week alone.”

  “And how am I supposed to manage here?”

  “I’ll help you, you won’t have to worry about anything. We’ll talk on the phone every day, I’ll find help for you, a nanny, a babysitter, you can be totally free, you can go back to school, find a job, do anything you want, just let me go now, it’s not good for me to stay here even for ten minutes.”

  “But when did you think about all this?” Ora murmured dully. “We were together the whole time.”

  Ilan spoke rapidly, organizing her bright future in a blink. “I could actually see,” she tells Avram, “how in a second that mechanism of his was turned on, you know? The cogwheels in his eyes?”

  She looked at Ilan and thought that as smart as he was, he didn’t understand anything, and that she had made a terrible mistake with him. She tried to imagine what her parents would say and how devastated they would be.

  “And I thought about how they always warned me about you,” she tells Avram, “and how they admired him, mainly my mother, who in my opinion always wondered what a guy like him saw in me.”

  Avram smiles, his face hidden in his arms. Hochstapler, her mother used to call him, and Ora had translated: a guy with holes in his pockets who thinks he’s a Rothschild.

  “And I lay on the couch and tried to figure out how I would manage alone with Adam. And think about it, I was still barely able to move, to go out of the house, to keep my eyes open. And I thought this couldn’t be happening, it was just a nightmare and I would wake up any minute. And all the time I also felt that in fact I understood him so well, and I wished I could do that too, run away from myself, and from Adam and from you and from everything, from the whole mess. And I felt sorry for Adam, sleeping calmly without knowing that his life was being screwed up.

  “I lay there with my robe open, just the way I was, I didn’t care about anything. I heard Ilan moving around the bedroom quickly. You know how he moves when he’s decisive”—they smile at each other, a glimmer between them, a tiny thread—“I heard closets opening, doors, drawers. He was packing, and I lay there thinking that for the rest of our lives we would keep on paying for one minute, for a stupid coincidence, for nothing.”

  She and Avram both look away quickly.

  “Take a hat,” Ilan and Avram had told her cheerfully over the military phone from the base in Sinai, “and put two slips of paper in it, but identical ones.” Then they’d both laughed: “No, no, you don’t have to know what you’re drawing lots for.” That laughter still rings in her ears. They haven’t laughed that way since. They were twenty-two, in the last month of their regular army service, and she was already in Jerusalem, a first-year student, studying social work, which was opening up a whole new world for her, and she thought how lucky she was to have found her calling at such a young age. “No, no,” Ilan repeated, “it’s better if you don’t know what the lottery is for, that way you’ll be more objective.” When she insisted, they softened: “Okay, you’re allowed to guess, but do it silently. And quickly. Ora, they’re waiting for us, there’s a command car outside.” (And then she got it: A command car? One of them is going to be allowed home. Who? She quickly ran to get a hat, one of her old military caps, and found a piece of paper and tore it into two equal halves, and inside she was bubbling: Which of the two did she want to come home?) “Two identical slips,” Ilan repeated impatiently. “One with my name and one with fatso’s name.” Then she heard Avram: “Write ‘Ilan’ on one, and ‘Jehovah’ on the other. Wait, on second thought, just write ‘His armies.’ ” Ilan interrupted: “Okay. Desist all chatter. Now pick one out. Did you do it? Which one? Are you sure?”

  Ora weighs a pointy little stone in her hand, and slowly, methodically cleans the dirt off it. Avram sits hunched over, his hands grasping each other, his knuckles turning white.

  “Should I go on?”

  “What? Yes, all right.”

  “Then he stood over me. I couldn’t even get up, I was so weak. I felt like an avalanche. I didn’t even have the strength to cover myself. He didn’t look at me. I felt that I was disgusting him. I was disgusting myself, too.” She speaks in a narrow, contracted voice, as if forced to report everything, down to the last detail. “And he said he’d hang around outside for a while that night, go to some all-night café, there was one on Queen Helena Street back then, and he’d call the next morning. I asked if he wasn’t going to say goodbye to Adam. He said it was better if he didn’t. I felt that I had to get up and fight, if not for me, for Adam, because if I didn’t do something right then, it would no longer be possible to change anything. Because with Ilan these kinds of decisions spread like lightning, you know him, within seconds there’s already a new reality, a fancy settlement with red rooftops and paving stones, and you cannot uproot it.

  “And look how wrong I was,” she mumbles in astonishment, and for a moment, in her eyes, Ilan and Adam row a little wooden boat up a green river, making perfectly coordinated strokes, through a jungle thicket. “Look how in the end everything turned out differently than I thought. It came out the exact opposite.”

  “He called in the morning to say he was staying at a hotel and was planning to rent a small apartment. ‘Not far from you two,’ he said. Do you understand? ‘From you two’! It had only been a few hours and already he was not one of us. Not even one of me.

  “He rented a studio apartment in Talpiot, as far away as he could get, on the other side of town. He called twice a day, morning and evening, decent, responsible, you know him. Killing me softly. And I would cry to him over the phone to come home. I was so stupid, I really humiliated myself, and I probably made him hate me even more with all that sobbing, but I didn’t have a drop of energy to put on heroic shows for him. I was a wreck, body and soul. I don’t even know how I made enough milk to breast-feed or how I managed to take care of Adam. My mom came to stay with me, a bundle of good intentions, but after about two days I realized what was going on and what she was doing to me, how she was starting in with the comparisons between Adam and other babies, and he always lost, of course. I asked my dad to come and take her home. I didn’t even say why, and the worst thing was that he understood immediately.

  “And there were the girlfriends, who came right away, an emergency call-up. They helped and cooked and cleaned, and of course it was all done gently and tactfully, but all of a sudden I was once again surrounded by this cluster of girls, like when I was fourteen, and they all knew exactly what was best for me, and what I really needed, and they reminded me of how much I always, always, except for Ada, got along much better with boys.

  “It was mainly their venom toward Ilan that I couldn’t stand, because I’m telling you that despite everything, I understood him, and I knew that I was the only one who could understand what was really going on. In all the world, only he and I could understand, and maybe you too, if you even had any understanding at all back then.”


  Avram nods to himself.

  “Ugh.” She stretches and rubs her stiff neck. “It’s not easy, all this.”

  “Yes,” he says, and distractedly massages his own neck.

  She checks in to make sure she can abandon Ofer for this long. An internal ray beams out, probes, touches lightly: womb, heart, nipples, the sensitive spot above the navel, the curve in the neck, upper lip, left eye, right eye. Quickly she weaves the feeling of Ofer inside her like a game of connect the dots, and she finds that things are all right, that in some dim way Ofer is even growing a little stronger while she talks, while Avram listens.

  “Adam was on me most of the time,” she tells him as they get up and continue walking on the narrow path down the mountainside. “From the minute Ilan left, he simply refused to be alone. He clung to me like a little monkey, day and night, and I didn’t have the strength to resist. I would put him down to sleep in our bed—I mean, in mine. I mean ours—mine and Adam’s.

  “I slept with him for almost two years, and I know, it was against the instructions, but I’m telling you, I didn’t have the strength to fight him when he was screaming, and I didn’t always have the strength to put him back in his crib after feedings. And the truth is that I kind of liked it when he fell asleep with me after feeding, the two of us melting away together, and it was nice to have another living, warm body in the bed.”

  She smiles. “It was as though after a short period of separation we went back to our natural state, one body, one organism that more or less supplies all of its own requirements and doesn’t need any favors from anyone.”

  Mom and I were a little bit like that, Avram thinks. In the beginning, for the first few years after he left us.

  You and your mom might have been like that, she says with her eyes. I always remembered what you told me. I thought about the two of you a lot then.

  “Ilan kept calling every day like clockwork, and I would talk to him, or actually I would mostly listen. Sometimes—I told you, like that Cocteau woman of yours, that lamebrain, except in Hebrew—I would even give him advice about things, like how to get out an ink stain, or whether he could iron this shirt or that one. I would remind him to get his teeth cleaned and listen to him grumble about how difficult it was without me. If someone had listened in on one of our phone calls, they would have thought it was an ordinary conversation between a little wifey and her husband away on a short business trip.