To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  “And sometimes I would just stare with my ears while he told me what he was doing, how his studies were going, how the criminal justice professor already had his eye on him, and the contract law tutor told him that with grades like his he could get a clerkship at the supreme court. I would hear him and think about how I was focused on Adam’s poop and problems with the diaper service and my cracked nipples, and there he was, floating in a sky of diamonds—”

  “But he gave up the filmmaking,” Avram says softly.

  “As soon as the war was over.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You know, after you came back.”

  “But he wanted it so badly.”

  “That’s exactly why.”

  “I was always sure he’d be—”

  “No, he cut it off, like only Ilan knows how to cut things off.” She slices the air with her hand and feels herself falling on the other side of the knife.

  “Because of me? Because of what happened to me?”

  “Well, not just that. There were other things.” She stops walking and looks at him in despair. “Tell me, Avram, how will we have time for everything?”

  The mountain towers above them in a bed of forest, and Avram sees her brown eyes colored green, sees how those eyes still sparkle, still, still.

  “And don’t forget,” she continues after a while, “that during the first months after Adam was born he also took care of you on his own. He would drive to the hospital every single day, and to all the convalescent homes where they sent you, and every day he gave me a detailed report. We had long telephone conferences every evening about your treatments, the medications, the side effects. And those interrogations, don’t forget that.”

  “Aha,” Avram says and looks out into the distance.

  “And you, you never even once asked him about me. How I was doing. Where I’d suddenly disappeared to.”

  He breathes deeply, straightens up, widens his steps. She has to work hard to keep up.

  “You didn’t even know that I’d had Adam. Or at least that’s what I thought at the time.”

  “Ora?”

  “What?”

  “Did he take any interest in Adam?”

  “In Adam?” She lets out a thin laugh.

  “I was just asking.”

  “Well,” she stretches, preparing to massage an old insult. “At first he definitely asked about Adam. Or rather, made a point of asking. Then he asked a little less, and I could tell that he found it difficult even to say his name. And then one day he started talking about ‘the boy.’ How does the boy sleep at night, how is his digestion, that sort of thing. And that was when I lost it. Even a sucker like me has some kind of limit, I guess.

  “I think it was then, when he started calling him ‘the boy,’ that I began to feel like myself again. I told him to stop calling me. To get out of my life. I was finally able to tell him what I should have said months before. I’m stupid, you know, what can I say. For maybe three months I kept dragging out that twisted arrangement. Just imagine. When I think about it now—”

  They stop in a patch of shade on a vista that looks out onto the entire Hula Valley. All the muscles in their bodies are aching now, and not just from walking. Avram collapses to the ground and doesn’t even have the strength to take his backpack off. Ora notices that every time he stops walking and moving, he takes on a sort of heavy, rock-like lumpiness. Secretly, through her teenage girl’s eyes, she watches him: he avoids looking fully at the broad valley spread out at the foot of the mountain, at the mountain itself as they walk down it, at the expanse of sky. She remembers that Ilan once said about Avram, “He just turned himself off and he’s sitting inside himself in the dark.” And here too, on the path, in the sun, his skin is fair and reddens easily, but his body seems impervious to light.

  And to beauty. And to Ofer.

  She briskly wipes her glasses off and breathes on them. She wipes them again. Calms herself.

  “But as soon as I hung up on him, he called back. He said he could definitely understand me throwing him out of my life. He totally deserves that. But I can’t remove him from the joint responsibility we share for our second child.”

  “What? Oh.”

  “Yes, well.”

  So that’s how they thought of me, Avram muses. Very soon, in a minute or two, he will ask her to stop talking. There’s no room left in him for all this.

  “And then we had another conversation. One of the most outlandish ones we’ve ever had. We figured out how we’d keep taking care of you, and how we’d hide what was happening to us from you, because it was obvious that the last thing you needed was this sort of crisis with us, with the parents, you know.” She laughs feebly.

  Avram remembers for some reason that when he was about thirteen, years after his father got up one morning and disappeared, he convinced himself to believe that his real father, the secret one, was the poet Alexander Penn. For weeks, every night before bed, he would read Penn’s poem “The Abandoned Son” in a whispered voice.

  “And we talked like total strangers, Ilan and me. No, like the lawyers of total strangers. With a matter-of-factness that I could not believe I was capable of, with him or at all. We opened our calendars and settled exactly how long Ilan would keep caring for you alone, and when I would start doing shifts again, and we agreed that we’d keep pretending that everything was okay when we were with you, at least until you recovered a little. We knew it wouldn’t be much of an effort, because you didn’t show any interest in anything anyway. You barely knew what was happening around you—or is that what you wanted everyone to think, so they’d leave you alone? Hey? So they’d give up on you?”

  His eyes move sideways under his half-closed lids.

  “In the end you got what you wanted,” she says drily.

  And then, in mid-breath, she freezes, because she is suddenly unable to recall Ofer’s face. She jumps up quickly and starts walking, and Avram groans and gets up to follow her. She stares straight ahead without seeing anything, her eyes burning like black chimneys in the daylight, but they cannot see Ofer. As she walks, his face breaks up inside her head into a whirlwind of fragmentary expressions and features. At times they swell and burst, as though someone has shoved a huge fist behind his skin and cleaved him from the inside. She knows she is being punished for something, but she does not know what. Perhaps for continuing her journey instead of going home right away to receive the bad news? Or for not being willing to accept any compromise (a minor injury? A moderate one? One leg? From the knee down? From the ankle? A hand? An eye? Both eyes? The penis?). Almost every single hour of the day, behind all the things and the words and the acts, these propositions have hummed inside her, dispatched from far away: You can live a pretty good life with one kidney, even with one lung. Think about it, don’t be quick to say no, it’s not every day you get these kinds of offers, and you’ll be sorry one day that you rejected them. Other families took them and now they’re happy, relatively speaking. Think about it again, think good and hard: if it’s a phosphorus burn, for example, they can do skin grafting. They can even rehabilitate the brain these days. And even if he’s a vegetable, he’ll still be alive, and you can take care of him yourself, you can use all the experience you gained after Avram was injured. So please, reconsider. He’ll have a life, sensations, emotions. It’s not the worst bargain you could make in your condition.

  And for all those days and nights she has pushed away these buzzing communications. Now too she holds her head up and walks between them, careful to look away from Avram, to protect him from the gorgon face she feels she has taken on. She won’t be cutting any deals. And she will not be accepting any bad news of any kind, of any kind whatsoever. Go on, keep going. Talk, tell him about his son.

  • • •

  “A different life started for me then. I didn’t have the strength for it at all, but I had a baby who simply forced me to live and came into my life with the determination of a … well, of a baby, who is convinced
that everything was created for his benefit, especially me. We were together all the time, he and I, almost twenty-four hours a day. For the first year I didn’t have a nanny or much help, just a few girlfriends who came on shifts, twice a week, when I started going to see you again in Tel Aviv. But the rest of the time, days and nights, he and I were alone.”

  Her look hovers somewhere in the distance. There are some things that are futile to try to explain to him: the murmured conversations between her and Adam while he nursed, before bed, half asleep in the middle of the night, when the whole world was asleep and it was just the two of them, eyes to eyes, learning each other. And the peals of laughter they shared when he got the hiccups. And the way their gazes grasped each other when evening fell and shadows grew long in the room. And his quiet expression of bewilderment when he saw tears in her eyes, and his lips that curled and trembled around questions he did not know how to ask.

  Avram walks beside her, nodding to himself, hunched inward like a question mark.

  “It was also a wonderful time. Our age of wonders. Mine and Adam’s.”

  And to herself she thinks: The happiest years we had.

  “I slowly got to know him.” She smiles, remembering his grumpiness when she dared to pull him off one nipple, until his mouth locked in on the other. He would scream bloody murder, with furious eyes, and his entire head would turn red with insult. “And the lovely humor in his looks and his games and the way he played around with me. I never knew babies had a sense of humor, no one told me.”

  Avram keeps nodding to himself, as though reciting an important lesson. Ora realizes: We’re practicing together, Avram and I. Practicing on Adam, before we get to Ofer. Exercising vocabulary, boundaries, endurance.

  “And with me, there was always turmoil inside. It was like all my systems had gone awry, body and soul. I was very sick too, with endless infections and bleeding, and I was terribly weak. But I also felt a crazy sense of power, lots of power, don’t ask me why. I had attacks of sobbing and joy and desperation and euphoria, all within three minutes. I used to wonder how I would get through another hour with him when he was running a high fever and screaming in my ear, and it was two o’clock in the morning and the doctor wouldn’t pick up the phone, but at the same time—I could do anything! I could carry him by my teeth to the farthest corners of the earth. Terrible as an army with banners.”

  Avram lights up for an instant and smiles to himself. He seems to be tasting the words silently with his lips: Terrible as an army with banners. Her shoulders relax, opening up to him like a freshly sliced challah—he sometimes used to call her that, but he also called her “malted spirits,” or “wool gabardine.” These names had no meaning, apart from the endearment with which he enveloped her in the words, the sweet exotic sounds, as though covering her shoulders with a shawl so fine that only she and he could see it. He loved to pepper his speech, sometimes expediently and sometimes not, with dudgeon wood and jasper stones, curtilages and sippets, pedicels and ovules. “That’s Avram’s,” she and Ilan used to say to each other in the years after Avram, when somewhere in the conversation, or on the radio, or in a book, a word that had simply been born for him would pop up—a word that bore his seal.

  “And one day he calls to tell me his address and phone number have changed, like I’m his reserve duty office. The apartment in Talpiot is too cold, he says, so he’s renting a different one, on Herzl Boulevard in Beit HaKerem. ‘Good for you,’ I say, and cross out his old number on the note on the fridge.

  “Two months later, in the middle of a regular conversation about you, about your condition, he gives me a new number. What happened? Did you get a different phone? No, but they’ve been doing roadwork outside his place for three months now, digging up the street and paving it over day and night, and there’s a terrible racket, and you know how noise makes him crazy. ‘So where does your new number live?’ ‘In Evan Sapir, near Hadassah Hospital. I found a nice little apartment in someone’s backyard.’ ‘Is it quiet there?’ I ask. ‘Like a graveyard,’ he assures me, and I change the number on the fridge.

  “A few weeks later, another call. His landlord’s son bought a drum set. He holds the phone out the window, so I can enjoy it, too. Huge drums, apparently. A tom-tom, at the very least. A person can’t live this way. I agree with him and walk to the fridge with pen in hand. ‘I’ve already settled on a little place in Bar Giora,’ he says in a nasal voice. Bar Giora? That’s pretty close, I think, it’s right across the valley. I feel my stomach contracting, and I can’t tell if it’s excitement or alarm at his sudden proximity. But a week goes by, and another week, and I see no change in our relationship. He’s over there, we’re over here, and there starts to be more and more of an ‘us.’

  “After a while, another phone call. ‘Listen, I had a slight falling-out with the landlord, he has two dogs, murderous rottweilers. I’m moving again, and I thought you’d want to know: it’s quite close to you.’ He giggles. ‘It’s more or less in Tzur Hadassah itself, I mean, if that won’t bother you.’ ‘Hey, Ilan, are you playing hot and cold with me?’ ”

  Ilan had laughed. Ora knew him and his systems of laughs, and in this laughter there was something weak and pathetic, and she felt once again how strong she was. “I’m telling you,” she says to Avram, “I didn’t even know up to then that I was such a lioness. But I’m also a dishrag, as you know, and a doormat, and I missed him almost all the time and everything reminded me of him—Adam’s suckling used to make me so horny for Ilan.” She laughs quietly to herself as she remembers. “I would pick up Ilan’s smell from Adam at night and it woke me. And all that time I felt as though he were just a couple of meters away.”

  When she says that, she can hear the music in which Ilan spoke to her on the phone all the years they were together, with a firm sort of sharpness and a rousing “Ora!” Sometimes, when he said her name that way, she had a vague sense of guilt—like a soldier asleep on guard duty whose officer calls him out—but there was almost always something daring in the way he addressed her too, and teasing, and arousing and inviting: Ora! She smiles to herself: Ora! As though he were establishing a decisive, solid fact that she herself often doubted.

  “So I pretend to be strong and ask softly, ‘What’s going on, Ilan? Is this like some kind of Monopoly game for you, renting and selling houses in all sorts of streets around town? Or is my learned friend a little homesick?’ And without even blinking, he says yes, that he’s had no life since he left home, that he’s going crazy. And then I hear myself say, ‘Then come back,’ and straightaway I think, No! I don’t need him and I don’t want him here. I don’t want any man getting under my feet around here.”

  She smiles broadly when Avram briefly lifts his heavy eyelids and an ancient spark glimmers slyly in his eyes. “There you are,” she says.

  “Sometimes at night,” Ilan told her back then, “I drive to the house. It’s some kind of force … It just gets hold of me, wakes me up at one o’clock in the morning, or two, throws me out of bed, and I get up like a zombie and get on my motorbike and drive to you, and I know I’ll be with you in one minute, in your bed, begging you to forgive me, to forget, to erase my madness. And then, when I’m twenty meters from the place, the counter-force kicks in, always at the same point, as if that’s where the magnet’s poles get reversed. I can actually feel something physically pushing me, and it says: Move away, get out of here, it’s no good to be here—”

  “Is that really what happens?”

  “I’m going crazy, Ora, I have a child and I can’t see him?! Am I sane? And I have you, and I’m one thousand percent sure that you’re the only person I’m able and willing to live with, the only person who can stand me, and so what? What am I doing? I thought maybe I just needed to escape this place, to get out of Israel, maybe go to England, finish my studies there, get a change of air, but I can’t do that either! Because of Avram I can’t leave this place! I don’t know what to do, tell me what to do.”

  “And t
hen,” Ora tells Avram, “when he said that to me, it occurred to me for the first time that you were definitely the reason for his running away from us, but you may also have been the excuse.”

  “Excuse for what?”

  “For what?” She lets out a thin, unpleasant snicker. “For example, his fear of living with us, with me and Adam. Or of just living.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Oof,” she grunts, shaking her head firmly a few times. “You. The two of you.”

  “He rented a house next to the children’s park, you know, the one that all the parents in Tzur Hadassah built, a hundred meters from our house as the crow flies. And he didn’t call for maybe three weeks. I turned into a bundle of nerves again, and of course Adam picked up on it immediately. I would push him around the neighborhood for hours in his stroller, that’s the only way he would calm down at all, and no matter which direction I set off in, I always ended up at Ilan’s house.”

  Avram walks next to her with his head bowed, not looking at her or at the view. He sees the young woman, lonely and restless, pacing about with the stroller. He leads her along the paths of the village he grew up in, down the loop road and the side street that splits off past houses and yards he knows.

  “Once we met face-to-face. He was just coming out, and we happened to run into each other at the gate. We said cautious hellos and both got stuck. He looked at me as if he was about to bed me right there on the sidewalk—I knew that hunger of his so well. But I wanted him to look at Adam, too. Adam was a mess that day—he had a cold and he was kvetchy, with sleep and gunk in his eyes, but Ilan threw him such a fleeting glance that I thought he’d barely noticed a thing.