To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  “You don’t say …”

  “Yes.”

  “So in fact,” Avram says, speeding up and thoughtfully sucking on his cheek, “he’s taller than Ilan, too?”

  “Yes, he’s taller than Ilan.”

  Silence. It almost embarrasses her to witness this.

  “But how tall is Ilan? One meter eighty?”

  “Even taller.”

  “You don’t say …” The flash of a well-played ploy glimmers in his eye. He mumbles wonderingly, “I never thought he’d be like that one day.”

  “What did you think?”

  “I didn’t think anything,” he repeats, this time so feebly that his voice is barely audible. “I hardly thought, Ora. Every time I tried …” He spreads both hands out in a gesture that might indicate a wish, or perhaps an explosion cracking open.

  She resists asking, Then what were you so afraid of, if you didn’t think anything? Who were you protecting from afar, just so long as you didn’t know anything about him?

  “And how old is Adam now?”

  “Twenty-four and a bit.”

  “Wow, a big boy.”

  “Almost my age,” she says, attempting one of Ilan’s jokes. Avram looks at her, finally gets it, and smiles politely.

  “And what’s going on with him?”

  “Adam? I told you.”

  “I didn’t … I must not have been paying attention.”

  “Adam is with Ilan now, touring the world. South America. Ilan took a year off. They’re having the time of their life, those two, it seems. They don’t want to come home.”

  “But Adam,” Avram probes, and Ora thinks his tongue is straining to learn the music of the questions. “What does he do normally? I mean, does he work? Is he studying?”

  “He’s still searching, you know. These days they spend a lot of time searching. And he has a band, did I tell you?”

  “I don’t remember. Maybe.” He shrugs helplessly. “I don’t know where I was, Ora. Tell me again, from the beginning.”

  “He’s an artist. Adam is really an artist in his soul.” Ora’s face brightens as she talks.

  A silence thickens, rustles, and one question goes unasked. Ora feels that if she could tell Avram that Ofer was also an artist, an artist in his soul, things might be a little easier.

  “A band? What band?”

  “Some kind of hip-hop thing, don’t ask me too many questions.” She waves her hand. “They’ve been together for ages, he and his guys. They’re working on their first CD. They even have a company that wants to produce them. It’s a kind of hip-hop opera, I really don’t understand it, it’s very long, three and a half hours, something about exile, a kind of voyage of exiles, lots of exiles.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yes.”

  Ora and Avram’s shoes scratch through the bushes as they walk.

  Ora remembers something that caught her ear by chance, when Adam was on the phone with a friend. “And there’s a woman in it. She walks along with a length of string, unraveling it behind her.”

  “A string?”

  “Yes, a red one. She unravels it behind her on the ground.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What an idea,” he murmurs, and the skin around his eyes reddens.

  “Adam and his ideas,” she giggles, somewhat repelled by Avram’s sudden excitement.

  “You mean, it’s like the land was ripped apart? Unraveled?”

  “Maybe.”

  “And this woman is giving the earth a string …” Avram latches on to the idea.

  “Yes, something symbolic like that.”

  “That’s powerful. But exiles from where?”

  “They’re a very serious bunch, his band. They did their research, read about places around Israel, about early Zionism, dug through kibbutz archives, and on the web, and they asked people what they would take with them if they had to flee suddenly.” This is the sum of what she knows about the topic, but she doesn’t feel comfortable with Avram knowing that, at least not yet, and so she chatters on. “It’s him and a group of guys, and they write everything together, lyrics and music, and they do gigs all over the place.” She smiles with visible effort. “By the way, Ofer played music once, too. Drums, bongos. But he stopped pretty quickly, and at the end of the tenth grade, for his final project—this is actually interesting—he made a movie.”

  “Who are the exiles?”

  “And Ofer was in a little band too, when he was eleven.”

  “Exiled from where, Ora?”

  “From here.” She gestures with a suddenly feeble hand over the brown mountain cliffs that encircle them, the oak, carob, and olive trees, the thickets of shrubbery that curl around their feet. “From here,” she repeats quietly. In her ears she can hear the words Ofer whispered to her in front of the TV cameras.

  “Exiled from Israel?” Avram seems upset.

  Ora takes a deep breath, straightens up, and puts on a weary smile. “You know how they are at that age. They want to astound people at any cost, to shock them.”

  “Have you heard it?”

  “The opera? No, I haven’t had the chance.”

  Avram gives her a questioning look.

  “He hasn’t played it for me,” she says, giving in, emptying out. “Look, Adam and I—forget it, he doesn’t tell me anything.”

  “The Hornies,” thinks Ora, her lips pursed, as she walks on, turning her back on Avram and his sudden, irritating eagerness. Why is he so hung up on Adam? Ofer started his band with three guys from school. They had four drum sets and no guitar or piano. They wrote wild songs, with most rhymes involving “schmuck” and “fuck,” she recalls as she rubs her arms to pump some blood into them. They put on a show for the families once, in one of the boys’ basements. Ofer was frozen and reserved for most of the show—at that age, he almost always shrank away in the presence of strangers—but every so often, especially after the band sang a rude word, he would peek at her with the defiant boldness of a young chick, and her insides would flutter.

  Toward the end of the gig he finally let loose and suddenly started banging on his bongos with a strange, violent glee, bursting out of his own skin. His three band mates were at first amazed by the outburst, and then, exchanging glances, hurried to keep up with his pace on their own drums, and the whole thing became a noisy commotion, a jungle of beating drums and screaming and groaning, the three of them against Ofer. Ilan shifted in his seat, about to get up and put an end to it, but it was she—who usually did not read situations well at first, and had real dyslexia when it came to comprehending basic human interactions—Wasn’t that what he’d said? Weren’t those the central tenets of his I’ve run my course speech?—who’d placed a hand on his arm and stopped him, because she noticed something, a very slight change in Ofer’s rhythm, a new channeling of the streams of violence and competitiveness that flowed between him and the three others, and she had the feeling (unless she was wrong as usual) that Ofer was infiltrating the other three without them realizing it. At first he mimicked them, doing a perfect impersonation of their apish rowdiness, and then he started to echo them with his own gentler drumming, just a hairsbreadth behind them, and she thought he was letting them hear themselves in a softer, more ironic version. He had that seemingly perplexed look on his face, the eyes drawn diagonally upward in an innocent slant, an expression that was entirely Avram, and then she knew she was right: he was seducing them with a subtlety and cunning that she did not know he had, with a whispered rhythm that was new to them. They responded immediately, unable to resist the temptation, and they too whispered and murmured, and suddenly they were engaged in a conversation of hints and secrets that only eleven-year-old boys could understand.

  A breeze of enjoyment blew through the basement. The parents exchanged looks. The four boys’ eyes shone, beads of sweat glistened on their faces, and they wiped them away with a sleeve or a tongue darting over lips, and kept on chattering and mumbling in drum-speak
, in a thick whisper she had never heard before, which circled around her, approaching and retreating.

  A minute went by, and another, until the four of them could no longer continue whispering, and all at once they burst out in a storm of thunder and lightning, and sang the opening song again at the top of their lungs, and the audience sang with them and went wild. Ofer retreated to his usual position, gathered up his forces, and shut the door, looking serious and somewhat gloomy, but his forehead still bore the occasional wrinkle, in which she could read something of his tempestuous thoughts. A flush of pride burned on his cheeks, and she thought: Avram, you are so much with us. Ilan put his hand on her thigh. Ilan, who almost never touched her in public.

  • • •

  “You can’t sleep with me,” she said ponderously.

  “I can’t sleep with you,” he echoed in a hollow voice.

  “You’re incapable,” she said and put down the knife and stood motionless at the sink.

  “I’m incapable,” said he, curiously probing for the meaning of the strange tone in her voice.

  She reached out sideways without looking at him, found his hand, and pulled it to her.

  “Ora.” His voice was hesitant, cautionary.

  She took the knife out of his hand. He did not resist. She lingered for a moment, her head bowed, as though seeking advice from someone invisible. Maybe even from the old Avram. Then she led him to the bedroom. He walked with her as though he had no volition. As though all his vitality had leaked out. She lay him on his back and placed a pillow under his head. Her face was close to his. She kissed him lightly on his lips for the first time since he had come back and sat next to him on the edge of the bed and waited to understand.

  “You can’t sleep with me,” she said after a moment in a slightly firmer voice.

  “I can’t sleep with you,” he repeated, astonished at her intention, and very hesitant.

  “You simply cannot sleep with me now,” she said decisively, and started to take her blouse off.

  “I simply cannot,” he repeated suspiciously.

  “Even if I take my shirt off, it won’t make any difference to you.”

  “Even then.” He looked at her blouse without any expression as it fell to the floor.

  “Or even if I take off, let’s say … this,” she added with total matter-of-factness and hoped Avram could not sense her embarrassment as she took off her bra—he had once suggested calling bras “booby-traps”—“it wouldn’t interest you at all.” Without looking at him, she felt for his hand and placed it on her right breast, the smaller and more sensitive one, which the old Avram had always turned to first. She softly caressed herself with his hand.

  “Nothing at all,” he murmured and watched his hand stroke the pure, delightful breast, and those words, “pure, delightful breast,” pierced him from a great distance, through a thick coat of dullness.

  “And not even when I …” She stood up and slowly took off her pants, her hips moving softly, still asking herself what she was really doing, knowing that only when she did it would she understand.

  “Nothing,” he said carefully, and looked at her long, pale legs.

  “Or even this,” she murmured, and took off her underwear and stood facing him naked, tall, thin, and downy. “Take off your clothes,” she whispered. “No, let me undress you, you have no idea how long I haven’t been waiting for this moment.” She took off his shirt and pants. He lay in his underwear looking forlorn. “You can’t sleep with me,” she said as though to herself and ran her hand down his body, from his chest to his toes, and lingered on his many scars, stitches, scabs. He said nothing. “Say it,” she said, “say, I can’t sleep with you, say it after me, say it with me.”

  “I can’t sleep with you.” His chest rose and expanded slightly.

  “You’re simply incapable.”

  “I’m incapable.”

  “And even if you really want to, you won’t be able to fuck me.”

  “Even if I …” He swallowed.

  “Even if you’re dying to feel my legs around you, hugging you and tightening against you.” She knelt on the floor by his side and rolled down his underwear, and her hand hovered over his penis, and he let out a soft moan. “And even if my tongue rolls and glides on it,” she said with complete nonchalance, almost indifference, and felt that she had finally found the right voice, and that only thanks to the old Avram did she know how to do what she was doing. She dotted him with quick spots of wetness and rounded her lips around him. “Even if your tongue—” Avram murmured and choked up, and his hand lifted up of its own accord and came to rest on his forehead. “And even if, say,” she whispered in between licking and lightly sucking. “Even if,” he sighed and propped himself up on his elbows to see her body crouched on all fours next to his, and he stared at the way her beautiful long white back arched, and at the curve of her ass, and at the impertinent little breast hidden under her arm. “And even if maybe it roused a little, completely against its will, of course,” Ora added and ran her damp fingers over his glans, and tightened her grip, and sucked and bit lightly. “Even if it—” Avram murmured and licked his dry lips and his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. “And even if I kiss and lick at it and feel it warm and throbbing in my hand.” “Even if you feel it warm,” Avram groaned, and a thread of passion suddenly glowed red inside him. “And even if, for example, I take it all deep inside my mouth,” she said with a calmness that surprised her, and did not take him into her mouth, and Avram moaned and moved his hips up toward her, longing to be gathered in. “And even if it stays asleep and keeps on dreaming inside my mouth,” she said, and enveloped him with her mouth. “Even if it—” Avram’s head fell back and his eyes rolled up, and he deeply inhaled the fullness that whispered in his thighs.

  Ora dozes. Lying on her back, her head turned to one side, her face is tranquil and beautiful. Next to her ear, alongside a stem of onion weed, three fire bugs crawl in single file, gleaming like tiny red shields. In the shadow of her feet, hidden beneath some fringed rue, swallowtail caterpillars swell in black and yellow, batting their feelers against enemies, real and imagined. Avram looks at her. His eyes scan and caress her face.

  “I was thinking,” his voice suddenly pipes up.

  “What?” Ora awakes immediately.

  “I woke you …”

  “Never mind. What were you saying?”

  “When you told me about his shoes, the big ones, I wondered if you remember all kinds of things.”

  “Like what?”

  He laughs awkwardly. “You know. Like, how he started to walk, or how—”

  “How he started to walk?”

  “Yes, the beginning …”

  “Ofer? As a baby?”

  “Because we talked about how he walked, and I was thinking—”

  She laughs too, but there is something unpleasant in her giggle, exposing how completely she has accepted the fact that he never thought about Ofer as flesh and blood, as a human being who once, at some moment in time, had stood up on a pair of tiny legs and started to walk.

  “It was when we still lived in Tzur Hadassah,” she says quickly, before he can take it back. “He was thirteen months old, and I remember it really well.” She pulls herself up into a seated position, rubs her eyes, and yawns. “Sorry,” she says with a strained jaw and clumsily covers her mouth. She has a pleasant sensation in her limbs. She’s had a good nap, but she hopes it won’t keep her awake at night. “Should I tell you?”

  He nods.

  “Ilan and Adam and I were in the kitchen. I remember how crowded it always was in there, before we did the renovations.” She gives him a sideways glance. “Do you really want me to?”

  “Yes, yes, why are you—”

  She folds her legs beneath her. Every sentence she utters seems to contain firecrackers of memory and new information that could hurt him. For example, the slightly dark kitchen, and its smallness, and its crowded aromas, and the damp stains on the ceiling, and
how she’d made love with him there once when they were young, standing up with her back against the pantry door. She felt bad telling him that they’d renovated the kitchen, as though by doing so they had removed all traces of him.

  “The three of us were in the kitchen, us and Adam, and Ofer was playing on the rug in the living room. We were talking, chattering, it was in the evening. I was probably cooking something, maybe frying an omelet, and Ilan was probably making spaghetti. I’m just guessing now. And Adam … I think he was already sitting on a proper chair by then. Yes, of course, he was four and a half or so, right? So we’d already switched the high chair to Ofer.” She speaks slowly. Her hands move, furnishing the picture in her mind, positioning the actors and props in their places. “And I suddenly noticed that it was very quiet in the living room. And you know, when you have a baby—” Avram blinks to indicate, to warn her, that he doesn’t know, and Ora, without thinking, blinks twice: Now you do know—“when you have a baby, you always have one ear tuned to him, especially when he’s not right next to you. And somehow you’re always picking up little signals, every few seconds. A cough or a sniffle or a mumble, and then you—I—can relax for a few seconds.” She examines his face. “Should I go on?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you interested?”

  He shrugs. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “No.”

  She sighs. “Where was I?”

  “It was quiet in the living room.”

  “Yes.” She takes a deep breath and chooses not to respond to the insult. At least he’s honest, she says to herself. At least he says exactly what he feels.

  “I realized immediately that I wasn’t getting the signal. And so did Ilan. Ilan had the instincts of an I-don’t-know-what. Of an animal,” she says, and Avram picks up what she isn’t saying: Ilan took good care of your boy. Ilan was a good choice. For both of us. She can barely resist describing what she now remembers, a series of scenes in which Ilan uses his teeth to remove a tiny splinter from Ofer’s foot; Ilan licks a speck out of Ofer’s eye; Ofer lies on Ilan, who lies in the dentist’s chair and strokes and hypnotizes Ofer with soft purring breaths—“Ofer got the injection and my whole mouth went numb,” he tells her later.