To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  “So I rush to the living room and I see Ofer standing in the middle of the room with his back to me, and it was obvious that he’d already taken a few steps.”

  “On his own?”

  “Yes. From the round table, you remember that low wooden table we found in a field once, when the three of us were hiking, a kind of round thing that was used to store cable?”

  “Something from the electrical company …”

  “You and Ilan rolled it all the way home.”

  “Yes, sure.” He smiles. “That thing still exists?”

  “Of course it does. When we moved to Ein Karem we took it with us.”

  They both laugh in astonishment.

  “And Ofer,” she continues, and draws a thin line in the dirt with her finger, “must have moved from that table to the big brown couch—”

  I remember, Avram’s face says.

  “And from there he walked to the floral armchair—”

  “I still have its sister to this day,” Avram murmurs.

  “Yes, I saw that,” Ora notes with a grimace. “And from there, I guess, he went toward the bookcase, the brick bookcase—”

  “The red bricks—”

  “That you and Ilan used to pick up all over the place—”

  “Ahh, my bookcase.”

  Ora wipes the dirt off her hand. “This is all guesses, you see, ’cause I don’t really know exactly how he walked, what his route was. By the time I got to the living room he was already standing a few steps beyond the bookcase, and then he didn’t have anything more to hold on to, nothing, so he was walking in an open space.”

  It takes off inside her now, the greatness and the wonder of the act, the bravery of her little astronaut.

  “And I actually stopped breathing. So did Ilan. We were afraid to startle him. He stood with his back to us.” She smiles, her gaze lost in that room, and Avram steals a look and draws his face in the same direction. And Ilan, she remembers, came up and hugged her from behind. He steadied her and crossed his arms over her belly, and they stood together quietly, swaying in a sort of muted coo.

  A feathery quiver in her back climbs up and spreads around her neck and takes hold of the roots of her hair. She silently allows Avram to look at the scene: the room he knows so well, with its jumble of furniture, and Ofer standing there, a crumb of life in an orange Winnie-the-Pooh T-shirt.

  “And of course I couldn’t help it, and I laughed, and the sound startled him and he tried to turn around and fell over.”

  The soft, padded bump as his diaper hit the rug. The heavy head rocking back and forth. The insult at being surprised in this way, and then the wonderment on his face as he turned to her, only to her, as though asking her to interpret what he had just done.

  “And where was Adam?” Avram asks from somewhere in the distance.

  “Adam? He was still in the kitchen, I suppose, probably kept on eating—” She stops: How did he realize so quickly that Adam was left on his own, abandoned? Why did he rush to take his side? “But when he heard my laughter and Ilan’s cheers, he jumped up and came running.”

  Alive and lucid she sees it: Adam grabs Ilan’s pants with his fist, head cocked to one side to examine his little brother’s achievement. His lips curl into a grimace that gradually, over the years, through the slow process of sculpting the soul in the flesh, would become a permanent feature.

  “Listen, the whole thing lasted three or four seconds, it wasn’t some kind of saga. And the three of us quickly ran over to Ofer and hugged him, and of course he wanted to get up again. From the minute he learned how to stand up, you couldn’t stop him.”

  She tells him how hard it was to put Ofer down at night. He kept standing up, holding on to the wooden bars and pulling himself up, and he would stand there, then collapse with exhaustion, then stand up again. In the middle of the night, confused, crying, longing to sleep, he’d get up and just stand there. And when she changed his diaper, or tried to sit him in his chair to eat, or when she strapped him into the car seat, he constantly squirmed and pushed his way up, as if a big spring were launching him, as if gravity were reversed in him.

  She sighs. “Do you really want to hear all this, or is it just to make me feel good?”

  He produces a slightly diagonal nod, which she has trouble interpreting. Perhaps he means both things? And why not, in fact? This is something, too. Take what there is.

  “Where was I?”

  “He fell.”

  “Oh,” she groans in painful surprise, the air slashed out of her in one sweep. “Don’t say that.”

  “I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry, Ora.”

  “No, it’s okay. You should know that when I talk about him with you, he’s all right, he’s protected.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what I feel. He’s preserved.”

  “Yes.”

  “Does that sound crazy?”

  “No.”

  “Should I tell you more?”

  “Yes.”

  “Say it with words.”

  “Tell me more. About him.”

  “About Ofer.”

  “About Ofer, tell me about Ofer.”

  “So we helped him up”—her eyes flutter for a moment, having seen an ungraspable picture: he said “Ofer”; he touched Ofer—“and we stood him on his feet and held out our arms and called him to us, and he walked again, very slowly, wobbling—”

  “To who?”

  “What?”

  “To which one of you?”

  “Oh.” She strains her memory, surprised by his new sharpness, the dim flash of determination in his face. Just like long ago, she thinks, when he was intent on understanding something new, an idea, a situation, a person, and he would circle around and around in a slow gallop, very lightly, with that predatory glint in his eye.

  Then she remembers. “To Adam. Yes, of course. That’s who he walked to.”

  How could she have forgotten? Tiny Ofer, very serious and focused, looking intently ahead with his mouth open and his arms straight in front of him. His body rocked back and forth and one hand dropped and grasped the wrist of the other, declaring himself a closed, independent, self-sufficient system. She can see it alive and sharp: she and Ilan and Adam stand across from him, some distance from one another, holding their hands out, calling, “Ofer, Ofer,” laughing, tempting him, “Come to me.”

  As she recounts the story, she realizes something she missed at the time: the moment of Ofer’s first choice between them, and his distress when they forced him to choose. She shuts her eyes and tries to guess his thoughts. He had no words, after all, just the inner push-and-pull, and she and Ilan and Adam cheered and danced around him, and Ofer was torn as only a baby can be torn. She rushes away from his distress, and her face is already lighting up with Adam’s astonished glee when Ofer finally turned to him. His amazement and happiness and pride momentarily erased the grimace and turned it into an excited smile of disbelief at being chosen, at being wanted. A stream of pictures, sounds, and smells churns inside her, everything coming back now—how Adam had welcomed Ofer when she and Ilan brought him home from the hospital, just over a year before that day. She has to tell Avram about that, but maybe not now, not yet, she mustn’t flood him, but she tells him anyway: “Adam jumped up and down and went wild, and his eyes burned with electric fear, and he hit his own cheeks with both hands, slapping himself hard and shouting wildly, ‘I’m happy! I’m so happy!’ ”

  Then Adam made the same high squeaks that used to erupt from the depths of his body every time he went near Ofer’s crib for the first few months, a series of small uncontrollable shrieks, an almost animalistic mixture of affection and jealousy and uncontainable excitement. That was exactly how he chirped that day, when Ofer wobbled over to him at the first moment of choice. Or perhaps they were different chirps. “What do I know? Maybe he was guiding and encouraging Ofer in a language only the two of them knew.”

  Ofer took another step, then another.
He walked without falling, and perhaps thanks to his brother’s chirps, to which he had tied his willpower, he managed to maintain some stability. Like a tiny airplane in a storm, homing in on a beam of light from a control tower, he walked over and collapsed into his brother’s arms, and the two of them rolled on the rug, embraced and squirmed and shrieked with laughter. She suddenly feels like writing down this little memory so it won’t slip away for another twenty years. She just wants to describe the seriousness of Ofer as he walked, and Adam’s screeching excitement, and his huge relief, and above all, their puppy-like embrace of each other. That was the moment they truly became brothers, the moment Ofer chose Adam, the moment Adam, perhaps for the first time in his life, truly believed he had been chosen. Ora smiles, bewitched by the heap of her children on the rug, and thinks how clever Ofer was, because he knew how to give himself to Adam, and because he carefully avoided getting trapped in the thicket of secrets and silences that lurked between her and Ilan’s open arms.

  “So that was how he walked for the first time,” she sums up hastily, exhausted, and gives Avram a strained smile.

  “The second time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You said so.”

  “What?”

  “That you didn’t see the first time, the real first steps.”

  She shrugs. “Oh, yes, that’s true. But really what does it—”

  “No, nothing.”

  She wonders whether this is some strange insistence on historical accuracy, or perhaps a hint of haggling with her and with Ilan, a sort of “I didn’t and you didn’t, either.”

  “Yes,” she says, “you’re absolutely right.”

  They look at each other for a moment, and she knows: it’s haggling. And perhaps even more than that, it’s the settling of accounts. The discovery is frightening, but also exciting, like the first sign of an uprising, the rousing of someone who has been depressed and silenced and dormant for too long. Then it occurs to her that when Ofer rolled over onto his back for the first time, no one was there, either. Is that true? She checks quickly with herself. True. I swear: Ilan went over to his crib one afternoon and found him lying quietly on his back, looking at his blue elephant mobile—she even remembers the mobile, in its every detail, with utter clarity now. It’s as though someone has come along and removed a cataract that had covered her eye for years. And when he sat up for the first time he was alone too, she thinks with increasing bewilderment. And when he stood up for the first time.

  For one moment, no longer, she hesitates, and then she gives Avram a simple reportage of facts, the facts that now belong to him too, because he has finally come to demand them. His eyes narrow: she can almost see the wheels in his mind straining.

  “Somehow the first time he did all these things—turning over, sitting up, standing, walking—he really was alone.”

  “So,” Avram murmurs, staring at his fingertips, “is that something, you know, unusual?”

  “Honestly, I’ve never thought about it before. I never made a list of all the first things he did. But for instance, when Adam sat up for the first time, or stood up or walked, I was with him. Well, I told you that for the first three years of his life we were never apart. And I remember how he glowed every time he accomplished something like that, and Ofer, yes, Ofer is—”

  “Alone,” Avram quietly finishes, his features suddenly softening.

  Ora gets up and hurries to her backpack, digs through it urgently, and pulls out a thick notebook with dark blue binding. From a side pocket she takes out a pen. Without introductions, still standing with her head slightly tilted, she writes on the first page: Ofer walked funny. I mean, his walk, at first, was strange. Almost from the moment he started walking he used to veer around all sorts of obstacles that no one else could see, and it was really funny to watch. He would avoid something nonexistent, or draw back from some monster that must have been lurking for him in the middle of the room, and you could absolutely not convince him to step on that tile! It’s a bit like watching a drunk walk (but a drunk with a method!). Ilan and I agree that he has a private map in his head, and he always follows it.

  She cautiously walks back to her spot, puts the open notebook on the ground, and sits down next to it, very straight, then looks at Avram.

  “I wrote about him.”

  “About who?”

  “Him.”

  “What for?”

  “I don’t know. I just—”

  “But the notebook—”

  “What about it?”

  “Why did you bring it?”

  She stares at the lines she wrote. The words seem to scurry about on the page, wagging their fingers at her, calling her to go on, not to stop now. “What did you ask?”

  “What did you drag a notebook along for?”

  She stretches, tired suddenly, as though she’d written whole pages. “I don’t know, I was just thinking I’d write down all sorts of things we saw on the way, Ofer and I. A kind of travel diary. When we used to go on vacations abroad with the boys, we always wrote our experiences together.”

  She was the one who used to write. Every evening in the hotel, or on rest stops, or during long drives. They refused to cooperate—Ora hesitates, and decides not to tell Avram this—and the three of them affectionately mocked her endeavor, which they thought was unnecessary and childish. She insisted: “If we don’t write things down, we’ll forget them.” They said, “But what is there to remember? That the old man in the boat threw up on Dad’s foot? That they brought Adam eel, instead of the schnitzel he ordered?” She wouldn’t answer, thinking, You’ll see how one day you’ll want to remember how we had fun, how we laughed—how we were a family, she thinks now. She always tried to be as detailed as possible in those diaries. Whenever she didn’t feel like writing, when her hand was lazy, or her eyelids drooped with exhaustion, she would imagine the years to come when she might sit with Ilan, preferably on long winter evenings, with a mug of mulled wine, the two of them wrapped in plaid blankets, reading each other passages from the scrapbooks, which were decorated with postcards and menus and tickets from tourist sites, plays, trains, and museums. Ilan guessed it all, of course, including the plaid. She was always so transparent to him. “Just promise you’ll shoot me before that happens to me,” he told her. But he said that about so many things …

  How did it happen, she wonders, that while I only softened with the years, the three of them grew tougher? Maybe Ilan’s right, maybe it’s because of me that they hardened. They hardened against me. A good cry would do me some good now, she notes to herself.

  When she opens her eyes, Avram is sitting across from her, leaning with his backpack against a rock, delving into her.

  Once, when he used to look at her like that, she would immediately open herself to him, allowing him to see into her inner depths unhindered. She did not let anyone else see inside her like that. Not even Ilan. But she was easy with Avram—such a horrible word, “easy”; she was always easy with Avram, letting him see all of her, almost from the first moment she met him, because she had a feeling, a conviction that there was something inside her, or someone, perhaps an Ora more loyal to her own essence, more precise and less vague, and Avram seemed to have a way to reach her. He was the only one who could truly know her and could pollinate her with his look, with his very existence, and without him she simply did not exist, she had no life, and so she was his, she was his prerogative.

  That’s how it was when she was sixteen, and nineteen, and twenty-two, but now she pulls her gaze sharply away from him, fearing he might hurt her there, punish her for something, take his revenge on her there. Or perhaps he will discover that there’s nothing inside her anymore, that his old Ora has dried up and died along with what dried up and died inside him.

  They sit quietly, digesting. Ora hugs her knees, rationalizing that she isn’t all that accessible and permeable even to herself anymore, and that even she herself doesn’t go near that place inside her. It must be th
at she’s growing old, she decides—for some time now she’s had a strange eagerness to pronounce her aging, impatient for the relief that comes with a declaration of total bankruptcy. That’s how it goes. You say goodbye to yourself even before other people start to, softening the blow of what will inevitably come.

  Later, much later, Avram gets up, stretches, gathers some firewood in a pile, and surrounds it with a circle of stones. Ora senses new purpose in his movement, but she knows herself and remains cautious: she might simply be convincing herself that she’s seeing things—seeing Avram in Avram’s shadow.

  She takes out an old towel and spreads it on the ground. She lays out plastic plates and cutlery and hands Avram two overripe tomatoes and a cucumber to chop. She has crackers too, and canned corn and tuna fish and a small bottle of olive oil that Ofer loves, from the Dir Rafat monastery, which she was planning to surprise him with. She had other little surprises that were supposed to make him happy on their trip. Where is Ofer now? She isn’t sure whether she should think about him or let him be. What does he need from her now? Her eyes are drawn to the open notebook. Maybe the answer is there. She wants to close it, but cannot. It’s all exposed there, yet to close it would be to stifle it, even to stamp it out. She gets down on one knee, straightens the corner of the towel, and weighs it down with a stone. As she does so she pulls the notebook to her and reads what she has written. She is surprised to find that in just a few lines she skipped from past to present: Ofer walked funny … It’s a bit like watching a drunk … Ilan and I agree that…

  Ilan would have something to say about that.

  Avram lights a piece of newspaper and coaxes the fire to the twigs. Ora stares at the paper, wondering what day it’s from, and looks away from the headlines. Who knows how far things have gone there? She quickly shuts the notebook and waits for the paper to be consumed. Avram sits down opposite her and they eat silently. Actually, Avram eats. He boils water for a Cup-a-Soup and gobbles down two of them, one after the other, claiming he’s addicted to MSG. She asks casually about his nutritional habits. Does he cook? Does someone cook for him?