To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  “So then he started running around the whole house in a frenzy, and he yelled”—she remembers a thin wail, not his voice, not a human voice at all, but it came from him—“and he touched things, the furniture, pairs of shoes on the floor, he ran and screamed and touched, the keys on the table, door handles. It was scary, to be honest, it looked like some kind of ritual, I don’t know, like he was saying goodbye to everything that …”

  She looks at Avram softly, saddened by what she is telling him, and by what he has yet to hear from her. She feels that she is infecting him with the sorrows of raising children.

  “Ofer ran to the edge of the hallway, by the bathroom door, you know, where the coatrack was? And he stood there and yelled: ‘You kill her? You kill a cow to take her meat? Tell me! Yes? Yes? You do that to her on purpose?’ And at that moment I got it. Maybe for the first time in my life I got what it means that we eat living creatures, that we kill them to eat them, and how we train ourselves not to realize that the severed leg of a chicken is sitting on our plate. And Ofer couldn’t cheat himself that way, do you see?” Her voice lowers to a whisper. “He was totally exposed. Do you know what it is to be that kind of child, like that, in this shitty world?”

  Avram pulls back. Deep in his gut he senses a flutter of the terror that had gripped him once, when Ora told him she was pregnant.

  She drinks water from a bottle and washes her face. She holds the bottle out to him, and without thinking, he empties it over his head.

  “And all at once his face sealed up, locked, like this”—she shows him, tightly clenching her fist—“and then he ran all the way down the hallway, from the bathroom to the kitchen, and kicked me. Just imagine, he’d never done that before! He kicked my leg as hard as he could and screamed: ‘You’re like wolves! People like wolves! I don’t want to be with you!’ ”

  “What?”

  “He screamed, and he ran—”

  “That’s what he said? Like wolves?”

  And this is a kid who one year earlier was hardly talking, she thinks, he couldn’t string three words together.

  “But where did that come from? How did he get that—”

  “He ran to the door, he wanted to run away, but it was locked, and he threw himself against it, kicking and pounding, he was totally crazed. You know, I’ve always felt that that’s when something started in him that was irredeemable, something lifelong, a first scratch, you know, the first sorrow.”

  “No. I don’t get it, explain to me,” Avram murmurs and thrusts his suddenly sweaty palms into his lap.

  How can she explain? Maybe she can tell him about himself. About him and his father, who got up one day when Avram was five and disappeared, and was never seen again. His father, who once grabbed little Avram’s face in his hands and held it up for Avram’s mother to study, and asked with a grin if she thought the child looked anything like him, and whether it was really possible that a creature like that had come from a man like him, and if she was sure she’d given birth to him or if maybe she’d just crapped him out.

  She speaks quietly. “I always have the feeling that there, in the kitchen, he found out something about us.”

  “About who?”

  “About us, about humans. About this thing we have in us.”

  “Yes.”

  Avram looks at the earth, at the dust. You’re like wolves. He rolls the words around in his mind. I don’t want to be with you. He is profoundly unsettled by these simple words, which he has sought for almost thirty years and were yelled out by his son.

  Ora asks herself, for the first time, what really happened in the kitchen that day. Exactly what melody did she use, and which tone, to teach Ofer the facts of life and death? Was it really as she had described it to Avram? Not exactly a lie, but an attempt to soften for Ofer, as much as she could, the matter of the slaughter itself, to save him from the true horror? For some reason she remembers how her own mother had told her, when she was six, in great detail and with a trace of defiance and even a peculiar reproach, about the abominations committed by inmates in the concentration camp where she spent the war.

  “I don’t really know whether, by telling him those kinds of things … I don’t know when it was really an essential part of his education, preparing him for life and all that, and when, at what moment, there was a tiny bit of, how to put it, cruelty?”

  “But why? Why would you say cruelty?”

  “Or even a bit of gloating.”

  “I don’t understand, Ora, what are you …”

  “I mean, wasn’t I really hinting, in an oblique sort of way, that what I was telling him was also, somehow, his punishment for having joined my screwed-up team in the first place? Or the whole game itself, you know, the game of the human race.”

  “Oh, that.”

  “Yes, that.”

  They sit quietly.

  Avram nods, his eyes very heavy.

  “And when I tried to hug him, to calm him, he writhed in my arms and scratched me so hard it drew blood. He kept crying at night too, in his sleep, it was burning so hard in him. The next morning he woke up with a high fever, and he wouldn’t let us comfort him, wouldn’t let us touch him, touch him with our meat hands, you see, and from that day, for twelve years, he didn’t touch meat or anything that had been near meat. Until he was sixteen or so, until he started growing up, maturing, that kid did not touch meat.”

  “So why did he start at sixteen?”

  “Wait, I’m not there yet.” We still have a long way to go, she thinks; we’ll understand it slowly, together. “At first, during meals, he wouldn’t talk to me if I happened to point at him with a fork that had touched chicken. Do you understand how far it … Just like Ilan said at the time: Ofer belonged to the Shiite wing of vegetarianism.” She laughs.

  That’s it, she has to write it down, that whole period. Ilan’s struggles with Ofer, the unbelievable stubbornness and determination that came out of Ofer, and the slightly confusing weakness that beset her and Ilan in the face of this four-year-old child who had such solid principles. And the feeling they both had that he was drawing strength from some hidden source that was both beyond his age and beyond them, his parents. “Where’s my notebook?” She stands up. The unresolved distress from moments ago grows denser inside her and finally erupts: “Where’s the notebook, Avram? Did you see where I put the notebook?” She storms the backpack and digs through it, but the notebook isn’t there. Not there! She looks in a panic at the other backpack, Avram’s, and Avram tenses up. She asks cautiously: “Could it be with your stuff?”

  “No, I didn’t put it there. I didn’t even open it.”

  “Do you mind if I look?”

  He shrugs his shoulders indifferently: It’s not mine and it’s not my business, his shoulders say. He gets up and walks away from the backpack.

  She opens hooks, zippers, knots. Scans the contents from above. Everything still looks more or less as it did when she packed the bag with Ofer at home. Avram had somehow managed not to unsettle anything, through all these days of carrying the thing on his back.

  It sits wide open between them. At the top of the pile of clothes is the red “Milano” T-shirt, just the way Ofer packed it, and she can tell immediately that the notebook isn’t there, but she cannot close it up again.

  “There are lots of clean clothes here,” she says drily, delivering useful information. “Socks, shirts, toiletries.”

  “I don’t smell so good, do I?”

  “Let’s just say I always know where you are.”

  “Oh.” He lifts up an arm and takes a sniff. “Don’t worry, we’ll find a spring or a faucet, it’ll be okay.” His voice is unconvincing. He has the craftiness of a boy fibbing to his camp counselor about why, to his regret, he cannot shower with the other kids.

  “Well, whatever you say.” She breathes deeply. Her fingers hover over Ofer’s backpack with a life of their own.

  “Anyway, his clothes probably won’t fit me.”

  “Some
may. The pants definitely will. He’s pretty broad. And by the way, it’s not just his clothes in here.” She scans the backpack, eyebrow raised, still not touching. “There are some of Adam’s and Ilan’s shirts, too. And there’s a pair of sharwals he always wears when he goes to Sinai. You could definitely wear those, they’re so baggy.” And silently she adds: They won’t infect you with Ofer.

  “But why Adam’s and Ilan’s clothes?”

  “That’s what he wanted. To be enveloped in the two of them while he hiked.”

  She resists telling him that they share underwear too, her three men.

  She finally reaches in, hesitant at first, afraid to disturb Ofer’s order, but then she plunges deep down, penetrating, and now both hands are tunneling in, grabbing handfuls of sun-warmed clothes that have been baking for a week now, and her hands encounter paired socks, and they thrust into crevices with pickpocket speed, and here a towel, and there a flashlight, and sandals and underwear and T-shirts. Her fingers dig wildly in the depths, beyond her field of vision, looting whatever they can. A strange feeling spreads through her: his clothes, his shells, and somehow his insides, warm and damp.

  She leans down and buries her face in the backpack. The smell of clean clothes, crammed in and unaired. They had packed together the night before, recalling the solemn preparations on the eve of the great battle in The Wind in the Willows, which Ora had read to him three consecutive times in his childhood: a shirt for Mole, and a pair of socks for Toad. And it turns out that through the whole cheerful ceremony, while Ora could not stop rolling around with laughter, Ofer was planning and scheming, perhaps even already knew with complete confidence that he wasn’t going on the trip with her, that it was all a big charade. How could he trick her? And why, in fact, did he do it? Maybe he was afraid he’d be bored spending a whole week with her. That they wouldn’t have anything to talk about, or that she’d interrogate him about Talia and the breakup again, or whine about Adam, or try to recruit him to her side—which would never have occurred to her!—against Ilan, or ask him about Hebron again. Yes, it might have been mainly that.

  The entire state of particulars revolts her. A sour taste crawls up her throat. Her face is buried in the backpack and her hands clutch it on either side. She looks like someone drinking thirstily from a well, but Avram notices that the lovely, slender vertebrae on the back of her neck are twitching beneath her skin.

  Inside, she sobs uncontrollably, flooded with self-pity over the ruination of her life, her family, her love, Ilan, Adam, and now Ofer out there, and God forbid, and what is left of her, and who is she now that all these have vanished or simply ripped themselves away from her, and what was all her brilliant motherhood worth? Nothing but cowardice—that’s what her motherhood was. A skilled sponge. Most of what she’d done for twenty-five years was mop up everything that poured out of the three of them, each in his own way, everything they spat out constantly over the years into the family space, namely into her, because she herself, more than any of them, and more than the three of them together, was the family space. She’d mopped up all the good and all the bad that came out of them—mainly the bad, she thinks bitterly, prolonging her self-castigation, though she knows in the depths of her heart that she’s distorting things, wronging them and herself, yet still she refuses to give up the bitter spew that flies out of her in all directions: so many toxins and acids she’s absorbed, all the excrements of body and soul, all the excess baggage of their childhood and their adolescence and adulthood. But someone had to absorb all that, didn’t they? she sobs into the shirts and socks that cling to her face like little consolation puppies—soft, how soft the touch, soft the scent of laundry, despite its gently mocking derision: two-bit feminist, an insult to women’s lib, a stain on the neon glow that emanates from the books her friend Ariela insists on buying her, books she’s never managed to read more than a few pages of, written by decisive, witty, opinionated women who use expressions like “the duality of the clitoris as signifier and signified,” or “the vagina as male-encoded deterministic space,” which immediately activate in her feeble, characterless mind an interfering hum of machines and home appliances, blenders and vacuum cleaners and dishwashers—women who perceive her limp existence itself as a crude insult to them and their just struggle. Fuck feminism, Ora thinks and laughs a little through her tears. But it’s so obvious, she argues into a T-shirt that insists on cramming itself into her face, that without the mechanisms of drainage and irrigation and purification and desalination that she has created and constantly refined, and without her never-ending concessions and her continuous swallowing of self-respect and her occasional kowtowing—without all these, her family would have crumbled long ago, years ago, for sure, though maybe not, who knows? Yet still, always, through all the years, the question had hovered in her mind: What really would have happened had she not volunteered to be their cesspit, or rather—this sounded slightly less humiliating, slightly more sophisticated and polished—their lightning rod? And which of them would have volunteered to replace her in that exhausting, thankless job? The satisfactions of which, incidentally, are incredibly deep and well hidden, right down to the depths of her innards, down to the top of her womb, which arches at the very thought, and the three of them know nothing about that—how could they know, really? What do they know about the sweetness that flows through the clefts of her soul after she manages to quell and ground another lightning storm of anger or frustration or vengefulness or insult, or just the momentary misery of each and every one of the three of them, at each and every age? She weeps a little more into the laundered fabrics, but the sorrow has subsided in her tears, and she wipes her face on the T-shirt that Ofer’s battalion gave all the soldiers when they finished serving on the base near Jericho, which read Nebi Musa—Because Hell Is Under Construction. She feels comforted now, even refreshed, as she always does after a short, sharp cry, just like after sex, ten or twenty strokes and then the explosion, always, without any delay or complication, and now that the cloud has passed she has the urge to dive down into the backpack again and grab his clothes by the handful, spread them out here in front of Avram, on the bushes and on the rocks, and conjure him from the clothes—his height, his breadth, his size. Excitement flutters down her body: if she really tries hard—and for a moment she almost believes that anything is possible on this journey strung along on a thin web of oaths and wishes—she can pull him out, deliver Ofer himself from the depths of the backpack, tiny and delightful and twitching his arms and legs. She settles for an army hat, a pair of sweatpants, and the sharwals, and these make her happy, with her arms entirely immersed, kneading her child out of the fabric like a village baker shoulder deep in a basin full of dough. But it’s also like picking through his estate—the thought pecks at her and intercepts her pleasure, and only then, with her chin over the edge of the backpack and her face buried in pairs of warm walking socks, she remembers, and stares at Avram with frightened eyes: “Listen, I’m such an idiot, I left the notebook there.”

  “Where?”

  “Down there. Where we slept.”

  “How?”

  “I was writing a bit this morning, before you woke up, and I somehow forgot it.”

  “So we’ll go back.”

  “What do you mean go back?”

  “We’ll go back,” Avram says and straightens up.

  “It’s a serious hike.”

  “So what?”

  She snivels. “I’m such an idiot.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Ora, it really doesn’t matter.” He smiles. “We’ve been going around in circles most of the time for a week anyway.”

  He’s right, and a warm ripple gurgles in her at the realization that only she and he can understand how little it matters, to go on or go back, turn around, lose their way. The point is to be in motion, the point is to talk about Ofer. They zip up and buckle up and tie down. They stop at the small military base to fill their water bottles, and the soldier from the lookout tower gives th
em two slightly stale loaves of sliced bread, three cans of tuna and corn, and two handfuls of apples. They walk back down the steep incline, holding on to pine trees, and Ora thinks feverishly about the man they met on the trail that morning, about his long, dark, wise face. Who knows what he thought about her and Avram? What story did he tell himself in his mind? She stops abruptly, horrified, and Avram almost walks into her: “What if that guy finds the notebook and reads it?”

  Between two rocks, she remembers. I put it down for a minute, this morning, while I rolled up my sleeping bag, and I left it there. How could I leave it there?

  “With any luck,” she says out loud, perhaps too loud, “no one will find it before we get there.”

  It happened very early that morning. She and Avram were hiking up the riverbed when they saw a figure walking down the hillside in their direction. Perhaps that was why he had at first seemed taller and thinner than he was. And the strange light coming through the terebinth branches—a dusty, yellowish dawn light—made him look dark and blurry. Ora stood watching the figure for a moment, pondering the way sometimes, in the morning, when someone comes at you from the opposite direction and the sunlight is behind them, in your eyes, all you can see is the outline of a spindly Giacometti body that disintegrates and re-forms itself with every step, and it’s hard to know if the figure is a man or a woman, and whether it’s coming toward you or moving farther away. And then she heard stones skidding behind her, and Avram jumped ahead in a flash to stand between her and the stranger, who gave them a slightly bewildered smile.

  Avram’s move also confused her, and she did not respond. Having planted himself in front of her, Avram stood breathing deeply, his chest puffed out, and stared intently not at the man in front of him but at the pebbles on the ground. He looked like a guard dog: loyal, stubborn, dense, protecting his lady.