To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  The picture suddenly picks up speed. She sees him darting around, clearing tables, taking out the trash, vacuuming, lighting candles and incense sticks. She is fascinated by his movements, his swiftness, his lightness. “Avram FSF,” as he used to introduce himself to new girls, with a flourish and a bow: fat, speedy, and flexible.

  “And whoever wants to can smoke. Anything, no problem.”

  “You, too?” She laughs nervously—she can’t see the fortress anymore, but she suddenly feels as if they’re running, as if the path is pulling them too quickly to Jerusalem, to home, to the notice that might be waiting there for her with the calm patience of an assassin. I’ll go back—it flickers in her—and there’ll be death notices up on the street. On the utility poles. Next to the grocery store. I’ll know from a distance.

  “Go on, tell me.” She turns to Avram in a panic. “I want to hear!”

  “Well, nothing heavy, mostly joints.” His hand habitually pats the non-pocket on his chest. “Sometimes a hash blunt, some E, acid, if there’s any going around, nothing serious.” He looks at her and smiles. “Do you still uphold the Scouts’ commands?”

  “I was in the Machanot Olim, not the Scouts,” she reminds him drily. “Forget it, I’m afraid of those things.”

  “Ora, you’re running again.”

  “Me? It’s you.”

  He laughs. “You suddenly get these … You start running ahead as if God knows what is chasing you.”

  To their left, the Hula Valley grows steamier as the heat increases. Their faces are red, burning with effort and warmth, they drip with sweat, and even speech is tiring. On the side of the road, at the foot of an old olive tree, lies a huge, fancy chandelier. Avram counts twenty-one crystals, all intact, connected with stylish thin glass pipes. “Who threw this here?” he wonders. “Who throws out something like that? It’s too bad we can’t take it.” He crouches down and examines the chandelier. “Good stuff.” He tilts his head and laughs softly, and Ora questions him with her eyebrows. Avram says: “Look at it. What does it remind you of?” She stares and doesn’t see anything. “Doesn’t it look like some sort of ballerina? Like an insulted prima donna?” Ora smiles. “It does.” Avram stands up. “It’s shimmering with insult, hey? Look at it from here, wallowing in its tutu, I swear.” Ora laughs deeply. A forgotten pleasure gurgles into the corners of her eyes.

  “And Ofer?” he asks later. “Does he take anything?”

  “I don’t know. How can you know anything about them at this age? Adam, I think so. Here and there.”

  Or most of the time, or all of it, she thinks. How could he not? With those guys he hangs out with, with his eyes, always bloodshot, and that bashed-up, bashing-up music. Oh God, what do I sound like? When did old age creep up on me like this?

  “It’s too bad you didn’t take some weed from my place when you kidnapped me. You’d have seen what good stuff is.”

  “So you keep it around at home?” She struggles to maintain a measured, enlightened voice and feels like a social worker interviewing a homeless guy.

  “For personal use, what do you think? I grow it in a flower box. With the petunias.”

  “Do you miss it now?”

  “Let’s just say, it would have set me right, especially in the first few days.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I’m okay.” He sounds astonished. “Don’t need anything.”

  “Really?” Her face lights up, her glasses glisten with happiness.

  “But if there were any”—he quickly cools her excitement and puts her in her place; for a moment she looked as though she’d pulled off a rapid intervention plan straight out of a kids’ comic book—“if there were any, I wouldn’t say no.”

  How far apart we’ve grown, she thinks. A whole life separates us. She imagines him in his restaurant again, circling among the low tables, clearing leftovers, joking with the customers, taking their banter with good spirits. She hopes they don’t mock him. She hopes he doesn’t seem pathetic to those young people. She tries to picture herself there.

  “You take your shoes off before you go in,” he notes, as though guiding her.

  She sits down on a cushion. She’s uncomfortable. Too upright, doesn’t know what to do with her hands. She smiles in all directions. Her fakery rustles all around her. She wonders if she could have lived with Avram, in his apartment, in the meager neglect of his life. For some reason her thoughts adopt the guttural Mizrahi speech of the man they met in the riverbed. She thinks about his red checkered shirt. He looked like someone had dressed him up nicely this morning and sent him off on a hike. She sees the colorful woman’s glasses that dangled on his chest. Maybe they were not tasteless foppishness or a defiant pose, as she had thought, but a small private gesture? A gesture to a woman? She sighs softly and wonders if Avram had picked up on anything back there.

  And without even noticing it, they’re having a conversation. Two people conversing as they walk on one path.

  “On the army base in Sinai, there was an Ofer,” Avram muses. “Ofer Havkin. He was a special guy. Used to wander around the desert on his own, playing the violin for the birds, sleeping in caves. He wasn’t afraid of anything. A free spirit. And so all these years I thought Ilan had that Ofer in mind when you chose the name.”

  Ora delights in the words that came out of his lips—“free spirit”—then says, “No, I was the one who chose it, because of the verse in Song of Songs: ‘My love is like a young hart’—Domeh dodi le’Ofer ayalim. And I liked the way it sounds, too: o-fer. It’s soft.”

  Avram silently repeats the name in Ora’s music, and then says quietly, reverently, “I could never give someone a name.”

  “When it’s your own child, you’ll be able to,” she says—it just slips out, and they both fall silent.

  The path is wide and comfortable. So many colors, she thinks, when all I saw at first was black and white and gray.

  “I’m just curious, did you think of any names other than Ofer?”

  “We thought of girls’ names too, because we didn’t know what we were having. I was convinced halfway through the pregnancy that it was a girl.”

  A flock of birds alights inside Avram, noisily beating their wings: He had never thought of that possibility—a daughter!

  “And what … Which names did you think of for a girl?”

  “We thought of Dafna, and Ya’ara, or Ruti.”

  “Just imagine …” He turns to face her. The bags under his eyes glow, and now he is entirely here, shining with life, and the pillar of fire he used to be is visible through his skin. Ofer is protected now, she senses, protected in the palms of two hands.

  “A girl,” she says softly. “That would have made everything simpler, wouldn’t it?”

  Avram expands his chest and takes a deep breath. “A girl” rocks him even more than “a daughter.”

  They walk, each lost in thought, the path crunching beneath their feet. She thinks: Even the path suddenly has voices. How did I not hear anything all those days? Where was I?

  “Didn’t you want to try again?” he asks bravely.

  Ora replies simply that Ilan didn’t want to, because as it was, he said, with all the complications, we already had an excess of kids.

  And parents, Avram thinks. “And you? Did you want to?”

  Ora lets out a little bray of pain. “Me? Are you asking seriously? My whole life I’ve felt that I missed out terribly by not having a daughter.” After a moment’s hesitation she adds, “Because I always think a girl would have made us into a family.”

  “But you … I mean, you already are …”

  “Yes,” she says, “we were, absolutely, but still, that’s how I felt all these years. That if I had a daughter, if Adam and Ofer had a sister, it would give them so much, it would change them”—she outlines a circle with both hands—“and also, if I’d had a daughter, I think it would have strengthened me against them, the three of them, and maybe it would also have softened them a little tow
ard me.”

  Avram hears the words and does not understand their meaning. What is she giving him here?

  “Because I’m alone,” she explains. “I wasn’t enough to soften them, and they turned so hard over time, especially toward me, and even more so recently. Hard and tough, the three of them. Ofer, too,” she adds with some effort. “Listen, it’s really difficult to explain.”

  “Difficult to explain to me, or in general?”

  “In general, but especially to you.”

  “Try.”

  The insult in his voice is good, it’s a sign of life, but she can’t explain it, not yet. She’ll bring him in slowly. It’s painful to admit to him that even Ofer wasn’t tender with her. Instead of answering, she says, “I always thought that if I’d had a daughter, maybe I would have remembered what it was like to be me. The me from before everything that happened.”

  Avram turns to face her. “I remember how you were.”

  Every time he touches the thought of a daughter, he feels a caress of light on his face. “Listen,” he probes, “if it had been a girl, I mean—”

  “I know.”

  “What do you know?”

  “I know.”

  “Go on, say it.”

  “If it had been a girl, you would have come to see her, right?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But I do.” Ora sighs. “You think I never thought about that? You think I didn’t pray for a girl the whole pregnancy? That I didn’t go to a seer—like Saul, who came to the woman by night—in the Bukharian neighborhood, so she could give me a blessing for a girl?”

  “You did?”

  “Of course I did.”

  “But you were already pregnant! What could she have—”

  “So what? You can always barter. And by the way, Ilan also wanted a girl.”

  “Ilan, too?”

  “Yes, I’m sure of it.”

  “But he didn’t tell you?”

  “You wouldn’t believe how quiet we kept around that pregnancy. We only talked when Adam asked us something. Through Adam we talked about what was in my belly, and what would happen when the new baby was born.”

  Avram swallows and recalls how that whole time he lay in bed, paralyzed by the terror of the growing pregnancy.

  And praying it would fail.

  And planning in great detail how he would nullify his life as soon as he heard the baby was born.

  And counting the days he had left.

  And in the end he did nothing.

  Because even when he was a POW, and increasingly after he came home, he always latched on, at the last minute, to Thales, the Greek philosopher he had admired as a youth, who said there was no difference between life and death. When asked why, in that case, he did not choose death, Thales replied, Precisely because there is no difference.

  Ora laughs. “We called him Zoot. Adam made up the name.”

  “You called who Zoot?”

  “Ofer.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “When he was still in my belly. A sort of pregnancy name, you know.”

  “No,” Avram murmurs, defeated, “I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I know nothing.”

  She puts a hand on his arm. “Don’t.”

  “Don’t what,” he grumbles.

  “Don’t torture yourself more than you have to.”

  “Still, Ofer is a good name,” he says after a while.

  “A very Israeli name. And I like that it has ‘o’ and ‘e’ in it. Like khoref, winter, and boker, morning.”

  Avram sees her lovely forehead enveloped in brightness now. Like osher, happiness, he thinks, but does not say it.

  “It’s good for nicknames, too,” she adds.

  “You thought about that?”

  “And also it’s like the English word ‘offer,’ which is soft and open, sort of giving.”

  He laughs. “You’re amazing.”

  She resists telling him that she also thought about how the name would sound in bed, coming from the lips of the women who would love him. She had even tried it out, whispering breathlessly to herself, Ofer, Ofer, which had made her giggle at the confusion that flooded her.

  “Nicknames, of course,” he murmurs. “I never thought of that. And insults, too. You wouldn’t want it to rhyme with any curses.”

  “Like ‘Ora Gomorrah.’ ”

  “No-Fair Ofer,” he laughs.

  Is he still smiling, like we do, Ora sadly hums to herself, Our hero, our lost soldier, Dudu.

  The green, sedate pasture, dotted with black-and-white cows, curves abruptly into a steep mountain. They groan and sigh as they walk and grab at tree trunks that lean into the incline. If I’d had a daughter, she thinks, if I’d had a daughter there are a few things I could have repaired in myself. She tries to explain this to Avram, but he doesn’t really understand, not the way she needs him to understand her, not the way he once knew her instantly, with a hint and a wrinkle. There were things she’d once hoped to change in herself through the boys, and it had never happened. “What things?” Avram asks. She has trouble explaining it and thinks again about Ofer’s Talia, and the way all the men in the household responded to her, happily and simply giving her what they’d held back from Ora. She tells Avram that it was only recently, once Adam and Ofer were grown up, that she realized it would probably never happen to her through them, this change, this repair. It became clear to her, late in the day, that it would not be through them that she would solve anything—“Perhaps because they’re boys, perhaps because they’re them, I don’t know.” She stops talking and breathlessly climbs up the mountain, and thinks, They weren’t really attentive to me, and they weren’t really generous, not in the way I needed.

  “I didn’t write it properly,” she says now, as they go back down the mountain to find the lost notebook. “I just don’t feel that I’m getting the main point across. Not when I write, and not when I’m talking to you. I want to tell all the minutiae about him, the fullness of his life, his life story, and I know I can’t, it’s impossible, but still, that’s what I need to do for him now.” Her speech ebbs and turns to mumbles as she pictures the man with his long, sinewy hands, and those thumbs. They were the hands of a worker, not a doctor, and she sees them opening her notebook and leafing through the pages as he tries to understand what he’s reading, what story it contains. Her heart leaps: Maybe at this minute he’s sitting on a rock, maybe even the same rock she herself sat on the night before, the only comfortable rock around, with her notebook on his lap, and he knows without a doubt that the person who wrote these pages was the woman he met coming up from the riverbed, the one with the wild hair and the slightly paralyzed lip.

  “At first it was hard”—she resumes what was interrupted long ago on the way up the mountain—“his vegetarianism, and the way Ilan fought to get him to taste some meat, or at least fish, and the fighting and yelling at mealtimes, and Ilan’s personal insult at Ofer’s decision to stop being a carnivore.”

  “Why was it an insult? Why personal?”

  “I don’t know, that’s how he took it, Ilan.”

  “You mean, like it was something against him?”

  “Like it was, you know, against masculinity. That it was somehow feminine to be disgusted by meat. Can’t you understand that?”

  “Yes,” Avram says, surprised at her rebuke, “but I wouldn’t take it as a personal affront. I don’t know, maybe I would. What do I know, Ora?” He spreads both hands out in a slightly flamboyant gesture of acquiescence, and an image-fragment of the old Avram flashes. “I don’t understand anything about families.”

  “Come on, you?”

  “What do you mean, me?”

  “Well, I mean, really!” Ora blinks and the tip of her nose turns red. “Weren’t you ever born? Didn’t you have parents? A father?”

  Avram says nothing.

  “Let’s sit down for a minute, all my muscles are spasming.” She rubs her thighs. “Look, they’re actu
ally shaking. It really is harder to go downhill than up!

  “I’ll never forget the expression on his face the day after he found out that we kill cows, and the way he looked at me for having made him eat meat since he was born. For four years. And his astonishment at the fact that I ate meat, too. Ilan was one thing—that’s maybe how he felt, I’m trying to get into his head at the time—you could believe it about Ilan, but me? To think I was capable of murdering for food? I don’t know, maybe he was afraid that under certain circumstances I might be capable of eating him, too?”

  Avram’s thumbs run back and forth over his fingertips. His lips move soundlessly.

  “Maybe he felt like everything he’d thought about us was completely wrong, or worse—that it was all our conspiracy against him.”

  “To wolferize him,” Avram murmurs.

  She looks at him with tense pleading. “Explain to me how I never asked myself what a four-year-old boy feels when he finds out that he belongs to a carnivorous breed?”

  Avram can see that she is torn apart and does not know how to comfort her.

  “I have to think about it some more,” she whispers. “I mustn’t stop here. I always stop here, because there was something there, you see, in that whole vegetarianism thing. It’s not for nothing that I’m so … Look, for example, the way he was depressed afterward, for weeks, really depressed, a four-year-old boy who doesn’t want to get up in the morning for preschool because he doesn’t want some kid to touch him with ‘meat hands,’ or he’s just afraid of the children and the teacher and recoils from everyone and suspects everyone, do you understand?”

  “Do I understand?” Avram snorts.

  “Of course you understand. I think you could have understood him perfectly,” she says quietly.

  “Really?”

  “You could understand children in general. Understand them from inside.”

  “Me? What do I—”

  “Who better than you, Avram?”

  He lets out a snicker and turns red. The skin of his face glows suddenly. Ora thinks she can see all the pores of his soul opening up.

  “When he finally agreed to go back to preschool, he started inciting all the children not to eat meat. He kicked up an intifada at every snack break, dug through their sandwiches, mothers called me to complain, and when he found out that the girl who gave them music lessons was also vegetarian, he simply fell head over heels in love with her. You should have seen it, he was like some alien living among humans who suddenly finds a female alien. He used to draw pictures for her and bring her gifts and all day long all he talked about was Nina, Nina, Nina. He used to call me Nina by mistake. Or maybe it wasn’t such a mistake.”