To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  Here too, in the open field, he hugs her, steadies her, then gently holds her away. A pity. She was ready, if he’d only wanted to. They may have struggled that way for a minute, no longer, yet she crossed an ocean of time. And where is he? What does he want? What does she know? Only that he is grasping her, holding her in his arms, softly caressing her hair, asking, “Did I hurt you?”

  Then he lets go, pushes himself away from her as though he has realized what almost happened, the ghost that was almost conjured up. Ora rocks dizzily and takes hold of his arm again. “Wait, don’t run away, why are you running away from me?” She looks at him weakly, touches a long bloody scratch on his nose, which she has given him, and says quietly, “Avram, do you remember us?”

  “ILAN CAME HOME. After he ran away from me and Adam and tried out houses all over Jerusalem, he came back to us, to the house in Tzur Hadassah. As soon as he did, he was shocked at Adam, I mean at me, at the way I’d neglected Adam and his education and his speech, and any order and discipline, and he started improving him.” Ora laughs. “Do you understand? For almost three years, Adam and I were more or less on our own, two wild beasts in the jungle, no laws, no commandments, and then the missionary landed. And we suddenly discovered that nothing we did was right, that we didn’t have an agenda or a routine, we ate when we were hungry and slept when we were tired, and the house was pretty much a dump.

  “Wait,” she says, holding up a finger, “there’s more. That Adam walked around the neighborhood naked and scarfed down massive amounts of chocolate and watched TV indiscriminately and got to day care at eleven a.m. And at his advanced age he still didn’t know how to go potty properly. And he called me Ora, not Mom!

  “Ilan, being Ilan, took matters into his own hands right then and there. He did everything very nicely of course, with lots of smiles—he knew he was on probation with me—but all of a sudden, for example, clocks turned up around the house. One in the kitchen, a little one in the living room, and a Mickey Mouse clock in Adam’s room. And there were cleaning days, and we had to clear out the mess and get rid of the junk. The fun was over! ‘This Saturday we’re sorting through Adam’s toys, next Saturday your paperwork, and what about that pharmacy spilling out of the bathroom cabinet?’ ”

  She laughs joylessly.

  “I liked it, don’t get me wrong. It was nice to have a man in the house and to feel that someone was starting to eliminate the chaos. A sort of purification. The rescue forces had arrived. And don’t forget that I was pregnant with Ofer, so I didn’t have a lot of strength to resist, and all his enthusiasm signaled that he was pretty serious about his nesting and that maybe this time he would stay.”

  Avram walks beside her, wriggling his toes in Ofer’s shoes. When he first stepped into the shoes, he immediately announced that he was swimming in them, and that it wouldn’t work. “It will, it will,” Ora mumbled and took out a pair of thick walking socks from his backpack. “Put these on.” He did, and still the shoes were a little big, but they were more comfortable than his old pair, whose soles were so worn out that he could feel the ground through them. “Just let your feet sail, and think about what a nice feeling that is,” Ora advised.

  He spreads out in Ofer’s space, measuring his toes. The soles of his feet study his son’s footprints. Tiny dips and mounds, secret messages. Things even Ora doesn’t know about Ofer.

  “But most of all, he fixed up Adam. Cleanliness and neatness and discipline, like I said, and then came the reeducation. How can I explain it? Adam was a fairly quiet boy. I wasn’t much of a chatterbox either, back then. I didn’t really have that many people to talk to. Adam and I were alone at home most of the time, and we had our little life, and it was pretty good, considering, and talking really wasn’t the most important part of it. We got along just fine without a lot of words. We understood each other perfectly. And I also think—although maybe not—”

  “What?”

  “Maybe I’d had a little too many words out of the two of you, all those years, you and Ilan together. Maybe I wanted a bit of quiet.”

  He sighs.

  “All that talk of yours, the brilliant, witty yada yada yada that never stopped for a second, that constant effort the two of you made.”

  Ilan and me, Avram thinks. Two arrogant peacocks.

  “And I always felt a bit left out.”

  “You? Really?” Troubled, he does not know how to tell her that he always felt she was the center, their focal point. That she, in her own way, created them.

  “Well, I never really got into that thing of yours.”

  “But it was all because of you, for you.”

  “Too much, too much.”

  They walk silently. The dog trails them at a fixed distance, her ears cocked in their direction.

  “And Ilan”—she returns from her contemplations—“was really amazed at Adam, at his underdeveloped speech, as he put it, and he started teaching him how to talk. Do you get it? At the age of two and three-quarters he put him through talking boot camp.”

  “How?”

  “He just talked to him all the time. He would take him to day care in the morning and talk about everything they saw on the way. Bring him home from day care and talk to him about what happened at day care. He asked questions and demanded answers. He wouldn’t let him off the hook. It was like a one-man protest movement: Fathers Against Silence.”

  Avram laughs softly and Ora turns red: her joke worked.

  “He talked to Ofer while he dressed him and while he put him to bed and while he fed him. I heard him all the time. There was a constant hubbub of speech at home, and Adam and I weren’t used to that kind of noise, and it wasn’t easy for me. I’m sure it wasn’t for Adam, either.

  “There was no more pointing and saying ‘that.’ Now there was ‘doorframe,’ ‘lock,’ ‘shelves,’ ‘saltshaker.’ I heard it in the background the whole time, like a broken record. ‘Say “shelf.” ’ ‘Shelf.’ ‘Say “grasshopper.” ’ ‘Grasshopper.’ And he was right, I’m not saying he wasn’t. I felt he was doing the right thing, and I could really see Adam’s world growing richer and fuller because he suddenly had names for things. I’m just not … I don’t … You see, I don’t really know how to say it exactly.” She laughs and points sharply to the spot between her eyes: “This.”

  Her heart pounded when she saw the immense thirst coming from Adam, which she previously hadn’t detected at all. Because after the initial shock, he seemed to get what Ilan was offering him, and she suddenly had a prattling child.

  Ilan—she explains to Avram—talked to Adam like you talk to a grown-up, both in vocabulary and in tone. It stung her to hear the businesslike, egalitarian way Ilan addressed the boy, using a voice that did not contain a hint of the childish, slightly playful tone that she herself used. There was almost no word he considered too sophisticated for a conversation with Adam. “Say ‘association.’ ” “Association.” “Say ‘philosophy,’ ‘Kilimanjaro,’ ‘crème brûlée.’ ”

  Ilan explained to him about synonyms, drawing pictures of words as identical twins. At three, Adam learned that the moon was also a crescent, or Luna. That at night it could be dark, dim, or even dusky. That a person could jump, but also leap and hop. (As Avram listens, a strange smile curls inside him, slightly proud, slightly embarrassed.) Ilan used nursery rhymes to teach him grammar and spent hours practicing “my child,” “his rabbit,” “her fingers.”

  Every so often Ora would find the courage to protest. “You’re training him to do tricks, you’re turning him into your toy.”

  “For him it’s just like LEGO, but with words,” Ilan replied.

  She wanted to object—You’re just marking him as your territory—but all she said was, “He’s too young for that, a boy of his age doesn’t have to know all about possessive pronouns.”

  “But look how much he enjoys it!”

  “Of course. He can tell you’re enjoying it and he wants you to like him. He’ll do anything to make you like him.�
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  “And listen to this”—she tells Avram parenthetically—“about six months after Ilan came home, Adam asked where the man in the hut had gone.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I just couldn’t talk, and all Ilan said was, ‘He left, he’s never coming back.’ I only just remembered that. What were we talking about?”

  She was weak. Her second pregnancy, which had begun with ease and a sense of health, grew burdensome and sickly toward the end. Most of the time she felt elephantine and drained and ugly. “In the last trimester, Ofer was pressing on a nerve that gave me horrible pain every time I stood up.” For the last two months she had to spend most of the time lying in one position, in bed or in the big armchair in the living room, and her breathing was labored, cautious—it hurt to breathe sometimes. She would stare at Ilan and Adam as they buzzed around her with intellectual fervor while she grew weaker and weaker, squeezing into the old familiar niche she had carved out years ago with a dull sort of self-deprecation.

  She had no way to prevent Ilan and Adam from constantly amusing themselves with synonyms, rhymes, and association games, and of course she was flattered when the day-care teacher talked about Adam’s huge leap, and how within such a short time he seemed to have matured by at least two years. His status at day care greatly improved, although his wetting problem grew worse for some reason. But at least he was able to report the little accidents, so it was hard to get angry. “ ‘My pee-pee escaped,’ ” Ora quotes with a crooked smile. “What are you smiling about?” she asks irritably.

  “I was thinking,” Avram says without looking at her, “that I would have definitely done that, too.”

  “With your child? What Ilan did?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t say the thought never crossed my mind,” she notes, and vows not to expand on this point, ever.

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Come on, what?”

  “That that was really what he was looking for. A partner like you. So that he’d have someone to be witty and clever with.”

  Avram silently twirls a strand of his beard.

  “Because I wasn’t a good enough substitute,” she continues drily. “At least not in that regard. I couldn’t do it and I didn’t try, either.”

  “But why did you even have to?”

  “Ilan needed it. Oh, how he needed you and what you had together. And how withered he felt without you.”

  Avram’s face burns, and Ora has the sudden gnawing thought that she may not have understood what Ilan was going through at all, and that perhaps he had not been looking for a substitute for Avram, but trying to be Avram. Excited, she hastens her steps: Maybe he was trying as hard as he could to be a father the way he imagined Avram would be.

  They are so lost in their thoughts that the sudden appearance of a road startles them. What’s more, the path markings have disappeared. Ora walks back to look but returns disappointed. We were happy with our path, she thinks, and now what? How will we get to Jerusalem?

  The road is not especially wide, but vehicles zoom past frequently, and they both feel slow and dull in comparison. They would happily retreat to the quiet, light-filled meadow, or even back to the shadowy forest. But they can’t go back. Ora cannot, and Avram seems to have been infected by her onward-and-forward purposefulness. They stand there confused, looking left and right, pulling their heads back with every passing car.

  “We’re like those Japanese soldiers who emerged from the forests thirty years after the war was over,” she says.

  “I really am like that,” he reminds her.

  She can see that the road and the violence that emanates from it are scaring Avram. His face and body have locked up. She looks for the bitch. She was walking behind them just a few moments ago, keeping her distance, but now she’s gone. What to do? Should she go back and look for her? And how will she get her across the road? How will she get the dog and Avram across?

  “Come on,” she says, swinging into action, knowing that if she doesn’t do something now, his enervation will seep into her and paralyze them. “Come on, we’re crossing.”

  She holds his hand, feeling how defeated and stalked he is by the road.

  “When I give the word, run.”

  He nods feebly. His eyes are on the tips of his shoes.

  “You can run, right?”

  His face suddenly changes. “Tell me something, wait a minute—”

  “Later, later.”

  “No, wait. What you said before—”

  “Pay attention, after the truck. Now!”

  She takes some steps into the road but is pulled back—his mass, his weight. She quickly looks to both sides. A bright purple jeep roars around the bend at them, flashing its headlights. They are stuck almost in the middle of the lane—can’t swallow and can’t throw up—and Avram is frozen. She calls to him and tugs at his hands. She thinks he’s talking to her, his lips are moving. The jeep whips past them with an angry honk and Ora prays no one comes from the other side. “Tell me,” he mumbles again and again, “tell me.”

  “What?” she groans in his ear. “What’s so urgent right this minute?”

  “I … I … What did I want to ask … What did I want to ask …”

  A truck rolls in their direction, bellowing with what sounds like a foghorn. They’re standing in its lane. Ora pulls Avram toward her and out of the truck’s path, then they freeze on the white stripe in the middle of the road. They will die here. Run over like two jackals.

  “Nobody else, either?”

  “Nobody else what? What are you talking about, Avram?”

  “About what you said, the substitute, that Ilan … that Ilan didn’t have.”

  Through the din of a passing horn she hears a thin whisper slip away in his voice like the sleeve of a child playing hide-and-seek behind the drapes. She stares at him: his large, round, sun-scalded head, the wild tufts of hair sprouting on both sides, his blue eyes with their gaze refracting like a teaspoon in a glass. She finally understands what he’s asking.

  She slowly smoothes both hands over his face, his disheveled beard, his broken eyes, erasing the road around them with one stroke. The road will wait. Very quietly she says, “Do you really not know? Can’t you guess? Ilan never had another friend like you.”

  “I didn’t, either,” he says, and bows his head.

  “Me neither. Now come on, give me your hand, we’re crossing.”

  “I’m in hell!” he announced in a letter from a pre-military training camp, at age seventeen. “I’m at the Be’er Ora base, which is undoubtedly named after you. You would like it here, because we get to eat sand and gun grease, and jump off twelve-foot-high platforms like hunted fowl, to land on canvas sheets. All your favorite pastimes. Me? I make do with fantasies about you, and failed attempts to deflower your stand-ins. Last night, for example, I invited a young lady named Atarah to my room. I have no love for her in my heart, as you well know, but (a) I had the impression that she was available, and (b) biology calls … The excuse (a lowly trick!) was that we’d listen to Paul Temple (it was the Vandyke Affair episode) on the radio together, but then they announced that the girls weren’t allowed in the boys’ rooms, and I would therefore be left on my lonesome to shrivel away in my hole. Meanwhile, Ilan disappeared with the guys—who included, if you ask me, a number of girls (FYI), and there was undoubtedly some fooling around going on there.”

  “This morning, my dear,” he wrote the next day, “we got up at five-thirty and went to work on a mountain, clearing stones, weeding, and building terraces (Can you imagine me there? Without an undershirt?). I devised a plot whereby I was the only boy working with seven members of your gender, but they turned out to be cold-buttocksed females with no fondness for the common Avram wherever he may grow. Next to me was Ruchama Levitov (I wrote to you about her, we once had a hasty and cheerless affair), so I had the opportunity to examine our relationship more profoundly. But in the end, as usua
l, we just engaged in small talk (I’ve made up a new word for it: ‘chat-air.’ Do you approve?), and she had the audacity to tease me about how we always argue and fight and break up and then start over again, like a double diagram. I gave her a perfect Jean-Paul Belmondo look and said nothing, but afterward it occurred to me that this has always been my fate with girls, that something never quite works out, and even when I have the occasional success, there’s always a moment when she suddenly gets scared of me and runs away, or claims I’m too much for her (Did I tell you about Tova G.? About how when we finally horitzontalized, she declared that I was ‘too intimate’ [??!!] and literally fled from the bed?!). Honestly, Ora, I don’t know what my problem is with girls, and I’d be happy to discuss it with you one day, candidly and uncensored.

  “Yours, blister-footed Caligula, as he rushes to dinner.”

  Ora rummaged through the brimming shoe box and fished out another letter from the same period. She glanced at Avram as he lay there covered in bandages and casts, and read out loud.

  “My Shaina-Shaindle. Chemistry class yet again, with promising talk of endodermic and exothermic activation reactions. I had a huge argument with the teacher. It was fantastic! She tried to get out of it, so I had to smite her hip and thigh. She crawled out of the jubilated classroom with her tail between her legs, and I made my triumphant victory laps around the classsss!”

  She glanced at him. No response. Two days earlier, the doctors had gradually started to bring him out of the induced coma, but even when he was half awake he did not open his eyes or speak. He was snoring now. His mouth was open, his face and exposed shoulder covered with open, pussy wounds. His left arm was in a cast, as were both his legs. His right leg was raised and suspended in a Thomas splint, and tubes emerged from every part of his body. For several nights she had read to him from letters he’d sent her when they were young. Ilan did not believe in this therapeutic approach, but she hoped Avram’s own words would be able to penetrate him and rouse him to speech.