To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  “He—Ilan—and I, we knew?”

  “What?” she shouted in a whisper. “Knew what?”

  “That both of us … that we were with you together?”

  “What do you want from me? What do you want to hear?”

  His voice climbed into an agitated whisper: “We didn’t know?”

  She no longer had a choice. “But you knew.”

  “And he didn’t?”

  “Apparently not. I don’t know.”

  “You didn’t tell him?”

  She shook her head.

  “And he didn’t ask?”

  “No.”

  “And he didn’t ask me, either?”

  “You never told me he did.”

  “But did he know?”

  “Ilan’s a smart guy,” Ora spat out. She had a lot more than that to say. The word “smart” explained nothing. There was something broad and deep, wonderful in its own way, in what the three of them had been given in that silenced year. She looked at Avram’s strained face, at his narrow, haggling apprehension, and realized he was incapable of comprehending even the tip of the iceberg now.

  “But we were friends,” he murmured with dim amazement. “Ilan and I. We were friends, he’s my best … so how could I …”

  Had she been able to, she would have put him to sleep again, so he wouldn’t understand so much, so he wouldn’t encounter himself so unprotected.

  It was too late. With a stare suspended in infinity, his eyes glazed over. Ora felt as though a slow explosion of comprehension was detonating inside him.

  Beyond the shoulder of the road they’ve just crossed lies a fertile stretch of pasture. A barbed-wire fence is partially trampled to the ground, and the clover blooms abundantly. “Hey!” Avram smiles and points happily to a round rock, where the orange-blue-and-white path marker winks at them in the sunlight. “We’ve found it!” He plants one foot on the rock and sweeps his arm out in the direction of the path. “That’s quite a mountain,” he exclaims as his eyes follow his arm all the way up the path, and he tentatively moves his foot off the rock.

  “Are mountains also an issue for you?”

  “Roads aren’t an issue either,” he says, “I don’t know what got into me.”

  “I was really scared. We could have got run over back there.”

  “So it turns out I owe you my life.”

  “Let’s say another few times like that and we’ll be even?” She sees the shadow of a bitter smile pass over his lips like a sly animal caught stealing something delectable—perhaps a heart pang.

  “And your dog, where is she?”

  “My dog? Now she’s mine?”

  “Ours, okay, ours.”

  They walk back to the roadside and whistle to the dog. Over the rush of traffic, they shout out, “Hey! Whoa! Doggy! Dog! Come here!” They hear the interweaving sounds of their own voices. If she had the courage, Ora would yell, just once, Ofer, Oh-Fer, come home!

  But the dog is gone, and perhaps it’s for the best, Ora thinks. I don’t want to get attached to her, I can’t take another separation. Still, it’s a pity, we could have been good friends.

  The mountain is steep and meandering, entangled with olive trees and terebinths and spiny hawthorn. The path strains their calf muscles painfully and wears out their lungs. “I wonder which mountain this is,” says Avram breathlessly. “I don’t even know where we are.”

  Ora stops and takes gulps of air. “All of a sudden you care where we are?”

  “Well, it’s just weird to walk without knowing where you are.”

  “The map is in your backpack.”

  “Should we look at it?”

  They sit down and suck on hard lemon candy. Avram hesitates briefly, then opens the right pocket of the backpack. For the first time since they left, he reaches inside. He pulls out a Leatherman penknife, a matchbox, and candles. A ball of twine. Mosquito repellant. Flashlight. Another flashlight. Sewing kit. Deodorant, aftershave. A small pair of binoculars. He spreads his loot on the ground and looks at it. For a moment she thinks he’s trying to form a mental image of Ofer from these items.

  “Ofer’s always prepared, but you know he didn’t get that from me or from you,” Ora says, laughing.

  On a bed of poterium they spread out a large, plastic-covered 1:50,000-scale map and pore over it, heads almost touching.

  “Where are we?”

  “Maybe here?”

  “No, that’s not even the right direction.”

  They strain their eyes. Two fingers dart around, run into and cross over each other.

  “Here’s our path.”

  “Yes, it’s marked.”

  “That’s what that guy said, the Israel Trail.”

  “Which guy?” she asks.

  “The one we met.”

  “Oh, him.”

  “Yes, him.”

  Her finger runs back along the path until it hits the border. “Oops.” She stops and folds in her finger. “Lebanon.”

  “If you ask me, that’s more or less where we started.”

  “Maybe it was here? Because that’s right where we waded into the stream, remember?”

  “Could I forget?”

  “And we followed it along here in a zigzag, like this.” She leads her finger down the winding path. Avram’s finger is next to hers, just behind. “This is where we climbed up, and here there was a wooden bridge, and here we saw the flour mill, and maybe this is where we slept the first night? No? Maybe here, next to Kfar Yuval? How can anyone remember? What did we even see those first few days? Who could see anything at all?”

  He laughs. “I was a total zombie.”

  “Here’s the Kfar Giladi quarry, and here’s the Tel Chai Forest, and the sculpture path, and here’s where we ate, at Ein Ro’im.”

  “I wasn’t seeing anything back then.”

  “No, you weren’t. You just walked and cursed me for dragging you along.”

  “And ’round about here, I think, we met Akiva, and then we went down into the wadi.”

  “This whole stretch was a real hike, see?”

  “Yes, and that must be the Arab village.”

  “What’s left of it.”

  “I wanted to see it, but you ran on.”

  “I’ve had enough ruins in my life.”

  “And that’s the Kedesh River.”

  “So here’s where we slept.”

  “And then we walked up the riverbed and met that guy of yours.”

  “Since when is he mine?” Her fingers press into the map, leaving a brief indentation in the plastic. “And here’s Yesha Fortress, and that’s the Sheik’s tomb, Nebi Yusha.”

  “And here, you see, here’s where we walked up all the way to Keren Naphtali, and then down again because you left the notebook at the Kedesh River.”

  “And here was another stream, Dishon.”

  “It looks so innocent on the map. And look here, it’s those turbines we couldn’t figure out. Apparently that was the Ein Aviv Regional Pumping Station. So we’ve learned something.”

  “And I think this is the pool where we bathed.”

  “And here we walked along that big pipe to cross the water.”

  “I was shaking.”

  “Seriously? I didn’t know, you didn’t say anything.”

  “That’s me.”

  “And here, look, it’s your fairy-tale forest, Tsivon Stream.”

  “And here’s the meadow we walked through earlier. Definitely.”

  “And here’s the road we crossed.”

  “Yes, it said ‘Highway 89.’ ”

  “So if we crossed here,” Avram says musically, “then now we must be—”

  “On Meron,” she determines.

  “Mount Meron?”

  “See for yourself.”

  Their fingers point reverently.

  “Avram,” she whispers, “look how far we’ve walked.”

  He gets up, hugs his chest, and paces among the trees.

  They fold u
p the map, hoist their backpacks, and start making their way up the steep incline again through the thistles. Avram leads now, and Ora has a hard time keeping up. These shoes are really good for me, he decides. Excellent socks, too. He finds a long, supple branch of an arbutus tree, breaks it into the right size with one stomp, and uses it to help with the climb. He suggests that Ora use one, too. He comments on the excellent path markings in this section. “Frequent and consecutive, just like they should be,” he pronounces. She thinks she can hear him humming a tune to himself.

  It’s a good thing the path is so long, she thinks, watching him from behind. This way, there’s time to get accustomed to all the changes.

  “Black-Maned Horse. That was one of Ilan’s nicknames for Adam, when he was maybe three and a half. There was also Giant-Trunked Elephant. Get it?”

  Avram mumbles the words, hearing them in Ilan’s voice.

  “Or Lovely-Braying Donkey. Or Angry-Browed Cat. That kind of thing.”

  “Angry-Browed Cat?”

  “I’m telling you, it was like he was conducting human experiments.”

  She saw Adam changing in front of her very eyes, twisting and turning himself to adapt to Ilan’s desires. He painted an orange cat: “I oranged it,” he told her, “and now I’m trickling some yellow with my paintbrush.” She smiled crookedly. Of course she was proud of him, but with every accomplishment she felt him grow farther away from her. She looked at him as he wagged his tail for Ilan and was alarmed at what she felt toward him. She could not understand how all that time he had hidden from her the eagerness that now overflowed, bursting from every pore in his skin. The exposed—and so masculine—fervor with which he turned his back on the years he had spent with her, in their little paradise for two. Bambi and his mother, RIP.

  “My stomach is butterflying!” he’d shout joyously after Ilan spun him over his head. “Yes,” she’d say, straining to smile, “lucky you.”

  It seems to her that shortly after he mastered speech, speech mastered him. He started to voice his thoughts out loud. She didn’t notice it immediately, but at some point she realized that another channel had been added to the already bustling soundtrack of their domestic life. He vocalized all his thoughts, wishes, and fears. And since he still talked about himself in the third person, it made for entertainment sometimes: “Adam is hungry, hungry, hungry! Just wait a bit! No, he’s sick of waiting for Mom to come out of the bathroom. Adam is going into the kitchen now, and he’s going to make himself a snack. What should he put in his sandwich? And which should he put in his sand-what?”

  He would lie in his bed after the bedtime rituals and mumble his thoughts. Ora and Ilan would stand behind the door eavesdropping halfheartedly. “Adam has to go to sleep. Maybe a dream will come? Teddy, here’s what we have to do now. You have to go to sleep, and if a dream comes, shout ‘Adam!’ Dreams aren’t real, it’s just a drawing in your brain, Teddy.”

  “It was strange,” Ora says now, “and a little embarrassing, as though his subconscious was completely exposed to us.” She looks away from Avram so as not to remind him of his own narcotic-induced ramblings the night she kidnapped him. She wonders if she should tell him what he said about her that night: “She’s totally nuts, she’s gone off her rocker.”

  Adam knew all the letters and vowel marks by the time he was four. He picked them up with incredible ease, and you just couldn’t stop him. He read, he wrote. He saw characters in the cracks of a soap bar, in a crust of bread, in the whitewash on the walls. He insisted on reading words in the folds in his sheet and the lines of his palm.

  “Remind me what kind of pie you are?” Ilan said, tickling Adam while he bathed him.

  “I’m a pirate,” Adam answered, laughing.

  “And what else?”

  “A pied piper!”

  “And?”

  “A grieving magpie!”

  “Thieving,” Ilan corrected him with a smile. “And what else?”

  “A pile of cow pie!”

  Bubbles of rolling laughter foamed up in the bathroom and burst in front of her as she lay in bed.

  But now, walking up Mount Meron, she tries to remember why she was so angry at the time. What I wouldn’t give to lie in that bed again, pregnant, with the aching back and the exhaustion, with Ofer in my belly, hearing that laughter of theirs. “Let’s sit down for a minute. This is no mountain; this is a ladder.”

  She plunges to the ground. The incline, and the longings—her old heart can’t take it. Adam is here with her, four years old at most, running around in the field. His childish movements, his curious, fragile, slightly suspicious looks. And the light that shines when he allows himself to be happy, when he excels at something, when Ilan praises him. “I keep talking about Adam, but Ofer is never Ofer alone. You understand that, don’t you? Ofer is always also Adam, and Ilan, and me. That’s the way it is. That’s a family.” She giggles. “You have no choice, you’ll have to get to know us all.”

  Pictures and more pictures: Adam and baby Ofer napping together in a sleeping bag on the living-room rug—an Indian camp—naked, cuddling, their sweaty hair clinging to their foreheads, and Adam’s right arm hugs Ofer’s belly with its protruding navel. Adam and Ofer, five and a half and two, setting up house in an empty cardboard box, their two faces peeking from a little round window she’d cut out for them. Ofer and Adam, one and four and a half, very early in the morning, sleeping naked in Adam’s bed; while they slept, Ofer had pooped and smeared Adam thoroughly, diligently, and undoubtedly with generosity and love. Ofer puffing his cheeks to blow out three candles on his birthday cake, and Adam running up from behind to finish them off with one breath. Ofer reaching up on his matchstick legs after Adam has snatched his beloved stuffed elephant, and shrieking: “Ofer e’phant! Ofer e’phant!” He stands his ground so firmly that Adam panics and gives it back to him, then stares at him with a new tinge of reverence, as Ora watches from the kitchen.

  A big family picnic. The scene is as vivid as though it is happening right here on the mountain. Adults and children sit in a circle watching Ofer, who stands in the middle. A fair, thin, tiny child with huge light-blue laughing eyes and a golden mass of hair. He is about to tell the funniest joke in the world, which Mom—he assures his audience—has already heard seven times and rolled around with laughter every time. Then he launches into a long, incomprehensible yarn about two friends, one called Whaddayacare, the other named Whatsupwithyou. He gets it all wrong and forgets things, then remembers, and sparks of laughter dart around his eyes. The audience flutters with delight, and Ofer keeps stopping to remind his listeners: “Soon comes the end of the joke, and that’s when you laugh!”

  All that time, Adam—Eight years old? Seven?—looking thin, secretive, and shadowy, slinks from one person to the next, following a hidden code known only to him. He never lingers, never allows anyone to hug or caress him, only watches ravenously as they all focus on Ofer. He loots them, a little predator, preyed upon.

  Avram listens to Ora and a titmouse chirps joyously in the thicket. Nearby on the mountainside, in a patch that must have recently burned, mustard plants are starting to bloom again in a wild, joyous rabble of fauna. Ora laughs. The flowers have clearly decided to just get on with it, and the scorched spot now buzzes with mustard plants and bees.

  “And Ofer kept quiet until he was almost three. Well, not quiet, but he didn’t make much of an effort to learn how to talk.”

  Avram asks hesitantly, “And that … that’s old, three, right?”

  “It’s pretty late to start talking.”

  Avram furrows his brow, considering the new information.

  “I mean, he had a few basic words, and some very short phrases, and lots of fragments. A syllable here, a syllable there. Other than that he simply refused to learn how to talk. But he got by very well with his smiles and his charm, and those eyes of his. Which you gave him,” she adds, unable to resist.

  To Ora’s surprise, Ofer had even convinced Ilan that you c
ould live a full life without saying almost a single word correctly. “And this is Ilan, you know?” she notes with a raised eyebrow. “Ilan who told me, even before Adam was born, that he already knew he wouldn’t be capable of loving a baby—not even his own son—until the baby started talking. And then comes Ofer, and he went on like that for almost three years, quiet as a monk, and look how it turned out.”

  Ilan and Ofer dug beds in the garden together and planted vegetables and flowers. They built a fancy ant farm and cared for it meticulously, and they built multisectioned LEGO castles, and spent hours making things out of plasticine and Play-Doh, and they played with Ofer’s huge eraser collection, and baked cakes together. “Ilan!” She laughs. “Imagine! And Ofer, just so you know, was crazy about taking things apart. As soon as he could do anything, he liked to take things apart and put them back together, over and over again, a thousand times. The automatic sprinkler in the garden, an old tape recorder, a transistor, a fan, and of course watches. Ilan taught him some basic technical skills, and carpentry, and electrical engineering, and all that happened almost without words. You should have heard the gargles and squeaks that came out of those two. You should have seen Ilan. It was like he took a vacation from himself.”

  Avram smiles. Near happiness distorts his unaccustomed face for a moment. He really wants to hear, Ora observes once again, and her heart replies simply what she has always known about Avram: that he may never be able to or dare to connect himself to Ofer, but he certainly can and will connect to the story of Ofer.

  A lighthearted, laughing Ilan emerged in Ofer’s life. An Ilan whom she loved very much. He rolled around and wrestled on the floor with him, and played soccer and tag in the living room and in the yard, and ran around the house with Ofer on his shoulders, shouting and yelling, and walked Ofer up and down the hallway perched on his own feet, and sang silly songs with him.

  They stood at the mirror and made funny or scary faces. Ilan would hold his face close to Ofer’s, nose almost touching nose, and whoever laughed first lost. Then he’d disappear into the kitchen and emerge with his face covered in flour and ketchup. And the way those two horsed around in the bathtub, water fights and splashing. “You should have seen the bathroom when they were done. It looked like the scene of a water terrorist attack.”