To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  “Yes?”

  “Yes, after I wrote in my notebook that night. Since then, I’ve suddenly noticed that almost everything I see, the view, the flowers, the rocks, the color of the earth, the light at different times”—she makes a sweeping, circular motion—“everything, you know, even you, and the stories I’m telling you, and both of us, and this hyacinth here”—she greets it with a nod—“I’m trying to engrave all of this in my memory now, because you never know”—she mischievously gives Avram a clown face that does not make him laugh—“this may be my last time with them.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen to him, Ora, you’ll see, he’ll be fine.”

  “You promise?”

  He raises his eyebrows.

  “Promise me.” She bumps her shoulder against his. “What do you care—make an old lady happy.”

  They pass by another lookout point, dedicated to Yosef Bukish, of blessed memory, who fell in service on July 25, 1997:

  So many things in the world are pretty,

  Flowers and animals, nature and city,

  And if you open your eyes and explore,

  You’ll see hundreds of wonders each day—maybe more!

  LEAH GOLDBERG

  Remember, Avram thinks as he rushes around in his own mind, slamming against its walls. This head that you emptied, that you erased, that you sullied, that you filled with trash, with shit, will now store every word she says, everything she’s telling you about Ofer. Give her at least that, what else do you have to give? All you can give her is your damn, sick memory.

  “What he said to you,” Avram suggests cautiously after a while, “I was thinking, maybe he was a little influenced by Adam’s opera?”

  “About exile? Where everyone leaves in a convoy?”

  “Maybe.”

  She blushes from chest to neck. She had entertained that same thought herself. And now he is. It is amazing how he is learning to weave his threads into her tapestry. They stand swaying lightly. At their feet are the green expanses, forests, and rocky mountains of the Mount Meron Nature Reserve. Avram thinks again about the woman unraveling the crimson thread behind her. Perhaps it is an umbilical cord that comes out of her and keeps going forever. He imagines more and more men, women, and children streaming out of the towns and villages, the kibbutzim and moshavim, to tie their own threads to hers. For a moment he sees a red tapestry spreading out over the expanses below him, clinging to them like a fishing net, a thin, bleeding mesh that glistens in the sun.

  “There’s something special about this kind of walk, isn’t there?” he says later.

  Ora, lost in thought, laughs. “There’s a lot, yes, you could definitely say so.”

  “No, I mean the walking itself, where you have to go from point to point, you can’t skip anything. It’s like the trail is teaching us to walk at its pace.”

  “It’s so different from my normal life, with the cars and the microwave and the computers, where you can defrost a whole chicken with the click of a button, or send a message to New York. Oh, Avram”—she stretches her arms and inhales the sharp mountain air—“this heel-to-toe is much more suited to me. Maybe we can spend our whole lives just walking and walking without ever getting there.”

  They leave the path and find a lovely pillow of green, where they sprawl on their backs on the warm earth, facing the sun. It’s afternoon, and near Ora’s head is a heron’s bill flower that has finished its pollination work and now sheds its blue petals before dying. An earthy, rocky, primeval strength seeps into her body from the mountain beneath her. The bitch sprawls some distance away, licking and cleaning herself thoroughly. Avram takes Ofer’s hat out of his backpack—Shelach Battalion, Company C, The Guys—and covers his face. She also shelters her face with a hat. The warm sun makes her sleepy. A deep silence plunges all around them. A tiny beetle burrows through fallen poppy leaves by her fingers. Next to her knee, an iris hurries to seduce the followers of the deceased heron’s bill by displaying its blue blossoms.

  “Before, when we were standing at that lookout point,” Ora says softly under her hat, “when we looked down on the Hula Valley and it was so beautiful, with the fields in all those colors, I realized that it’s always like this for me with this land.”

  “Like what?”

  “Every encounter I have with it is also a bit of a farewell.”

  Hidden under his hat, Avram fleetingly sees the shred of an Arabic newspaper he had found in a bucket in the latrine at Abbasiya Prison. Through the smeared excrement he had managed to decipher a brief report about the executions of deputy ministers and fifteen mayors from Haifa and the surrounding suburbs, held the previous night in the central square in Tel Aviv. For a few days and nights he was convinced that Israel no longer existed. Then he realized the fraud, but something had been damaged in him.

  His eyes are wide open now. He remembers the interminable drives around the streets of Tel Aviv with Ora and with Ilan, after he got out of the hospital. Everything had seemed real and alive, but also like a big act. During one of those drives he’d said to Ora: “Okay, it’s all very well to say, If you will it, it is no dream, as Herzl said, but what if you stop willing it? What if you can’t be bothered to have the will anymore?”

  “The will for what?”

  “To stop being a dream.”

  A flock of partridges alights with beating wings from within the nearby thicket, and the bitch emerges, disappointed.

  “And in those moments,” Ora says through her hat, “I always think: This is my country, and I really don’t have anywhere else to go. Where would I go? Tell me, where else could I get so annoyed about everything, and who would want me anyway? But at the same time I also know that it doesn’t really have a chance, this country. It just doesn’t. Do you understand?” She plucks the hat off her face and sits up, surprised to find him sitting there watching her. “If you think about it logically, if you just think numbers and facts and history, with no illusions, it doesn’t have a chance.”

  All of a sudden, as if in a clumsy theater performance, a few dozen soldiers burst onto the green meadow, running in two lines, and split off on either side of Ora and Avram. Ordinance Corps Officers’ Course, their sweaty shirts read. Thirty or forty young men, strong but exhausted, with a delicate-looking blond soldier jogging in front of them. She sings an irritating tune:

  “Tem-em-em-em-em!”

  And they answer with a hoarse roar: “All for lovely Rotem!”

  “Tem-em-em-em-em!”

  “All to war for Rotem!”

  • • •

  What do you tell a six-year-old boy, a pip-squeak Ofer, who one morning, while you’re taking him to school, holds you close on the bike and asks in a cautious voice, “Mommy, who’s against us?” And you try to find out exactly what he means, and he answers impatiently, “Who hates us in the world? Which countries are against us?” And of course you want to keep his world innocent and free of hatred, and you tell him that those who are against us don’t always hate us, and that we just have a long argument with some of the countries around us about all sorts of things, just like children in school sometimes have arguments and even fights. But his little hands tighten around your stomach, and he demands the names of the countries that are against us, and there is an urgency in his voice and in his sharp chin that digs into your back, and so you start to name them: “Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon. But not Egypt—we have peace with them!” you say cheerfully. “We had lots of wars with them, but now we’ve made up.” And you think to yourself: if only he knew that it was because of Egypt that he himself had come into being. But he demands precision, a very practical, detail-oriented child: “Is Egypt really our friend?” “Not really,” you admit, “they still don’t completely want to be our friends.” “So they’re against us,” he solemnly decrees, and immediately asks if there are other “countries of Arabs,” and he doesn’t let up until you name them all: “Saudi Arabia, Libya, Sudan, Kuwait, and Yemen.” You can feel his mouth learning the n
ames behind your back, and you add Iran—not exactly Arabs, but not exactly our friends, either. After a pause he asks softly if there are any more, and you mumble, “Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria,” and then you remember Indonesia and Malaysia, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and probably Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan too—none of those stans sounds so great to you—and here we are at school, sweetie! When you help him get off the bike seat, he feels heavier than usual.

  Over the following days Ofer started to listen closely to the news. Even if he was in the middle of a game, he would perk up just before the hour and again at the half-hour bulletin. Secretly, with spy-like movements, he would move toward the kitchen and stand, as if by chance, near the door, listening to the radio that was always on. She watched his little face twist into a mixture of anger and fear every time there was a report of an Israeli killed in an act of hostility. “Are you sad?” she asked him when he sobbed after another bomb went off in the market in Jerusalem, and he stomped his feet: “I’m not sad, I’m angry! They’re killing all our people! Soon we’ll run out of people!” She tried to reassure him: “We have a strong army, and there are some very big and strong countries that will protect us.” Ofer treated this information with skepticism. He wanted to know where exactly these friendly countries were. Ora opened an atlas: “Here’s the United States of America, for example, and here’s England, and here are another few good friends of ours.” She quickly waved an overgeneralizing hand near a few European countries that she herself did not particularly trust. He looked at her in astonishment. “But they’re all the way over there!” he shouted, in disbelief at her stupidity. “Look how many pages there are between here and there!”

  A few days later he asked her to show him the countries that were “against us.” She opened up the atlas again and pointed to each country, one after the other. “Wait, but where are we?” A glimmer of hope shone in his eyes: Maybe they weren’t on that page. She pointed with her pinky finger at Israel. A strange whimper escaped his lips, and he suddenly clung to her as hard as he could, fought and plowed his way to her with his whole body, as though trying to be swallowed up in it again. She hugged him and stroked him and murmured words of comfort. Sharp sweat, almost an old man’s sweat, broke out all over his skin. When she managed to hold up his face, she saw in his eyes something that knotted her gut in one pull.

  Over the next days he grew uncharacteristically quiet. Even Adam could not cheer him up. Ilan and Ora tried. They plied him with promises of a trip to Holland over summer vacation, or even a Kenyan safari, all in vain. He was depressed and lifeless, lost in himself. Ora realized then how much her own happiness depended on the light of this child’s face.

  “His gaze,” said Ilan. “I don’t like the look in his eyes. It’s not a child’s look.”

  “At us?”

  “At everything. Haven’t you noticed?”

  She may have noticed, of course she’d noticed, but as usual—“You know me,” she sighs as she and Avram walk down the Meron. “You know how I am with these things”—she simply preferred not to think about what she saw, to turn a blind eye to all the signs, and certainly not to say anything about them out loud, hoping they would fade away. But now Ilan would say it, he would define it, he would soberly and crudely put words to it, and then it would become real, and it would grow and multiply.

  “It’s like he knows something we don’t yet have the courage to—”

  “Don’t worry about it, it’s just a phase. These are normal fears at that age.”

  “I’m telling you Ora, they’re not.”

  She giggled joylessly. “You remember how when Adam was three, he was really preoccupied with the question of whether there were Arabs at night, too?”

  “But this is something different, Ora. My feeling is that—”

  “Listen, let’s take him to spend a day on the horse ranch he once—”

  “Sometimes I have the feeling he’s looking at us like—”

  “A parrot!” Ora fluttered desperately. “Remember he asked us to buy him a—”

  “Like we’ve been given death sentences.”

  And then Ofer demanded numbers. When he heard there were four and a half million people in Israel, he was impressed, even reassured. The number seemed enormous to him. But after two days a new thought came—“He was always a terribly logical child,” she tells Avram, “and that’s not from you or from me either, that analytical, purposeful mind”—and he wanted to know “how many are against us.” He wouldn’t stop until Ilan found out for him exactly the number of citizens in each Muslim country in the world. Ofer enlisted Adam, who helped him with the calculations, and they shut themselves up in their room. “What do you do with a child like that, who suddenly learns the facts of life and death?” Ora asks Avram as they pass a rocky monument for a Druze soldier. Sergeant Salah Kassem Tafesh, May God Avenge His Blood, Avram reads out of the corner of his eye—Ora hurries ahead—Fell in Southern Lebanon in an Encounter with Terrorists, on the 16th of Nissan 5752, at Age 21. Your Memory Is Engraved in Our Hearts.

  “What do you do with a child like that?” she repeats with pursed lips. A child who goes out and uses his pocket money to buy a little orange spiral notebook and every day writes in it, in pencil, how many Israelis are left after the last terrorist attack. Or who at Passover Seder, with Ilan’s family, suddenly starts crying that he doesn’t want to be Jewish anymore, because they always kill us and always hate us, and he knows this because all the holidays are about it. And the adults look at one another, and a brother-in-law mumbles that it is kind of difficult to argue with that, and his wife says, “Don’t be paranoid,” and he quotes, “That in every generation, they rise up against us to destroy us,” and she replies that it’s not exactly scientific fact, and that maybe we should examine our own role in the whole rising up against us business, and the familiar argument ensues, and Ora, as usual, flees to the kitchen to help with the dishes, but she suddenly stops: she sees Ofer looking at the adults as they argue, horrified at their doubts, at their naïveté, and his eyes fill with fervent, prophetic tears.

  “Look at them,” Avram had said to her once, in one of their drives around the streets of Tel Aviv after he got back. “Look at them. They walk down the street, they talk, they shout, read newspapers, go to the grocery store, sit in cafés”—he went on for several minutes describing everything they saw through the car window—“but why do I keep thinking it’s all one big act? That it’s all to convince themselves that this place is truly real?”

  “You’re exaggerating,” Ora had said.

  “I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think the Americans or the French have to believe so hard all the time just to make America exist. Or France, or England.”

  “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “Those are countries that exist even without having to always want them to exist. And here—”

  “I’m looking around,” she said, her voice slightly hoarse and high-pitched, “and everything looks completely natural and normal to me. A little crazy, that’s true, but in a normal way.”

  Because I’ve looked at it from a different place, Avram thought, and sank silently into himself.

  The next day, Ora told him now, Ofer woke up with a conclusion and a solution: from now on he would be English, and everyone had to call him John, and he would not answer to the name Ofer. “ ’Cause no one kills them,” he explained simply, “and they don’t have any enemies. I asked in class, and Adam says so too, everyone’s friends with the English.” He started speaking English, or rather, what he thought was English, a gibberish version of Hebrew with an English accent. And just to be on the safe side, he buttressed his bed with protective layers of books and toys, trenches of furry stuffed animals. And every night he insisted on sleeping with a heavy monkey wrench next to his head.

  “I happened to look in his notebook one day, and I saw that he kept writing ‘Arobs.’ When I told him it was spelled with an ‘a’ he was amazed: ‘I tho
ught it was A-robs, ’cause they keep robbing us.’

  “Then one day he found out that some Israelis were Arabs. Well, by that time I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, you know? He discovered that all his calculations were wrong, and he had to deduct the Israeli Arabs from the number of Israelis.”

  She remembers how furious he was when he found out. He stomped his feet and shouted and turned red and hurled himself on the floor and screamed: “Make them go away! Back to their own homes! Why did they even come here? Don’t they have their own places?”

  “And then he had an attack, a bit like the one he had at age four, with the vegetarianism. He ran a high fever, and for almost a week I was in total despair. And there was one night when he was convinced there was an Arab with him.”

  “In his body?” Avram asks in horror, and his eyes dart to the sides. She has the feeling that he has lied to her about something.

  “In his room,” she corrects him softly. “It was just feverish nonsense, hallucinations.”

  The hair on her skin stands on end, telling her she has to be careful, but she’s not sure of what. Avram seems to have ossified right in front of her. His eyes harden with the look of a captive.

  “Are you okay?”

  There is shame and terror and guilt in his eyes. For a moment Ora thinks she knows exactly what she is seeing, and the next moment she flings herself away. An Arab in his body, she thinks. What did they do to him there? Why doesn’t he ever talk?

  “I’ll never forget that night,” she says, trying to abate the horror on Avram’s face. “Ilan was on reserve duty in Lebanon, in the eastern sector. He was gone for four weeks. I put Adam to sleep in our bed so Ofer wouldn’t disturb him. Adam didn’t have a lot of patience for Ofer through that whole episode. It was like he couldn’t see that Ofer was afraid of something. And just imagine: Ofer was—I don’t know, six? And Adam was already nine and a half, and it was like he couldn’t forgive Ofer for breaking down like that.