To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  “I sat with Ofer all night, and he was burning up and confused, and he kept seeing the Arab in the room, sitting on Adam’s bed, on the closet, under the bed, peering at him from the window. Madness.

  “I tried to calm him, and I turned on the light, and I brought a flashlight to prove to him there was no one there. I also tried to explain some of the facts to him, to put things in perspective—me, the big expert, right? There I was in the middle of the night, giving him a seminar on the history of the conflict.”

  “And then what?” Avram asks very quietly, his face fallen.

  “Nothing. You couldn’t even talk to him. He was so miserable—you’ll laugh—that I almost thought of calling Sami, our driver, you know, the one who—”

  “Yes.”

  “To explain to him, or something like that. To show him that he was an Arab too, and that he wasn’t Ofer’s enemy and didn’t hate him and didn’t want his room.” She falls quiet and swallows a bitter lump: the memory of her last drive with Sami.

  “At nine the next morning, Ofer had an appointment with our family doctor. At eight, after I sent Adam to school, I bundled up Ofer in a coat, sat him in the car, and drove to Latrun.”

  “Latrun?”

  “I’m a practical girl.”

  With a stern and determined look, she had climbed up the steps, walked down the gravel path, put Ofer down in the center of the huge courtyard at the Armored Corps site, and told him to look.

  He had blinked hazily, blinded by the winter sun. Around him were dozens of tanks, both ancient and new. Tank barrels and machine guns were aimed at him. She held his hand and walked him to one of the larger ones, a Soviet T-55. Ofer stood facing the tank, excited. She asked if he was strong enough to climb on it. He replied in amazement: “Am I allowed?” She helped him climb up the turret, then clambered up after him. He stood there, swaying, looked fearfully around, and asked, “Is this ours?”

  “Yes.”

  “You mean, all this?”

  “Yes, and there’s lots more, we have loads of these.”

  Ofer waved his arm in the air over the semicircle of tanks in front of him. Some of them had been discontinued as long ago as the Second World War, metal toads and iron tortoises, antiquated booty tanks from at least three wars. He asked to climb on another tank, and another, and another. He ran his fingers in awe over tracks, firing platforms, equipment chambers, and transmissions and rode like a cavalier on the barrels. At ten-thirty they both sat down in the restaurant at the Latrun gas station, where Ofer devoured a huge Greek salad and a three-egg omelet.

  “Maybe it was a little primitive, my instant treatment, but it was definitely effective.” Then she adds drily, “Besides, at the time I thought that what was good enough for a whole country was good enough for my child.”

  In the heart of a pasture, at the foot of a giant lone oak tree, a man is lying on the ground. His head rests on a large rock, a backpack sits beside him, and Ora’s blue notebook peeks out of one of its pockets.

  They stand awkwardly by his side, afraid to wake him, yet drawn to the notebook. Ora snatches her glasses off her face and hides them in her fanny pack. She quickly runs her fingers through her disheveled hair to tidy it. She and Avram try to understand—exchanging looks and furrowed brows—how the man has managed to get here ahead of them. Ora, slightly envious, admires the tranquillity and confidence with which he has abandoned himself in this open, invadable space. His dark, masculine face is so exposed. Those glasses lie on his chest like a large butterfly, tied to a string around his neck.

  Avram signals to her that if she has no objection, he will take the notebook. She hesitates. The notebook is nestled comfortably in his backpack pocket.

  But Avram is already approaching, and with a pickpocket’s expertise he fishes the notebook out of the bag and signals to Ora that they should move away quickly if they don’t want to get embroiled in explanations, especially with someone who, at their first encounter, had made the mistake of mentioning the news.

  She hugs the notebook to her heart, soaking up its warmth. The man goes on sleeping. With his mouth half open, he snores, making soft, woolly sounds. His arms and legs are clumsily splayed out. A rug of silver hair rises out of his shirt collar and awakens in Ora a vague longing to put her head there, to give herself over to a deep, infectious slumber, like his own. In a moment’s impulse, she tears out the last page of the notebook and writes, “I took back my notebook. Bye, Ora.” She hesitates, and quickly adds her phone number, in case he wants a more detailed explanation. When she leans over to put the note in his backpack, she notices them again: two identical wedding rings, one on his ring finger, the other on his pinky.

  They slip away quickly, bubbling sweetly with the success of their plot, their eyes glimmering with childlike mischief. As they walk, she leafs through the notebook, amazed to see how much she had written that night by the river. She scans her lines with his eyes.

  The path appears again, bending and twisting cheerfully, and the dog circles around them, sometimes runs alongside them and at other times sprints ahead quickly, then suddenly stops for no reason. She sits on her behind, turns her head back to Ora, the black arches above her eyes slightly raised, and Ora makes a similar gesture.

  “She’s a happy dog, see? She’s smiling at us.”

  But as they walk down the mountain, over heaps of shattered fallen rocks, a bothersome thought nags at her. She could not have written so many pages in one night. A few steps later, next to a huge rock with a mysterious oblong shape, she has to stop. She pulls the notebook out of her backpack, puts her glasses back on, and quickly leafs through the pages. She lets out a little shriek: “Look!” She shows Avram. “Look, it’s his handwriting!”

  Avram studies the pages and his face wrinkles. “Are you sure? Because it looks like—”

  She holds the page close to her face. It looks like her handwriting, or a masculine version of it: straight, neat characters, all at the same angle. “It really does look like mine,” she mumbles awkwardly, feeling naked. “Even I was confused.”

  She turns the pages back, looking for the place where the writers switched. Twice, then three times, she flips past the right point before recognizing her final lines: Aren’t we like a little underground cell in the heart of the ‘situation’? And that really is what we were. For twenty years. Twenty good years. Until we got trapped. Immediately after those words—even without turning the page: such chutzpah! Even without a separating line!—she reads: Next to Dishon River I meet Gilead, 34, an electrician and djembe drummer, who used to be from a moshav in the north. Now lives in Haifa. What does he miss: “Dad was a farmer (pecans), and in slow years he did all kinds of jobs. There was a time when he gathered construction planks from dumps and sold them to an Arab in the village nearby.”

  “What is this?” She thrusts the notebook at Avram’s chest. “What is this supposed to be?” She pulls it back and reads with a choked-up voice:

  “Wood, you see—you have to know how to treat it. You can’t just throw it in the basement. You have to carefully stack big ones on big ones, and small ones on small ones, and put bricks on top of it all, otherwise it warps. But first of all you have to take out the nails. So I would stand with Dad at night in the sheltered area where he kept the wood—

  “What on earth is this? What is all this stuff?” She raises her eyebrows at Avram, but his eyes are closed, and he signals: Keep reading.

  “Dad had a blue undershirt, with holes here. And we had a crowbar that we connected to an extension handle, and we would take an iron chisel and separate, say, two planks nailed together. Dad on this end, me on that end, bracing, and after we separated them, we’d work together on the plank, pulling out nails with the other end of the hammer. It went on for hours, with a little bulb hanging above from a string, and that’s something I still miss to this day, the way I worked with him like that, together.

  “There’s more. Listen, that’s not all. There’s more.

&n
bsp; “Now about the regret. Well, that’s a harder one. I regret lots of things (laughs). I mean, do people just come out and tell you? Look, at some point I had a ticket to Australia, to work on a cotton farm. I had a visa and everything, and then I met a girl here and I canceled my trip. But she was worth it, so it’s just a partial regret.”

  Ora frantically turns the page and her eyes run over the lines. She reads silently: Tamar, my darling, someone lost a notebook with her life story. I’m almost positive I met her earlier, when I walked down to the river. She looked like she was in a bad state. In danger even (she wasn’t alone). Ever since I saw her, I’ve been asking you what to do but you haven’t answered. I’m not used to not getting answers from you, Tammi. It’s all a little confusing. But I am asking the questions you posed at the end: What do we miss most? What do we regret?

  Ora slaps the notebook shut. “What is he? Who is this?”

  Avram’s face is gloomy and distant.

  “Maybe a journalist, interviewing people along his way? But he doesn’t look like one at all.” A doctor, she remembers. He said he was a pediatrician.

  She glances at the pages again: Near Moshav Alma I meet Edna, 39, divorced, a kindergarten teacher, Haifa: “What I miss most is my childhood days in Zichron Yaakov. Originally I’m a Zamarin, that was my maiden name, and I miss the days of innocence, the simplicity we had then. Everything was less complicated. Less, kind of, ‘psychological.’ You wouldn’t believe it to look at me, but I have three grown sons (laughs). It doesn’t show, does it? I married early and divorced even earlier…”

  Ora is sucked in. She turns the pages rapidly and sees, on every page, longings and regrets. “I don’t understand,” she murmurs, feeling deceived. “He looked like such a”—she searches for the right word—“solid man? Simple? Private? Not a man who … who would just walk around asking people these kinds of questions.”

  Avram says nothing. He digs the tip of his shoe into the gravel.

  “And why in my notebook?” Ora asks loudly. “Aren’t there any other notebooks?”

  She spins around and starts to walk away, head held high, pressing the notebook close to her. Avram shrugs his shoulders, looks back for a moment—there’s no one there, the guy must still be asleep—and follows her. He does not see the thin smile of surprise on her lips.

  “Ora—”

  “What?”

  “Didn’t Ofer want to go on a big trip somewhere, after the army?”

  “Let him finish the army first,” she says curtly.

  “Actually, he did talk about that,” she picks up later. “Maybe to India.”

  “India?” Avram bites back a smile and buries an unruly thought: He should come see me at the restaurant. I can tell him all about India.

  “He hasn’t decided yet. They were thinking of traveling together, he and Adam.”

  “The two of them? Are they really that—”

  “Close. Those two are each other’s best friend.” A seedling of pride grows inside her: At least in that realm she’d been successful. Her two sons were soul mates.

  “And is that—is that normal?”

  “What?”

  “For two brothers, at that age …”

  “They were always like that. Almost from the beginning.”

  “But didn’t you say that … Weren’t you telling me that Ilan and Ofer—”

  “That changed, too. Things kept changing in that period. I just don’t know how I’m going to have time to tell you everything.”

  It’s a bit like describing how a river flows, she realizes. Like painting a whirlwind, or flames. It’s an occurrence, she thinks, happily recalling one of his old words: A family is a perpetual occurrence.

  And she shows him: Adam at six and a bit, Ofer almost three. Adam lies on the lawn at the house in Tzur Hadassah. His arms are spread-eagled and his eyes are closed. He is dead. Ofer goes in and out of the screen door, and the slamming wakes Ora from a rare afternoon nap. She looks out the window and sees Ofer bringing presents to Adam, sacrificial offerings to bring him back to life. He takes out his stuffed animals, toy cars, a kaleidoscope, board games, and marbles. He piles his favorite books and a few choice videotapes around Adam. He is serious and worried, almost frightened. Again and again he toddles up the four concrete steps into the house and back to Adam to place precious objects around him. Adam does not move. Only when Ofer is inside the house does he raise his head a little and open one eye to examine the latest offering. She hears heavy panting. Ofer pulls out his favorite blanket and places it tenderly on Adam’s legs. Then he looks at Adam pleadingly and says something she cannot hear. Adam lies motionless. Ofer makes fists, looks around, and runs back into the house again. Adam wriggles his toes under Ofer’s blanket. How cruel he can be, she thinks. Yet his cruelty is so hypnotic that she cannot put an end to Ofer’s torture. Outside her closed door she hears sounds of effort and struggle. Something heavy is being dragged. Chairs are pushed aside, and Ofer breathes rhythmically, grunting a little. A moment later his mattress appears at the top of the stairs, towering over his head. Ofer feels for the top step with his foot. Ora freezes, careful not to laugh so as not to frighten him and make him fall. Adam opens a slit in one eye and an admixture of amazement and awe emerges on his face as he watches his little brother carrying almost his own body’s weight on his head. Ofer walks down the steps, rocking back and forth under the clumsy mattress. He groans, pants, and propels himself forward with trembling legs. He reaches Adam and collapses beside him on the mattress. Adam props himself up on his elbows and looks at Ofer with deep, grateful, open eyes.

  It seemed to Ora, as she watched from the window, that in fact Adam was not being cruel but rather testing Ofer, to find out if he could sustain a far greater mission, which Ora could not identify at the time; she still thought it was merely the usual, sufficiently complicated mission of being Adam’s little brother.

  “What do you mean?” Avram asks hesitantly.

  “Wait, I’ll get there.”

  “So you’re not dead anymore?” Ofer asked. “I’m alive,” said Adam, and he got up and started to run around the yard with his arms outstretched, declaring that he was alive and kicking. Ofer pranced along behind him, smiling, exhausted.

  “Ilan may have betrayed Adam, but Ofer never did,” she explains.

  Small, thin, and stuttering, enchanting everyone with his gaze, his large blue eyes, his golden hair, his wondrous smile. He had certainly sensed that he could capture hearts effortlessly, simply with his sweetness and the light that shone from his face. And obviously, she thinks, he’d already noticed that every time he went anywhere with Adam, everyone’s eyes immediately skipped over his older, restless, slippery, bothersome brother and were drawn to him. “Just think about what a temptation that is for a boy—to rake in the whole pot at his brother’s expense. But he never did. Never. Always, in any situation, he chose Adam.”

  “From his first step,” Avram reminds her generously.

  “That’s right, you remember,” she says happily.

  “I remember everything.” He reaches out to embrace her shoulders. They walk on that way, side by side, his parents.

  They are nine and six, one tall and thin, the other still small, walking and talking feverishly, gesticulating, climbing on top of each other’s ideas. Weird, complicated conversations about orcs and gnomes, vampires and zombies. “But, Adam,” Ofer squeaks, “I don’t get it. A wolfman is a boy born from a family of wolves?”

  “It could be that way,” Adam replies gravely, “but it could be that he’s just got lycanthropy.”

  Ofer is stunned for a moment, then tries out the word and stumbles. Adam explains at length about the disease that turns humans, or quasi-humans, into human-animals. “Say ‘lycanthropy,’ ” Adam says, his voice hardening, and Ofer repeats the word.

  Before going to sleep, in the dark, in their beds they talk: “Is the green dragon, who breathes clouds of chlorine gas and whose chances of knowing how to talk are t
hirty percent, is he more dangerous than the black one, who lives in swamps and salt flats and breathes pure acid?”

  Their door is open just a crack, and Ora, with a pile of laundry in her arms, stops to listen.

  “Crazy Death is a creature that has completely lost its sanity.”

  “Really?” Ofer whispers reverentially.

  “And listen what else I made up. He can turn into a crazy undead, whose whole purpose is to kill, and anyone who gets killed by him turns into a crazy zombie in one week and walks around with Crazy Death everywhere.”

  Ofer’s voice is hoarse: “But are they real?”

  “Let me finish! Once a day, all of Crazy Death’s crazy zombies unite into a huge ball of death-craziness.”

  “But it’s not real, is it?”

  Adam replies sweetly, “I made it up, and that’s why it obeys only me.”

  “So make something up for me, too,” Ofer asks urgently. “Make something up against it for me.”

  “Maybe tomorrow,” Adam murmurs.

  “Now, now! I won’t sleep all night if you don’t make up something for me!”

  “Tomorrow, tomorrow.”

  Ora hears the thin wires that twist through both voices and interweave them: wires of fear, of bared cruelty and submissive pleading, the power to save and the refusal to save, which is also, perhaps, the fear of being saved. And all these also come from her, even Adam’s cruelty, which angers her, which is so foreign to her, yet at that moment it strangely excites her, animates her wildly and seems to reveal something about herself that she had not dared to know. The two of them, Adam and Ofer, unraveling from the root of her soul in a double reel.

  “Good night,” Adam says and starts to snore loudly.

  Ofer whines, “Adam, don’t sleep, don’t sleep, I’m scared of Crazy Death! Can I get in your bed?”

  Eventually Adam stops snoring and invents a Skort for him, or a Stark, or a hawk-man, and describes his characteristics and heroic properties in detail. As he talks, a new tenderness enters his voice, and with a rustle in her back Ora can feel how much he enjoys buttressing Ofer, enveloping him in the protective pillows of his imagination, his one and only source of power. And that padding, the kindness and compassion and protection that now emanate from Adam, are also a little bit hers, until suddenly, in the midst of Adam’s speech, she hears Ofer’s soft hums of sleep.