To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  Finally, after pressure and threats—taking away his computer privileges was the most effective method—they overcame Adam’s resistance and took him to see a psychologist.

  After three meetings the man summoned Ora and Ilan. “Adam seems like an intelligent boy with a lot of potential. A boy with strong character. Very strong.” His voice sounded weak. “The truth is, he sat here on this chair for three hours and didn’t say a word.”

  Ora was amazed. “He didn’t speak? What about the gestures?”

  “No gestures. He just sat here like a statue. He looked at me and barely blinked.”

  Ora suddenly remembered that when Ilan was a boy, he had blackballed his whole class.

  “Not an easy experience,” the man said. “Three whole sessions. I tried this, I tried that, but there’s some kind of resistance in him.” He tightened his hand into a fist. “A bunker, a sphinx.”

  “So what do you suggest?” Ilan asked rancorously.

  “Of course we can try another few sessions,” the man replied without looking in their eyes. “I’m certainly willing, but I have to say there’s something in the interaction—”

  “Tell us what we should do,” Ilan interrupted. The vein in his temple was turning blue. “I want you tell me in simple words, what—do—we—do—now!”

  Ora looked in despair at the iron layer descending over Ilan’s face.

  The man blinked as he spoke. “I’m not certain there’s an immediate solution here. I’m just trying to think out loud with you. Perhaps it would be more successful with someone else? Perhaps a woman therapist?”

  “Why a woman?” Ora sat back in her chair, feeling accused. “Why does it have to be a woman?”

  One evening, Ora sat poring over receipts for her income-tax return—every two months she had to report her income from the physiotherapy clinic (“But patients I see at home, I don’t report on principle,” she tells Avram with a proud sense of conspiracy between two mutineers; he doesn’t even carry an identity card!)—when Adam came up to her and asked her to help him tidy his room. This was an unusual request, especially in those days, and the mess in his room was intolerable, but she had to finish her taxes. “Does it have to be now?” she asked irritably. “Why didn’t you ask me an hour ago, when I wasn’t busy? Why is it that only my time is expendable in this household?”

  Adam danced and fidgeted away in his complex of tics. Ora tried to keep sorting through her receipts, but she could not concentrate. More than anything, it depressed her to think that he had walked away without arguing. Without saying a word. As though he knew he could not waste even one drop of energy now.

  As she calculated her mileage and per diem expenses, she could sense that Adam was in his room crumbling into shards of despair and loneliness. She knew his disintegration was sucking her in too, and that soon it might dissolve her and Ilan as a couple, and the entire family. We’re so weak, she thought, staring at the neat little piles of paper. How can the two of us be so paralyzed, instead of really fighting for him? It’s like—the thought punctured her—it’s like we can feel that it’s … what? Our punishment? For what?

  “For you we fought a lot harder,” she says to Avram.

  Avram tightens his hands around the hot cup of coffee. His body is tense, his eyes enthralled by the last glimmers of light on the stream.

  Ora got up and almost ran to Adam’s room with a foreboding heart. But he was just standing there in the middle of the room he shared with Ofer, surrounded by incredible heaps of clothes, toy parts, notebooks, towels, and balls, leaning slightly forward, frozen.

  “What’s going on, Adam?”

  “I don’t know, I’m stuck.”

  “Is it your back?”

  “Everything.”

  In mid-motion, while trying to erect barriers between one fragmentary movement and the next, he must have been trapped into cessation. Ora hurried over and hugged him, and rubbed his neck and back. His body was rigid. For several moments she unfroze him, just as she used to do for Avram in rehab, and miraculously did for her patients, restoring the body’s memory, replaying the music of its movement. Adam finally loosened a little, and she lowered him into a chair and sat on the rug at his feet.

  “Does it still hurt?”

  “No, it’s okay now.”

  “Come on, let’s do it together.”

  She picked up objects and clothes off the floor and handed them to him so he could put them away. He obeyed, moving robotically to the closets and shelves, then back to her. She did not say a thing about his movements and gestures. She could not stop looking.

  Then Ofer arrived home from a weeklong vacation at his grandparents’ in Haifa and eagerly joined in the operation. It seemed as if a bright light had been turned on in the room, and the bad thoughts retreated. Even Adam’s face lit up. Ora, who knew how much Ofer hated untidiness and dirtiness, was amazed at how he had let Adam turn their room into a dump. He’d never complained even once that whole month. Perhaps it was time to give them separate rooms. They had talked about it a year ago. But she knew what that would mean to Adam, and she had no doubt that Ofer would refuse now, too.

  With Ofer’s help, she turned the chore into a game. She asked questions about each item she fished out of the pile, and Adam and Ofer answered. They all laughed. Adam laughed tightly, with pursed lips, and every titter obligated him to perform a series of acts that probably canceled out the effect of the laughter. For two whole hours Ora sat on the floor and sorted through the material culture of their childhood. Games they no longer played, drawing papers and work papers, crumpled notebooks, depleted batteries, old election ballots Ora had once stolen for them from the polling booth, books about soccer players and TV stars, worn-out gym shoes, LEGOs, various amulets, Boglins and ugly monsters that had once filled their world, weapons and fossils, torn posters, towels, and socks with holes in them. Some toys and games they refused to give up, and they were truly hurt when she suggested giving them away to children who were smaller and had less. Ora learned for the first time about a complicated emotional relationship between her sons and a bald stuffed bear made of wool. There was also a particularly disgusting rubber snake and a small broken flashlight that reminded them of nighttime adventures she never imagined had occurred behind their closed door when she thought they were asleep.

  Gradually, despite the struggles and the haggling over every old toy or moth-eaten shirt from some Spanish soccer team, the room emptied out. They filled up huge trash bags and stacked them by the door, to give away or throw away. She sensed some relief in Adam: his movements became rounder, almost at ease. He walked this way and that in the room without interrupting his steps or speech to make any gestures. No commas or periods with an elbow or a knee. Finally, when the tidying was done and Ora got up to order a pizza, he went up to her and hugged her gently. A simple hug.

  But the reprieve lasted only a few moments. “You know what Ilan says: ‘Happiness is always premature.’ ”

  “That’s not Ilan’s, that’s mine!”

  “Yours?”

  “Of course! Don’t you remember how I always used to …”

  The dog lifts her head off her paws and looks up at Avram in surprise. Ora watches the little tempest brewing inside him and thinks: This is what you get angry about, of all the things he took from you?

  She went on: after the lull, Adam was compelled to wash his mouth and fingers at the sink again, and you could practically see the tightropes he walked on. This time Ora’s despair was intolerable, and just as she was about to burst out and scream at him with everything that had built up inside her, she put down her slice of pizza, left the boys, who were now chattering in their usual way, and walked into Ilan’s study, where she sat by the table and let her head collapse on the receipts and invoices.

  A heavy shadow settled in her mind. She wanted to call Ilan and ask him to come home from work. She wanted him to come home and hold her, because she was falling. What was he doing out and about when everyth
ing here was coming apart? Lately he’d hardly been at home. He left early in the morning, before the boys got up, and came home at midnight, when they were already asleep. Where are you? How can we both be this paralyzed? How can we disintegrate so quickly? Why does all this look like a curse that has waited patiently for years—the revenge of the wicked witch who wasn’t invited to the birthday party—to hurt us precisely when things are good? But she didn’t have the energy to reach for the phone.

  “We’re not treating it,” she told him that night in the living room as she lay on the rug, exhausted. Ilan was sprawled on the couch, his long legs dangling over the arm. He looked weak and tired. “What’s happening to us? Tell me, explain to me, why can’t we do anything?”

  “Like what?”

  “Force him to get treatment, drag him to a doctor, a psychiatrist, I don’t know. I feel that the fear is paralyzing me, and you’re not helping. Where are you?”

  “Make an appointment for him with someone else.” He seemed frightened. Something in his face, his chin, suddenly reminded her of the days after Adam’s birth, right before he left.

  Tomorrow, she swore, first thing in the morning. She reached out and squeezed Ilan’s arm. “We don’t even know what he feels. I try to talk with him and he runs away. Just think how frightening this is for him.”

  “And for Ofer. We’re so focused on Adam that Ofer is being neglected.”

  “I just think that if it was some kind of normal danger, like a fire, or even a terrorist, something familiar, logical, wouldn’t I jump up to rescue him? Wouldn’t I give my own life for him? But this …”

  Adam came out of his room to get a drink in the kitchen. From the dark living room, Ora and Ilan followed his progress to the fridge. When he finally managed to bring the water bottle up to his lips, Ilan cleared his throat and Adam turned to them in surprise.

  “Hey, what-are-you-do-ing-there?” His voice was monotonous, angular, bionic.

  “Nothing,” said Ilan. “Just resting. How are you doing, sweetie?”

  “Do-ing-great,” he said dismissively. He turned and fidgeted his way back to his room, lifting his knees as he walked in a mechanical imitation of human motion, subsiding into a stutter of Adam.

  And then she knew. A membrane inside her tore open all at once and she knew that something completely new had been revealed to Adam—some new knowledge or power. It suddenly seemed so clear. You only had to look at him to see it: the force of negation, of collapse, of absence, had pulled him inside and was consuming him from within. “That is what Adam was discovering, and it must have been a huge force, don’t you think?” she asks Avram in a hoarse voice. “The force of no, the force of not-being?”

  Avram does not move. His hands almost crush the empty coffee mug. In the first few months after he came home—after his hospitalization and rehab—he used to walk the streets of Tel Aviv and imagine himself as one single bee amid a huge swarm. It was good for him to know that he could not understand the actions of the entire swarm.

  • • •

  He had one mission: to be. He needed only to move, eat, shit, and sleep. Other parts of the swarm might be experiencing emotions, or gaining knowledge or an entire consciousness, or perhaps they were not. Perhaps that wasn’t happening anywhere. That was not his business. He was just one insignificant cell, easily replaced, unflinchingly destructible.

  Sometimes, though rarely, he did different things, opposite things: he would talk to himself out loud as he walked, intentionally, as though he were alone in the world, or as though the whole world were occurring only inside his mind, a figment of his imagination, which also created those boys making fun of him, the old men pointing at him, the car that screeched to a halt only inches away from him.

  When Adam shut his door behind him, Ora got up and went into the kitchen. She opened the fridge with Adam’s motions, held up the water bottle to her mouth as he had done—elbow, wrist, fingers—closed her lips over the opening of the family bottle, drank, and navigated her soul to Adam. And then she knew, for one instant—enough for a lifetime—what it is like when you cannot see the line but only the dots that create it, the darkness in the blink of an eye, the chasm between one moment and the next.

  “Yes,” Avram says softly, and she thinks he has not been breathing for several minutes.

  She put the bottle back in the fridge, reenacting her son’s fragmentary movements, and forgot about Ilan, who lay watching her from the dark. Here was the fall between two steps. Here was the whisper of the dismantling. Here was how her Adam watched with wide eyes and, perhaps, saw what no one was allowed to see: how he himself could crumble into nothing. Into the dust from which he had come. He saw how tenuously it was all held together.

  She sat down in the dark next to Ilan, who quickly wrapped her in his arms and clung to her with strange fervor and, she thought, a hint of awe.

  “What?” Ilan asked in a whisper. “What did you feel?”

  She did not answer. Afraid to wake up, afraid it would disappear, afraid that the place in which she had known Adam would melt away like a dream.

  • • •

  Ora yawns and enjoys seeing Avram unwittingly repeat her yawn. “Let’s continue tomorrow,” she says. Although he would like to hear more, Avram gets up and clears away their dinner, picks up the trash, and rinses the dishes, then rolls out his sleeping bag near hers. He does all this in silence, and she sees the thoughts and the questions darting around his forehead and tells herself: Tomorrow, tomorrow. She goes behind some bushes to do her business and thinks of Scheherazade, and then they both undress, back to back, and zip themselves up in their sleeping bags, and lie with their eyes open by the glowing embers of the fire. Avram, restless, gets up and fills two bottles at the river, douses the embers, and lies down again.

  As soon as the fire goes out, all the creatures around the river awake and a chorus of toads, night birds, jackals, foxes, and crickets erupts into a deafening commotion. They wail, screech, snort, caw, yowl, and chirp. Ora and Avram lie there feeling the entire riverbed rustle and stir around them. Small and large animals pass next to them and over them, running or flying, and Ora whispers, “What’s going on?” Avram whispers back, “They’ve all gone mad.” The dog stands up restlessly, her eyes aglimmer in the dark. Ora needs Avram to come and lie next to her, even just hold her hand and calm her with a caress, with long, quiet breaths, the way Ilan does—did—but she doesn’t say a word. She won’t push him, and he does not offer, but the dog moves closer, step by cautious step, until finally she is standing beside her. Ora reaches out and strokes her fur in the dark, and the fur trembles with tension because of the sounds all around, or because of the human touch, her first contact in such a long time. Ora strokes and strokes, rubbing delightedly, feeling the warmth of this new body, but the dog suddenly recoils, unable to bear it any longer, and goes off to lounge not far away and watches Ora.

  The three of them lie quiet and slightly afraid, and the commotion gradually dies down and gives way to the hum of mosquitoes. Meaty and impudent, they hack at every exposed inch of flesh. Ora hears Avram slap himself and curse, and she curls up in her sleeping bag and zips it around her head, leaving only a tiny opening for air, and she sinks down into herself, sleepily arranges her head so it nestles in her favorite place, in the round of Ilan’s shoulder, and then, subtly, like the gushing of a small spring, a longing awakens in her for the house in Ein Karem. She yearns for their house, for the scents embedded in it and the textures woven through the window lattices at different times of day, and for Ilan’s and the boys’ voices rolling through the hallways. She walks through the house, room by room.

  When Ofer surfaces in her, she gently moves him away, tells him it’s okay, not to worry, she’s doing what needs to be done. He shouldn’t think about her right now. He should look after himself there, and she’ll look after him here.

  A few months after she and Ilan separated, she had gone back for one last time to the empty house. She opened t
he blinds and the windows in all the rooms, turned on all the faucets, watered the neglected garden, rolled up the rugs, dusted, swept the floor, and washed it thoroughly. She spent almost a whole morning there, without sitting down or drinking a glass of water. When she was finished cleaning, she drew the blinds and closed the windows and turned off the power and walked out.

  It should at least be clean, she thought. It’s not the house’s fault we broke up.

  Avram’s voice came through: “Ora, are they similar?”

  She has almost fallen asleep, and his question shocks her awake. “Who?”

  “The boys. Today. Are they similar?”

  “To who?”

  “No, I mean … to each other. Their personalities.”

  She sits up and rubs her eyes. He is sitting up bundled in his sleeping bag.

  “Sorry, I woke you up,” he mumbles.

  “It’s okay, I was barely asleep. But what’s the sudden …” Her tongue steals a circle of delight around his “boys.” As though he has finally accepted her own vision of them, even her tone of voice when she thinks about them. She watches him affectionately. For a moment it seems possible: Uncle Avram. “Maybe we should make some tea?”

  “Do you want some?” He jumps up and runs to gather branches in the dark. She hears him walk into a bush, curse, slip on the wet stones, grow farther away and then closer. She holds in her laughter.

  “Yes and no,” she says afterward, with a cup of tea warming her hands and face. “They’re completely different in the way they look, I told you. On the other hand, you couldn’t have any doubt about them being brothers. Although Adam is more—”

  “More what?”

  She stops. Afraid that now, in her state, in the state of her relationship with Adam, she may get carried away into all sorts of unnecessary and unfair comparisons between Adam and Ofer. How could she—