To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  “The cop’s name will be Speed,” Ofer says.

  “And the thief?”

  “Let’s call him Typhoon.”

  “Okay.”

  “Speed rides a motorbike and he has a hovercraft.”

  “And the thief?” Adam asks weakly.

  “The thief will have long hair, and on his shirt there’s a black star, and he has a bazooka and a laser drill.”

  “Okay,” Adam says.

  Ora puts her hand to her neck. This is an ancient game. They used to play it—how long ago? Two years? Three? They would lie on the rug and make up pairs of cops and robbers, or orcs and halflings. Except that back then Adam was the creator and Ofer the nodding pupil.

  “Don’t,” Ofer says casually. “I’m doing the fingers today.”

  “Did I do the fingers?”

  “You didn’t notice.”

  “Then do it already.”

  “Wait. You have to pay a fine, ’cause you did mine.”

  “What’s the fine?”

  “The fine,” Ofer answers thoughtfully, “is that I’m taking the eye thing from you too, where you blink hard and open them.”

  “But I have to do that one,” Adam whispers.

  “Well, I took it.”

  “I don’t have anything left.”

  “You have the hands and feet left, and the one where you blow.”

  There is a long silence. Then Ofer picks up as if nothing has happened. “Now I’m bringing in a cop with an iron fist. He’s called Mac Boom Boom, and he can open his shirt—”

  “How many days are you taking mine for?”

  “Three days not counting today.”

  “So today I can still do it?”

  “No, today neither of us can.”

  “Neither of us? Then who’s going to do it?”

  “No one. It doesn’t get done today.”

  “Is that allowed?” Adam whispers sadly.

  “Whatever we decide,” says Ofer in a Dungeon Master’s voice.

  Ora tells Avram she will probably never know what really went on behind Adam and Ofer’s closed door during that whole period. Because what, in fact, did happen? Two kids, one almost thirteen, the other just over nine, spent every day together, usually just the two of them, for three or four weeks during summer vacation. They played computer games and foosball, chattered for hours, made up characters, and every so often they cooked shakshuka or pasta together. “And while they did all that—don’t ask me exactly how it happened—one of them saved the other.”

  “You were asking if they’re alike?” His question from the night before suddenly pops into her head.

  “Yes, that’s what I asked.”

  “Ofer, I think, is a little more … Actually, a little less, um …”

  “What?”

  “Oh, it’s complicated. Look, let me put it this way: Adam is kind of … Kind of what? What am I trying to say?” She pouts. “It’s funny how hard it suddenly is to describe them. Almost everything I want to say about them sounds so inaccurate.” She shakes herself off and gathers her thoughts. “Adam—I’m only talking about outward appearances now, right? Well, he’s less, say, he draws less attention at first glance. You know? But on the other hand, when you really get to know him, he’s a very charismatic young man. The most charismatic. He’s the kind of guy who can—”

  “What does he look like?”

  “You mean, you want me to describe him?”

  “You know me—I like details.”

  The detaileater: a distant relative of the anteater, a virtually extinct subspecies of the order Pilosa, survives exclusively on details. That was how Avram had defined himself in a booklet he put together in his senior year at high school, “The Class of ’69 Encyclopedia of Human Fauna.” It contained his descriptions of the students and teachers, with precise illustrations, arranged by their zoological categorizations.

  “He’s a little bit short, relatively speaking. I told you that. And he has very black hair, like Ilan’s, but he parts it in the middle and it comes down in a kind of wave over his left ear.” Ora illustrates. Her face sparkles at Avram.

  “What?”

  “Nothing at all,” she answers and shrugs one shoulder provocatively. But the more Avram comes back to life—quiet and heavy and lacking as he is—the more he magnetizes her to an internal precision, a private nuance that spreads the kind of warm ripples through her body she hasn’t felt in years.

  Two young couples pass by. The women nod hello and look at them curiously. The men are immersed in a loud conversation. “We’re mostly into biometric identification smart cards,” the taller one says. “We’re working on a card called BDA, and what it does is that a Palestinian who wants to get in just has to hold his hand and face under the biometric reader. Get it? No contact with soldiers, no talking, no nothing. Clean as a whistle. CWC—communication without contact.”

  “So what’s ‘BDA’ stand for?” asks the second man.

  The first one snickers. “Actually, it’s an acronym for biometric access device, but we realized that that came out BAD, so we changed it.”

  “And his left ear,” Ora says when the people have gone, “is always exposed. It’s cute, like a little pearl.”

  She shuts her eyes: Adam. His cheeks still look a little red beneath his shadow of stubble, a childhood souvenir. And he has long sideburns. And big, bitter eyes.

  “His eyes are what stand out most. They’re big, like Ofer’s, but completely different, more sunken and black. All in all we’re a family of eyes. And his lips—” She stops suddenly.

  “What about them?”

  “No, I think they’re beautiful.” She concentrates on her hands. “Yes.”

  “But?”

  “But … but here, on the top one, he has a sort of tic, a permanent one. Not a tic, but an expression—”

  “What sort of expression?”

  “Well …” She takes a deep breath, girding her face. The time has come.

  “You see what I have here?”

  He nods without looking.

  “So it’s this. Except his is turned upward.”

  “Yes.”

  They skip from stone to stone across a shallow creek, holding on to each other every so often.

  “Tons of flies today,” Avram says.

  “It must be the heat.”

  “Yes. This evening it will be more—”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “What?”

  “Does it really stand out?”

  “No, no.”

  “Because you didn’t say anything about it.”

  “I hardly noticed.”

  “I had this thing, it was nothing, something in the nerves on my face, about a month after Ilan left. It happened in the middle of the night. I was alone at home. I was terrified. Does it look awful?”

  “I’m telling you, you can hardly see it.”

  “But I can feel it.” She touches the right corner of her upper lip, pushes it slightly up. “I keep thinking my face is falling to one side.”

  “But you really can’t see anything, Ora’leh.”

  “It’s just a couple of millimeters that I can’t feel. The sensation in the rest of my lips is totally normal.”

  “Yes.”

  “It should go away at some point. It won’t always be like this.”

  “Of course.”

  They walk down a narrow path among orchards of strawberry and walnut trees.

  “Avram, tell me something.”

  “What?”

  “Stop for a minute.”

  He stands waiting. His shoulders hunch up.

  “Would you mind giving me a little kiss?”

  He comes up close to her, rigid and bearish. Without looking at her, he hugs her, and plants a decisive kiss on her lips.

  And lingers, and lingers.

  “Ahhh.” She breathes softly.

  “A-ah.” He sighs in surprise.

  “Avram.”

  “Wh
at?”

  “Did you feel anything?”

  “No, everything’s normal.”

  She laughs. “ ‘Normal’!”

  “I mean, like you used to be.”

  “You still remember?”

  “I remember everything.”

  “Remember how I get dazed from kissing?”

  “I remember.”

  “And that sometimes I almost pass out from kissing?”

  “Yes.”

  “You be careful when you kiss me.”

  “Yes.”

  “How you loved me, Avram.”

  He kisses her again. His lips are as soft as she remembered. She smiles as they kiss, and his lips move with hers.

  “One more thing—”

  “Hmmmmm …”

  “Do you think we’ll ever sleep together?”

  He presses her against his body and she feels his force. She thinks again of how much good this journey is doing him, and her.

  They walk on, at first hand in hand, then they let go. Threads of new awkwardness stretch out between them, and nature itself winks behind their backs and plays nasty tricks on them, scattering yellow clods of asters and groundsel, blanketing purple clover and pink flax, erecting stalks of huge—but smelly—purple arum flowers, sprinkling red buttercups, and hanging baby oranges and lemons on the trees around them.

  “Very arousing,” Ora says. “This walk, and the air. Isn’t it? Don’t you feel it?”

  He laughs, embarrassed, and Ora—even her eyebrows suddenly feel warm.

  He’s known Neta for thirteen years. She claims that she sat several evenings in the pub where he worked, on HaYarkon Street, and he did not take his eyes off her. He says he didn’t even notice her until she threw up and passed out on the bar one night. She was nineteen and weighed eighty-two pounds, and he carried her in his arms, against her will, on a stormy winter night—not a single cabdriver would take them—to a doctor friend in Jaffa. She squirmed in his arms the whole way, her gaunt limbs swirled around him and hit him mercilessly, and she hurled vile curses at him. When she ran out of those, she worked her way through the insults showered upon Sholem Aleichem by his stepmother, in the alphabetical order in which he had recorded them, calling him “carbuncle,” “forefather of all impurities,” “leper,” and “purloiner.” Avram himself mumbled the occasional choice curse to fill in what she omitted. When these ran out too, she started to pinch him painfully, and as she did so she laid out in detail the various uses one could make of his flesh, his fat, and his bones. Here Avram raised an eyebrow, and when she told him about the strips of wax she would be glad to produce from him, Avram—who never forgot a line he read—mumbled into her ear, “It was the idea also, that this same spermaceti was that quickening humor of the Greenland Whale.” This was a sentence he and Ilan had loved to quote in their youth, when Moby-Dick served as a particularly fertile ground for quotations. The tangle of vipers in his arms fell silent at once, gave a cross-eyed glance at the heavy monster exhaling condensation into the downpour, and noted, “There are some similarities between you and the book.”

  “She was nineteen?” Ora asks. And thinks: I was sixteen when we met.

  Avram shrugs. “She left home at sixteen and wandered around Israel and the whole world. The gypsy from next door. About two months ago was the first time she ever rented a real apartment. It was in Jaffa. Yuppified, you know.”

  Ora doesn’t feel like talking about Neta now.

  Reluctantly, she learns that Neta always looks starved—“not necessarily for food, but a general, existential starvation,” Avram explains with a laugh—and that her fingers almost always shake, maybe from drugs or maybe because, Avram quotes with a smile, “life zaps her at high voltage.” For years, she spent every summer living in an ancient Simca that a friend had left her. She also had a small tent, which she pitched whenever she found a place she wasn’t asked to leave. As he talks, the name “Neta” begins to etch a circle of frost in Ora’s gut, even though the sun is shining. What is this flood of speech suddenly coming out of him? What is he doing sticking Neta between us now?

  “How does she make a living?” (Be generous, she commands.)

  “This and that. It’s not really clear. She needs very little. You wouldn’t believe how little she needs. And she paints.”

  Ora’s heart sinks a little lower. Of course she paints.

  “Maybe you saw in my apartment, on the walls? That’s her.”

  The huge, stirring charcoal drawings—how had she not asked him about them before? Perhaps because she had guessed the answer—prophets breast-feeding goats and lambs, an old man bending over a girl turning into a crane, a maiden being born from a wound in the chest of a godlike deer. She thinks about the drawing of a woman with a mohawk, and asks if that’s how Neta looks.

  Avram chuckles. “Once, a long time ago. I didn’t like it, and now she has long hair, all the way down to here.”

  “Yes. And the empty albums I saw at your place, the ones without any photos—are those hers, too?”

  “No, those are mine.”

  “Do you collect them?”

  “I collect, I search, I aggregate. Things people throw out.”

  “Aggregate?”

  “You know, I put together all sorts of alte zachen.”

  They are walking down the side of a cliff. The river, far below, is invisible. The dog leads, Ora walks behind her, and Avram brings up the rear as he tells her about his little projects. “It’s nothing, just something to pass the time. Like photo albums that people throw away, or albums that belonged to people who died.” He takes the photos out and puts in ones of other people, other families. He copies some of the photos onto tin boxes, right on the rust, or on the sides of ancient, rusty engines. “I’m very interested in rust lately. That place, or that moment, when iron turns to rust.”

  It’s a good thing you found me, then, Ora thinks.

  The path descends into the channel again, and suddenly Avram is alert and bright. He excitedly describes an atlas he found in the trash, printed in England in 1943. “If you looked at it, you wouldn’t understand anything about what happened in the world back then, because all the countries are still in their old borders, there’s no annihilation of the Jews, no occupation of Europe, no war, and I can sit looking at it for hours. So on the corners of the maps, I stuck pieces of a Russian newspaper I found in the dump, The Stalinist, also from ’forty-three, and there the war is described in detail, with battle maps and vast numbers of casualties. When I put those two objects together, I can really—Ora … I can feel electricity going through my body.”

  She discovers that he and Neta do joint projects sometimes, too. “It’s this thing we have going together,” he says, blushing. They look for old objects and junk on the street, then they fantasize about what they could do with the things. “I’m always a little more practical,” he says with an apologetic snort, “and she’s much bolder.” He inadvertently drops himself from the story and describes some of what Neta has done in her brief life, her trials and tribulations, the skills she’s learned, her hospitalizations and adventures, and the men who have passed through her life. Ora thinks he is describing the life of a seventy-year-old. “She’s so brave,” he says admiringly, “much braver than I am. She may be the bravest person I’ve ever met.” He laughs softly when he remembers that Neta says she’s composed mainly of fears. Fears and cellulite.

  Ora sees the crossed-out black lines over his bed, and a thick streak runs from them to the charcoal drawings in his living room. A spark lights up in her: “Avram, does she know?”

  “About Ofer?”

  Ora nods quickly. Her heart starts to pound.

  “Yes, I told her.”

  She walks ahead in confusion, with her hands held out. She steps into the stream, balancing on the slippery stones. This is the Amud River, she thinks. I hiked here in high school, on a sea-to-sea trip. It seems like it was yesterday. As if just yesterday I was still a young girl. She rubs h
er eyes. The hillside across the way is covered with thick growth, and a family of hyrax dots the rocks. The scene blurs, and she finds it’s best to look only to the next steps: pay attention, you’re going up again, walking on the rock ledge, and the river below plunges into a waterfall, and just don’t fall, hold on to this railing, and Neta knows.

  The dog comes over and rubs against Ora’s leg as if to encourage her. Ora leans down and strokes her head distractedly. Neta knows. The secret bubble has been burst. The sealed, stifling bubble that Ora has taught herself to breathe in. Avram himself has punctured it. A stream of outside air bursts in. Such relief: a new, deep breath.

  “What did she say?” Ora asks as her legs almost fail her.

  “What did she say? She said I should go and see him.”

  “Oh.” She lets out a thin, involuntary coo. “That’s what she said?”

  “And I thought, when I called you, that evening, before you came. That’s what I wanted to tell you.”

  “What?”

  “That.”

  “What?” She is almost suffocating. Her entire body hunches over the dog, burying ten trembling fingers in her fur.

  “That if he’s finished with the army,” Avram says, hewing word by word, “I would like to, but only if you and Ilan didn’t have any objection …”

  “What? Say it already.”

  “Maybe see him one day.”

  “Ofer.”

  “Just once.”

  “You would like to see him.”

  “Even from a distance.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Without him … Look, I don’t want to interfere with your—”

  “And you’re telling me this now?”

  He shrugs his shoulders and plants his feet firmly on the rock.

  “And when you phoned”—she finally gets it—“I told you he was …”

  “Going back there, yes. And then I no longer—”

  “Oh.” She moans, holds her head in both hands and presses hard and curses this war from the depths of her heart—this eternal war that has once again managed to shove its way into her soul. She opens her mouth wide and her lips roll back to expose her gums, and the cord of a sharp scream leaves her throat and shocks all the birds into silence. The dog looks up and her wise eyes expand until she can bear it no longer, and she too erupts into a heart-rending howl.