To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  • • •

  The last time he’d seen her was when he went to help paint her new apartment in Jaffa. A one-bedroom fourth-floor walk-up with a kitchenette and a rooftop. She was standing on a tall painter’s ladder with a joint in one hand and a brush in the other, and he was on an aluminum stepladder. Her three cats slunk around between the ladders. One had a kidney disease, one was retarded, and one was a reincarnation of her mother, who in this form continued to make Neta’s life a misery. Before she moved in, the apartment had housed foreign workers from China, and one whole wall was still studded with little nails hammered in a pattern whose meaning she and Avram were trying to discern. She insisted on wearing a man’s gray undershirt full of holes, which she’d found in a pile of trash left behind in the apartment. “This is how I honor the memory of the one billion,” she said, and he was just happy to see her in an undershirt.

  “Every so often she stocks up my fridge,” he tells Ora, “and cleans my apartment. Gives me a makeover. Does this even interest you?”

  “Yes, of course, I’m listening.”

  With money she didn’t have, Neta bought him a first-rate stereo system, and they listened to music together. Sometimes she read entire books to him out loud. “And she doesn’t say no to any drug. She even does coke and heroin, but somehow she doesn’t get addicted to anything.”

  “Except you,” Neta laughed when he suggested she quit her Avram addiction and go into rehab.

  “Nothing good will come of me for you,” he’d said.

  “And what are illusions, chopped liver?”

  “You’re young, you could have children, a family.”

  “You’re the only person I’m willing to familiate with.”

  But maybe she’s fallen in love with someone else? The thought pains him far more than he had imagined it would. Maybe she finally changed her mind?

  “What?” Ora asks. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know.” Avram hastens his steps. He suddenly realizes that if Neta is not in his life, or he in hers, he may not have a reason to go home after this trip. “I’m a little worried about her. She’s disappeared on me lately.”

  “Is that unusual for her?”

  “It’s happened before. That’s how she is, she comes and goes.”

  “When we reach a phone, try calling her.”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe she left you a message at home.”

  He walks quickly. Tries to remember her cell-phone number, but cannot. He, who remembers everything, every bit of nonsense, every stupid sentence anyone said to him thirty years ago, every random combination of numbers his eyes fall upon. In the army he could recite all the serial numbers of all the soldiers and officers in the listening bunker; and the unlisted phone numbers of all the unit commanders; and of course the names and serial numbers of all the Egyptian units and divisions and armies, and of the commanders of all the military airfields in Egypt; and their private addresses and home phone numbers, and sometimes the names of their wives and children and mistresses; and the lists of monthly code names of all the intelligence units under the Southern Command. But now, with Neta, he can’t get the numbers straight!

  “She’s very young,” he murmurs. “I’m old, and she’s so young.” He laughs glumly. “It’s a bit like raising a dog who you know will die before you do. But I’m the dog, in this case.”

  Ora distractedly covers the bitch’s ears with her hands.

  Through Neta he has met a whole gang of people. People like her. Kind and hardworking. “Chipped mugs,” she calls them. They roam in packs. The beaches of Sinai, Nitzanim, the Judean Desert, ashrams in India, music festivals with drugs and free love in France, Spain, and the Negev.

  “Do you know what an Angel Walk is?”

  “Something in sports?”

  He takes Ora to a “rainbow gathering” in the Netherlands or Belgium. “Everyone shares everything,” he explains enthusiastically, as if he himself has been there. “Everyone helps out with meals and pays for food with whatever they have. The only thing that costs money is drugs.”

  “I see.”

  “One evening she took part in an Angel Walk.” Avram gives Ora a smile that is not intended for her, the likes of which she has not seen on him since he was a boy. Like the flicker of a candle in an old, dusty lantern. The smile is irresistible. “Two rows of people stand opposite each other, very close”—he demonstrates with his hands—“and usually they don’t know each other. Total strangers. And one person goes in with his or her eyes shut, and walks all the way down between the rows.”

  The two rows of hitters, Ora suddenly remembers. So many times he’d talked about them, in a thousand different contexts and digressions, until sometimes it seemed that the entire world was those two rows, into which a person is thrown when he is born, and he gets pummeled around between them as they hit and kick, until finally he is spat out, bruised and crushed.

  “And they lead this one person slowly, gently, between the rows, and everyone strokes him, touches him, hugs him, whispers in his ear: ‘You are so beautiful, you are perfect, you are an angel.’ It goes on that way right to the end, and then someone is waiting for him with a big, pampering hug, and then he steps back into the rows of givers.”

  “Did she get hugged like that?”

  “Wait. First she was in the rows, and for a few hours she stroked and hugged and whispered all those lines, which usually make her giggle. Those kinds of words really don’t work for her.” He perks up. “Listen, you have to meet her.”

  “Okay, when we have a chance. And then what happened?”

  “When her turn came to receive, to walk through the lines, she didn’t go in.”

  Ora nods. Even before he said it, she knew.

  “She ran away to the forest and sat there until morning. She couldn’t do it. She felt that it wasn’t her time to receive yet.”

  Ora suddenly knows what Avram and Neta share: they have both found that those who stroke can also hit. She hugs herself tightly as she walks. This girl Neta arouses conflicting emotions in her, because suddenly, in the last few moments, she feels affection toward her, and a maternal tenderness. And Neta knows about Ofer. Avram told her about Ofer. “Does she know anything about me?”

  “She knows you exist.”

  Ora swallows heavily, then finally manages to cough the pit out of her throat. “And do you love her?”

  “Love? What do I know? I like being with her. She knows how to be with me. She gives me space.”

  Not like me. Ora thinks about the boys and their complaints.

  Too much space, Avram thinks fearfully. Where are you, Nettush?

  After they’d finished painting her little apartment, they took the ladders out onto the roof and she taught him how to ladder-walk. “In her wanderings, when she travels sometimes, she makes a living as a street performer. She swallows fire and swords, she juggles, and joins street circuses.” Like two drunken grasshoppers, they’d walked toward each other under the evening sky, between the water tank and the antenna. Then she leaped up off the ladder onto the roof ledge and Avram’s blood froze.

  “So what do you say?” she asked with her sweet, sad smile. “It’s not going to get any better than this. Should we get it over with now?”

  He leaned over and gripped his ladder. Neta crab-walked along the edge of the roof. Behind her he could see rooftops and a bloodred sunset and a mosque dome. “You’re a tough nut, Avram,” said Neta, almost to herself. “You’ve never, for example, told me that you love me. Not that I ever asked you, as far as I can remember, but still, a girl needs to hear it from her man once in her life, or something like it, even a paraphrase. But you’re cheap. At most you’ll give me an ‘I love your body’ or ‘I love being with you’ or ‘I love your ass.’ That kind of witty sidestep. So maybe I should get the message already?”

  The ladder’s legs clicked against the stone lip of the roof. Avram decided in a flash that if something happened to her, he would, with
out thinking, throw himself after her.

  “Go into my room,” she murmured. “On the table, next to the ashtray, there’s a small brown book. Go and get it.”

  Avram shook his head.

  “Go, I won’t do anything until you get back. Scout’s honor.”

  He got off his ladder and went into the room. He was there for a second or two, and every vein in his body yelled out that she was jumping. He grabbed the book and went back to the roof.

  “Now read where I marked it.”

  His fingers trembled. He opened the book and read: “ ‘ … for I had my life support in Vienna. I use this expression to describe the one person who has meant more to me than any other since the death of my grandfather, the woman who shares my life and to whom I have owed not just a great deal but, frankly, more or less everything, since the moment when she first appeared at my side over thirty years ago.’ ” He turned over the book: Wittgenstein’s Nephew by Thomas Bernhard.

  “Keep going, but with more feeling.”

  “ ‘Without her I would not be alive at all, or at any rate I would certainly not be the person I am today, so mad and so unhappy, yet at the same time happy.’ ”

  “Yes,” she said to herself, her eyes closed in deep concentration.

  “ ‘The initiated will understand what I mean when I use this expression to describe the person from whom I draw all my strength—for I truly have no other source of strength—and to whom I have repeatedly owed my survival.’ ”

  “Thank you,” said Neta, still swaying on the ladder as if in a dream.

  Avram said nothing. He seemed loathsome and despicable in his own eyes.

  “Do you understand what the problem is?”

  He moved his head to indicate something between yes and no.

  “It’s very simple. You are my life support, but I’m not your life support.”

  “Neta, you’re—”

  “Your life support is her, that woman who had a child with you, whose name you won’t even tell me.”

  He buried his head between his shoulders and did not answer.

  “But look.” She smiled and brushed the hair away from her eyes. “It’s not such an original tragedy, what we have here. And not such a big problem, either. The world is just a very unfocused picture. I can live with that—how about you?”

  He did not answer. She asked for so little, but he could not give her even that. “Come on, Neta.” He held out his hand.

  “But think about it?” Her soft eyes lingered on him, full of hope.

  “Okay. Now come on.”

  A flock of starlings soared by with a flutter of wings. Avram and Neta stood there, both immersed in themselves.

  “Not yet?” she murmured to herself after a while, as though responding to an unheard voice. “It’s not time yet?”

  With two swift strokes she landed the ladder on the rooftop floor. “Look at you,” she said, sounding surprised. “You’re shaking all over. Are you cold inside? In your no-heart?”

  Ora tells him more about Adam the next day. She would prefer to talk again about the old Adam, baby Adam, about the three years when he was hers alone. But he asks about today’s Adam, and without holding anything back, she describes her older son, whose eyes are always red and bloodshot, whose body is slender and a little stooped, hunched forward with troubling languor, his hands and fingers drooping to the ground, his lip pulled up with a slightly contemptuous expression of subtle, nihilistic scorn.

  She is struck by the things she says about him and by the fact that she is capable of looking at Adam this way. Ilan’s objective view of the boys is now hers, too. She is learning to speak a foreign language.

  Note by note, she depicts a young man of twenty-four who looks both weak and tough at the same time, conveying a quiet strength beyond his age. “I don’t quite understand it,” she says hesitantly, “this strength he has. It’s something elusive, even a bit”—she swallows—“dark.” There, I’ve said it.

  “His face isn’t anything special, at least not at first sight—he’s pale, with cheeks darkened by stubble, sunken black eyes, and a very prominent Adam’s apple—still, to me he looks exceptional. I find him really beautiful from certain angles. And he has this combination of features that looks as though several of his ages are all there at the same time. I find it so interesting sometimes just to look at him.”

  “But what is that strength? What do you mean?”

  “How can I explain it?” She knows she must be precise now. “It’s like you can’t surprise him with anything. Yes, that’s it. Not with anything happy or anything sad, and not with something really painful or really terrible, either. You’ll never surprise him.” Having said it, she realizes for the first time how accurate her perception of him is. She also understands how different he is from her—the opposite. “He has such power,” she says in a fading voice. “The power of contempt.”

  She’s seen two of his shows. One he invited her to, and the other she snuck into after he’d dropped her. There were dozens of young boys and girls there, and their faces leaned toward him in the blinding lashes of light whipped from every direction, all drawn, with their eyes closed, to his indifferent, slightly sick frailty, which sucked them out of themselves. “You should have seen them. They looked like … I don’t know what. I don’t have the words to describe it.”

  Avram sees a field of albino sunflowers. Albino sunflowers in a solar eclipse.

  They rest at the peak of Mount Arbel, above the thirst-quenching Kinneret Valley. The area is full of hikers. A school group of screeching girls and boys arrives. They take one another’s pictures and scurry around. Buses spit out groups of tourists, and their guides compete against one another in a shouting match. But Ora and Avram are immersed in their own affairs. A soft breeze refreshes them after the exhausting ascent. On the way up they hardly spoke—it was an especially steep climb. Carved steps and iron posts in the rock helped them, but every few steps they had to stop for a breather. From the Bedouin village at the foot of the hill came roosters’ crowing, a school bell, and the commotion of children. Above them, in the cliff side, a chain of gaping mouths: the caves where the Galilean rebels hid from Herod (“I read about it somewhere,” Avram murmured). Herod’s soldiers had cleverly propelled themselves down the mountain in cages and used rods fitted with iron hooks to hunt down the cave dwellers and hurl them into the valley.

  Above the mountain, above the human tumult, a large eagle glides against the blue sky, floating on a warm, transparent air column that rises up from the valley. In broad circles, with spectacular ease, the eagle hovers above the air column until its towering warmth evaporates, then glides away in search of a new breeze. Avram and Ora take pleasure in its flight, and in the mountains of the Galilee and the Golan, glowing purple in the warm vapors, and the blue eye of Lake Kinneret, until Ora notices a plaque in memory of Sergeant Roi Dror, of blessed memory, who was killed below this cliff on June 18, 2002, during a training operation of the Duvdevan special forces unit. “He fell as gently as a tree falls. There was not even the slightest sound, because of the sand” (The Little Prince). Without a word, they get up and flee to the opposite end of the mountaintop, but there is another monument in their new place of refuge, in memory of Staff Sergeant Zohar Mintz, killed in ’96 in Southern Lebanon. Ora reads with tears in her eyes: He loved the country and died for it, he loved us and we loved him. Avram pulls her hand but she does not move, so he forcefully tugs her away. “You started telling me about Adam,” he reminds her.

  “Oh, Avram, where will this end? Tell me, where will this end? There’s no more room for all the dead.”

  “Now tell me about Adam.”

  “But listen, I remembered that I wanted to tell you something about Ofer.” She could feel it again. The slight push she gives Ofer to the front of the stage every time she thinks Avram is too drawn to Adam.

  “What about Ofer?” he asks, but she can feel that his heart is still caught in the riddle of Adam.


  They walk down the mountain heading south, toward Karnei Hittin. On either side of the path are fields of wheat ears turning golden in the sun. They find an isolated patch, like a little nest on the ground, surrounded by a meadow of purple lupines. Avram sprawls out, Ora lies down opposite him, and the dog nuzzles under Ora’s head. Ora feels the warm, breathing body, which needs her, and thinks she might break the vow she’d made after Nicotine died and adopt this dog.

  “When Talia left Ofer—I guess my boys always get deserted; so they did inherit something from me after all. But wait, I have to explain that Adam never had a serious girlfriend, I mean a true love, before Ofer had Talia. And think about that. Two boys like them, they’re not that bad, are they? They’re definitely a catch, but neither of them had a girlfriend until a pretty late age. Think about us at their age. Think about you.”

  Of course he already has. She sees in his face that he is instantly there, at seventeen and nineteen and twenty-two. Buzzing around her like mad, but at the same time pursuing every other girl he laid eyes on. She could never understand his taste in girls, and he found every one of them worthy of his undying love. Each grew greater and more beautiful in his eyes, even the stupidest and ugliest ones, and especially the ones who scorned and tormented him. “Remember how …,” she starts, and he shrugs his shoulders in embarrassment. Of course he remembers. She thinks about his efforts to enchant, to seduce, and how he would hollow out his soul for them, humiliate himself, stammer, blush, and then poke fun at himself: “What am I? Nothing more than a hormonal fermentation bacterium.” And now, thirty years later, he still has the nerve to argue with her: “It was all because you didn’t want me. If you’d said yes right away, if you hadn’t tortured me for five years before giving in, I wouldn’t have needed that whole march of folly.”