To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  She hoists herself up on her elbows. “I didn’t want you?”

  “Not the way I wanted you. You wanted Ilan more; I was just the zest.”

  “That’s not true. That’s really inaccurate, it’s a lot more complicated than that.”

  “You didn’t want me, you were afraid.”

  “What did I have to be afraid of?”

  “You were afraid, Ora, because the fact is you gave up on me in the end. You gave up. Admit it.”

  They both sit quietly. Her face is flushed. What can she tell him? She couldn’t even explain it to herself back then. When she was with him for that one year, she sometimes had the feeling that he was flushing through her en masse, like a whole army. What can she tell him? After all, she wasn’t even always convinced it was her he loved so much, that she was the one creating that love storm. Perhaps it was someone he had once fantasized about, and he just kept on daydreaming her with all his creative powers. She also suspected that simply because he had fallen in love with her once, in a hasty, crazy moment, in the isolation ward, he would never admit, not even to himself, that she wasn’t right for him. With his peculiar, Quixotic chivalry, he would never go back on his resolution. (But how could she have told him that at the time? She hadn’t even had the courage to say it to herself, as she was doing now.) Sometimes she felt like a mannequin on which he constantly piled more and more colorful outfits that only underscored her dryness, her diminution, her narrowness. But every time she told him, full of sorrow and a broken heart, a little of what she felt, he was deeply insulted, amazed at how little she knew herself and him, at how she could hurt the most beautiful thing he had ever had in his life.

  Why does everything have to be so exaggerated with him? Why does everything have to have such force? she used to wonder. And then she’d feel ashamed, and she’d think of the girl who jumped out of his bed because he was too intimate for her. She also often felt that he had so much love and passion that he was invading her, raging inside her body and soul like an oversized carnivorous puppy, without even imagining how much it pained her and ripped her apart. At times he would look into her eyes so intently. There were no words to describe what was in his eyes at those moments. And it didn’t necessarily occur in times of passion. Usually it came after the passion. He would look at her with such exposed, piercing, almost mad love, and she would teasingly touch his nose, or giggle, or make a funny face, but it was as if he did not sense her embarrassment. His face would take on a strange expression, imploring her for something she did not understand, and for one long moment he would sink into her eyes without taking his look off hers, and he was like a massive, shadowy body drowning in dark liquid, and he would gradually disappear as he looked at her, and her eyes would slowly close and cover him inside them, sheltering from herself, too. She could no longer look, and yet she did, and she saw his gaze emptying to reveal something else, something skeletal and terrible, with no end. He would dive deep inside her, hold her tight against his body, clutch her until she almost choked in his grip, and every so often he shuddered powerfully as though he had absorbed something from her that he could not tolerate. She did not know what was there, what she’d given him, what she’d received.

  “I couldn’t be with you,” she says simply.

  The sun sets slowly, and the earth gives off a fresh, steaming scent of insides. Ora and Avram lie motionless in their nest on the field. Above them the sky mingles with the various evening blues. Take a hat and put two slips of paper in it. No, you don’t have to know what you’re drawing lots for. You’re allowed to guess, but do it silently. And quickly. Ora, they’re waiting for us, there’s a command car outside. Now pick one out. Did you do it? Which one? Are you sure?

  Her face grows long in the shadows. She shuts her eyes. Which one did you pick? And which one did you want to pick? And which one did you really pick? Are you sure? Are you really sure?

  “Listen, I just couldn’t breathe. You were too much for me.”

  “How could it be too much?” Avram asks quietly. “What is too much when you love someone?”

  “Adam and Ofer were so lazy, it took them forever to find girlfriends,” she tells Avram the next day, walking through Switzerland Forest. “They spent almost all their time with each other, always shared a room. They refused to be separated until finally, when Adam was about sixteen, we gave them separate rooms. We thought it was time.”

  “Where did you put the rooms?”

  Ora hears the flicker in his voice and tenses. “In … you know, downstairs, where the storage room was. That basement? Where your mother’s Singer sewing machine was?”

  “So you partitioned the basement?”

  “With drywall, yes. Nothing major.”

  “Wasn’t it too crowded?”

  “No, it came out nicely. Two rooms, kind of nooks. It was great for teenagers.”

  “And a bathroom?”

  “A small one, you know, with a tiny sink.”

  “What about air?”

  “We put two windows in. More like peepholes. Symbolic.”

  “Yes,” he says thoughtfully. “Sure.”

  When he’d finished all his treatments and surgeries and hospitalizations, Avram had decided he didn’t want to go back to his mother’s house in Tzur Hadassah. Not even to visit. Ilan and Ora, with help from Ora’s parents, and loans and a mortgage, bought the house from Avram. They made a point of buying it at a higher price than its real value—much higher, Ilan liked to stress whenever the topic came up—and they followed all the rules and carried out the transaction through a lawyer who had been a friend of Avram’s from before. But Ora—and perhaps Ilan too, although he always denied it—never forgave herself for that heartless act, for their prolonged torment of him (there, she’s finally said it to herself), which ended only when she and Ilan moved to Ein Karem. Now, faced with his pained look, as though blinded by the attempt to follow the innovations and changes in the home that was once his, she can hardly resist giving him the list of rationales that are always on the tip of her tongue, ready for use: everything was done with the best of intentions, thinking only of his needs; they wanted to save him from having to deal with buyers and agents; they really thought he’d feel better if he knew that in some way the house was staying in the family. But they purchased his house from him (at full price, yes, at an excellent price), and they lived their lives in it, she and Ilan and Adam and Ofer.

  Sometimes, when no one was looking, she would touch a wall as she walked by, in the rooms or in the hallway, slowly sliding her fingers over it. Sometimes she would sit and read, as he had, at the top of the steps to the yard, or on the windowsill facing the wadi. There were the window handles, which she would linger on every time she opened them, as if in a secret handshake. There were the bath and the toilet, the cracked ceilings, the cabinets with their dense smell. There were the sunken tiles and the ones that stuck out. There were the rays of sun that came from the east in the morning, and she would stand and bathe in them for long moments, sometimes with little Ofer in her arms, quietly watching her. There was the evening breeze, which came from the wadi, which she would sway in, letting it float over her skin and breathing it deep inside.

  “Surprisingly, Ofer had a girlfriend before Adam did.” Ora hopes this information will make Avram happy. But he darkens a little and asks what she means by “surprisingly.” She explains: “After all, he’s younger. But I guess Adam needed Ofer to pave the way in that realm, too. Even when they were grown up, they were both at home with us all the time until Adam’s military service, until the army separated them, and then everything changed. Suddenly Adam had friends, lots of friends, and so did Ofer, and then Ofer found Talia. All at once they both opened up and went out into the world—so the army did them some good after all. But until Adam turned eighteen, until his enlistment, most of the time it was just him and Ofer. I mean, him and Ofer and us, the four of us together”—she mimes stuffing something tightly into a suitcase or backpack. “Even thoug
h they always had lots of things going on, school, and Adam’s band, we still felt, Ilan and I, that they were mostly directed inward, to the house, and even more, to their own relationship. I told you, they had this secret.” Her hands grip the backpack straps and her head tilts slightly. She hardly sees what is in front of her: cliffs, raspberry hedges, blinding sunlight. It suddenly occurs to her that within the longer, cumbersome secret, Ofer and Adam had made their own little secret, a kind of igloo in the ice.

  “It was fun, that togetherness. They were always with us, they went everywhere with us—‘like bodyguards,’ Ilan used to joke, or maybe complain—and we went on trips together, and sometimes to movies, and they even came with us to our friends’ sometimes, which is really hard to believe.” She gives a meager laugh. “They would come with us and sit on the side and talk as if they hadn’t seen each other in a year. It was wonderful, I’m telling you, it was such a rare thing. But still, Ilan and I always have—always had—the feeling that it was a bit, how can I put it—”

  For an instant, in the wandering beam of her gaze, Avram sees the four of them moving through the rooms of the familiar house. Four bright, elongated human spots, with a dim light around their edges, like figures seen through night goggles, foggy shadows surrounded by a greenish, downy halo, stuck to one another, moving clumsily together. And when they briefly come apart, they each leave in the other strands of sticky, glowing fibers. To his surprise, he senses a constant effort emanating from them. There is tension and caution. He is even more astounded to discover that there is no ease or pleasure in the four of them. They do not evince the joy of living together, which he had always pictured when he thought of them, when he had given in to thoughts of them, when he had drizzled into his veins, drop by drop, the poison of thinking about them.

  “And when Ofer had a girlfriend,” he asks hesitantly, “wasn’t Adam jealous?”

  “At first it wasn’t easy. Yes, Adam had a hard time with Ofer finding a new soul mate, and with the fact that he had no part in this very close connection they shared. Just think—it was the first time that had happened since Ofer was born. But they were a nice couple, Ofer and Talia. There was a tenderness between them.” She finds it hard to talk. “Later, later.”

  She picks up after a while. “When Talia left Ofer, he crawled into his bed and barely left for a week. He stopped eating, completely lost his appetite. He just drank, mostly beer, and friends came to see him. All of a sudden we saw how many friends he had, and even though it wasn’t planned, they basically began to sit shiva in our house.”

  “Shiva?!”

  “Because they sat around his bed and consoled him, and when they left others came, and the door was open all week long, morning, noon, and night, and he kept asking his friends to tell him about Talia, to tell him everything they remembered about her, in great detail. And by the way, he wouldn’t let them say anything bad about her, only good things. He’s such a kind soul.” She giggles. “I haven’t even told you anything about him, you haven’t begun to know him …” Suddenly she is flooded with nostalgia. Simple, hungry, incautious longing. She hasn’t seen him for a long time, or talked to him. This may be the longest she has gone without speaking to him since he was born. “And the guys played him songs Talia liked, and watched one of her favorite movies, My Dinner with André, in an endless loop. And they gobbled down bags and bags of Bamba and Tuv Taam, which she was addicted to. And this went on for a whole week. And of course I had to feed and water the whole tribe. You wouldn’t believe the quantities of beer those guys could down in one evening. Well, you probably could, because of the pub.”

  Maybe, she thinks, Ofer or Adam, or even both of them together, on one of their pub crawls in Tel Aviv one evening, when they were on leave from the army, had turned up at his pub. Could he have somehow recognized them? Known without knowing?

  “Ora?”

  “Yes.” She smiles to herself. “Look, I guess it turned into this thing around town”—like everything Ofer touched, she intimates—“and people started turning up who didn’t really know Ofer but had heard that something was going on, this kind of love shiva. They came and sat there telling stories about their own soured loves, and about affairs that had ended, and all sorts of heartbreaks they’d experienced.”

  An afternoon ray of sun smooths her forehead, and Ora distractedly turns her cheek to pamper herself in the warmth. Her face is young and lovely now, as though nothing bad has ever happened to her. She can get up now and go out into life, whole and innocent and pure.

  “And by the way, that’s how Adam met Libby, who became his girlfriend. She’s like an overgrown puppy, a homeless puppy, a bear cub, although she’s a head taller than he is. During the first days of the shiva she just sat in a corner and cried nonstop, and then she pulled herself together and started to help me with the food and the drinks and the dishes, emptying ashtrays and taking out empty bottles. But she was so exhausted from something that she would fall asleep in any available bed around the house. Just collapse into a slumber. And somehow, without us noticing, in our sleep, she came into our lives, and now they’re together, she and Adam. I think they’re happy, because even though Libby is a puppy, she’s also very maternal toward him.” A tinge of sorrow trails behind Ora’s voice. “I think he’s really happy with her. At least I hope so.”

  She surrenders to a deep, pent-up sigh, a sigh of total bankruptcy. “Look, I wasn’t exaggerating when I told you a few days ago that I know nothing about his life now.”

  The dog stops and comes up to Ora when she hears her sigh. Ora leans down to the damp, sharp snout nuzzling between her thighs. She speaks to Avram over the dog’s head. “Sometimes, when I say a certain word, or if I say something in a slightly different tune—”

  “Or when you laugh suddenly—”

  “Or cry—”

  “She responds immediately.”

  “Yesterday, when you were chasing the flies around with a towel and shouting, did you see how upset she was? What did that remind you of, sweetie?” Ora tenderly rubs the dog’s head as she leans into her. “Where did you come to us from?” She kneels on one knee, holds the dog’s face between her hands, and rubs noses with her. “What happened to you? What did they do to you?”

  Avram watches them. The light turns Ora’s hair even more silver and glows in the dog’s fur.

  “So you don’t have any contact with him, with Adam?” he asks when they start walking again.

  “He totally cut me off.”

  Avram does not reply.

  “There was this thing,” she mutters. “Not with him. It was with Ofer, actually, in the army. We had this whole story with him, some screwup that happened in his unit in Hebron. No one died, and Ofer wasn’t to blame—he certainly wasn’t the only one. There were twenty soldiers there, so why would it be his fault? Never mind, not now. I made a mistake, I know that, and Adam was very angry at me for not supporting Ofer”—she takes a deep breath and portions out, one by one, the words that have been tormenting her ever since—“for not being able to support Ofer wholeheartedly. Do you understand? Do you understand the absurdity? Because with Ofer I’ve already made up long ago. Everything’s fine between us”—but her eyes shift a little, this way and that—“but Adam, because of his lousy principles, won’t forgive me to this day.”

  Avram doesn’t ask anything. Her heart pounds in her throat. Did she do the right thing by telling him? She should have told him long ago. She’s afraid of his judgment. Maybe he’ll also think, like Adam, that she’s an unnatural mother.

  “Do they hug?” Avram asks.

  “What did you say?” Ora jolts out of a fleeting daydream.

  “No, nothing.” He sounds startled.

  “No, you asked if they—”

  “Hug. Sometimes, yes. Ofer and Adam.”

  She looks at him gratefully. “Why do you ask?”

  “I don’t know, I’m just trying to imagine them together, that’s all.”

  That’s all?
She rejoices inside: That’s all?

  They’ve walked far. At the village of Kinneret they had stocked up on food and visited the nearby cemetery, where they leafed through the book of Rahel’s poems chained to the ground next to her grave. They crossed the Tiberias-Tzemach highway, strolled through orchards of date trees, and paid their respects to a mule named Booba, buried near the Jordan River, who had Loyally Plowed, Tilled, and Furrowed the Kinneret Soil in the 1920s and 1930s. They saw pilgrims from Peru and Japan sing and dance as they dipped in the river. They walked a ways between the clear river and a foul-smelling sewage channel, until the path led them away from the Jordan and toward the Yavne’el. At Ein Petel they enjoyed a feast fit for kings in the shade of eucalyptus and oleander trees. They could see Mount Tabor and knew without a doubt that they would reach it.

  The day is extremely hot and, feeling toasted, they dip in the occasional spring or run through giant sprinklers on the fields. They get scratched by raspberry bushes, and every so often they doze in a spot of shade, then get up and walk for a while longer. They slather themselves repeatedly with sunscreen; he spreads it on the back of her neck and she does his nose, and they sigh at how unsuitable their skin is for this climate. As he walks, Avram carves “the stick of the day” for Ora with Ofer’s penknife, and today it’s a thin oak branch, slightly crooked and partially gnawed, perhaps by a goat. “Not the most convenient thing,” she announces after trying it, “but it’s full of personality, so it can stay.”

  “When they were boys they almost never hugged,” she tells him when they sit down on a heap of stones in the shade of a large Atlantic terebinth on the heights of the Yavne’el mountains. The spot has a rare view of the Kinneret, the Golan, the Gilead, Mount Meron, the Gilboa mountains, Mount Tabor, the Shomron, and the Carmel. She even sensed that the boys were a little embarrassed by each other’s bodies. She found this awkwardness strange: they shared a room, and when they were little they always showered together, but to touch each other, body to body … They wouldn’t even hit each other, she thinks now. They only fought when they were little, but not much. And when they grew older, almost never.