To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  And now here she is with them again. She’s back. The temporary fault in her brain has been fixed. She had experienced some sort of electrical short when Ofer said, “But, Dad, that’s my job! I stand there precisely so they’ll blow themselves up on me and not in Tel Aviv.” She laughs with them, laughs despite herself, laughs because the three of them are laughing and she can’t afford to stay outside their circle of laughter. But something is not right. She looks helplessly from Ilan to Ofer to Adam and back. Something smells funny, and she laughs nervously and tries to figure out whether they can detect it, too. At the moment of the electrical short, she saw something: a picture, a real one, completely tangible, of someone who came running in from outside, from the fields, jumped up on the table, pulled down his pants, crouched down between them, and dumped a huge stinking pile of shit among the dishes and glasses. And they kept on talking as if nothing had happened, her guys, and everyone at the other tables was behaving normally too, and the nymphs fluttered and chirped, “How is everything? Is everything okay?” Yet something did not make sense to her, and everyone else seemed to have passed a course on how to act in this situation, when your son tells you something like, “But, Dad, that’s my job! I stand there precisely so they’ll blow themselves up on me and not in Tel Aviv,” and it turns out that she’s missed a lot of classes, and the air in the restaurant suddenly becomes unbearably hot, and now she realizes what happened, she feels the signs coming closer, and she starts to drip with sweat. She’s had these kinds of attacks before. It’s purely physical, it’s nothing, just hot flashes, the rampages of menopause. It’s completely beyond her control, a little intifada of the body. It happened at the ceremony after the advanced training course, in the parade courtyard at Latrun, when the formation passed by a huge wall covered with thousands of names of fallen soldiers; and at a fire demonstration in Nebi Musa to which the parents were invited; and on two or three other occasions. Once her nose bled, another time she threw up, and once she cried hysterically. And now—she laughs nervously—now she thinks she’s going to have diarrhea, and it’s entirely possible that she won’t even make it to the bathroom, it’s that bad, and she clenches and constricts her body, even her face is strained. How can they not notice what’s happening to her? She looks weakly from one to the other as they talk. It’s good for them to laugh: Go ahead, laugh, she thinks, let out the week’s tension. But inside her body the systems are collapsing. She is a shell containing only fluids. She is a coconut. Maybe they are actors? Maybe her family has been switched? Her heart pounds. How can they not hear it? How can they not hear her heart? Loneliness closes in on her. The basement loneliness of childhood. It’s so hot in here, I swear, it’s like they turned on all the ovens and shut all the windows. And it stinks. Horribly. She practically gags. She has to pull herself together, and most important, she must not show them anything, not ruin this wonderful, happy evening. They’re having such a good time, it’s so fun here, and she’s not going to ruin it for them with the stupid nonsense coming from her body, which has suddenly turned bleeding heart on her. One more minute and she’ll have everything under control, it’s just a matter of willpower. She just has to not think about the severity and the responsibility and the gravity with which he said, “But, Dad, that’s my job!” And now, right in front of Ilan and Adam and Ofer’s laughing faces, oh God, it’s coming back, he’s here again, in this soft lighting, among the dainty dragonflies—“How is everything? Is everything cool?”—there he is, jumping right up on the table with both feet and dumping a huge pile of shit, and a terrifying wave rises inside her, one second from now she’ll have no more room in her body, it will burst out of her mouth, her eyes, her nostrils, and she desperately closes everything off, scurries among the treacherous orifices, and all she can think about is the relief of that guy, the immense, scandalous relief of the lowlife who jumped onto the table with two solid legs, and just like that, among the little white dishes and the delicate wineglasses and the napkins and the dark bottles of wine and the asparagus spears, simply crouched down and shat out a huge, steaming pile of radioactive stench. And Ora struggles with all her might to uproot her gaze from the center of the table, from the huge naked fiend smiling at her with excremental seduction—he isn’t, he isn’t here, but he’s about to split her open—wait for me! she chirps with charming sweetness and pursed lips, and flits away.

  A long time ago, at the beginning of Ofer’s service in the Territories (“This is parenthetical,” she tells Avram. “It has nothing to do with that evening in the restaurant”), they were living in Ein Karem, and she heard a strange sound from the steps that led from the back of the house down to the garden. She followed the sound to the edge of the garden and saw Ofer sitting there, wearing shorts and an army shirt—he was on leave—carving a beautiful stick with his penknife. She asked what it was, and he looked up at her with his ironic, arched eyebrows and said, “What does it look like?”

  “Like a rounded stick.”

  He smiled. “It’s a club. Club, meet Mom. Mom, meet club.”

  “What do you need a club for?”

  Ofer laughed and said, “To beat up little foxes.” Ora asked if the army didn’t give him weapons to protect himself with, and he said, “Not clubs, and clubs are what we need most, they’re the most efficient weapon in our situation.” She said that scared her, and he said, “But what’s wrong with a club, Mom? It’s minimal use of force.”

  Ora, with uncharacteristic cynicism, asked if they had an acronym for that, “MUF, or something.”

  “But clubs prevent violence, Mom! They don’t create it.”

  “Even so, allow me to feel bad when I see my son sitting here making himself a club.”

  Ofer said nothing. “He usually avoids getting into these arguments with me,” she tells Avram. “He could never be bothered with that kind of talk, always said politics just didn’t interest him.” He was doing his job and that’s that, and when he got out, when everything was done, he promised her he would think over exactly what had happened.

  He kept on smoothing the stick until it was completely round. Ora stood over him, at the top of the steps, and hypnotically watched his skilled hands at work. “He had wonderful hands. You should see some of the things he’s made. A round dining table. And the bed he made for us.”

  Ofer wrapped elastic webbing around the head of the stick. Ora went down and asked to touch it. For some reason it was important to her to touch it, to feel what it’s like when it strikes you—“a black, rigid, unpleasant sort of fabric,” she reports to Avram, and he swallows and looks out into the distance—and Ofer added more brown binding around the stick itself, and then the club was ready, and that’s when he made the move. She shows Avram how Ofer hit his open palm with the club three times to assess its strength, to appraise its hidden force. And he played around with it, like someone would with a dangerous animal whose training has only just begun. “That was a bad moment, when I saw Ofer sitting there whittling a club. And it was important to me that you know about that.”

  Avram nods to confirm that he has accepted this too from her.

  “Where was I?”

  “Hugs,” he reminds her, “and that restaurant.” He likes the way she asks “Where was I?” every so often. A sloppy, dreamy, distracted young girl peers out of her face when she does.

  Ora sighs. “Yes. We were celebrating Adam’s birthday, and the truth is we didn’t even think they’d both be home that Shabbat until the last minute. Adam was on reserve duty in the Bik’ah, and Ofer was in Hebron and wasn’t supposed to get out for the weekend, but they let him go at the last minute, there was a vehicle leaving for Jerusalem, and he got home late and was exhausted. He even nodded off during dinner a couple of times. He’d had a hard week, we later learned, and he was so tired he barely knew where he was.”

  Avram looks at her expectantly.

  “It was a lovely evening,” she says, skipping tactfully over the sudden indigestion that meant she ate almost nothi
ng the whole meal. “And then I wanted us all to toast Adam,” she continues in the same tense voice, hoping she has managed to establish for Avram the fact of Ofer’s abysmal exhaustion, his main line of defense in the inquiries and questionings held afterward, and in his endless arguments with her. “We always have a little toasting ritual when we’re celebrating something …”

  She hesitates again: All these family affairs of ours, all our little rituals, do they pain you? His eyes signal back to her: Go on, go on already.

  “Normally, Adam never let us toast him. We weren’t allowed to do that in public, where strangers could hear. He’s so much like Ilan that way.”

  Avram smiles. “God forbid you might be overheard by all those people who booked tables months in advance so they could eavesdrop on you?”

  “Exactly. But that evening Adam said yes, though only if Ofer would do it. Ilan and I quickly said, ‘Fine,’ we were so surprised he’d agreed at all. And I thought I’d give him my toast later, when I was alone with him, or I’d write it for him. I always used to write birthday wishes for him, to all of them actually, because I think, I thought, that these occasions were an opportunity to sum things up, or to summarize a period, and I knew he kept my cards—Hey, have you noticed we’re really talking now?”

  “So I hear.”

  “We’ll have to hike the whole country three times to fit everything in.”

  “That’s not a bad idea.”

  She says nothing.

  “Where was I?” Avram says a while later instead of her, and replies, “The restaurant. Ofer’s toast.”

  “Oh, the birthday.”

  She sinks back into her thoughts. That weekend, those final moments of the careful, fragile happiness. And she realizes what she’s been doing here all these days: reciting a eulogy for the family that once was, that will never be again.

  “So Ofer leaned his head between his hands and thought quietly for a few minutes. He wasn’t in any hurry. He’s always a little slower than Adam. In general, there’s something heavier, more solid about him, his movements, his speech, even his appearance. Usually strangers who see them both think he’s older than Adam. And it was so nice, the way he treated Adam’s request so seriously.

  “Then he said that first of all he wanted to say how happy he was to be Adam’s little brother, and how in the last few years, since he’d started going to Adam’s high school, and even more once he joined the battalion where Adam had served, he was getting to know Adam through all the other people who knew him—teachers, soldiers, officers. At first it got on his nerves the way everyone kept calling him Adam by mistake, and treating him as just Adam’s little brother, but now …”

  “Seriously,” Ofer said in his slow, raspy, deep voice, “people are always coming up to me and talking about you—what a great guy you are, what a good friend, and how you always took the initiative. Everyone knows your jokes, and everyone in the battalion has a story about how you helped him, how you cheered him up when he was bummed out—”

  “This is Adam?” Avram asks carefully. “You’re talking about Adam, right?”

  “Yes, we were also intrigued by this new side of him. Ilan even joked that Ofer was recklessly destroying the reputation Adam had spent years building up at home.”

  “Or like the bingo you invented,” Ofer told Adam with a giggle, “which is still named after you at school.”

  “What’s that?” Ilan interrupted.

  “You pick seven words that are totally unlikely for a teacher to say in class. Like ‘pizza,’ or ‘belly dancer,’ or ‘Eskimo.’ And when class starts, everyone has the words written down in front of them, and they have to ask the teacher questions that sound all innocent, like they have something to do with the material, so that the teacher himself, without knowing it, says all the words.”

  Ilan leaned forward with a glimmer in his eye and slowly interlaced his fingers. “And the teacher doesn’t know anything about it, of course.”

  “Not a thing.” Adam smiled. “He’s just happy to see the students suddenly so interested in his boring class.”

  “Ha!” Ilan said and looked admiringly at Adam. “I’ve raised a real snake.”

  Adam bowed his head modestly, and Ofer said, smiling at Ilan, “An ‘inventional spark,’ don’t you think?” Ilan confirmed this, and bumped his shoulder against Ofer’s. Ora still didn’t get the rules of the game, and she didn’t like what she did understand. She was impatient to get back to what Ofer had started saying to Adam.

  “And who wins?” asked Ilan.

  “Whoever makes the teacher say the most words from the list.”

  Ilan nodded. “Okay. Give me an example of how you get him to say a word.”

  “But Ofer was in the middle of telling Adam something,” Ora reminded them.

  “Hang on, Mom,” Ofer said cheerfully, “this is super cool. Go on, gimme a word.”

  “You pick one,” said Adam.

  “But don’t let me hear it, I’m the teacher!” Ilan laughed.

  The boys leaned in, whispered, laughed, and nodded.

  “But it’s a history lesson,” Adam said, adding a twist.

  “Then we’ll do the Dreyfus affair,” Ilan decided. “I still remember that one a bit.”

  Ilan launched into an account of the French Jewish officer accused of treason, and Ofer and Adam bombarded him with questions. He talked about the trial, about the silencing of Dreyfus’s defenders, about the conviction. They were more interested in Dreyfus’s family, its customs, its dress and food. Ilan stuck to his lecture and avoided all the traps. Theodor Herzl showed up in the audience at Dreyfus’s public humiliation. The boys’ questions grew more frequent. Ora leaned back and watched, and the three of them felt her watching them and picked up the speed. Dreyfus was imprisoned and exiled to Devil’s Island, Emile Zola wrote his J’accuse!, Esterhazy was captured and convicted, Dreyfus was released, but the boys were more interested in Herzl. Der Judenstaat was published, and then came Herzl’s meetings with the Turkish Sultan and the German Kaiser. Ilan leaned forward and licked his lips. His eyes sparkled. The boys salivated on either side of him like two young wolves closing in on a buffalo. Ora found herself swept up in the excitement, though she was entirely unsure whom she wanted to win. Her heart was with the boys, but something about the wild enthusiasm on their faces made her crumple, and she felt compassion for the new, scant grayness gradually emerging on Ilan’s temples. The First Zionist Congress convened in Basel, Altneuland was published, Britain offered the Zionists a state on a large piece of land in Uganda—“ ‘a land that will be beneficial for the health of whites,’ ” Ilan quoted, recalling his high school days—and Adam wondered what things would have been like had the offer been accepted: all of Africa would have been stricken with frenetic zeal had the Jews gone there and started stirring things up with their hyperactive nervousness. Ilan added, “And you can be sure that within sixty seconds there would already be deep-seated anti-Semitism.”

  Ofer laughed. “And then we’d have had to occupy Tanzania.”

  “And Kenya and Zambia!”

  “Of course, just to protect ourselves from their hatred.”

  “And teach them to love Israel and give them a little Yiddishkeit with chicken soup!” Adam rolled around laughing.

  “Not to mention gefilte fish,” Ilan snickered, and the boys jumped up and cheered: “Bingo!”

  The main courses arrived. Ora remembers every dish. Adam had steak tenderloin, Ilan ordered the goose leg, and Ofer got steak tartare. She remembers her gaze being drawn to Ofer’s raw meat; she missed the vegetarian Ofer. In the weeks and months that followed, during the sleepless nights and nightmarish days when she replayed the events of that evening, minute by minute, she often wondered what really went through Ofer’s mind when he ate the steak, or during that game of bingo, and whether he honestly did not remember anything—after all, they had talked about occupation and hatred and had even mentioned locking up people and releasing them, and t
here was even something about silencing. How could it be that not a single alarm bell had sounded in him? How had he not picked up even the vaguest association between all of that and, say, an old man with his mouth gagged, trapped in a meat locker in the cellar of a house in Hebron?