To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  “He was just really tired,” she states apropos of nothing. “His eyes were half closed and he could barely hold his head up. He hadn’t slept for two whole days, and he’d had three beers, too. But somehow the game and the joking around kept him up.”

  There was a moment, she thinks, when it seemed as if he remembered. He suddenly asked for Adam’s phone and wanted to call the army. She can see it: he held the phone in his hand. His eyebrows moved. His forehead was strained. He was trying to gather something in through the tiredness. But then he saw the screen and got excited about some new function he’d never seen before, and Adam demonstrated it for him.

  “Ofer, you didn’t finish toasting Adam,” Ora said.

  “You’re off the hook,” said Adam and started to devour his steak.

  “No fair!” Ora pleaded. “He hasn’t said anything yet!”

  “Only if he wants to,” Adam said. “And no violins!”

  Ofer turned serious again. His face softened and hardened intermittently. His chiseled, generous lips, Avram’s lips, moved unconsciously. He put down his fork. Ora noticed the exchange of amused glances between Adam and Ilan: Watch out, their eyes said, get your handkerchiefs ready.

  Then Ofer spoke. “The truth is, I don’t even know how I would get along in life without your help, and without the way you took care of me in all kinds of bad situations that Mom and Dad don’t even know about.”

  That was surprising. Ora perked up, and so did Ilan. “Because we only knew the opposite situation, where Ofer took care of Adam. And he suddenly opened up a whole world we’d never known, but which I’d always somehow hoped did exist, you know? Do you understand?”

  Avram nods vigorously. His lower lip surrounds his whole mouth.

  “And I saw Adam lower his gaze, and he got this kind of flush on his neck, and I knew that it was true.”

  “And I think,” Ofer continued, “that there’s no one else in the world who knows me like you do, knows all my most private stuff, and who always, from the minute I was born, did only good things for me.”

  Adam did not comment or crack a joke. Ora felt that he really wanted her and Ilan to hear these things.

  “And there’s no one in the world I trust like you, and value and love like you. No one.”

  Ora and Ilan bowed their heads so the boys wouldn’t see their eyes.

  “Even though I always used to get mad at you, especially when you got preachy, or made fun of my taste in music.”

  “Guns N’ Roses is not music,” Adam put in, “and Axl Rose is not a singer.”

  “But I didn’t know that back then, and I was so mad at you for ruining my enjoyment of them, and in the end I realized you were right. See, you improved me in every way. And you protected me from all kinds of crap, and even though you weren’t exactly a bruiser, and I couldn’t threaten the kids who hit me and tell them my brother would come and beat the crap out of them, I still felt that you always had my back, and you wouldn’t let anyone do anything to me.” Then he blushed, as though only now comprehending the candor he’d permitted himself.

  There was a long silence. Everyone’s heads were bowed. They had touched on the root of the matter. Ora held her breath and prayed that Ilan wouldn’t try to make them laugh. That none of them would give in to their stand-up-comic reflex.

  “Lechayim,” Ilan said softly. “Here’s to our family.” There were tears in his eyes, and he looked at her gratefully and held his glass up to her.

  “Lechayim,” Adam and Ofer repeated, and to her surprise they also looked straight at her and raised their glasses. “To our family,” Ofer added quietly, and his eyes met hers on a new frequency, and for one brief moment she thought—he knows.

  “After that he seemed a bit stiff, stunned by his own speech, and then he leaned his head on his hands again, like this, and Adam turned to him and hugged him. He really hugged him, with both arms”—Avram sees, he sees them—“and small as Adam is compared to him, he still enveloped him, and Ofer’s head leaned in, like this.”

  She remembers his handsome, shapely head. Back then he wasn’t shaving it yet, and it was very fair after his haircut. For a minute it looked like Adam was smelling Ofer’s hair, the way he used to do when Ofer was a baby and he’d just had it washed.

  Her head unconsciously reconstructs the gesture and nestles into her own shoulder.

  “Ilan and I watched them, and I had a feeling, maybe Ilan did too, I never asked him—”

  “What feeling?”

  “When they hugged, I suddenly knew, body and soul, that even when Ilan and I were gone they would stay together, they wouldn’t grow apart, they wouldn’t be cut off, they wouldn’t be alienated, and they’d help each other out if there was a need. They would be family, you see?”

  Avram’s mouth stretches out in a tortured grimace.

  “What’s going to happen, Avram?” She looks up at him with tear-filled eyes. “What will happen if he—”

  Avram almost shouts: “Tell me, tell me about him!”

  On the drive home from the restaurant, everyone was full and soft and pliable. The boys sang a silly Monty Python song about a sexed-up lumberjack who likes to wear women’s clothing, and Ora noted the heartwarming deviation from their usual puritanism, as though they were confirming that they now viewed their parents as grown-ups. In the backseat they slapped their knees, stomachs, and chests while they sang—Ofer’s broad chest produced a dense, drum-like echo that excited her—and then they discussed which pub to go to. Ora and Ilan were amazed that they still had the energy to go out drinking so late, when Ofer had barely been able to keep his eyes open. Ilan asked only that they not go together into the same place and reminded them that a month ago a terrorist strapped with explosives had been caught trying to enter a Jerusalem bar. The boys put their hands to their hearts and promised gravely that they would split up: Ofer would go to the “Shahid Hope” pub, and Adam to the “Hezbollah Martyrs” nightclub. “Then we’ll meet up in “Seventy Virgins” square and hang around downtown for a while, mostly in crowded places, and we’ll get right up close to people with Middle Eastern features and piercing looks.”

  The next day, at eight a.m., Adam and Ofer were still asleep—they’d probably come home around dawn—and she and Ilan sat in the kitchen, still basking in the ambience of the night before, getting ready for their morning walk. Before leaving, they made a big salad for the boys, and jachnun and hard-boiled eggs and crushed tomatoes, to be ready when they got up. They peeled and chopped and spoke in quiet voices about the dinner, the things Ofer had said to Adam, and the rare hug. Suddenly there was a cautious knock on the door, and then a firm, foreign-sounding ring.

  Ilan and Ora glanced at each other. It made no sense, but still, that kind of ring, at that time on a Saturday morning, could only mean one thing. Ora put her knife down and looked at Ilan, and his eyes grew wide. A lightning flash of insane, almost inhuman terror clotted between them. Everything slowed down until it finally froze. Even the definite knowledge that Adam and Ofer were at home iced over—because in fact, maybe they weren’t. “We hadn’t seen them for a whole night, and one night is a long time in Israel. Maybe something had happened, maybe they’d been called back to the army urgently. We hadn’t even heard the news, how could we not have turned on the news?”

  Ora’s eyes sought out the car keys that Adam had taken the night before. She thought she could see them hanging on the hook, but maybe it was a different bunch. Another impatient ring. “They’re at home, they’re both at home now,” Ora insisted adamantly, “they’re asleep, there’s no way this has anything to do with them.” Maybe they’d left the lights on in the car and a neighbor had come to let them know. Maybe someone had broken into the car—she could accept that, she would welcome it. Another sharp knock, and neither of them moved, as though hoping to hide their existence here.

  Everything suddenly had the strange quality of a dress rehearsal, as though they were practicing for something that had always been lur
king, but they still could not play their parts. Ilan leaned one hand on the countertop. She saw how old he’d grown in recent years, since the boys’ army service. His face was drawn, almost defeated, and she could read his thoughts: the sweet illusion in which they’d existed had been shattered. Their private underground cell had been breached. For twenty years they’d walked on air above an abyss, always knowing it was there below, and now they were falling, and they would fall forever, and life was over. Their previous lives were over.

  She wanted to go to him so he could hold her, gather her in, as he always did, but she couldn’t move. Another jarring ring came, and for a moment Ora experienced a peculiar sensation, the merging of two utterly different dimensions of reality: in the one, Adam and Ofer were sleeping soundly in their beds, and in the other the army had come to notify her about one of them. The two dimensions were concrete yet somehow did not contradict each other. She heard Ilan murmur, “Open the door, why aren’t you opening the door?” Ora said in a foreign voice, “But they’re both home, right?” He shrugged his shoulders with submissive misery, as if to say, And even if they’re at home now, how long will we be able to protect them? And then Ora thought: But which one of them? Her fog was pierced with the memory of the lots. Take a hat, take two pieces of paper…

  Ora opened the door and found, to her horror, a pair of awkward-looking men in uniform. They were two very young MPs, and her gaze skipped beyond them to look for the doctor who always comes with the notification team, but it was just the two of them. One had very long eyelashes, crowded like a soft brush. The fact that she noticed such trivial details was completely un-survivor-like; in this country you need sharper instincts. The other, whose face was still pocked with acne, held a printed document signed with a large stamp. He asked if Ofer was home.

  In the notebook they swiped back from the man at the Kedesh River, there are still some blank pages and lines, and Ora covers one of them with tiny handwriting:

  Thousands of moments and hours and days, millions of deeds, countless actions and attempts and mistakes and words and thoughts, all to make one person in the world.

  She reads it to Avram.

  “He’ll be fine, you’ll see. We’re making it so he’ll be fine.”

  “You really think so?” she asks.

  “I think you know exactly what to do, always.” After a pause, he says, “Show it to me for a minute.” She hands him the notebook. He holds it carefully and reads to himself in a whisper: “Thousands of moments and hours … countless actions … mistakes … all to make one person in the world.” He puts the notebook in his lap and looks at Ora, and a cloud of slight fear darkens in his eyes.

  “Add another sentence,” she says without looking at him, and hands him the pen. “One person, who is so easy to destroy. Write that.”

  He writes.

  She remembers:

  “Let’s work on nested parentheses. Do you know how to do that?”

  “You start with the square brackets and then do regular parentheses?”

  “Let’s do it like the example. They give you an example here.”

  “But it’s tons of numbers … Can’t you just do it for me?”

  “How will you learn if I do it for you?”

  “Have you no mercy on a poor child?”

  “Enough, stop being a wiseass. And sit up straight, Ofer, you’re practically on the floor.”

  “I don’t even know how to read this!”

  “Stop whining.”

  “I stopped.”

  “Believe me, I have plenty of things to do other than teach you about nested parentheses.”

  “Is the artichoke ready?”

  “Wait, it takes time.”

  “The smell is driving me crazy.”

  “At least clean the table if you’re going to do your homework in the kitchen. You’ll stain your notebook. What page are you on?”

  “A hundred and fifty. It’s a huge test. I’ll never pass.”

  “Calm down. Let’s do these equations first. Read this one. Go on, stop staring.”

  “Maaaan…”

  “I’m not a man. Now read it already!”

  “ ‘What—separates—the—2x—and—the—3?’ ”

  “Well, what separates them? Leave the cake alone!”

  “How should I know? I don’t understand what this says. Is it even in Hebrew?”

  “Come on, start with the internals.”

  “But what do I do with this lousy 2x?”

  “You multiply that by 3. Every term gets multiplied by 3! Try it.”

  “Merde, I got 2x again.”

  “Let’s try it again, but without getting annoyed, okay? And stop eating the cake! You’ve already polished off half of it!”

  “What can I do? I need energy.”

  “Now solve your 3 minus 2x.”

  “Mine? It’s mine now?”

  “Yours, yours, I’m done with school.”

  “I just want you to know that my brain is rotting, and it’s your fault.”

  “Ofer, listen to me. There’s no reason why you can’t do this exercise.”

  “Yes there is.”

  “Well?”

  “I’m stupid.”

  “No you’re not.”

  “I just don’t have the part of the brain that solves equations.”

  “Come on now, shut up, honestly, talking with you is like talking with a lawyer! It’s only a few exercises in—”

  “A few? All the way to page one sixty-one …”

  “You’ve done far more complicated ones before. Remember what we had last week?”

  “But in the end I did it!”

  “Of course you did. When you want to, you can do anything. Now come on, let’s finish this up nicely, and then we’ll do the problems.”

  “Oh, we’ll do the problems, great!”

  They laugh together. His head rubs against her shoulder and he purrs like a cat, and she responds.

  “By the way, has anyone fed Nicotine and rinsed out his bowl today?”

  “Yes, I did. Scratch!”

  She scratches his head again. “Now do the exercise.”

  “That’s my thanks?”

  “Pay attention. You’re going too fast again, you’re not checking it.”

  “Stop, Mom, I can’t do it anymore! Where’s the phone?”

  “What do you need the phone for now?”

  “I’m calling Child Protective Services—”

  “Very funny. Now concentrate: once you get the principle of coefficients and simplifying terms—what are you laughing at?”

  “I don’t know, it’s just that I don’t see anything efficient or simple about this!”

  They both crack up. Ofer lies down on the floor and waves his legs around.

  “Come on, pull yourself together. We’re not making any progress.”

  “Have pity on me, Mom, I’m a poor, innocent, wretched waif.”

  “Will you shut up already?”

  “Okay, okay, what did I say?”

  “Now work quietly. I don’t want to hear another word out of you. Follow the sequence.”

  “And then you’ll make me an artichoke?”

  “I’d love to. It’s done now, I think.”

  “With mayonnaise dipping sauce?”

  “Yes.”

  “And also—Oops, sorry, I let one out. I made a mistake, a horrible mistake …”

  “A fart isn’t a mistake.”

  “So x equals a fart?”

  They roll around laughing.

  “I think we’re both losing it. Come on, let’s move on to the problems.”

  “I don’t want problems! I want an easy life!”

  “Is that you whistling?”

  “It’s not me, it’s Dad from the living room.”

  “Ilan, do me a favor, stop whistling. As it is I’m—”

  “Yes, it’s breaking our concentration, Dad.”

  “Go on, do your work.”

  “I bet you now he
’ll come in here and do a dance to make us laugh …”

  “You wish!”

  “He has the ears of a wildcat. You married a wildcat.”

  “Enough, stop babbling. How do you approach this problem?”

  “With the face of a murderer.”

  “Be careful, it’s still hot. Dip it in this, and don’t get your book dirty.”

  “ ‘If we multiply a number by 4, and add 2 to the result, we get 30.’ How am I supposed to know how to do this?”

  “Think: x times 4 plus 2 is 30.”

  “Then I know! 4x plus 2 equals 30.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning 4x equals 28. Meaning x equals 7! Hallelujah! Genius, genius!”

  “Excellent. Always remember to carry. You always want x on one side and the numbers on the other.”

  “I’m starting to enjoy this.”

  “Now let’s go on to this exercise. This also has one variable.”

  “Why is this guy so variable, I’d like to know.”

  “Will you be quiet and do the work?”

  “Do you want some of the heart?”

  “Don’t you want the heart? It’s the best part.”

  “Take it. A good, warm Jewish heart.”

  “Okay, now concentrate. You’re almost done.”

  “Will you help me with Bible Studies, too?”

  “Bible is Dad.”

  “Yeah, that’s what he thinks, too.”

  A few days later Ilan told her that while he was lying on the couch reading the paper and their voices drifted in from the kitchen, he stopped paying attention to his article and listened to them. At first, he said, he could hardly resist getting up and going into the kitchen to put an end to Ofer’s whining and acting up. He was angry at Ora’s indulgence and lenience, and her excessive collaboration with Ofer’s spoiled ways. With me, he thought, the whole thing would last for ten minutes, tops, and Ofer would have had all his equations solved long ago. But he felt that if he interfered he would make both of them angry at him, and he also sensed that they might not want to be stopped at all, even though they were arguing and teasing each other. So he just lay there and listened, and felt—in body and soul—the thousands of actions and words and thoughts and moments and mistakes and deeds, the slow, patient, stalactite accumulation of Ofer’s being in her hands. And he knew that he could never do that. He could not sit with Ofer for so long, absorbing his frustration and defeatism, and his jabs, nor would he know how to divert them and lead him slowly to the solution.