To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  Hours go by, slowly. As though they have been preserved in some distant cellar, in jars of pickled time. They fall asleep and awake and return. They cross expanses, plains, absences, insults, longings, and regrets. And again he slows down, he slows and stops exactly at the moment she wants him to, so they can gather strength together. A quiet circle breathes heavily in the eye of the storm, and they curl up inside it, and Avram is quiet, perhaps asleep, dissipated, contracting inside her, and she remembers his deep, steep dive, now he is a prehistoric ocean creature, a fish with one half fossilized, turning over inside her, diving into her depths, and now he is there, now he will not move for a moment, he will just slowly throb, resting among the corals of her flesh, hallucinating inside her, and she waits, she waits, and he starts to move again, very slowly, and she moves with him, her lips against his shoulder, very focused, she remembers him fat and heavy and clumsy, and the dance that emerges from him, and now slowly his scent will change, she starts to smile, it’s a scent that only Avram has, and only in these moments, and you cannot describe it in words.

  “One day, not now, one day,” she murmurs afterward, playing with the curls on the back of his neck, “you’ll write about our walk.”

  They lie naked under the sky canopy as the wind caresses them with soft brushes.

  “I wanted so badly to be filled up with you,” she says.

  The dog is lying closer to them now, but she does not submit when Ora invites her to come closer, to be stroked by her free hand, and she does not look directly at the two bodies whitening in the moonlight. When her gaze meets them, she runs a tongue of discontent over her lips.

  “What?” He wakes from a doze of repletion. “What did you say about the walk?”

  “I’ll buy you little notebooks, like I used to, whatever you need, and you’ll write about us.”

  He laughs in embarrassment. His fingers tap a light rebuke on her neck.

  “About me and you,” Ora says gravely, “and about how we walked, and about Ofer. Everything I told you.” She takes his right hand and kisses his fingertips, one after the other. “And don’t stress about it. For all I care, you can take a year, two, ten, however much you need.”

  Avram thinks it will be a miracle if he ever writes anything more complex than a restaurant order again.

  “You just have to remember everything I’m telling you. What do you have such a big head for? Because I’ll forget, I know I will, and you’ll remember everything, every word. And in the end, you’ll see, we’ll give birth to a book.” She laughs softly at the twinkling stars.

  “Do you know that Ilan went to look for you?” she murmurs into his shoulder.

  “When?”

  “Then.”

  “When the war was over?”

  “No, at the beginning.”

  “I don’t understand. What …?”

  “He got all the way to the Canal—”

  “No way.”

  “From Bavel. He just walked off the base.”

  “That can’t be, Ora, what are you talking about?”

  “I’m telling you.”

  His back hardens under her hand, and Ora is amazed at her stupidity: all she had in her mouth were the pleasurable murmurs and purrs of afterward, and then this came out.

  “On the second day of the war, or the third, I can’t remember.”

  Avram sits up abruptly, his nakedness still soft and anointed in her. “No, that can’t be, we’d already lost the Canal.” He searches her face for clues. She is still dizzied by the sweetness of her body, still fluttering yet already abandoned. “It was all full of Egyptians. Ora, what are you saying?”

  “But we still had a few strongholds, no?”

  “Yes, but how could he … There was no way to get to them, the Egyptians were twenty kilometers into our territory. Where did you come up with this?”

  She turns her back to him, hunches into a ball, and curses herself. Twenty-one years I waited with this, so why now?

  “Hey, Ora?”

  “In a minute.”

  Why now, after they made love? Which demon had spurred her to ruin it? But the fact that we slept together, she tells herself firmly, was so good, and it was the best thing we could do for Ofer. “Just don’t regret it!” She turns to him and her heart sinks, because it’s there, that same expression she saw in his face after the last time, when they conceived Ofer. His face has fallen, emptied out.

  “I don’t regret it, it’s just that you’re suddenly laying this story on me.”

  “I didn’t … I didn’t think I was going to tell you. It just came out.”

  “But what is the story?” he whispers.

  “He left Bavel with the water tanker, on the second or third day. Forged a transit order and left. He got all the way to the HQ at Tassa. And from there he hitched a ride in a jeep, I think, with a Canadian or Australian TV crew. A cameraman and a reporter, two crazy guys in their sixties, and they were high, you know those disaster freaks.”

  “But what was he thinking?” Avram wonders feverishly, and Ora gestures: I’m getting there.

  “The jeep ran out of gas in the middle of the desert, so he set off alone, on foot, at night, no map and almost no water, and all around him—well, you know.”

  No, Avram says voicelessly, tell me.

  What she heard from Ilan one morning twenty-one years ago, she now tells Avram in detail—she remembers quite a bit, in fact—finally bringing the story full circle.

  Ilan walked. He was scared of the roads and walked only on the sides, through sand that was sometimes knee-high. Every time he saw a vehicle, he fell flat and hid. All night he walked alone among the charred remains of jeeps and APCs, smoldering tanks and cracked fuel tankers. Egyptian armored vehicles passed him twice. Then he heard a wounded Egyptian soldier crying, begging for help, but he was afraid of traps and didn’t get close to him. Here and there he saw a charred body with black stumps sticking up and the head bent backward, mouth agape. A burned helicopter with its propeller missing was pinned into the side of a dune; he couldn’t tell if it was ours or theirs. Soldiers still sat inside, leaning forward, looking very intent. He walked on.

  “He just walked. He didn’t even know if he was heading in the right direction. You asked what he was thinking, and he wasn’t. He walked because he walked. Because you were there at the end of the road. Because only by chance were you there instead of him. I don’t know, I think I would have done the same thing. Maybe you would have too, I don’t know.”

  Because that’s exactly the way she’s walking here, Avram thinks and tries to stop the mounting tremors in his body. She is walking because she is walking. Because Ofer is there, at the end of the road. Because she’s decided that this is how she will save him, and no one will dissuade her from that. “I wouldn’t do that,” he says angrily, buttressing himself against what her story is piling up on top of him, closing in on him from one minute to the next. “I wouldn’t have gone out to find him like that, I’d have been scared to death.”

  “Yes you would have. That’s exactly the kind of thing you would have done.” An act of greatness, she thinks. A misdeed.

  “I’m not so sure,” he hisses through gritted teeth.

  “And I’ll tell you something else. It was exactly because of everything he’d learned from you over the years that he knew it could be done.”

  What he remembered from that night, Ilan told her only once, at daybreak. He squeezed her suddenly from behind, as if in his sleep, trapped her between his arms and legs, and emptied the story into her spasmodically. Now it was her turn to do the same to Avram. She hadn’t meant to tell him, Ilan had made her swear she would never, under any circumstances, in any situation, tell him. But maybe, she thinks, Ilan didn’t know the story would burst out of him either, a moment before Ofer was born. And besides, it was enough. Enough with the secrets.

  Ilan kept walking. It started to get light. Every so often he had to hide in some bushes, or in the shady folds of sand dunes.
His eyes and nose filled with sand. His teeth were gritty with sand. A soldier with a cushy job in Intelligence, armed with an SKS, no bullets, no gear, one water canteen.

  He lay down to rest in a ditch and must have fallen asleep, because when he opened his eyes there was a guy in glasses sitting next to him, gesturing for him to be quiet. He was a tankist from Brigade 401 and his tank had been hit, killing his entire crew. He’d pretended to be dead when the Egyptians had looted the tank. So these two, with one water canteen and a torn map, navigated for several hours—in total silence because they were afraid of Egyptian commando units—until they reached the coast and saw an Israeli flag, shredded and bedraggled but still flying from the broken, sunken roof of the Hamama stronghold.

  The whole time she talks, Avram frantically runs his thumbs over his fingertips, as though he has to count them over and over again. I’m not, he murmurs to himself, it can’t be. What is she babbling about?

  “It’s a fact. It happened.”

  “Ora, listen, don’t play with me about this.”

  “Have I ever played with you?” she answers angrily.

  “Hamama was one kilometer from my stronghold.”

  “One and a half.”

  “And how come he never told me anything?”

  “Didn’t you ever tell him anything?” she’d asked Ilan back then.

  “If I’d reached him, he’d know. I didn’t, so I didn’t tell him.”

  Even without touching Avram, she can feel what is occurring inside him. She pulls up her sleeping bag over her nakedness.

  “I don’t understand!” he almost yells. “Explain to me again, slowly, how did it happen?”

  “Think about it. On Yom Kippur he was in Bavel. They already knew that the strongholds were falling and there were loads of casualties. There were horrible rumors. And also, he listened in on the Egyptian networks and heard—”

  “What do you mean ‘listened in’?” Avram jumped up, furious. “He wasn’t a radio operator, he was a translator! Who gave him permission to intercept networks?”

  “I don’t know if anyone ‘gave him permission.’ He probably found an unmanned scanner, and in between translation shifts he sat and played with the frequencies. You can imagine what kind of chaos it was there in the first few days.”

  “This is just impossible.” Avram shakes his heavy head. “I don’t know why you would tell me something like this.”

  He suddenly remembers Ilan the teenager, scanning the old radio in Avram’s house for Willis Conover’s jazz program on the Voice of America. His green eyes narrow, his long fingers gently turn the dial. Avram gets up and starts to pull on his clothes. He cannot hear this news with nothing on.

  “Why are you getting up?”

  “I have to know, Ora. Did he hear something on the network?”

  “Wait, I’m getting there, let me—”

  “Did he hear me?” His eyes gape.

  “I can’t do it like this.” She gets up and also dresses quickly. “With—you—pressuring—me—like—this!”

  “But what could he have done there?” Avram yells, one leg hanging out of his pants. They fumble around, each hopping on one foot, battling rebellious pants and shouting, and the dog barks fearfully. “What was he looking for?!”

  “You! He was looking for you!”

  “Is he an idiot? What is he, Rambo?”

  They sit down breathlessly, facing each other.

  “I need some coffee.” Avram gets up and gathers wood and twigs in the dark. They light a fire. The night is cold and seething. Birds screech as in a dream, toads croak with thick voices, mongooses churr. Dogs bark in the distance, and the bitch scurries around, restlessly watching the dark valley. Ora wonders if she can hear her pack barking. Perhaps she regrets leaving them.

  “Listen, they wanted to court-martial him after the war,” she says quietly. “But in the end they let it go. The circumstances. The chaos. They dropped it.”

  “But he barely knew how to shoot! What was he thinking? Didn’t you ask him?”

  “I did.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “Well, what could he say? He said he was mostly looking for someone to shoot him.”

  “What?”

  “ ‘Someone to do him a favor,’ ” she quotes. “What are you looking at? That’s what he said.”

  At ten a.m., Ilan and the tankist reached the Hamama stronghold on the banks of the Suez Canal, opposite the city of Ismailia. For the first time, they saw the Egyptians crossing the Canal en masse, not far away, streaming into the Sinai Peninsula. They stood staring. It was hard to believe the scene. Ilan told her, “Somehow it wasn’t frightening. We felt like we were watching a movie.”

  They called out to the soldier watching them from the tower near the gate, waved a white undershirt, and asked him to let them in. A short burst of fire came from the stronghold, and they ran and fell to the ground, spread their arms out in front of them and kept shouting. The gate opened a crack and a frightened-looking officer with an Uzi aimed at them peered out. “Who are you?” he yelled. Ilan and the guy replied that they were Israelis. The officer screamed at them not to move. “Let us in!” they begged, but he wasn’t in any hurry. “Where are you from?” They gave him their unit numbers. “No, where in Israel?” “Jerusalem,” they both replied, and glanced at each other. The officer considered this, signaled for them not to move, and disappeared. The earth below their feet trembled. Behind their backs they could hear the hum of Egyptian tanks. “Where d’you go to school?” Ilan hissed without moving his lips. “Boyer,” the guy said, “a year below you.” “You mean you know me?” Ilan exclaimed. The soldier smiled. “Who didn’t? You were always with that other one, the fat guy with long hair who jumped off the tree.” The gate swung open and the officer motioned for them to approach slowly, on their knees, with their hands up.

  Ghosts with bloodshot eyes gathered around them. Filthy ghosts covered with white dust. From all ends of the stronghold they closed in around the two new guys. They silently listened to their report on what they’d seen on the way. The stronghold commander, a tired, worn-out man twice Ilan’s age, asked what he was doing in this area. Ilan looked him in the eye and said he’d been sent from Bavel to remove classified information and secret equipment from Magma, and asked when he could go there. The soldiers gave one another sideway looks. The commander just grimaced and left, taking the tankist with him. A fat reservist with a blunt look turned to Ilan and said in a drawl, “Forget about Magma. Those guys are done for. And even if by some miracle anyone’s still alive there, the Egyptians are throttling them from all directions.” Ilan was astonished. “Then why doesn’t someone go help them? Why doesn’t the Air Force take out the Egyptians?” The soldiers snickered. “The Air Force? Forget it,” said the fat reservist. “Forget everything you know about the IDF.” The others mumbled in concurrence. “You should have heard the guys from Hizayon crying over the radio,” said a blond soldier with a soot-blackened face. “Depressed the hell out of us.” Ilan whispered: “Crying? They really cried?” The fat guy said, “They cried, and they cursed us for not coming to help. Don’t worry, we’ll be crying soon, too.” Another soldier, with a bandaged arm hanging in a filthy fabric sling, said, “We know how it goes now, all the stages.” A short, dark-skinned sergeant piped up: “You hear everything here. You hear it right up to the last minute, right up to when they shit themselves. Live broadcast.” A squat reservist added, “We’ve gone through it with a few strongholds by now.” They all talked at Ilan together, interrupting each other. Their voices had no colors. Ilan sensed they were taking advantage of his presence to talk to one another through him.

  He turned away and staggered over to a corner and sat down on the floor. He looked around and did not move. His brain was empty. Every so often someone came up to him and tried to engage him, asked what he knew about the war and about the situation in Israel. The medic forced him to drink some water and ordered him to lie down on a stretc
her. He lay down obediently and must have fallen asleep for a while. He soon awoke when an earthquake shook the ground and a cloud of dust thickened the air. A faint alarm rang out somewhere in the distance, and then came hurried footsteps from all directions, and panicked shouts. Someone tossed him a helmet. He stood up and walked around the bunker, confused, from wall to wall, amid the commotion of a disturbed ants’ nest. He felt as if he were walking very slowly through a fast-forwarded movie and that if he reached out to the soldiers dashing around him, his hand would go right through their bodies.