To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  “Ora.”

  “What?”

  “When did he tell you all this?”

  “The morning Ofer was born.”

  “What, in the delivery room?”

  “No. We were still at home. Before we left for the hospital. Very early in the morning.”

  “He just woke you up and started telling you?”

  She blinks, trying to understand why the details are so important to him, amazed at how, just like in the old days, his soothsaying instincts have awakened. “Look, it was the first and last time I heard the story.”

  “Then how do you remember everything?”

  “I can’t forget that morning. Every single word.” She looks away, but he spies, he scans, sharp and keen, and she knows: he can feel something. He just doesn’t understand what.

  • • •

  The bombardment stopped. People calmed down, took off their steel helmets and flak jackets. Someone made Turkish coffee and handed Ilan a cup. He stood up, walked mechanically to the commander, and asked if he could go back to his base at Um Hashiba now. People poked their heads up over maps and transceivers and looked at him as if he were crazy. They repeated his question to one another. “You’re a real space cadet,” they scoffed. “The only way you leave this place is with broken dog tags in your mouth.”

  “And that’s when he finally grasped what he’d gotten himself into,” Ora said.

  “I didn’t know,” Avram whispers, pained.

  Ora thinks: Wait till you hear how much you didn’t know.

  “They stuck an Uzi in his hand and asked if he knew how to shoot it. He said he’d done target practice six months ago. They smiled disdainfully and sat him down by some device. I think it was something for night vision—”

  “SLS,” Avram murmured. “Starlight scope, we had one at Magma, too.”

  “—and they told him to snap out of it because the Egyptians were coming and it would be rude to greet them in that state. ’Cause at that point they were still joking around.”

  He couldn’t see anything through the telescope and probably didn’t know how to use it, but all night he heard shouting in Arabic, very close, and large objects splashing in the water, and he realized the Egyptians were still crossing. Shells fell constantly and shook the stronghold. Every so often he told himself: Avram is dead. My friend Avram is dead, his body is close by. But even though he kept repeating the words, he still couldn’t feel their meaning. He couldn’t feel simple pain or even bewilderment at not feeling pain.

  They sit quietly, both their hearts suddenly speeding up, beating down the questions that will not be asked. What did you think, Ora? What did you think when we called you and told you to take a hat and two pieces of paper? Did you really have no clue what you were drawing? And what did you secretly hope? Which name did you want to pick out of the hat? And had you known then what would happen—no, don’t ask that question. Still, he has to, he has to know for once: Had you known what would happen, which name would you have wanted to pick?

  At four in the morning someone took over his position. Ilan ran out to the bunker and a shell flew past his head. Horrified, he shrank into one of the pigeonholes in the side of the trench. “Where’s the latrine?” he yelled at a bearded soldier hunched nearby in the moat, his whole body shaking. “Wherever you take a shit, that’s the latrine,” the guy groaned. Ilan felt as if his pants were about to fill up any second. He tore them down, and for a few blessed moments forgot about everything—the war, the shelling, Avram whom he’d lost—and focused entirely on emptying his bowels.

  When he got to the war room afterward, the silence terrified him. Someone signaled for him to climb up the lookout point and look west. And there he saw a massive carpet of white and pale yellow moving toward the stronghold like a tidal wave floating through the desert.

  “Theirs,” a soldier spat out. “Probably twenty tanks. All the guns are at us.”

  And the bombardment began. Tanks fired, a battery of mortars that appeared on a distant hilltop fired, and an Egyptian Sukhoi flew over and dropped bombs. The air and the earth shook. Everything in front of Ilan’s eyes shook. People and concrete walls and tables and transceivers and weapons. Every object diverged from its natural shape and hummed wildly. A new discharge of diarrhea surged in Ilan’s bowels. He turned and ran to his pigeonhole.

  “The world’s dead,” muttered a young redhead in military long johns as he ran past, and Ilan dimly realized it might be time to write letters—or something like that—to his parents, and to Ora and Avram, and then he realized he’d never write anything to Avram again. Not notes in class, not lewd limericks, not ideas for recordings or Ephraim Kishon quotes or quasi-Talmudic interpretations of Fanny Hill. There would be no more songs in Rashi script describing the charms of their female classmates, nor long conversations in sign language during class, right in front of the teachers. No sweet dreams about the ultimate Israeli movie—a neon-realist film—which Ilan would direct based on Avram’s screenplay. No rhymed letters full of horny cogitations, like the ones that flew among the various bases to which they were each sent, already stamped with circles of ink for the censor’s drool spots. No messages—transmitted in code that was unbreakable because it was based on their own secrets and trivia—which they sent each other over the military teleprinter. Gone were their joint voyages of discovery to the new continents of Bakunin and Kropotkin, Kerouac and Burroughs, and Fielding’s Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews, or Druyanov’s Book of Jewish Jokes and Wit. Finished were the jokes, Ilan finally realized, the witticisms, the repartee, the rude puns, the comprehension with one glance, the deep, dark, mutual identification between two spies in enemy land, two only children and what always linked them together, beyond the hysterical laughter to the point of tears.

  That was it. He would no longer have anyone to marvel with at On Aggression and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which they read to each other out loud in the valley of Yafeh Nof, perched on a rock known as “the elephant tusk.” And whom would he argue with, while running through a hole in the fence of the Bahad 15 base in the middle of the night, about Moshe Kroy’s concepts or the blues chords encoded in Beatles songs? Who would dramatize and sketch and record with him on the clumsy Akai tape recorder the stomachachingly exhausting arguments between Naphta and Settembrini from Magic Mountain? There would be no more quotes from the sacred poetry of David Avidan and Yonah Wallach or from Catch-22 or Under Milk Wood—a song of praise for the human voice, from which Avram could recite entire pages by heart. And who else in the world would manage to drag him to the offices of Yedioth Aharonot in Tel Aviv for a meeting with the editor in chief, who was surprised to discover that they were only boys, and that the idea to which they had alluded in their letter—“which, if permitted, we may unfurl in your honor’s ears solely in a face-to-face meeting”—namely that once a month the entire newspaper should be written by poets (“all the sections,” Avram explained gravely to the astounded editor, “from the main headline down to the sports and ads. Even the weather”)? Only with Avram would he live a whole life, parallel to their own and hidden to all, in the smoky rooms of DownBeat magazine, which they stole every month from the Music Academy’s library, and with which they carefully planned their nightly entertainment at Carnegie Hall, Preservation Hall, and the jazz dens of New Orleans, and fantasized about new jazz albums, and books they could not get in Israel, though they could entertain wild conjectures about their content—Duke Ellington’s Music Is My Mistress drove them crazy for weeks, based solely on the reviews and the ads and the title. And who would dig through Ginsburg on Allenby Street with him, looking for secondhand instruments? Who would buy for him, with money he did not have, Stan Getz and John Coltrane albums, and open his ears to the political protest of jazz and blues, which he had never detected or imagined before Avram? No one in the world would cheerfully call him “progeny of languid seed,” or “misbegotten Adullamite,” or “gout-ridden vesicle.” And who else would thrash out with him the finer
points of the Hebrew language and its Greek borrowings? Who would compliment him after a brilliant move in backgammon by yelling, “Mighty is your roar, O lion!”?

  There would be no rowdy competitions to recite the Ayalon-Shen’ar Arabic-Hebrew dictionary by heart, and therefore, no one would hit him with tadahlaz: “to dally in the corridors, of parliament etc.” (of course Ilan had to remember the “etc.”), or slip him, in a crowded elevator, nahedah—“a maiden with rounded, full breasts.” Gone were their Arabized Hebrew and Hebraized Arabic: he could not call bottles bakabik instead of bakbukim, or birds tzapafir instead of tziporim, or condoms kanadem for kondomim, or buttocks aka’ez for akuzim. And who would there be to immerse him in a bubbling cauldron, pass him with the call of the wild, carry him through a storm in his talons, and shuffle him off this mortal coil?

  He went back to the war room just as the Israeli tanks flanked the Egyptian tanks and set two of them on fire. The soldiers throughout the stronghold cheered and hugged. They waved excitedly at the Israeli tanks and began to prepare for their rescue. When the forces disappeared over the sand dunes in pursuit of the unharmed Egyptian tanks, a heavy, toxic silence spread through the stronghold. The soldiers stood with their arms suspended awkwardly, mid-wave.

  A few moments later, a wounded Egyptian soldier climbed out of his tank with flames shooting up from his shoulders. He jumped off the tank and started running around with his hands held high, until he finally collapsed facedown, convulsed, and eventually stopped moving. He lay there in strange surrender as the flames engulfed his body. Four Egyptian APCs showed up and discharged a few soldiers in camouflage fatigues, who looked at the stronghold and consulted. The stronghold commander gave an order, and everyone who had a weapon started shooting. Ilan, too. The first shot, his only one in the war, punctured his eardrum and scarred him with a constant ringing sound. The Egyptian soldiers jumped back into the APCs and retreated. Ilan pulled a water canteen out of an abandoned gear belt and gulped down almost the entire contents. His knees were shaking. The thought that he could have killed a person, and that he really wanted to, ripped off a layer of film that had been covering him since he began this journey.

  The commander called him over, said he didn’t care where he’d come from, but from now on he was under his command. He told him to circle through the lookout positions and take care of anything the men asked for. Over the next several hours, Ilan hauled crates of ammunition, jerry cans of water and generator fuel, and sandwiches churned out by the medic. Together with a thick-bearded, reticent soldier, he dismantled a MAG from an APC in the yard and helped erect it on the northern post. He gathered more and more “administrative material,” papers and forms and activity logs, and burned them in the yard.

  When he stopped to pee, a thought came to him. He went up to the APC, untied and rolled back the camouflage net, and peered in at the pile of instruments. He stood looking at them for a long time. Suddenly he jumped up as though someone had slapped him and ran as fast as he could to look for the Intelligence NCO. He dragged him back to the APC and explained what he wanted to do.

  The NCO stared at him, then laughed loudly, cursed him, and yelled that HQ would kick his ass if anything happened to any of the instruments. In the same breath he added that in an hour or two they’d have to douse the whole thing with gasoline and burn it anyway. Ilan said, “Just gimme one instrument for an hour, that’s all.” The NCO shook his head and crossed his arms over his chest. He was a big guy, taller and broader than Ilan. Ilan said quietly, “We’re all going to die. Why would you cheap out on me for one lousy VRC?” The NCO tied the camouflage net back on the APC and whistled to himself. When he finished, he turned and saw Ilan still standing there. “Get lost,” he hissed, “there’s nothing for you to do here.” Ilan said, “Half an hour, you can time me.” The NCO turned red. He snarled that Ilan was getting on his nerves, and besides, the transceiver at Magma had been destroyed ages ago, so there weren’t any transmissions coming out of there anyway. Ilan smiled and asked pleasantly, almost sweetly (“Well, when Ilan wants something …,” Ora says, and Avram nods), “Just tell me one thing. What other instruments do they use in the strongholds?” The NCO, thrown by Ilan’s friendliness, muttered that Magma probably had a few PRC-6s, but there was no chance anything was left there. Ilan asked if this scanner could pick up a PRC-6 frequency. The NCO shoved Ilan’s hand off the instrument, fastened the net again, and growled that if Ilan didn’t get lost, he was done for. Ilan, with his usual coolheadedness, smiled again and said that if the NCO gave him an instrument now, just for an hour, he promised, he swore, not to tell the Egyptians when they came that he was the Intelligence NCO.

  “What did you say?” the NCO blurted. Ilan pinned him to the APC with his arms, and repeated his offer face-to-face. The NCO’s eyes darted around in search of help, but Ilan could already see the wheels in his mind moving like a very simple abacus. “You’re fucked up,” the NCO panted in his ear, “you’re an asshole, a spy, this is treason.” But he spoke in a whisper that disclosed the results of his calculations. Ilan let go. They stood facing each other. “Where did you come from?” the NCO whispered hoarsely. “Who are you, anyway?” Ilan flooded him with his green eyes and shamelessly mimed fingernails being torn out and electrodes being hooked up to his balls. The guy moaned. His lips moved silently. All this lasted maybe ten seconds. The NCO could no longer deal with such a terrifying scenario and voluntarily gave in. Without a word, he undid the camouflage net and extracted a VRC device. He placed it on a small wooden table outside the war-room bunker and turned to leave. Ilan grabbed his arm and asked: “Are you sure this can pick up a PRC-6?”

  “No,” the NCO mumbled, avoiding Ilan’s eyes like a hypnotist’s. “It’s not even in the right range.”

  “Then make it in the right range.”

  The NCO swallowed and hooked up the instrument with a wire to the only antenna that hadn’t yet collapsed. Then he pulled out a screwdriver, removed the instrument lid, dug through its innards, and expanded the frequency range. When he finished, he got up and walked away without looking at Ilan, his arms hanging by the sides of his body and the back of his shirt soaked with sweat.

  As Ora talks, Avram slowly pulls his sleeping bag around his body like a cocoon. Only his white face peers out.

  “Ora?”

  “What?”

  “He told you all that?”

  “Yes.”

  “The morning Ofer was born?”

  “I told you—”

  “What was it, some kind of urge he suddenly had, before the birth? To tell you all this?”

  “I guess. Ask him.”

  “Just like that, out of the blue, you were sitting there, chatting over your morning coffee, and he started telling you about—”

  “Avram, I don’t remember all the details.”

  “You said you couldn’t forget anything about that morning.”

  “But what difference does it make now?”

  “It’s just interesting, don’t you think?”

  “What?”

  “That right before Ofer’s birth, he decided. It’s a bit strange, after all.”

  “What’s so strange?”

  “That he chose that time—”

  “Yes, that time. Don’t you understand?”

  His eyes scan hers. She looks straight at him without hiding anything. She gives it to him: herself and Ilan, and Ofer in her stomach. He looks and sees.

  “Hello hello hello hello,” came a ghostly voice, exhausted and despondent, and Ilan jumped up in his chair, losing the signal when he did so. He carefully moved the dial again. His finger suddenly trembled uncontrollably, and he had to fold it in and use his wrist to turn the dial. He’d been sitting there for two hours, almost without moving, only his index finger rolling the dial with paper-thin moves as his eyes scanned the lawn of signals: thin green blades that sprouted and withered intermittently on the little screen. “Hello hello hello,” a distant voice whispered weakly agai
n. “Hello, hello …” The voice faded, disturbed by the breezes of radio noise, someone from Ismailia shouting in Arabic at a squad commander of Sagger missiles. Ilan tried to calm down and convince himself he’d been wrong—there was no way to identify a single voice in this hellish commotion. He carefully turned the dial through Egyptian and Israeli radio networks, a concoction of hysterical yells, engine hums, falling shells, orders and screams and curses in Hebrew and Arabic, until suddenly, from the depths, the weak and desperate voice emerged again: “Hello hello, answer already, you fuckers.” Ilan’s hair stood on end.

  With both hands he held the earphones to his head and heard it, word for word: “Where is everyone? You scurvy-ridden eunuchs, may my spirit haunt you at night!” He tore the headphones off and ran to the war-room bunker, burst into a debriefing, and yelled, “There’s a soldier in Magma! I heard him, I got him on the radio, he’s alive!”

  The commander gave him one look and hurried after him, without even asking who gave Ilan permission to deploy secret interception equipment. Trembling, Ilan put the headphones over the commander’s ears: “Listen, he’s alive, he’s alive.” The commander leaned on the desk with two fists, listened, and his forehead wrinkled as his face changed expressions. Ilan thought quickly: Maybe I should explain that this is how Avram always talks; he even considered adding that they had to rescue him despite his talk.