To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  Years later—Ilan told Ora that dawn, the day Ofer was born—he still tormented himself for being so embarrassed about Avram in front of the commander. When he told her, Ora suddenly realized that Avram, in the way he spoke, the way he acted, and his entire being, was always exposing a vaguely embarrassing, private secret that everyone kept. She remembered how he used to joke, “I always say out loud what everyone isn’t thinking.” The commander let out a pent-up breath, straightened up, and said, “Okay, it’s that kid, we know about him, but we thought he was gone.” He took the headphones off and asked, “Who gave you permission to open up a position?”

  Ilan seemed not to have heard and asked in a choked-up voice: “You know about him? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  The commander furrowed his brow. “Who are you, anyway? What makes you think I have to report anything to you?”

  Ilan turned very pale and seemed unable to breathe, and the commander sensed his distress and changed his tone. “Listen, calm down, sit down, we can’t do anything for him for now.” Ilan sat down obediently. His limbs were weak, and sweat poured down his face. “On the first and second days he drove the whole network crazy,” said the commander as he glanced at his watch.

  “What did he do?” Ilan whispered.

  “Oh, he just wouldn’t stop blathering and shouting for us to come and get him out. And he’s wounded, too. Lost a hand or a foot or something, I can’t remember. Truth is, he kept giving so many vivid descriptions, we just stopped hearing it, and then he disappeared off the airwaves just like everyone else over there, and we thought that was it. So it’s commendable that he’s lasted this long, but forget about reaching him. Get that out of your head.”

  “Get what?” Ilan whispered.

  “Him,” the commander said, raising his eyebrows in the direction of the scanner, which once again emitted Avram’s voice, now sounding strangely joyous as he trumpeted Duke Ellington’s “Take the ‘A’ Train” through his lips.

  The commander started to head back to the bunker, but Ilan grabbed his arm. “I don’t understand. What do you mean, we can’t? He’s a soldier in the IDF, isn’t he? So what do you mean ‘we can’t’?”

  The commander gave Ilan a cautionary look and slowly released his arm from his grip. They faced each other as Avram’s voice wafted between them, announcing, in English, a competition between Russian and American big bands, and asking his listeners to send in postcards and vote for their favorite.

  The commander was a short and doleful-looking man. His face was covered with floury dust. “Forget it,” he said gently. “I’m telling you, forget it. We can’t do anything for him right now. He’s surrounded by the entire Egyptian army, and we have zero forces out there. Besides, listen to him,” he added in a whisper, as though he feared Avram could hear him. “He’s beyond caring where he is, believe me.” As if to confirm this, Avram burst into a long, screeching yodel that sounded horrifyingly alien, and the commander quickly flipped the dial and replaced Avram’s screech with the sounds of orders and gunshot and Artillery Corps tracking points that briefly sounded, even to Ilan, logical in their own way, legal tender under these circumstances.

  “Wait!” Ilan ran after the commander as he left the room. “Has anyone been able to talk to him?”

  The commander shook his head and kept walking. “At first, yes. On the first day he had one good transmitter, but it stopped working, and he doesn’t seem to know how to put the PRC in receiving mode.”

  “He doesn’t know?” Ilan asked in horror. “How could he not know? All he has to do is listen, doesn’t he?”

  The commander shrugged his shoulders as he walked. “I guess the instrument’s screwed up. Or else the guy’s screwed up.” Then he stopped abruptly, turned to Ilan, studied him closely, and asked, “What’s your deal with this guy? You know him?”

  “He’s from Bavel. Intelligence.”

  The commander turned grave. “That I didn’t know. Not good. We’ll have to send word on.”

  Ilan brightened at this spark of interest. “Listen, we can’t let him get caught, he knows lots of stuff, he knows everything, he has a phenomenal memory, we have to get to him before they do—”

  He fell silent at once. He wanted to bite his tongue. Something foreign and tortuous flashed in the commander’s eyes, and Ilan realized that he himself might have handed down a death sentence for Avram at that very moment. He stood there, stunned by what he had done. In his mind’s eye he saw an Israeli Phantom diving down over the stronghold to destroy the security risk hidden among the ruins of Magma. He ran after the major and danced around him, behind him, in front of him. “Try to save him!” he begged. “Do something!”

  The commander lunged at him and lost his temper for the first time. “If he’s from Intelligence, why doesn’t he shut up?” He grabbed Ilan’s shoulders and shook him, shouting: “Is he an idiot? Doesn’t he know they’re listening in on all the networks? Doesn’t he know they’re pinpointing every fart they pick up in the whole sector?”

  “But you heard him,” Ilan whispered in despair. “I guess he isn’t really—”

  “Leave him there, I told you!” the commander shouted, and the veins on his neck bulged. “Get off the frequency, pack up the scanner in the APC, and get the hell out of my face!”

  The commander walked away, waving his arms angrily, but Ilan no longer knew what he was doing. He run after him again, blocked his way, and stood forehead to forehead. “Just let me listen in on him. At least let me hear what he says.”

  “Negative,” the commander hissed, amazed at Ilan’s impudence. “You have three seconds to get the hell out of my—”

  “But we have to!” Ilan groaned. “At least so we’ll know if he’s giving them anything about Leech—”

  “What’s that?”

  Ilan held his face very close to the man and whispered something.

  There was a silence. The major blinked, put his hands on his waist, and studied a flaw in the walls of the trench. ‘Leech’ was always beyond any argument or objection. “I can’t spare the men,” he finally snarled.

  “I’m not one of your men,” Ilan reminded him. They took a step back from each other.

  “You and your Intelligence can choke on it,” the major whispered. “You’ve really fucked us. You’ve murdered everyone here. Go on, get out of here, do whatever you like, I’m washing my hands of it.”

  “Hello, hello? Anyone left?” The voice returned when Ilan put the headphones on. They were still warm from the commander’s touch. “Why doesn’t anyone answer … What is this, are you playing with me? Over, over, over,” Avram mumbled hopelessly. “God damn this fucking machine. Does it work? No? How am I supposed to … Hello? Man, this blows. Fuck!”

  He must have hit the instrument. Ilan pulled a chair over and sat down with his back to the room. He forced himself to calm down and think rationally: Avram is in the stronghold, one and a half kilometers from here. He seems to be alone, injured, and slightly unstable, and an Egyptian Intelligence listener could locate him at any minute and send soldiers over there.

  Ilan found that his attempt to stick to logic made him even more anxious.

  “And I need clean water and bandages,” Avram mumbled, exhausted. “This thing stinks. It’s a rag … Hello? Hello? Can’t hear. Why would you hear, you assholes. Well, if you don’t hear, you’ll soon smell, with this wound. Gangrene for sure, fuckit.”

  Shut up, Ilan begged him. He pressed his legs together and pleaded: Just hide there and shut up.

  Silence. Ilan waited. More silence. He breathed a sigh of relief. The silence continued. Ilan leaned forward, his eyes darting nervously at the flickering display. “Where are you, why did you disappear?” he murmured.

  “Plant, this is Peach.” A new voice rose dimly over a rattling engine sound. “We’ve been hit on Lexicon 42. We have casualties. Requesting evacuation.”

  “Peach, um, this is Plant. Copy. Sending evacuation momentarily, over.”

  �
�Plant, this is Peach. Thanks, waiting, just hurry ’cause it’s kind of a mess here.”

  “Peach, this is Plant. We are handling, we are handling, out.”

  “Shakespeare, for instance, is immortal,” came the weak murmur again. “Mozart, too. Who else?”

  Ilan’s finger jumped. He still could not control his initial reaction every time he picked up Avram’s voice. His skipping heart had shuddered the frequency. The signal line shrank back into bushes of analog greenery, and Ilan swore at himself furiously with some of Avram’s juiciest curses.

  “Socrates is immortal too, I think. Don’t know him well enough. I started reading a little this summer, but I couldn’t get through it. Who else? Kafka? Maybe. Picasso for sure. Then again, the cockroaches will survive, too.”

  A foreign voice came over the frequency in Arabic. “Division 16 lookout to Bortukal. Sighted Jewish tank hit at Kilometer 42, over.”

  “Hello, hello, answer me, you sons of bitches, you quislings. You left me here to die? How could you leave me to die?”

  “Bortukal to lookout. On the way to Jewish tank, Allah willing we’ll be there in five.”

  “Dear listeners,” Avram suddenly said in a grotesquely seductive whisper that shocked Ilan. “Hurry up and get here, ’cause soon there won’t be any Avram left for anyone.”

  “Plant, this is Peach, still don’t see the evacuation. Situation here is bad. Over.”

  “Peach, this is Plant. Don’t worry, everything under control. Evacuation at yours in seven, and if needed we can call in the blues, over.”

  “Thanks, thanks, blues would be great, just hurry, I have two matchsticks with severe injuries, over.”

  “This is your beloved Avram.” His voice wove into the frequency again. “This is Avram begging you to hurry and save him before he lies with his forefathers, who, incidentally, adamantly refuse to lie with him, claiming his injury is considered menses—”

  “I heard you found that guy from Magma,” said a grinning Yemenite soldier as he walked past Ilan. “He’s shooting the shit again, is he? We thought he’d turned in his gear by now, if you know what I mean.”

  “So you heard him, too?”

  The soldier snorted and a demonic flash in his eyes cracked through the mask of dust on his face. “Who didn’t? Totally hysterical. Cursed us, threatened us. Berserk. What are you laughing at?”

  “No, nothing. Did he really threaten you?”

  “Even General Gorodish wouldn’t talk to a grunt like that. Move over, lemme hear.” He leaned on the table, flipped one side of Ilan’s headphones out, and held it to his ear. He smiled and nodded as he listened. “Yeah, that’s him all right, blah-blah-blah. Belongs in the Knesset.”

  “He’s been that way the whole time?” Ilan asked, although he knew the answer.

  “No, at first he was okay. Balls of steel. He was careful on the radio, talked in hints, used code names. I think he even got through to the BG at Tassa, gave him info.”

  Ilan imagined how quickly Avram would have adopted military lingo, making it sound like his mother tongue. He could hear him intoning in a deep voice, “Negative, um, negative, over,” and delightfully picturing the astonished look at HQ (“Anyone know this kid running the show at Magma on his own?”).

  “But you’re on a PRC-6,” the soldier jibed. “This thing’s like a walkie-talkie; I don’t get how you even found him.”

  “Someone set it up for me.”

  “It’s for internal communications, anyway, for inside the stronghold. It’s just a shoddy hunk of metal, not for these ranges.”

  “Are you a radio operator?”

  “Can’t you see?” He smiled and pointed at his big ears.

  “How long can it keep transmitting?”

  The solider pouted as he considered the question, and finally decreed: “Depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On how many batteries it has, and how long till the penny drops on the other side that they have one of our guys alive.”

  In the background, Avram sang vigorously, “My sukkah is a delight—with greenery and lights!” and the radio operator hummed along with him, bobbing his head to the rhythm. “Listen to him. Thinks he’s on Sesame Street or something.”

  The song broke into a groan of pain. Avram disappeared for several seconds and Ilan searched feverishly, fiddling with the needle, slamming the radio—and that was when he realized that the sharp ring he kept hearing wasn’t coming from the scanner but from his ear, because of that one shot he had fired. When he found Avram again, there was no trace in his voice of that terrifying cheerfulness, only a quiet, docile murmur: “I don’t remember, leave me alone, my brain’s fried. I wanted to tell you … what did I want to say? Why did I even come? What am I here? I don’t even belong in this place.”

  Shoulder to shoulder, ear to ear, the radio operator and Ilan stooped over the device. The radio operator said, “He’s got a chick on his mind, you hear him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Poor guy. Doesn’t know he’ll never see her again.”

  “And there’s no food,” Avram groused, “only flies, a trillion of them. Fuck you, you sucked out all my blood. I have a fever, touch here, and there’s no water, and they won’t come, hello …”

  “His problem,” the soldier said, “is that he’s keeping it turned on.”

  He always keeps it turned on, Ilan thought to himself with a smile. Avram would have liked that.

  “Hello, you urethra-less, testes-scalded …” Avram blathered on, but the desire was gone, and the words dropped from his mouth empty and dry. “For God’s sake, you’ve had your fun and games, I get it, now come and get me already, I want to go home.”

  “What’s his deal?” the soldier asked with a grimace. “D’you understand him?”

  “I understand him,” Ilan replied.

  Avram whispered, “Hey, maybe you’ve got a connection at the Egyptian commando?”

  The soldier moaned, “Man, it’s bad enough he’s calling them over, now he’s spreading his legs, too.”

  “Maybe your aunt from Przemysl happens to have gone to school with the grandmother of Wicked Akid Khamzi from Regiment 13?”

  Ilan made a hopeless attempt: “D’you think we really can’t send over a force to—”

  The radio operator flipped the headphone back on Ilan’s ear, got up, and looked at him for a long time. “What’d you say your name was?”

  “Ilan.”

  “Okay, listen up, Johnny. Take the headphones off—take them off now—and get over him. Forget him. Khalas. Just erase that he ever was. He never was.”

  “Forget him?” Ilan scoffed. “Forget Avram?”

  “You’re better off making a clean cut.” Then he caught on. “Wait a minute, you know him?”

  “He’s a friend.”

  “A friend-friend or a how’s-it-going friend?”

  “Friend-friend.”

  “Forget what I said,” the soldier mumbled and walked away.

  “Scorpion, this is Butterfly. Sighted flock of Saggers on your right, five hundred range. Fire, fire all means, over.”

  “Plant, where the hell is the aerial support you promised? You keep saying ‘copy’ and ‘on the way,’ and nothing’s happening. They’re killing us here! I have one dead, one wounded, over, over.”

  “Who at his predestined time and who before his time; who by water and who by fire; who by sword and who by beast.”

  “Hello! What’s wrong with you? Yom Kippur was two days ago.”

  “In the name of Allah most gracious and most merciful, to all units, Division 16 continues across the Canal according to plans. No serious resistance so far, inshallah we will continue to victory.”

  “Abir, this is Duvdevan, in response to your question, maybe fifty men still alive along the border, one here, a couple there.”

  “Plant, they’re coming at us, why don’t you answer?”

  “Who by strangulation and who by stoning, who will rest and who will wan
der, who will live in harmony and who will be harried.”

  “Jewish pilot injured in bushes near two five three.”

  “Your orders are: be prepared, maintain radio silence, wait for them to come and rescue him, and only then, fire with all means, over.”

  “And my mother, even though you don’t deserve to hear about her, you fuckers, abandoners of your brethren—”

  Ilan pressed the sides of the machine until his knuckles turned white.

  “My mother,” Avram croaked, “she’s already dead, gone in a flash. But she always …” He made a strangled sound. “She was always patient with me, I swear on my life.” He giggled. “ ‘On my life,’ what a great expression! On-my-life—do you understand what that means? On-my-life! Lechayim!”

  Then another long silence, punctured by grating chirps. The green signal shrank, quivered, and split, then expanded and climbed up again.

  “I used to run down Bezalel Street with her,” Avram continued, and now he sounded so weak that Ilan slumped over on the radio. “We lived near the shuk when I was little … I don’t remember, don’t remember if I told you. How come I can’t remember anything? Don’t remember faces now, I can’t remember Ora’s face … Just her eyebrows. All her beauty is in her eyebrows.”

  His breathing was belabored. Ilan could feel him burning up and his consciousness rapidly slipping away.

  “And with Mom we used to run down Bezalel, all the way to Sacker Park, anyone know it? Hello?”

  Ilan nodded.

  “She used to hold my hand, I was maybe five, and we ran all the way down, then back up, and we’d run until I got sick of it.”

  He gurgled and fell silent. The background noises died down, too. A strange, terrifying silence pervaded the entire sector. Ilan imagined that everyone on both sides of the Canal had stopped for a moment to listen to Avram’s story.

  “And you know how when you’re a kid, and some grown-up plays with you, you’re always afraid of when they’ll get sick of you? When they’ll look at their watch, when they’ll have something more important to do than be with you?”