To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  “Yes,” Ilan said. “Yes.”

  “But Mom, she never got sick of it before I did, not with anything. I knew that no matter what, she’d never stop a game before me.” He was floating through a mist. His voice was bare and thin like a child’s, and Ilan felt as though he was seeing Avram naked, but he couldn’t stop. “That’s something that gives you strength for your whole life. That’s something that makes a person happy, isn’t it?”

  A gaunt and extremely agitated religious soldier bumped into Ilan’s chair and asked him to help pack up the religious paraphernalia. He blinked and smiled mechanically every few seconds. Ilan got up from his scanner. When he stretched, he realized he hadn’t moved for over an hour. He knelt down by the soldier and filled an empty ammunition crate with Bibles, prayer books, yarmulkes, a havdalah wine goblet, an army-issue menorah, boxes of Shabbat candles, and even a fragrant etrog for Sukkoth. The religious guy held the etrog up, then buried his face in it and inhaled the citrus scent with a wild sort of passion. He told Ilan in a broken voice that his child had been born right after Yom Kippur. The brigadier general himself had radioed to give him the news, but since he wasn’t trained to listen over the encoded phone, he wasn’t entirely sure if it was a boy or a girl, and he was embarrassed to bother the BG. God willing, he’d be fortunate enough to see his son or daughter. If it was a boy he’d name him Shmuel, after General Gorodish, and if it was a girl, Ariela, after General Sharon. He kept blinking as he talked, and his face changed expression rapidly, and all that time Ilan heard Avram calling out to him in his mind, imploring him, but still he kept encouraging the soldier, deriding himself for feeling so relieved at being free for a few moments from having to sit by the scanner and listen to Avram fade away.

  Shells fell very close to the stronghold. The soldier sniffed the air and grimaced. “It’s NBCs!” he yelled. He dragged Ilan to a large iron cabinet with a label that read Nuclear-Biological-Chemical Gear—Open Only in Emergency. The soldier broke the lock with his Uzi butt and the door swung open. Inside, from top to bottom, were empty cardboard boxes. The soldier looked at them and started to scream and hit his head and stomp his feet. Ilan walked back to his listening post and put the headphones on.

  “So how many more minutes do you think Avram has until his belly is cleaved? His soft, hairy belly, which he so loved to run his paws over? His belly that served him as storehouse and granary—”

  “Stop,” Ilan said. “Stop it!”

  “Because Avram, funny as this may sound, was actually planning to hang around for at least another forty or fifty years, he was planning to live to be an old man, a dirty old man. He was still hoping to fondle the occasional breast and thigh, to travel the world, devour the expanses, donate a kidney or an earlobe to the needy, bathe in earthly delights, write at least one book that would truly tremble on the shelf—”

  Ilan shook his head. He took the headphones off and stood up. He walked through the trenches until he reached a lookout post with a view of the old Ismailia hospital. Two reservists were sitting with their feet up on the sandbags as though they were relaxing on a cruise ship. They’d both been in the Six-Day War during their regular service and looked old to Ilan. He nonchalantly considered the fact that he would not live to reach their age. They were complacent and jovial and assured Ilan that the Sixth Fleet was on its way, and soon the “A-rabs” would regret the minute they’d thought all this up. Then they broke into an uproarious and grating duet of “Nasser Is Waiting for Rabin.” Ilan sniffed the air and realized they were drunk—probably on cheap army wine. When he looked behind, he found a few empty bottles hidden among the sandbags.

  He left them and stood staring at the blue water and the green gardens of Ismailia. Not far away, an endless convoy of Egyptian jeeps was crossing a bridge over the Canal. A massive torrent of humans and vehicles swarmed past, very close to the stronghold, not even bothering to stop and take it over. Ilan thought about the movie The Longest Day, which he’d seen twice with Avram. He felt that the various bits of reality he’d known could no longer be pieced together, and he simply stopped ruminating.

  The shells pounded, and the steel netting holding down the rocks started to tear. Shattered pieces of stone began flying. The stronghold’s protective layer was wearing down, and the air was ash, soot, and dust. Ilan stood there, unable to look south toward Magma, but he guessed that the smoke he could see curling around from the corner of his eye was coming from Avram’s location. He wondered if there was any way to force the commander to send a few soldiers to rescue Avram, but he knew there was no chance. The commander wouldn’t send any of his men on a suicide mission. He felt his way back to the war-room bunker. His eyes were red and teary, and he had trouble breathing. On the way he passed his little table and glanced at the scanner. He couldn’t sit himself down there.

  Inside the stifling bunker, someone remembered the manual air pump. It barely made any difference, and the noise—a feeble jackal’s howl—added to the gloom. A smoldering Egyptian MiG plummeted to the ground, and a parachute opened up as it fell. Paltry cheers came from some of the lookouts around the bunker. The pilot parachuted right onto the Canal bank and limped over to the bridge. Egyptian soldiers hurried over to him, embraced him, and seemed to shield him from a possible hit from the direction of the stronghold. The Israeli soldiers watched in gloomy silence. There was a spirit among this Egyptian gang that aroused their envy. Ilan scrubbed his filthy face with his fingers. Through all the thousands of hours he’d listened to Egyptian soldiers on the listening devices in the underground bunker at Bavel, and through all the days and nights he’d translated their conversations and been privy to their military routine and their trivial moments, their gags and lewd jokes, and their most private secrets, he had never felt how much they were real, living people, flesh and blood and soul, as sharply as he felt now, watching them hug their pilot friend.

  “But I did,” Avram tells Ora. It’s the first time he’s spoken for a long time. “I was more enthusiastic about the whole listening thing than any of the other radio operators, even the senior ones. It drove me crazy that you could listen freely to anyone who opened his mouth. And the fact that you could hear what people were saying to each other behind closed doors.” He laughs. “Well, I was less interested in the military secrets, you know. I was all about the stupid things, the little intrigues among the officers, the jabs, the gossip, all kinds of hints about their private lives. There were two radio operators from the Second Army, fellahin from the Delta, and I realized at some point that they were in love, and they were sending each other innuendos over the official network. That’s the kind of thing I was looking for.”

  “The human voice?” Ora suggests.

  An Israeli F-4 Phantom burst onto the sky, swooped over the stronghold, and fired from both guns. No one moved. The plane’s roar filled up the entire space. It filled Ilan’s body too, wreaking havoc on it. A heavy glass ashtray danced madly across a table, then fell off and shattered on the floor. In the yard, the Jerusalemite tankist who had arrived at the stronghold with Ilan stood drinking coffee. His wide eyes peered up at the sky over the lip of his mug. His glasses shimmered, the plane tilted slightly toward him, and Ilan watched as his body was split diagonally from shoulder to waist and his two halves were pitched to opposite ends of the yard. Ilan doubled over and threw up. Others next to him vomited, too. A few soldiers waved their fists in the air, cursing at the Air Force and the entire IDF.

  Then the Egyptians blanketed the skies with a red-orange carpet of antiaircraft fire. Every so often, the trail of a plummeting missile emerged. The Phantom capered among them, but suddenly flames leaped up from its tail and it spiraled down in loops of thick black smoke. The soldiers tracked it silently until it crashed to the ground. Not a single parachute opened up. Everyone in the stronghold looked away from one another. When Ilan glanced back at the yard, he saw that someone had covered the fallen soldier’s remains with two separate blankets.

  “What’s u
p with your buddy?” the dark-skinned radio operator asked. “Have you given up on him?”

  Ilan couldn’t understand what he was saying.

  “The guy from Magma. It’s a good thing you dropped that.”

  Ilan stared at him and his vision suddenly cleared. He took off running.

  “Hello, hello, anyone hear me? Hello? I’m alone here. They killed everyone yesterday, or the day before. Twenty guys or so. I didn’t know them, I got here a few hours before all hell broke loose. They killed them in the courtyard, took them out and shot them like dogs. Some of them they beat to death. The radio operator and I hid under some barrels of diesel that rolled over on us. We pretended to be dead.”

  Something had changed, Ilan noticed immediately. Avram sounded lucid and businesslike. He was talking as if he knew for certain that someone was listening, thirsty for his talk.

  “I heard our guys crying. They begged the Egyptians not to kill them. I heard two guys praying, then they were gunned down in the middle. The Egyptians left and didn’t come back. There’s shelling all the time. I don’t think you can even get into this room now. It’s all destroyed. I can see that the rods holding up the doorway are completely bent.”

  Ilan shut his eyes and tried to see what Avram was describing.

  “Up until the first evening I was with the radio operator. He lay maybe two meters away, badly wounded, with one radio on him, and another little one next to him, and loads of batteries. He must have had at least eighty, I know because he kept counting them, he had this obsession with counting the batteries. He was hurt in his leg, and me in my shoulder. I caught some shrapnel from a grenade that blew up when the place caught fire. It’s sticking halfway out of me. I can touch it. If I don’t move, it doesn’t bleed. Just hurts. That’s such a crazy thing. There’s iron inside my body. Hello, hello?”

  “Yes, I can hear you,” Ilan said softly.

  “Whatever. The radio operator lost a lot of blood. He kept bleeding. I don’t know his name. We hardly talked, so that if we got taken hostage we wouldn’t know too much about each other. After a while I could see he was really not doing well, he was shaking. I tried to cheer him up, but he couldn’t hear me. At some point I crawled over and put a tourniquet on his thigh. He was talking rubbish. Hallucinating. He thought I was his kid. Then his wife. The radio still worked, and I talked to some officer at Tassa, a pretty senior one, I think. I explained what was going on here, I told him what the army had to do. He promised help was on the way and that the Air Force would send a helicopter to evacuate me. That night, I don’t know when, the radio operator died.”

  Ilan found that Avram’s sudden sobriety was harder on him than the delirious chatter. He had the feeling that Avram was completely exposed now, without any insulation to protect him from what was ahead.

  “After that I dug in the earth a bit, until I fell into a hole underneath. I fell maybe one meter, on my back, with the radio and all the batteries. I can’t even sit up here, so I just lie with the fucking radio on top of me, and there’s no chance of anyone hearing me from this hole, but I can turn from side to side and even roll a few feet in either direction. I stacked up some sandbags to let some air in, but it’s dark as Egypt—”

  He paused, then added with a weak sigh: “Dark as Egypt, get it?”

  Ilan gave an encouraging laugh.

  “And I’ve got the shits like you wouldn’t believe. I don’t know what’s left to shit anymore. I haven’t had any food and barely any water for three days. Hardly slept, either. I can’t stand to think that they’ll kill me in my sleep.

  “Just not in my sleep, dear God.”

  He was slipping again, Ilan knew.

  “I guess they don’t want to stop here, the Egyptian commando. They’ll come back later to finish off the job. You think so? Dunno. What do I know about it? First they’ll probably blow the whole thing up, then they’ll come in to search. Bombing is better, no? Go out with a bang. This is so screwed up. It’s unbelievable, I keep …” He let out a sudden laugh. “No, I mean, really, what am I doing here? Why me?”

  Ilan cringed. He knew Avram was going to talk about the lots now.

  “Hey, Ora, Ora’leh, where are you? Just to touch your forehead, to draw your eyebrows and mouth with my finger … You drove me so wild.”

  Ilan put his hands over his mouth.

  “Listen, I’ve had this idea for a while. It’s a great idea. I haven’t told you, or Ilan … Hello? Anyone left in the galaxy? Hello, humanity? Ilan?”

  Ilan jumped out of his seat in terror.

  “They burned the whole stronghold,” Avram whispered in a panic. “With the people, the equipment, the kitchen, our backpacks, everything they could see. They walked around with flamethrowers and set fire to it all. I heard them. Everything was burning. My hands and face are burned from the heat, I’m all black with soot. They burned my notebooks, too. A whole year of work gone. The whole last year, my idea, that’s it, all gone. Fuckit. Every spare minute I had on the base, on leave, driving to the base, you saw what I was like this year. Seven notebooks. Shit. Thick notebooks, two hundred twenty pages each one, all ideas—”

  His voice broke and he started to cry. He talked and cried. It was hard to follow. Ilan got up and stood listening to Avram sob. Suddenly he ripped the headphones off and threw them aside.

  The Egyptians stepped up their fire. Shells of 240mm mortars fell constantly. The lookouts shouted warnings: boats carrying unidentified equipment were stealing onto the shore right beneath the stronghold. A cool breeze of fear blew through the trenches, the lookout positions, and the rooms, and then the boats began to hose them with water. At first it was a relief. The jets flushed out the dust that had thickened the air everywhere—bunkers, coffee cups, sinuses—but after a while the bottom of the stronghold began to cave in. The soldiers on the lookout points shot at the boats with every available weapon and tossed grenades. The boats left, but the stronghold had sunk slightly on one side and looked like a crooked, bitter sneer.

  The commander convened all the soldiers in the war-room bunker. Ilan found a corner and sat down on the ground. Avram’s voice sawed on inside his head, whispering, hallucinating, pleading for his life. The soldiers and officers sprawled along the walls. They avoided one another’s eyes. Now that the soupy dust had been sprayed with water, the air was unmistakably thick with a terrible stench of shit, a tangible sediment of terror. A soldier who looked as if he was around fifteen, with soft, smooth cheeks, lay next to Ilan with his eyes closed, curled up and mumbling quickly, devotedly. Ilan touched his leg and asked him to say a prayer for him. Without opening his eyes, the boy said he wasn’t praying. He wasn’t religious at all, he was just reciting chemistry equations. That’s how he used to quiet himself before his matriculation exams, and it always worked. Ilan asked him to say a few equations for him.

  The soldiers and officers sat with their heads bowed. Outside, the desert roared—a massive, injured beast that lurched up and died down with every strike. Ilan constantly thought he could hear the Egyptian soldiers breaking down the stronghold gate. His brain produced their voices vividly. They pounded on the gate with the butts of their rifles. Then came the explosions, just beyond the wall, and their cheers after bursting in. There was shouting in Arabic, and shooting, and yelling and pleading in Hebrew, which slowly died down. A metallic taste spread through Ilan’s mouth, freezing and dulling his upper teeth and his septum. “It won’t hurt, it won’t hurt,” mumbled the young soldier. His eyes were shut tight, and a patch of wetness spread over his pants.

  Ilan feverishly tried to remember something he’d once invented as a boy: the happiness method. How did it go? He used to divide himself up into different parts, separate regions, and whenever he was unhappy in one part, he’d skip to another. It never really worked, but at least he’d had that inner skipping sensation, and something like the momentum of his own private ejection seat, which could propel him for a few moments over his parents’ divorce, the parade of new
men who started visiting his mother, his father’s abominations with his female soldiers in front of the whole world, the forced move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the hated school, the horrible boredom—three days and nights every week at the transport base his father commanded. Once, on guard duty with Avram under the antennas on the northern cliff of Bavel, he’d half jokingly told him about his method, making fun of the child he used to be, but he’d sensed Avram’s converging revulsion and attraction.

  Avram had looked at him then as though he’d discovered something new, something very dark. He’d questioned Ilan in great detail about the method and demanded to know all the nuances of the mechanism, how he had come up with the idea and the different sensations at each stage. After luring him on mercilessly, he’d arched his eyebrows and grinned. “You know what the next stage is, right?”

  Ilan had smiled wearily. “What? What’s the next stage?”

  “After you divide yourself up into lots of little squares, you can’t fit into any of them anymore!” Avram conveyed an excitement that may or may not have contained slight mockery. “I’m telling you, I’ve never heard of a more elegant way to commit suicide! And without anyone noticing!”

  • • •

  The landline phone connected to the division HQ rang, and a familiar voice came through. The speaker did not identify himself, but he didn’t have to. He told the soldiers he was planning to reach their area with an entire division and rescue everyone trapped in the strongholds. They looked at one another, then slowly stood up and stretched out. Feet stomped, blood started flowing through dulled limbs again. “Arik is coming!” the soldiers told one another, savoring the words. They gradually sped up their movements and went back to their positions throughout the stronghold. Even Ilan repeated the line to himself and to others: “Arik is coming. Arik’s gonna screw the Egyptians. Arik will save Avram and me. One day we’ll laugh about all this.”