To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  Ilan leaned his head on his arm, pressed the headphone to his ear, and wrote quickly, every word.

  “Why not? Why not?” Avram whispered, as though arguing with himself. “Did I get carried away? And what would Ilan say? That I’m full of hot air again?

  “It’s a good thing I have enough balloons for all his pins.” He laughed.

  Ilan laughed too, then grimaced.

  “No one will feel guilty about what they are. And there will be a time, not for long, a month is enough, or a week, when every single person will be able to completely fulfill what they were meant to be—everything their bodies and souls have offered them, not what other people have dumped on them. God damn this all!” he roared. “I wish I could sit down and write it all now. Such light, such massive light, God.”

  He sighed, after a brief pause. “And every sight, every landscape or face, or just a man sitting in his room in the evening, or a woman alone in a café. Or two people walking through a field, talking, or a boy blowing bubble gum. There will be such splendor in the smallest thing, Ora’leh, and you’ll always see it, promise me that.

  “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” Avram whispered, “I will fear no evil, for my story is with me.

  “And I have to decide if they’ll even use money—

  “Well, we can leave that for later—

  “There is no later, you idiot.

  “Hello, Israel, homeland? Do you even exist anymore?”

  The transmission was getting weaker. Perhaps the battery was dying. Ilan’s foot tapped incessantly.

  “I wish they’d come already,” Avram moaned. “I wish they’d shout out their Itbach al Yahud and burn it all.”

  He breathed heavily. Ilan could no longer tell when Avram comprehended his situation and when he was disoriented.

  Avram was sobbing uncontrollably now. “Everything’s going to die. All the thoughts and the ideas I won’t be able to write now, and my eyes will be burned, and my toes also.

  “Ilan, you asshole,” he whispered through his sobs, “this idea is yours now. If I don’t come back, or if I come back in a decorative urn, do whatever you want with it. Make a movie out of it. I know your mind.”

  Some disturbances came over the radio, as though someone were rocking heavy objects in the background, behind Avram.

  “But listen, it has to start like this, this is my one condition: A street, daytime, people walking quietly. Silence. No noise at all, not yelling, not whispering. No soundtrack. Among the walking people, a few stand on crates here and there. And then the camera narrows in on a young woman standing, let’s say, on a laundry tub. That’s what she brought with her from home. A red laundry tub. She stands there hugging herself. She has a sad smile, she smiles into herself—”

  Ilan clutched the headphones. He thought he could hear human sounds in the background.

  “And she doesn’t even look at the people standing around her. She just talks to herself. And she’ll be beautiful, Ilan, I’m warning you, eh? With a pure forehead and perfect eyebrows, the way I like, and a big, sexy mouth, don’t forget. Anyway, you know who she should look like. Maybe you can use her?”

  There was no doubt now: the Egyptians were inside the stronghold. The transmitter’s microphone had picked them up, but Avram still hadn’t noticed.

  Avram laughed. “She can’t act to save her life, but she’ll just need to be herself, and she knows how to do that better than either one of us, right? And you’ll shoot her face, we don’t need anything more, you know? Just her face, and that happy, naïve smile—”

  The sounds grew louder. Ilan stood up. His left foot was stomping madly, and his hands crushed the headphones against his temples.

  “Wait a minute,” Avram murmured, confused, “I think there’s someone—

  “Don’t shoot!” he shouted in English. Then he tried Arabic: “Ana bila silakh! I’m unarmed!”

  Ilan’s ears filled at once with shouts in throaty Arabic. An Egyptian soldier, who sounded no less startled than Avram, was screaming. Avram pleaded for his life. One shot was fired. It may have hit Avram. He screamed. His voice was no longer human. Another soldier arrived and called out to his friends that there was a Jewish soldier there. The frequency bubbled with a medley of shouts and commotions and blows. Ilan rocked back and forth and murmured, “Avram, Avram.” People walking by looked away. Then came a very close burst of fire, one dry sequence, and then silence. The sound of a body being dragged, and again curses in Arabic, and loud laughter, and one more single shot. Then Avram’s transmitter went silent.

  The commander gathered all the soldiers again in the war-room bunker. He said it didn’t look like anyone was coming to rescue them, and they had to try to get out on their own. He asked for their opinions. There was a quiet, friendly conversation. People talked about the duty to save lives. Others feared that in the army, and in the country, they would be seen as cowards or traitors. Someone mentioned Masada and Yodfat. Ilan sat among them. He had no body, he had no spirit. The commander summed up and said he was planning to notify Arik Sharon immediately that they would leave that night. “What if Arik says no?” someone asked. “Then they’ll slap us with a five-year prison term,” one guy said, “but we’ll be alive.”

  The landline wasn’t working, and the officer used the two-way radio and asked to speak with “the boss.” He said the situation was hopeless and he’d decided to leave. There was a short silence, and then Arik said, “Excellent, you leave and we’ll try to hook up with you on the way.” The soldiers listened as Arik said, “Do whatever you can.” He stopped, and you could hear the cogwheels running in his mind. Finally he sighed and said, “Okay, then, um, goodbye, I wish you well …”

  The religious soldiers recited the evening prayers before leaving, and a few other soldiers joined them. Then everyone prepared for departure. They filled their canteens and made sure they didn’t rattle. They emptied their pockets of change and keys. Everyone had a weapon. Ilan got a bazooka in addition to his Uzi. “An anti-tank pipe,” they explained. He didn’t know how to operate it. He didn’t say a word.

  At two a.m. they set off. In the light of the full moon the stronghold looked like a ruin. It was hard to believe that this lopsided enclosure had protected them all those days. Ilan avoided looking left, toward Avram’s stronghold.

  They walked in two rows, at some distance from one another. At the head of Ilan’s row was the commander, and at the head of the other one was his deputy. Next to the commander walked a soldier who was born in Alexandria. If they ran into Egyptian forces, he was supposed to shout that they were Egyptian commandos on their way to nail the Yahud. The soldier recited his lines to himself as they walked, trying to embody the Egyptian commando spirit. Ilan was somewhere in the middle of the row with his head bowed. They tripped on the sand frequently and fell in silence, quietly cursing.

  Suddenly they heard shouts in Arabic. An Egyptian armored vehicle was driving nearby, shining a spotlight to track the sides of the road.

  “Turns out we’d walked into an Egyptian parking lot,” Ilan told Ora that dawn. His body had quieted down, but he was still enfolded in her and his hands dug into her shoulders. “I even stepped on the blanket of someone sleeping there.”

  She lay stunned, her flesh still fluttering around his.

  “We didn’t move, we didn’t breathe. The armored vehicle went on. They hadn’t seen us. Hadn’t seen anything. We lay there, thirty-three men, and they didn’t see us. We got up and ran back to the sand to get away from the road.” She could feel his warm breath against the back of her neck. “We kept going east and walked all night at a half run. I ran with my gun and the bazooka. It was hard, but I wanted to live. As simple as that.”

  She wanted him to pull out of her right away. She couldn’t speak.

  “Then the sun rose. We didn’t know where we were, or whether it was our territory or theirs. Or where the IDF was, if it even existed. I saw tire marks in the sand, and I remember
ed that the IDF only uses APCs with chains, but these tracks were from a Soviet BTR, which the Egyptians used. I told the commander, and we quickly changed course. We walked and walked until we reached a small wadi with hills and mounds, and we sat down to rest. We were dead tired. Tanks were burning on the hills around us. Giant torches. We didn’t know whose they were. The whole area reeked of scorched flesh. You can’t imagine it, Ora.”

  She flinched, and he tightened closer to her body. He was barely letting her breathe. The fetus felt as if it was throbbing too quickly. She wondered if it might somehow absorb anything of what Ilan was telling her.

  “On the radio they told us they couldn’t reach us. We had to wait some more. We waited. After a few hours they told us to try to reach this mountain range. They gave us a code map. We walked until we could see the range straight ahead. But see, the Egyptians are shooting at us all the time, from all the hilltops, and they’re not hitting us. It’s all miracles. We’re walking with bullets whistling past us like in the movies. When we got to the mountain range we realized it was swarming with Egyptians. We thought it was all over.”

  “I can’t breathe this way, Ilan—”

  “But a minute later, our tanks arrived and stormed them. A battle started. Gunfire. We just sit on our asses and watch the movie. Everything’s on fire. Burning people jump out of tanks. People getting killed ’cause they came to rescue us. We sit on our asses and watch. And we feel nothing—nothing!”

  “Ilan, you’re really suffocating me—”

  “They yelled at us over the radio to shoot up flares so they could see where we were. We shot a flare and they found us. One tank came down from the range, and it’s a steep incline, a wall. It came all the way to us. An M60 Patton. An officer sticks his head out the turret and motions for us to come quickly and get in the tank. We shout at him: ‘What should we do? How?’ And he gestures: Climb up, there’s no time. ‘You mean, all of us?’ ‘Get up. Get up!’ ‘What do you mean get up? Where?’ ‘Get up already!’ And there’s thirty-three of us. Ora, what did you say?”

  “Ilan!”

  “Sorry, sorry. Did I hurt you?”

  “Pull out, pull out now.”

  “One more minute, please, just a minute, I have to tell you—”

  “It’s not good, Ilan—”

  “Listen, just give me one more minute. Please, Ora, that’s all.” He spoke quickly, firmly. “We climbed up on the tank, every guy grabbed on to something, people glued themselves to the MAG hatches, ten guys crowded into the turret basket, I jumped up on the back and grabbed on to the leg of the guy above me, someone else took hold of my shoes, and the tank rolled. Not just rolled but barreled, in zigzags, to get away from the Saggers, and we barely held on. And the whole time I just kept thinking: Don’t fall, don’t fall.”

  This child, Ora thought, the things he’s hearing before he’s even born.

  “The tank is jumping around like crazy,” Ilan murmured and clutched her again, convulsing. “Your bones are breaking, you can barely breathe, dust everywhere, stones flying, you just stop up all your holes and just stay alive.”

  Dust penetrated her mouth, her nose. Yellow desert streams. She choked and coughed. She felt as though the fetus inside her was also shrinking, fighting to turn over, to turn his back. Stop, stop, she groaned inside, stop poisoning my child.

  “It went on that way for a few kilometers, stuck onto the tank, and then all of a sudden—that’s it. Over. We were out of the line of fire. I could barely let go of the other guy’s leg. My hand wouldn’t open.”

  His muscles relaxed. His head plunged onto her neck, heavy as a rock. His fingers slowly disengaged from her body and lay open in front of her face. She did not move. He slid out of her. A moment went by, and then another. He breathed heavily. His face was up against her and he lay in an utterly helpless huddle. A spasm went through her body.

  “Ilan,” she murmured. Her temples began to throb, and little beads of sweat glistened on her skin. Her body was telling her something. She lifted herself up on her elbow as if she were listening. “Ilan, I think—”

  “Ora, what have we done?” she heard him whisper in a panic. “What have I done?”

  She touched her wet thighs and sniffed. “Ilan, I think this is it.”

  HE ASKS ABOUT the deep cracks that had run through the walls even in his day, mainly in the kitchen, but also in the bedrooms. He wonders if the house continued to sag over the years and how she and Ilan dealt with the lintels that protruded from their frames. He asks if the huge bureau that used to be in his room still exists, and she tells him that until the family left the house and moved to Ein Karem, the bureau ruled the room like an old patriarch. The bedroom closet had also stayed. “We hardly touched that house. Just a little work in the kitchen, like I told you, and downstairs in the basement sewing room when the boys got older.”

  The path is hard going, and the day is very hot even this early. Tabor turns out to be the steepest of all the mountains they’ve climbed. Sometimes they turn to face down the incline and walk backward. “You let the quadriceps rest and make these two guys here work a little”—Ora pats her rear end with both hands—“the gluteus maximus and the gluteus medius. Let them do their part, too.”

  As they walk backward, facing Kfar Tavor and the Yavne’el Valley sprawling below, Avram goes through the house with her, room by room. He asks about the sunken floor in the hallway, the redundant step up into the bedroom, and the clumsy water pipes, some of which were exposed. He remembers every fault and defect as well as every beauty spot in that home, as though he’d never stopped walking through it and caring for it. He asks if the manhole in the basement kept overflowing every time it rained.

  “That was Ofer’s domain. He used to declare flood duty whenever it rained and prepare mops and buckets and rags. Later he got more sophisticated and installed a little pump.” Ora laughs. “You should have seen it, with an engine and two hoses. But he solved a problem that I think had started when the house was built.

  “He also built a bed for us,” she says. She had sensed this was something she should not tell him, but they were in a good mood, and why not?

  “He built a bed himself?”

  “When he was in eleventh grade, yes. Or was it twelfth?” She stops to catch her breath and leans against a boldly slanting pine tree. “Never mind, I was just thinking about it. Listen to what else I remembered”—she slyly changes the topic because when he asked, she thought Avram had a stab of pain, and she tells him about how Ofer, when he was around three, used to come up to her and announce: “I want to tell you a story.” She would say, “I’m listening,” and then wait and wait while Ofer stared into some corner of the room for a long time. Then his face would take on a ceremonial look, he’d fill his lungs with air and say in a voice hoarse with excitement: “And then …”

  “And then what?” Avram asks after a moment.

  “You don’t get it,” she says, her peals of laughter rolling all the way to the valley.

  “Oh,” he says awkwardly. “That’s the whole story?”

  “And then, and then … That’s the main point in stories, isn’t it?”

  “That’s even shorter than my shortest story.” Avram smiles and leans his hands on his knees, breathing heavily.

  “Remind me.”

  “ ‘On the day I was born, my life changed unrecognizably.’ ”

  Ora sighs. “And then …”

  “And then he made you a bed.”

  “At first it was going to be for him,” she clarifies.

  She heard him pacing around the house in the middle of the night, and when she went up to him he said something was driving him crazy. He wanted to make a bed, but he couldn’t decide which kind, and it kept waking him up. Ora thought it was an excellent idea: the youth bed he’d slept on since he was a boy was wobbly and creaky, almost collapsing under his adolescent weight. “I have all kinds of ideas,” he said, “but I can’t decide.” He blew on his hands excitedly,
and repeated that he couldn’t sleep. He’d been waking up in the middle of the night for several nights in a row, feeling that he simply had to build this bed, now, and he kept seeing it in his thoughts, but it wasn’t really clear yet, it came and went.

  He paced around Ora, drummed his fingertips rapidly, and bit his lower lip. Then he stopped and straightened up, and his face looked altered. He crossed the room, practically passing right through her, snatched a piece of paper and a pencil from the table, improvised a ruler, and at three a.m. he started sketching the bed.

  She peered over his shoulder. The lines flowed easily and accurately from his fingers, as if they were extensions of them. He murmured to himself and conducted a lively inner debate, and she watched in amazement as a regal canopy bed emerged. But he crumpled the paper in annoyance. “Too refined, too elegant.” He wanted a peasants’ bed. He grabbed another page and sketched—how beautiful his hands are, she thought, heavy and delicate at once, and those triangular beauty spots on his wrist—and as he did so he explained: “Here, in the frame, all around, I want it to have wooden ties.”

  “I can help you with that,” Ora said cheerfully. “Let’s go to Binyamina, to the place where I got that.” She pointed at the wooden shelf above the sink, which had pots and pans and dried peppers hanging from it.

  “You mean, you’ll come with me?”

  “Sure, we’ll go together, and afterward we can spend the day in Zichron Yaakov.”

  “And I want eucalyptus tree trunks. Four, for the legs.”

  “Why eucalyptus?”

  “ ’Cause I like their colors.” He seemed surprised at the question. “And here, above the headboard, there’ll be an iron arc.” He quickly sketched it.

  “Ofer spent almost ten months working on that bed,” Ora tells Avram. “There’s a forge in the Ein Nakuba village, and he got friendly with the blacksmith. He spent hours upon hours there, watching and learning. Sometimes, when I drove him there, he let me see how the bed was coming along.” She draws with a stick in the earth: “This is the arc, an iron arc over the head. The crowning glory.”