To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  “Nice,” says Avram and watches her face as she looks at the dirt. An arc above their two heads, he thinks.

  Just before they reach the peak, they sit down to rest among oak and pine trees. A small grocery store in the Bedouin village of Shibli had revived them. They’d even found a bag of dog food there, and there’d been no radio on. Now they gobble down a full breakfast and drink fresh, strong coffee. The wind dries their sweat, and they enjoy the clear view of Jezreel Valley’s brown-yellow-and-green-checkered fields and the expanses that roll into the horizon—the Gilead mountains, the Menasheh hills, and the Carmel range.

  “Look at her.” Ora glances at the dog, who lies sprawled with her tail to them. “She’s been like that since we slept together.”

  “Jealous?” Avram asks the dog and lands a pinecone next to her paw. She defiantly turns her head the other way.

  Ora gets up and goes over to the dog. She scrubs her cheeks and rubs noses with her. “What’s up? What did we do? Hey, maybe you miss that friend of yours, the black one? He really was a hunk, but we’ll find you someone in Beit Zayit.” The bitch gets up and moves away a few steps, then sits facing the valley. “Did you see that?” Ora sounds amazed.

  “The bed,” Avram reminds her, startled by a flash of insult that ran through Ora’s face. “Come on, tell me about his arc.”

  Ofer had explained it to her: “At first I made an arc out of two identical pieces, and they were supposed to join up with this rung, here. It looked pretty good, and technically it worked, but I didn’t like it. I just didn’t like it, it didn’t work well with the bed I want.”

  She couldn’t follow all the details, but she enjoyed hearing and watching him as he described his work.

  “So now I’m making a different arc, this time from one piece, and I’m going to wrap iron leaves over it, and it’s going to be super-complicated, but that’s just the way it has to be—it has to, you know?”

  She knew.

  He disinfected wormholes in the tree trunks, sealed them with varnish, then carved into the center of each trunk at a ninety-degree angle. “ ‘This wood is hard, it’s resistant,’ ” she quotes, “but Ofer’s strong, he has your arms, kind of thick in this part”—she pats Avram lightly with unconcealed pleasure. “He worked for several weeks on those trunks and finally decided to buy, with his own money—he did it all on his own, apart from driving he wouldn’t let us help him at all—a power saw for cutting iron. But that didn’t work for what he wanted, and he bought another blade—an aggressive one,” she stresses with an expert tone—“and made channels through the trunks. And wait—” She interrupts a question forming on his lips. “He made the little leaves on his own too, from iron, for the arc over the head. Beautiful little rose leaves, twenty-one of them, with thorns.”

  Avram listens and his eyes narrow in concentration. He strokes his arms distractedly.

  “He designed every single leaf right down to the last detail. You would have enjoyed seeing how lovely and delicate they came out. And for the frame, the wood itself was a massive hunk, but it flows in these wavy kinds of lines”—she rounds her hands, and for an instant she feels Ofer himself between them, large and strong and tender—“I’ve never seen a bed like that anywhere.”

  There was something alive about it, she thinks. Even in the iron parts there was motion.

  “And when he finished making it, he decided to give it to us.”

  “After all that?”

  “We argued with him, we wouldn’t let him. ‘Such a special bed, you worked on it for so long, why shouldn’t it be yours?’ ”

  “But he’s stubborn.” Avram smiles softly.

  “I don’t know what happened. Maybe he looked at it when it was done and it frightened him a little. It was huge. The hugest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  She swallows down quickly what almost escaped about the bed and its size, and how many people could lie comfortably on it. She shakes the dirt off her hands. Why did she even tell him? She has to get out of this story quickly.

  “Anyway, he said that one day, when he got married, he’d build a new bed for himself. ‘For now,’ he said, ‘buy me one.’ And that was it. Just a little story. So you’ll know. Come on, let’s go.”

  They get up and walk around the nipple of the mountain, avoiding the churches and monastery, then start walking back down toward Shibli. A buzzard hovers overhead, and the white down of sheep’s wool clings to a thistle. The bitch hears the village dogs barking and casually comes closer to Ora and rubs against her leg. Ora cannot keep a grudge for even three minutes, and she leans down and strokes the golden fur. “Is that it? Friends? You forgive me? You’re a bit of a prima donna. Has anyone ever told you that?”

  They walk side by side, Ora scolds and strokes, and the dog flicks up her tail and curls it into a loop and skips lightly around them again. Ora thinks about the night before, and about the night ahead, and looks at Avram’s back. Only last night she’d discovered that his eyebrows were not as soft and velvety as she’d remembered. And his fleshy earlobes—Ofer is the only one in the family who has them, and Ilan and Adam always make fun of his Dumbo ears; Ofer won’t even let her touch them, but now she knows their touch. Five years, she thinks. It was only five years ago that Ilan and I inaugurated the bed. Ilan was afraid it would creak. He went downstairs to the living room and shouted, “Now!” and Ora, upstairs, jumped all the way up and down the bed like a madwoman. She almost lost consciousness from jumping so hard and laughing hysterically (and not one creak could be heard downstairs).

  “I like him,” Avram says suddenly.

  “What?”

  He shrugs, and his lips curl with slight surprise. “He’s so …”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t know, he’s such …” His hands, raised in front of his body, sketch and sculpt Ofer, living matter, dense and solid and masculine, kneading him in an imaginary embrace. Were he to tell her now that he loved her, she would not be this moved.

  “Even though he isn’t …” She starts but changes her mind.

  “Isn’t what?”

  “He isn’t—I don’t know—an artist?”

  “An artist?” Avram sounds surprised. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Nothing, never mind, forget it. Wait, I didn’t even tell you—wow,” she lets out a gasp, “you really stunned me with that.” She stops and holds his hand to her chest. “Touch here, feel. The way you said, you know, that you like him, and there’s still so much I haven’t told you about him.”

  She laughs and shakes her head. “He saved a well, you know. Never mind, I’m just showing off a bit.”

  Avram responds immediately, a bit insulted: “That’s called showing off?”

  “Then what is it?”

  “It’s telling me about him.”

  She speeds up, walks in front of him, and spreads out her arms. There’s so much oxygen she can barely breathe.

  “They found a well, Ofer and Adam. They were hiking at the foot of Mount Adar, near Beit Nekofa, and they found a little well that was completely stopped up with mud and stones and hardly had any water. There was just a trickle. Ofer decided he was going to restore it, and for a whole year—d’you get this?—when he came home on leave from the army, he would go to this place. Sometimes Adam went with him—Adam wasn’t really into the project, but he was afraid for Ofer to be there alone, it’s right on the border, and the two of them would go together.”

  Avram has already noticed that a warmth spreads through his loins almost every time she says “the two of them.”

  “They removed the stones and rocks that were blocking the spring, and dirt and mud and silt and roots”—she is so radiant when she talks, and Ofer fills her with life, and now she is certain that it’s good, that it will be good, that her crazy plan may work—“and after they cleaned it out they dug a small holding pool, about a meter and a half deep. We spent a lot of time there too, we didn’t want them to be alone. We used to go on Satur
days and take food, and their friends went too, and some of our friends—I have to take you there one day, there’s a huge mulberry tree over the pool, and Ofer was the foreman and we all worked for him.”

  “But how? How did he know how to do it?”

  “First he built a little model at home. Ilan helped him”—she remembers the feverish enthusiasm that took hold of the two of them and how the house filled with sketches and computations of water supplies, flow angles, and volume, with constant experiments and simulations—“and then, you know, all you have to do is …”

  “What? What do you have to do?”

  “Build it,” she explains gravely. “Reinforce walls, concrete, plaster. All the stages. You need a special kind of plaster. Ilan lugged a ton and a half of plaster and sand in his car. And just so you understand, he wouldn’t have sacrificed his Land Cruiser for anyone but Ofer. And then he planted a little orchard of fruit trees. We helped him. We took a plum tree, and lemon and pomegranate and almond, and a few olive trees, and now there’s a real little oasis there, and the well is alive.”

  She stretches her arms out and her steps are light: she has so much to tell.

  They leave Shibli behind, and the trail crosses through fields and groves, hidden paths rich with cascading greenery that shelters them on either side. Ora drags a little, burdened by some shadow she cannot clearly see, an unfocused pain. The tiny hope from earlier has melted away and seems foolish and hollow.

  Avram thinks about Ofer, who is out there now. He tries to picture him there, forces himself to see the streets and alleyways, but there is only one permanent war play in his mind, staged continually in an utterly empty auditorium that he never enters. Avram has five of these auditoriums, all empty and dark, and in each one a different play is performed nonstop—when he sleeps and when he wakes. The plays must always go on, and their sounds are distant and vague when they reach his ears, and he does not go inside.

  A new fear trickles into Ora with each step. Perhaps she is wrong. Perhaps she has the whole thing upside down. Perhaps the more stories she tells Avram about Ofer, the less will remain of Ofer’s life. And in a state of suffocation she lets out: “I just wonder what kind of person he’ll be when he gets back.”

  “Yes,” Avram whispers beside her. “I was just thinking that.”

  “I can’t force myself to imagine what he’s seeing and doing there.”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “He may come back a completely different person.”

  They walk on, bowed, dragging heavy weights.

  But maybe Ofer’s immune now, she wonders. Maybe after the thing in Hebron he can withstand anything. What do I know? What do I really know about him? Maybe he really is more suited to life here than I am.

  ’Cause if I’d only kept my big mouth shut, she thinks, I might still have a family today. The three of them, Ilan and Adam and Ofer, had warned her so many times. They’d sent a thousand little signals to tell her that there are some situations, some issues, that it’s better to keep quiet about. Just put a sock in it. You don’t have to pour out a live broadcast of your whole stream of consciousness, right? But only when it was all over did she get it: they were constantly preparing themselves for every situation—every situation. And they knew ahead of time, and beyond any doubt, that there would in fact be a “situation.” It wasn’t difficult to assume, after all, given that Adam and Ofer served there for six years, three each, with patrols and checkpoints and chases and ambushes and night searches and demonstrations to suppress, that it was impossible for a “situation” not to arise. It was this annoying, exasperating, male wisdom that made Ora seethe. And the three of them were all decked out in protective gear while she walked around naked, like a little girl. “You’re not in Haifa anymore, Dorothy,” Adam spat at her during one family argument. What was it about? Something to do with Ofer’s problem, or a different matter? Who can remember? And by the time she realized what he was talking about and what he was insinuating, they’d already changed topics. They changed topics remarkably quickly back then, switching the subject like cardsharps when she started up with her business. She wonders what Avram would say about it.

  Avram quickly checks in on all his auditoriums: five, like the fingers on one hand. Once there were more, lots more, but over the years he’d managed with great effort to reduce the number. It was beyond his powers to keep them all active simultaneously; it was beyond his means. He scurries back and forth past the row of closed doors, counts them on the fingers of both hands—the second hand is just backup—and pricks up an ear to detect the dull murmur coming from inside, the soundtrack of plays produced continuously, day and night, for twenty-six years now, never losing their novelty. He grabs a line here and a line there; sometimes all he needs is one word to know what point in the plot they’re at. Sometimes he wishes he could shut them down for good, turn the lights off. On the other hand, the thought of the silence that would then prevail was utterly terrifying—a hollow sound, the whistling wind of an infinite plunge into the abyss.

  He secretly counts his fingers again, running the thumb over each digit. He has to do that periodically, at least once an hour, as part of his duties, his maintenance routine. There’s the play about the war, and the one about after the war, with the hospitalizations and the operations, and the one with the interrogations in Israel with Field Security and the Shabak and the Ministry of Defense and the Intelligence GHQ, and the one with Ilan and Ora and their children’s lives, and the one about the POW prison, of course, in Abbasiya, which he really should have noted earlier, before anything else, in Auditorium One. He forgot to start with that one, which is not good. The thoughts about Ofer must have thrown him, the thoughts about Ofer who is fighting now. Not good.

  He runs over his fingers again. The thumb, the counter, is of course the POW one, which he mustn’t insult under any circumstances, and obviously there will have to be a small sacrificial offering for his grave mistake, the unforgivable insult, the hurtful, impudent humiliation he has just caused it. The second one is the war. The hospital and treatments are in Three. And the interrogations in Israel are in Four. And Ora and Ilan’s family, Five.

  For good measure, he thrusts his hand into his pocket and pinches himself, twisting the flesh of his thigh and digging his nails in, thumb and ring finger, as if into foreign flesh—how dare you, how could you forget to start with the POW prison! Still walking, he falls on his knees and begs the moustached interrogator, the tall one, Doctor Ashraf, the one with the terrifying, sinewy hands. It almost never happens, he explains. It’s happened so rarely. It won’t happen again. And deeper inside, through the tearing skin: well done, now you’re talking, now you understand your mistake. And the dampness is spreading through the fabric and his fingertips.

  Ora is holding his face in her hands. “Avram!” she yells at him as if into an empty well. “Avram!” He looks at her with dead eyes. He is not here. He is frantically flitting among his dark auditoriums. “Avram, Avram,” she calls in to him, alarmed, fighting, not giving up, she has the power to do it. And he slowly comes back in hesitant waves, rises up and appears again through his pupils, smiles with miserable submission.

  “Once every three weeks or so, he’d come home on leave,” Ora says. She would pounce on him as soon as he walked through the door, press her whole body against him, then remember to hold her chest away and feel his soft stubble on her cheeks. Her fingers would recoil from the metal of the gun slung over his back and search for a demilitarized space on that back, a place that did not belong to the army, a place for her hand. She would shut her eyes and thank whoever needed to be thanked—she was willing to reconcile even with God—for bringing him home in one piece again. And she would sober up when he gave her three quick slaps on her back, as if she were just a friend, a male friend. With that thwack-thwack-thwack he would both embrace her and mark the boundaries. But she was also well versed and would soon drown out the whisper of insult with cheers of joy: “Come on, let’s have a l
ook at you. You’re tan, you’re sunburned, you don’t use enough sunscreen. Where’s this scratch from? How can you lug all that weight around, are you telling me everyone goes home with a backpack this heavy?” He’d mumble something, and she’d resist reminding him that he always used to take the whole house on his back to school as well. She should have guessed he would end up in the Armored Corps.

  He slowly removed his Glilon rifle and fastened the magazines with a thick khaki band. He looked giant, as though the house were too small for him. His shaved head and round forehead gave him a menacing look, and for a fraction of a second she was meekly handing him her identification card at a checkpoint. “But you must be hungry!” she said cheerfully with a dry throat. “Why didn’t you let us know you were coming at lunchtime? We thought you’d only get here in the afternoon. You could have at least phoned on the way, so I would have had time to defrost a steak for you.”

  “To this day I’m still not used to him eating meat,” she tells Avram. “At age sixteen or so, he just changed his mind. And the fact that he gave up his vegetarianism was somehow harder for me than for him. Do you understand that?”

  “Because being vegetarian is … what?” Avram asks curiously. “It’s special? It’s character?”

  “Yeah, I guess so. And it’s also a kind of cleanness. I won’t say purity, because Ofer, even when he was vegetarian he was always”—a moment’s hesitation: Should she tell him? Can she? May she?—“kind of earthy” (at least she managed not to say “corporeal”), “and I had the feeling that part of his maturation was to turn around all at once, with all his strength, in that direction, to the opposite of vegetarianism, a kind of anti.” She laughs awkwardly. “I don’t know what I’m saying.”

  “Anti what?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s more of a who.”