To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  It was amazing to her how quiet the passengers were. Most of them gazed out the windows as she did, as though not daring to look at their fellow passengers. Every time the bus stopped at a station, they all sat up a little straighter and stared at the people getting on. The new passengers, in turn, scanned them with squinting eyes. It was a very quick exchange of glances, for a fraction of a second, but there was the wondrously complex labor of sorting and cataloging going on, and Ora stayed on the bus through the Katamonim neighborhood and the Malha Mall, until they reached the last stop and the driver looked at her in the rearview mirror and called out, “Lady, end of the road.” Ora asked if there was a bus back to town. “That one over there,” the driver said and pointed to the 18. “But run, ’cause he’s about to move. I’ll honk at him to wait for you.”

  She got on the empty bus, and her eyes refracted a split-second scene that was torn, shattered, and bloody. She wondered where the safest seat was; had she not been embarrassed, she would have asked the driver. She tried to remember the many reports she’d heard about bus bombings and couldn’t decide whether most of them occurred when the terrorist got on the bus, in which case of course it would be in the front part, or whether he went farther inside, and then, once he was standing in the middle of the bus, surrounded by most of the passengers, he called out his Allahu akbar and pressed the button. She decided to sit in the back row and pushed away the thought of how the shrapnel and the metal studs would somehow be stopped before they reached her. But after a minute she felt too lonely, and she moved one row forward. Wondering if this simple switch might seal her fate in just a few moments, she met the driver’s probing eyes in the mirror. “And suddenly it occurred to me,” she tells Avram, “that he might end up thinking I’m the suicide bomber.”

  After an hour of traveling she was exhausted but afraid to let down her guard. Her eyelids drooped and she fought the urge to lean her head on the window for a quick nap. For the last few days she had felt like a child who discovers, unhappily and too quickly, the grown-ups’ secrets. A week earlier, she’d sat down one morning at Café Moment when the place was neither full nor empty, and a short, stocky woman wearing a heavy coat had come in, holding a baby covered with a blanket on her shoulder. She was not a young woman, around forty-five, and perhaps that was what seemed suspicious, because suddenly a whisper of “It’s not a baby” flew through the air, and the place turned upside down in an instant. People leaped up, overturned chairs as they fled, knocked over plates and glasses, fought one another to get to the door. The woman in the coat observed the commotion with a baffled look and did not seem to comprehend that it was all because of her. Then she sat down at a table and placed the baby on her lap. Ora, unable to move, watched the woman, transfixed. She unwrapped the blanket, unfastened the buttons of a little purple coat, and smiled at the chubby, sleepy face that peered out. She cooed at the baby: “Ah-googoo, googoo, googoo.”

  The next afternoon—Ora tells him on their way up to the Reish Lakish lookout point, as they step in the footprints of ancient Rabbinic sages on a glaring hot day; the level path winds comfortably through carob and oak trees, and plump cows graze in the distance—she asked her secretary to cancel her next session again, walked to the 18 bus stop, and took the bus to the last station. Since her afternoon was free and she didn’t feel like being alone at home, she took the bus back all the way to the first stop, in the Kiryat HaYovel neighborhood, where she changed to another bus and took it back downtown. She got off and walked around for a while, watched the reflection of the street behind her as she window-shopped, scanned the passersby, and forced herself to move slowly.

  The next morning, before her first patient, she got the 18 at the central bus station, and this time she sat in front. Every three or four stops, she got off and changed to a different bus. Sometimes she crossed the street and rode the other way. She tried to sit in a different place every time, as though her body were a pawn in an imaginary game of chess. When she realized she was late for her third patient, she had a brief moment of fear that her clinic directors would call her in for another talk, but she postponed the thought to a time when she would have more energy. She was so tired during those days that the moment she sat down she would let her head droop, and sometimes she’d doze off for several minutes. Every so often she would drowsily look up at the people on the bus through a haze. Voices from conversations between strangers and phone calls penetrated her slumber. If they stopped at a station and no one got on, relief would immediately spread through the bus, and the passengers would talk to one another. A heavyset elderly man adorned with Red Army medals who sat next to Ora on one of her journeys pulled a large brown envelope from his shopping basket and showed her an X-ray of his kidney, which had a growth on it. Through the X-ray, Ora could dimly make out two Ethiopian soldiers from Border Patrol checking the papers of a young man who might or might not have been Arab. He kept kicking at the sidewalk.

  They stop and take a breath. Hands on waists. Why have we been running like this? they ask one another silently. But something is already kicking at their heels, stirring pins and needles in their souls, and they merely glance at the beautiful Netofa Valley and walk on quickly through a forest of terebinth, oak, and birch trees. Ora walks silently, her eyes on the path. Avram throws her a few cautious looks and his face constricts and closes up from one step to the next. “Look,” she whispers, pointing. On the path, at their feet, a crowded series of hieroglyphics emerges, a crosshatch that flows and runs from all directions until it congregates in a cluster of snails on one branch of a bush.

  By the second week, some of the drivers recognized her. But since there was nothing suspicious about her, they filtered her out of their minds so they could focus on more important things. She began to identify a few regular passengers and knew where they got on and where they got off. If they talked on their cell phones, or with their fellow travelers, she also knew something about their ailments and their families, and what they thought about the government. An elderly couple drew her attention in particular. The man was tall and thin, the woman very small, shriveled, and almost translucent. When she sat down, her feet swung without reaching the floor of the bus. She always had a bad, phlegmy cough, and the man would worriedly examine her used tissues and replace them with fresh ones. Ora woke up a little every time the couple got on, at the market. They took the bus to the last stop, the way she did, and to her surprise they almost always switched with her to the bus going back and got off at the same station where they had originally boarded, on the other side of the street. She couldn’t understand the meaning of their route.

  Day after day, for three or four weeks, Ora took the 18 bus and spent at least an hour traveling around the city. She discovered that the bad thoughts loosened their grip on her while she was on the bus. Most of the time she did not have a single complete thought, merely transposing her body from one stop to the next. She grew accustomed to the jolting, the screeching brakes, the potholes, and the religious radio stations blasting their admonitions at full volume. And she realized that Ilan never asked her what she did for long stretches of the day, and she could keep her activities from him. Sometimes, when they sat down for dinner, she would stare at him and silently scream with her eyes: How can you not sense where I am and what I’m doing? How can you let me go on like this?

  “Just then, the thing with Ofer happened,” she says cryptically to Avram, who has been quiet for a long time. “We had a crazy month, with the constant questionings in the battalion and the brigade, and the inquiries and investigations. Don’t ask.” She sighs and swallows her saliva. Here comes the moment when I have to tell him. He has to hear it, to know, to judge for himself.

  In those days it seemed to Ora that every word she uttered, every look she gave, and even every silence were perceived by Ofer, Ilan, and Adam as a provocation, the premise for a fight. On these bus journeys, she felt a slight reprieve from them, and from herself too, from her strange insistence on bickering wi
th them over and over again, and from her petty, circuitous questions, which were honestly starting to drive her mad. They burst out of her like acidic hiccups every time she so much as thought about what had happened there, when she merely heard the beeps signaling the hourly radio news, or even when she just thought about Ofer. “It’s like I couldn’t think of him without going through the incident first.”

  “But what happened?” Avram asks.

  She listens inside herself, as though the answer will come, finally, from there. Avram holds his backpack straps with both hands—grips them.

  One day Ora left the clinic, apologized distractedly to a couple in the waiting room, and hopped on the 18 bus for a quick ride. When they were near the Mekasher bus depot, she heard a very loud explosion. Then there was a moment of bottomless silence. The passengers’ faces slowly foundered and turned to pulp. A powerful stench of excrement spread through the air, and Ora was flushed with cold sweat. People started to shout, curse, and cry, and begged the driver to let them out. The driver stopped in the middle of the street and opened the doors, and the passengers streamed out, fighting one another, kicking and punching to get out first. The driver looked in the mirror and asked, “Are you all staying?” Ora turned back to see who else he was talking to, and there was her elderly couple, huddled against each other, the woman’s tiny, almost bald head buried in the man’s body as he leaned over her and caressed her shoulder. Their expressions were difficult to describe: a mixture of shock and fear and also terrible disappointment. The radio immediately switched to emergency broadcast format—“First of all, allow me to express my condolences, to wish a speedy recovery to the injured, and to grieve with the families,” said ministers and security experts one after the other. The explosion had occurred on a bus going the opposite way, near Davidka Square, which Ora’s bus had driven past only moments before. The ambulances were already roaring to Shaare Zedek and Hadassah hospitals.

  The next morning, soldiers and policemen manned all the bus stops, and the few passengers were even more nervous, irritable, and suspicious than usual. There were outbursts of anger at anyone who pushed in line, trod on a toe, or bumped into someone. People talked loudly on their cell phones. Ora felt they were using the phones as breathing tubes to the outside world. When the bus passed the site of the attack, there was a silence. Through the window she saw a bearded Orthodox man, a volunteer from the victim-identification unit, standing in a treetop and using a cloth and tweezers to peel something gently off a branch and place it in a plastic bag. A group of kindergarten children got on the bus in Beit HaKerem, and a few of them were holding colorful balloons. They laughed and chattered and ran around, and everyone stared at the balloons. When one inevitably popped, although everyone could see it was just a balloon, a bitter screech of panic pierced the bus, and a few of the children burst into tears. The passengers, ashamed and exhausted, avoided one another’s eyes.

  More than once on those circular journeys, Ora realized that if she happened to see someone she knew, she wouldn’t know how to tell that person what she was doing there or where she was going. Sometimes she thought to herself: What is this ridiculous behavior? Just think how Ilan and the boys would feel if something happened to you, or if Ofer thought, God forbid, that it was because of him. Or that because of him you wanted something to happen to you. Yet still, for three or four weeks, every single day, a moment would come when she could not stop herself from leaving home or work and walking in a shamefaced, defeated sort of daydream state to the nearest bus stop, where she stood at some distance from the other people—all of whom also made a point of keeping a little distance between themselves—and got on a bus. She would walk into the middle, look dimly at an empty seat waiting for her, and search for her elderly couple, who seemed to expect her by now and who would nod with the forlorn partnership of co-conspirators. She would sit down, lean her head on the window, sometimes doze, and travel for a few stops or a whole route. She never knew in advance how much time she would have to spend on the bus, nor was she capable of picking herself up and getting off until the moment arrived when—without any apparent reason—she sensed relief, release, as though the effect of an injected substance had diminished, and only then could she get off the bus and go on with her day.

  As the weeks went by, she was more and more able to summon up the image of the strange old man who had danced and laughed and frolicked, naked as the day he was born, in front of the soldiers who had finally freed him from the meat locker in the cellar in Hebron. “The building’s owner was a wealthy butcher,” she explains to Avram, who still does not understand, but he is breathing faster and his eyes dart. And the soldiers, she remembers, were so embarrassed when they talked about it, about his nude dance, as though that was the hardest thing about the whole incident. He made a total idiot out of himself, one soldier told her when he slept over at their house the night before one of the inquiries. His name was Dvir, a kibbutznik from Kfar Szold. Six-five, lanky, stammering, and slightly juvenile. Ora drove him and Ofer to the brigade HQ—

  “Wait, Ora,” Avram says with a pale face. “I can’t follow, who is this old man?”

  “The army actually took the case seriously,” she says after a few moments of silence, during which they plunge to the ground, suddenly exhausted, and sit on the edge of a pool glistening with large yellow water lilies. The dog keeps jumping into the water, spraying everything around her, urging them to join in. But they do not see her. They sit side by side, hunched over.

  Even though Ofer had begged her several times to stop talking about it, at least in public, Ora had to ask Dvir: “But how could you forget he was there?”

  Dvir shrugged his broad shoulders. “I don’t know, maybe everyone in the platoon thought someone else had let him out.”

  Ofer sniffed angrily and Ora vowed to keep quiet, not to say another word. She drove on with her brow furrowed and her shoulders hunched up almost to her ears. “But how could you forget a human being?” The words escaped her lips again after a few moments. “Just explain to me how you can forget a human being in a meat locker for two whole days!”

  Avram lets out an uncontrolled grunt of pain and surprise. The sound of a body dropped from up high hitting the ground.

  Dvir looked at Ofer pleadingly. Ofer said nothing, but his eyes darkened. Ora saw, but she could not stop herself.

  “What can I tell you, Ora? It really wasn’t right, there’s no question about that. We’re all eating our hearts out now, but you have to take into account that everyone was busy with their assignments, we’re pulling eight-by-eight roadblock shifts that suck your brain dry, and the fact that all of a sudden they took us on an assignment we didn’t even know how to do, and we had to keep some families with us in that apartment for two days, in one room, with one bathroom, and kids and old people and all their crying and yelling and whining, and just that is enough to make you lose your shit, and at the same time you have to do lookouts onto the street and the killing zone, and cover for the prima donna snipers, and make sure the Hamasniks don’t booby-trap our downstairs doors, so it ended up falling between the cracks.”

  Ora bit her lip. Mustering up all the restraint she could find within herself, she said, “Still, Dvir, I can’t understand how a bunch of guys—”

  “Mom!” Ofer yelled. A single yell that cut like a knife. They drove the rest of the way in silence. When they got to HQ, Ofer wouldn’t let her wait for him to hear the results of the preliminary inquiry, as she had intended to do. “You’re going home now,” he announced.

  Ora looked at him, at her strong child with the shaved head and the pure gaze, and her eyes brimmed with tears. The question almost burst out again, and Ofer said in a terrifyingly quiet voice, “Mom, listen closely. This is the last time I’m going to tell you. Get off my case. Get off my case!”

  His eyes were gray steel, his lips iron wire, and his shaved skull a ball of cold fire. Ora shrank back from his power, his hardness, and above all his foreignness, and he
turned his back on her and left without letting her kiss him.

  She drove off, wild with sorrow, hardly able to see the road. A pelting, dusty rain began to fall, and one of the Fiat Punto’s windshield wipers didn’t work, and Ilan phoned and she couldn’t say more than a few words without shouting the question, and of course he lost his patience too—it’s a wonder he kept it for so long—and said he was getting sick and tired of her sanctimonious self-righteousness and that she should really keep in mind that Ofer needed her now, needed her full support.