To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  “Here, this is how I live,” he finally says quietly, perhaps honestly, perhaps as a modest bribe of candor.

  “How?” Her voice above him is grating, scratching.

  “Like this. I watch.”

  “Then maybe it’s time you went in,” she hisses and starts walking again.

  “What? Wait—”

  “Listen, Ofer’s fine,” she cuts him off, and Avram rushes after her excitedly. “What? How do you know?”

  “I called home from the grocery store to pick up my messages.”

  “You can do that?”

  “Of course you can.” Then she mutters to herself, “You can do a lot more than that.”

  “And? Did he leave a message?”

  “Twelve.”

  She lurches forward again, cutting like a razor. Fine strands of a morning spiderweb graze her face, and she brushes them away angrily. The ghost of an adolescent, grumbling girl flashes in her movements.

  “At least until last night he was fine,” she reports. “The last message was from eleven-fifteen.” She glances at her watch. Avram looks to see how high the sun is. They both know: eleven-fifteen is good, but meaningless now, like yesterday’s newspaper. As soon as he was finished leaving the message, an hourglass turned over somewhere, and the timer started from zero again, with no advantage to hope over fear.

  “Wait, why didn’t you just call him on his cell phone?”

  “Him?” She shakes her head, giggles nervously. “No, no way.” She half turns her head to him, like a doe to a hunter, and asks wordlessly, with her desperate eyes: Do you really not understand? Do you still not get it, that I can’t, I absolutely can’t, until he’s home?

  The path grows difficult and stubborn, and Avram is anxious. Ofer is suddenly so close, his voice still echoing in Ora’s ears. Even his clothes, which swathe Avram, rustle as though Ofer’s spirit blows through them.

  “But what did he say?”

  “He said all kinds of things. Joking around. Ofer, you know.”

  “Yes,” Avram says, smiling to himself.

  “What do you mean ‘yes’?” she spits. “What do you even know about him?”

  “Whatever you tell me,” Avram replies in bewilderment.

  “Yes, stories. Stories we have plenty.”

  He sinks into himself as he walks. Something happened, that’s obvious. Something bad.

  As far as the eye can see, stalks of sage soar in purple and white, campions glow in a rosy hue, and buttercups take over the red shift from aged, shedding poppies. Pine needles are dotted with beads of dew. The sound of bells tinkling: a herd passes nearby, lambs tremble on spindly legs, the bellies of pregnant sheep dangle, almost touching the ground. Ora glares at Avram as he gazes at the udders and bellies, and for a moment he is embarrassed, as though caught red-handed at something.

  They walk on, panting and groaning up the vertical path. Avram is restless, almost frightened. They’d shared a night of total love, and it seemed their bodies had finally been able to trust again and to believe they would not be separated for many years to come. All night they’d made love and slept and talked and dozed and made love and laughed and made love. Neta had come and gone, leaned in and faded away, and with his body he had told Ora about her. A rare tranquillity had engulfed him, and as if in a dream he had imagined them swinging him between them, very slowly, from one to the other. When he lay by her side afterward he felt happiness return to him with slow steps, like blood to a deadened limb.

  “One thing I know, which I never imagined,” he said during one of those hours, with her head resting on his chest.

  “Hmmm?”

  “You can live an entire life without purpose.”

  “Is that what this is?” She lifted up on her elbows and looked at him. “Without any purpose at all?”

  “Once, when I was still the dearly departed me, if you’d told me this was what I could expect, a whole life of this, I’d have done myself in on the spot. Today I know it’s not that terrible. That you certainly can. I’m living proof.”

  “But what does that mean? Explain it to me. What do you mean, a life without purpose?”

  He pondered. “I mean that nothing really hurts you and nothing really makes you happy. You live because you live. Because you happen not to be dead.”

  She managed to resist asking what he would feel if something happened to Ofer.

  “Everything passes in front of you,” he said. “It’s been that way for ages.”

  “Everything?”

  “There’s no desire.”

  “And when you’re with me like this?” She moved her hips against him.

  He smiled. “Well, there are moments.”

  She turned over and lay on him. They moved slowly against each other. She arched her back a little and opened to him, and he did not enter. He was happy this way, and he wanted to talk.

  “And lots of times I thought—”

  She stopped moving abruptly: something in his face, in his voice.

  “If you have a child, say,” he mumbled quickly, “that’s a purpose in life, isn’t it? That’s something worth getting up for in the morning, no?”

  “What? Yes, usually. Yes.”

  “Usually? Not always? Not all the time?”

  Ora thought back to some of the mornings this past year. “Not always. Not all the time.”

  “Really?” Avram asked wonderingly. “But I thought …”

  They lay silently again, moving over each other’s bodies carefully. His foot curled over her shin, his hand caressed the back of her neck.

  “Can I tell you something weird?”

  “Tell me something weird,” she hummed and held her whole body against his.

  “When I got back from there, right? When I started to understand what had happened to me, you know, all that”—he waved his hand dismissively—“I suddenly realized that even when I’d had it, I mean the desire, and a purpose in life, I somehow, in some recess, always knew it was only borrowed. Only for a limited time.” He paused. “Only till the truth emerged.”

  “And what is the truth?” she asked, and thought: the two rows of hitters. The cruel decree.

  “That it’s not really mine,” said Avram stiffly. He propped himself up on his arms and gazed at her intently. “Or that I don’t even deserve to have it,” he added, like someone deciding to confess to a horrible crime at the end of a trivial questioning.

  A notion flitted through her mind: And if he has a child?

  “What happened?” Avram asked.

  “Hold me.”

  If he has a child, she thought feverishly, his own child, whom he’ll raise. How did I never think of that? Of the possibility that he will be a father one day—

  “Ora, what’s up?”

  She breathed into his neck. “Hold me, don’t leave me. You’ll walk with me all the way home, right?”

  “Of course. We’re walking together, what are you—”

  “And we’ll always, always be together?” She tossed him the fragment of a sentence that had suddenly floated to the surface of her memory, a promise he’d sent her by telegram on her twentieth birthday.

  “Until death us do join,” he completed the sentence without hesitation.

  And then, at that moment, Avram felt that Ofer was in danger. He had never known the sensation before: something dark and cool slashed his heart. The pain was intolerable. He held Ora hard. They both froze.

  “Did you feel it?” she whispered in his ear. “You felt it, didn’t you?”

  Avram breathed into her hair, mute. His body was bathed in cold sweat.

  “Think about him,” she whispered and clung to him with her whole body until she put him inside her. “Think of him inside me.”

  They moved slowly, gripping each other as in the eye of a storm.

  “Think about him, think about him!” she cried out.

  “Listen,” she says angrily a few hours later, on the path from Yagur up to the Carmel. “He left me a
message yesterday. Ofer. ‘I’m okay, the bad guys not so okay.’ ”

  “Didn’t he ask where you were, where you’d disappeared to, how you were doing?”

  “Yes, of course, several times. He’s a terrible worrier. The biggest worrier of all of us. And he always has to know”—she doesn’t feel like telling him anything now, but it tumbles out of her anyway, so that he’ll know this too, so that he’ll remember—“he has this need, it’s really compulsive, ever since he was a child, to know exactly where each of us is, so no one will disappear on him for too long. He needs to hold us all together—”

  She stops talking and remembers how, as a child, Ofer used to get scared every time an argument broke out, even a tiny one, between her and Ilan. He would dance around and push them at each other, force them to be close. How, then, did he end up being the reason we broke up? she wonders. She lurches forward again in a sudden surge, butting the air with her forehead, and Avram wonders if Ilan left her a message, too. Or perhaps it was Adam who called and said something that hurt her.

  The dog rubs up against him as though to strengthen him and to seek refuge from Ora’s fury. Her tail droops and her smile is gone.

  “What was it you said? ‘I’m okay, the bad guys—’ ”

  “The bad guys not so okay.”

  Avram repeats the words silently. Tasting the arrogance of youth, he thinks—

  But Ora is already muttering out loud what he was thinking: “ ‘Back in Pruszkow, they didn’t say things like that.’ ”

  Avram throws up his hands: “I can’t win with you! You know it all.”

  His attempt at flattery falls flat. She sticks her chin out and lopes ahead.

  In the shift logs kept by the translators at Bavel, he had written a regular column entitled “Our Town of Pruszkow,” in which he logged his reports using the trembling, suspicious grumblings of the shtetl-dwellers Tzeske, Chomek, and Fishl-Parech. An Egyptian MiG-21 transferred from Zakazik to Luxor, a Tupolev grounded due to rudder problems, battle rations issued to commando fighters—all these were adorned with churlish, defeatist, and bitter commentary from the three elderly Pruszkowites invented by Avram. He constantly expanded and enriched their characters, until the base commander uncovered “the Jewish underground,” as Avram called it, and sentenced him to a week of night-guard duty next to the flag in the parade courtyard, to strengthen his nationalist convictions.

  “But Ora,” he says, to exploit quickly the sweetness of memory that might be softening her heart toward him.

  “Well, what is it?”

  With a stifled grunt, almost sobbing. Without even turning her face to him. Are her shoulders trembling or is it just his imagination?

  “Were there any other messages?”

  “A few, nothing important.”

  “From Ilan, too?”

  “Yes, he deigned to call, your friend. Finally heard what was going on here, and all of a sudden he’s terribly worried about the situation in Israel, and even about my disappearance. Imagine.”

  “But how did he know you—”

  “Ofer told him.”

  Avram waits. He knows there’s more.

  “And he’s coming back to Israel with Adam. But it’ll take them a few days, he’s not sure when they’ll get on a flight. They’re in Bolivia now, on some salt flats.” She sniffs angrily: There’s enough there for all my wounds.

  “And Adam?”

  “What about Adam?”

  “Did he also leave you a message?”

  She stops, amazed, and realizes: I can’t believe it.

  “Ora?”

  Because only now does she remember that Ilan said Adam sent his regards. She was so caught up with herself, with what she was doing, that she almost forgot. He specifically said, “Adam says hi.” And she’d forgotten that. Adam is right, he really is. An unnatural mother.

  “Ora, what happened?”

  “Never mind, forget it.” She’s almost running again. “There weren’t any important messages at my place.”

  “Your place?”

  “Leave me alone, okay? What’s with the interrogations? Just leave me alone!”

  “I’m leaving,” he murmurs, with a sinking feeling in his gut.

  A cloud of gnats accompanies them, forcing them to breathe through their noses and keep quiet for a long time. Avram notices exposed tree roots surrounded by mounds of damp earth: there were wild boars here last night.

  Later, they come across a big dark rock with letters carved deep: Nadav. A stone next to it reads: A grove in memory of Captain Nadav Klein. Fell in the War of Attrition in the Jordan Valley. 27 Sivan 5729. July 12, 1969. Across the way, among pine needles and pinecones, a monument and a plaque: In memory of Staff Sergeant Menachem Hollander, son of Chana and Moshe, Haifa, Kfar Hasidim. Fell in the Yom Kippur War in the battle for Taoz on 13 Tishrei 5734, at the age of 23.

  A short while later there is a huge concrete relief depicting the entire Canal region in 1973, marked with Our Forces’ Positions—Magma is there too, so tiny—and through the long, serrated leaves of a group of cactuses, they see gilded statues of a doe and a lion, and a monument bearing the names of eight soldiers who fell in the battle for the Suez Canal on May 23, 1970. Ora looks out of the corner of her eye to make sure Avram is able to cross these hurdles of memory in one piece, but he seems to be troubled only by her now, and she wonders how to tell him, where to start.

  She walks too fast for him to keep up. The dog stops every so often, pants, and looks questioningly at Avram. He shrugs his shoulders: I don’t get it, either. From the main road of Usafia, opposite the Shuk Yussuf greengrocers, they turn to follow the marker down a path that leads through a sparse grove of pine trees. The earth is covered with mounds of trash and filth, tires, furniture, old newspapers, shattered televisions, dozens of empty plastic bottles.

  “They throw this stuff here on purpose,” she hisses. “I’m telling you, it’s their twisted revenge on us.”

  “Whose?”

  “Theirs.” She sweeps her arm broadly. “You know exactly who.”

  “But then they’re just making their own place dirty! This is their village.”

  “No, no, inside their houses it’s all sparkling, glimmering, I know them. But everything on the outside belongs to the state, to the Jews, and it’s a commandment to junk that up. That’s probably part of their jihad, too. Look here—look at this!” She kicks an empty bottle, misses, and almost falls on her rear end.

  Avram cautiously reminds her that Usafia is a Druze village, and they’re not obligated by the jihad commandment. “And anyway, when we came down from Arbel, and also near the Kinneret, and at the Amud River, we saw piles of trash, totally Jewish trash.”

  “No, no, it’s their protest. Don’t you understand? Because they don’t have the guts to really revolt. I honestly would respect them a lot more if they just came out against us openly.”

  She’s feeling bad, Avram senses, and she’s taking it out on them. He looks at her and sees her face turn ugly.

  “Aren’t you angry at them? Don’t you have any anger or hatred about what they did to you there?”

  Avram thinks. The old man from the meat locker comes to his mind, lying naked on the sidewalk, banging his head against it, twitching in front of the soldiers.

  “What do you have to think about for so long? Me, if someone did to me a quarter of what they did to you, I’d run them down to the corners of the earth. I’d hire mercenaries to take revenge, even now.”

  “No,” he says, and runs a vision of his tormentors in front of his eyes: the chief interrogator, Lieutenant Colonel Doctor Ashraf, with his sly little eyes and his sickeningly flowery Hebrew, and the hands that tore Avram to shreds. And the jailors in Abbasiya, who beat him whenever they could, who were drawn to torture him more than the others, as though something about him drove them crazy. And the two who buried him alive, and the guy who stood on the side and took photographs, and the two men they brought in from outside—Ashraf tol
d him they were trucked in especially for him, two guys from death row, rapists from a civilian prison in Alexandria—even them he doesn’t hate anymore. All he feels when he thinks of them is insipid despair, and sometimes simple, raw sadness at having had the misfortune to end up there and see the things he saw.

  The path seems to be trying to shake off the filth, curving sharply to the left and spitting them out into the Cheik riverbed, then descending and plunging into the belly of the earth. They have to watch their steps because the rocks are slippery from the morning dew and the path is crisscrossed with sinewy tree roots. The sun dances through the foliage in tiny pieces of light.

  How come Adam said hi to me? she wonders. What happened that made him do that? What is he feeling?

  Oak trees and terebinths and pine trees, grandfathers and grandmothers by the looks of them, lean in from both banks of the riverbed, and ivy tumbles down their branches. Here and there is an arbutus, and then a massive pine tree on the ground, hewn, its pinecones dead and its trunk turning white across the path. In unison, Avram and Ora look away.

  Next to a dried-up reservoir filled with giant, blighted reeds, two tall boys with unkempt hair come toward them. One has thick, dark dreadlocks, while golden curls tumble from the other’s head, and they both wear tiny yarmulkes. Their faces are welcoming, and they carry large backpacks with sleeping bags rolled on top. Ora and Avram are experts at these encounters by now. They almost always say a quick “hello,” lower their eyes, and let the other hikers pass. But this time Ora greets the boys with a broad grin and takes off her backpack. “Where are you from, guys?” she asks.

  The boys exchange somewhat surprised looks, but her smile is warm and inviting.

  “Feel like a little coffee break? I just bought some fresh biscuits. Kosher,” she adds piously with a glance at their yarmulkes. She chatters and giggles with them, abounding with motherly warmth and a certain flirtatiousness. They accept her invitation, even though only an hour ago, on Mount Shokef, they’d had coffee with a doctor from Jerusalem who’d asked them all sorts of funny questions and written their answers in a notebook. Ora tenses up.

  At her request, after a moment’s hesitation, they tell her what the doctor had told them when they sat down for coffee with him—“amazing coffee the guy makes,” the dark one notes. It turns out that he and his wife had planned for years to make this journey together as a couple, all along the trail, from the north down to Taba, almost a thousand kilometers. But his wife got sick and died three years ago—the boys interrupt each other, excited by the story, and perhaps by Ora’s transfixed look—and before she died she made him swear that he’d still do the hike, even on his own. “And she was always looking for something else for him to do along the way,” the golden-curled boy adds with a laugh. “In the end she had this idea”—the dark one snatches the story from his friend’s mouth—“that every time he met someone, he’d ask them two questions.” It seems as though only now, recounting the story, the boys allow its true meaning to penetrate them.