To the End of the Land

by David Grossman

  Ora smiles but she is hardly listening. Deep inside, she tries to picture the woman. She must have been very lovely, with a ripe, glowing beauty, spiritual yet corporeal, with flowing, honey-colored hair. For a moment she forgets her troubles and clings to this stranger—Tammi, Tamar, he’d called her, Tamyusha—who had tried, on her deathbed, to find that “something else” for her man. Or someone else, she thinks, and smiles with affection and subtle appreciation for this woman who knew her husband so well (that shirt of his, honestly, it looked like a tablecloth in an Italian trattoria) and equipped him with two questions that no woman could resist.

  The two boys gather branches and straw. They light a fire and place a charred finjan on the embers and offer their collection of tea leaves. Ora takes more and more food out of her backpack. “Like a magician’s hat,” she laughs, delighting in her horn of plenty. Avram watches with some concern as she spreads out everything she bought that morning in the supermarket. Cans of hummus and labaneh, cracked green olives, a few pitas, still warm and soft. She urges them to taste everything, and they gladly comply. They haven’t had a meal this good for ages, they say with their mouths full. They boast of their frugality on the trip, of how industriously they are managing their little household, and she watches affectionately as they gobble down the food. Only Avram feels slightly out of place.

  They compare notes on the long route from the south and from the north. Helpful advice and important information flow back and forth about surprises and obstacles waiting for both parties on the way. Ora thinks it was good that she left her phone number on the note for that man. If he calls, she can deliver the pages he’d written in her notebook.

  Eventually Avram warms up. After all, the trail is like a home for him too, and to his surprise he even senses a hikers’ camaraderie that he’s never known before. And perhaps he, like Ora, enjoys the boys’ healthy appetites, and the fact that they are dining at his table, so to speak, and it seems completely natural to them. This is the way of the world: impoverished youngsters, frugal and ascetic by necessity, should occasionally enjoy the generosity of affluent adults they meet on their paths, and in this case, of a friendly, decent-looking couple—despite Avram’s flapping white sharwals and his ponytail tied with a rubber band—a man and a woman who are no longer young but not yet old, and are surely parents to grown children, perhaps even grandparents to one or two little ones, who have taken a little vacation from their full lives and set off on a short adventure. Avram is excited to tell them about the steep climb to the peak of Tabor, and the rock steps and the iron pegs on the ascent to Arbel, and he has some advice and a few warnings. But almost every time he wants to say something, Ora beats him to it and insists on telling the story herself, embellishing slightly, and suddenly it seems to him that she wants to prove at any cost how good she is at animating young people and speaking their language. He dwindles as he watches her, all bustling chumminess, as clumsy as an elbow in a rib, her conduct foreign and grating, until it occurs to him that she is doing this to spite him, that she is still angry at him about something and that she is defiantly pushing him, step by step, out of the little circle she has woven around herself and the two boys.

  And he does retreat. He extinguishes his light and sits inside himself in the dark.

  The young boys, who live on the settlement of Tekoa, sense nothing of the silent battle being fought so close to them. They talk about the wonders of the road from Eilat—the Tzin River at sundown, the daffodils in the cisterns of the Ashkelon River, the ibex at Ein Avdat—and Ora explains that she and Avram are only planning to go as far as Jerusalem. “Maybe one day,” she says, and her gaze wanders off, “we’ll do the southern part of the trail too, all the way to Eilat and Taba.” The boys grumble about the military practice zones in the Negev, which push the trail away from the wadis and mountains to plain old roadsides. They warn Ora and Avram about the Bedouins’ feral dogs—“they have tons of dogs, those people, make sure you protect yours,” and the conversation circles around, and suddenly Avram feels something hovering over his face, and when he looks up he sees that it is Ora’s gaze, a tortured, disconnected stare, as though she is suddenly seeing something new and extremely painful in him. He reaches up distractedly to brush a crumb from his face.

  As they talk, they discover that Jerusalem is about ten days’ walk away. “It might take you a bit longer,” the boys say.

  “It’ll zoom by at the end,” laughs the curly-haired one. “From Sha’ar HaGay you’ll start to feel the pull of home.”

  Ora and Avram flash each other a look of alarm: Only ten days? What then? What after that?

  “Ora, wait, you’re running.”

  “This is how I walk.”

  It’s been this way for a few hours. She’s been walking wildly, gritting her teeth. Avram and the dog trail behind, not daring to come close. She stops only when she can no longer walk, when she is literally falling off her feet.

  They had passed the Alon Valley, Mount Shokef, chives, cyclamens, poppies. Then suddenly they saw the sea. Ora had been waiting for this moment since the beginning of the trip, but now she didn’t stop, didn’t even point to the sea, her love. She kept on walking, lips pursed, grunting with the effort, and Avram straggled behind her. The walk up the Carmel was harder than the Galilee mountains. The paths were rockier, strewn with felled trees and invaded by thorny bushes. Titmice and jays hovered above them, calling to one another excitedly. They accompanied the walkers for a long way, passing them off to each other. When evening fell, they both stopped for a moment in front of a giant pine tree that lay in the middle of the path with a gaping crack. It was flooded with rays of dying sunlight, and a peculiar purple radiance glowed from between its thin leaves.

  They stood looking at it. A glowing ember.

  They started walking again. Avram began to feel that he too was seized with disquiet whenever they lingered even for a moment. The fear had started to nag at him. A new fear. When we get to the road, he thought, maybe we’ll take a bus. Or even a taxi.

  The Rakit ruins, the Yeshach caves, and a cliff looming brazenly above. They walked down among huge rocks, grasping on to tree roots, grottoes. Over and over again, Avram had to climb back up and carry the dog, who whimpered at the rocky channels. They kept walking when it got dark, as long as they could see the path and the markers. Then they slept, briefly and nervously, and woke in the middle of the night, just as on the first nights of the trip, because the earth was humming and rustling constantly under their bodies. They sat by the fire that Avram lit and drank the tea he made. So terrible was the silence and what filled it. Ora closed her eyes and saw the little street leading to her home in Beit Zayit. She saw the gate to the yard, the steps up to the front door. Again she heard Ilan saying that Adam said hi. In Ilan’s voice she could hear Adam’s concern. His compassion. Why was he worried about her all of a sudden? Why did he feel sorry for her? She leaped to her feet and started packing the dishes, shoving them haphazardly into her backpack.

  They kept walking in the dark, with only the light of the moon, and then the sky began to brighten. For a few hours they had not said a word. Avram felt that they were running to reach Ofer in time, the way you dash to rescue someone from the ruins of a building: every second counts. It’s not good that she’s quiet, he thought. She isn’t talking about Ofer. Now is when we have to talk about him, when she has to talk about him. We have to talk about him.

  And then he started talking to himself, silently. He repeated stories about Ofer, things Ora had told him, trivia, little moments, word for word.

  “Just tell me he’s okay,” he growls into the blinding sun. With a sudden lurch, he overtakes her and blocks her path. “Tell me nothing happened to him, that you’re not hiding something from me. Look at me!” he yells. They both breathe heavily.

  “I only know up to the night before last. As of then he was fine.” The sharpness is gone from her face. He senses that something has happened to her in the last hour, somewhe
re between the tea and sunrise. She looks tattered and stooped, as though finally defeated after a prolonged battle.

  “Then what’s wrong? Why have you been like this since yesterday? What did I do?”

  “Your girlfriend,” Ora says heavily.

  “Neta?” The blood rushes out of his face. “What happened to her?”

  Ora gives him a long, miserable look.

  “Is she all right? What happened to her?”

  “She’s fine. Your girlfriend is fine.”

  “Then what?”

  “She sounds nice, actually. Funny.”

  “You talked to her?”

  “No.”

  “Then how?”

  Ora trudges off the trail and into a tangled thicket. Dragging past thistles and shrubs, she trips as she walks, and Avram follows her. She climbs up a little crag of tall, gray rocks, and he follows. And suddenly they’re inside a small crater, where the light is dull and shadowy; the sun seems to have gathered up its rays from this place.

  Ora plunges onto a rock ledge and buries her face in her hands. “Listen, I did something … It was wrong, I know that, but I called your apartment. I picked up your messages.”

  He straightens up. “My apartment? Wait, you can do that, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “There’s a code, a general one, the manufacturer’s default option before you set it yourself. It’s really not that complicated.”

  “But why?”

  “Don’t ask me.”

  “I don’t understand. Wait—”

  “Avram, I did it, and that’s that. I had no control over it. I dialed home first, and then my fingers just jumped to the numbers.”

  The dog comes over and nestles between them, offering Ora her warm, padded body, and Ora puts her arms on the dog. “I don’t know what came over me. Listen, I’m really … I’m so ashamed.”

  “But what happened? What did she do? Did she do something to herself?”

  “I just wanted to hear her, to hear who she is. I didn’t even think—”

  “Ora!” he practically bellows. “What did she say?”

  “You had a few messages. Ten, and nine are from her. There’s one from your boss at the restaurant. They’re finishing the renovations next week, and he wants you to go back to work. He really likes you, Avram, you can feel it in his voice. And there’ll be a housewarming party that they—”

  “But Neta, what about Neta?”

  “Sit down, I can’t do this while you’re standing over me like that.”

  Avram doesn’t appear to hear her. He stares at the gray rocks protruding all around him. Something in this place is closing in on him.

  Ora rests her cheek on the dog’s body. “Listen, she called about a week and a half ago, maybe more, and asked you to call her back immediately. Then she called a few more times and asked … No, she just said your name. ‘Avram?’ ‘Avram, are you there?’ ‘Avram, answer me.’ That kind of thing.”

  Avram kneels down in front of her. His head is suddenly too heavy to bear. The dog, with Ora hunched over her, turns to him with her dark, soft eyes.

  “Then there was one message where she said”—Ora swallows, and her face takes on a childish, startled expression—“that she had something important to tell you, and then … Let’s see, yes, the last message is from the evening before last.” She laughs nervously. “That’s exactly the same time Ofer left his last message for me.”

  Avram is hunched, rounded into himself, ready for the blow—he won’t be taken by surprise.

  “ ‘Avram, it’s Neta,’ ” Ora says in a hollow voice, her eyes fixed on a spot beyond him. “ ‘I’m in Nuweiba and you haven’t been home for ages and you won’t call back your loving ones—’ ”

  Avram nods, recognizing Neta through Ora’s voice.

  Ora continues lifelessly, as though her entire being is operated by a ventriloquist. “ ‘A little while ago I thought I might be slightly pregnant, and I didn’t have the courage to tell you, and I came down here to think about what to do, and organize my thoughts, and of course in the end I’m not, as usual, it was a false alarm, so you have nothing to worry about, my love.’ And then there was a beep.”

  He stares at her. “What? I don’t understand. What did you say?”

  “What’s not to understand?” Ora rouses from her trance and sharpens her knives at him again. “What exactly don’t you understand? Did I say anything not in Hebrew? Do you understand the word ‘pregnant’? Do you understand ‘false alarm’? Do you understand ‘my love’?”

  His mouth drops. His face stiffens with immeasurable wonderment.

  Ora abruptly turns away from him and the dog. She hugs herself and rocks back and forth. Stop this, she orders herself. Why are you attacking him? What did he do to you? But she cannot stop. Back and forth she rocks, finding pleasure in pulling this molten thread farther and farther out of her innards and unspooling herself until she disappears completely—if only. And poor Neta—and of course in the end I’m not, as usual, it was a false alarm—and suddenly Ora knows how Avram and Neta sound when they talk to each other, she knows their music, and the soft playfulness, exactly the way he used to fence with Ilan, and the way Ilan still does with the boys, with that same lightning-fast wit that Ora herself is no longer capable of and in fact never was. False alarm, Neta had giggled. But does he even realize how much she loves him, and how much she is suffering?

  He grunts. “I still don’t understand what you’re angry about.”

  “Angry?” She flings her head back and lets out a toxic spray of ridicule. “Why would I be angry? What do I have to be angry about? On the contrary, I should be happy, right?”

  “About what?”

  “About the mere possibility,” she explains with a serious face and a dizzy sort of matter-of-factness, “that you may have a child one day.”

  “But I don’t have a child,” he says sternly. “Other than Ofer I have no child.”

  “But maybe you will. Why not? Men your age can still do it, after all.” She regains her senses for a moment and almost falls into his arms to apologize for the madness that took hold of her, for the narrow-mindedness, for the smallness of her soul. Because more than anything she wants to say how good it would be for him to have a child and what a wonderful father he would be, a full-time dad. But then another flaming sword turns every which way inside her, and she jumps up with an astonished realization: “Maybe you’ll even have a girl. Avram, you’ll have a girl.”

  “What are you talking about?” He gets up quickly and stands facing her. “Neta said she wasn’t, that she just thought she was.” He reaches out to embrace her and Ora flows through his arms and crumples into a large pit in the rock. Her hands cover her mouth as though she is sucking a finger or trying to stifle a scream.

  “Come on, let’s keep walking.” He kneels beside her and speaks rhythmically, confidently. “We’ll walk all the way to your house, as far as you want me to walk with you. Nothing’s changed, Ora, get up.”

  “What for?” she whispers helplessly.

  “What do you mean what for?”

  She looks at him with tearful eyes. “But you’ll have a girl.”

  “There’s no girl,” he says tersely. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “I suddenly get it, it’s suddenly tangible for me.”

  “I only have Ofer,” Avram repeats insistently. “Listen: you and I, together, have Ofer.”

  “How do you have Ofer?” she says, snorting into her hands. Her eyes flit emptily through the air. “You don’t know him, you didn’t even want to see him. Who is Ofer to you? Ofer is just words to you.”

  “No, no.” In his distress he shakes her, hard, and her head bobs forward and back. “No. You know that’s not true anymore.”

  “But all I’ve told you is words.”

  “Ora, don’t you happen to have …”

  “What?”

  “A picture of him?”

  She
looks at him for a long time, as though failing to grasp the meaning of his words. Then she digs through her backpack and pulls out a small brown wallet. She opens it without looking and holds it out to Avram. In a small plastic window is a picture of two boys with their arms around each other. It was taken the morning Adam joined the army. They both have long hair, and Ofer, young and skinny, hangs on his older brother, enveloping him with his arms and his gaze. As Avram looks at the picture, Ora thinks she can see every feature in his face begin to stir uncontrollably. “Avram,” she says softly. She puts her hand on his as he holds the picture. She steadies it.

  “What a beautiful boy,” Avram whispers.

  Ora shuts her eyes. She sees people standing on either side of the street that leads to her house. Some of them have already gone into the yard, others are standing on the steps to the door. They wait for her silently, eyes lowered. They wait for her to pass them and walk into her house.

  So that it can begin.

  “Talk to me. Tell me about him,” she murmurs.

  “Tell you what?”

  “What is he for you?”

  She takes the wallet and puts it back into the backpack. For some reason she cannot bear to have the picture so exposed to light. He does not dare resist, even though he would like to sit there and look at it more and more.