David Grossman - To the End of the Land

But now, walking up Mount Meron, she tries to remember why she was so angry at the time. What I wouldn’t give to lie in that bed again, pregnant, with the aching back and the exhaustion, with Ofer in my belly, hearing that laughter of theirs. “Let’s sit down for a minute. This is no mountain; this is a ladder.”

She plunges to the ground. The incline, and the longings — her old heart can’t take it. Adam is here with her, four years old at most, running around in the field. His childish movements, his curious, fragile, slightly suspicious looks. And the light that shines when he allows himself to be happy, when he excels at something, when Ilan praises him. “I keep talking about Adam, but Ofer is never Ofer alone. You understand that, don’t you? Ofer is always also Adam, and Ilan, and me. That’s the way it is. That’s a family.” She giggles. “You have no choice, you’ll have to get to know us all.”

Pictures and more pictures: Adam and baby Ofer napping together in a sleeping bag on the living-room rug — an Indian camp — naked, cuddling, their sweaty hair clinging to their foreheads, and Adam’s right arm hugs Ofer’s belly with its protruding navel. Adam and Ofer, five and a half and two, setting up house in an empty cardboard box, their two faces peeking from a little round window she’d cut out for them. Ofer and Adam, one and four and a half, very early in the morning, sleeping naked in Adam’s bed; while they slept, Ofer had pooped and smeared Adam thoroughly, diligently, and undoubtedly with generosity and love. Ofer puffing his cheeks to blow out three candles on his birthday cake, and Adam running up from behind to finish them off with one breath. Ofer reaching up on his matchstick legs after Adam has snatched his beloved stuffed elephant, and shrieking: “Ofer e’phant! Ofer e’phant!” He stands his ground so firmly that Adam panics and gives it back to him, then stares at him with a new tinge of reverence, as Ora watches from the kitchen.

A big family picnic. The scene is as vivid as though it is happening right here on the mountain. Adults and children sit in a circle watching Ofer, who stands in the middle. A fair, thin, tiny child with huge light-blue laughing eyes and a golden mass of hair. He is about to tell the funniest joke in the world, which Mom — he assures his audience — has already heard seven times and rolled around with laughter every time. Then he launches into a long, incomprehensible yarn about two friends, one called Whaddayacare, the other named Whatsupwithyou. He gets it all wrong and forgets things, then remembers, and sparks of laughter dart around his eyes. The audience flutters with delight, and Ofer keeps stopping to remind his listeners: “Soon comes the end of the joke, and that’s when you laugh!”

All that time, Adam — Eight years old? Seven? — looking thin, secretive, and shadowy, slinks from one person to the next, following a hidden code known only to him. He never lingers, never allows anyone to hug or caress him, only watches ravenously as they all focus on Ofer. He loots them, a little predator, preyed upon.

Avram listens to Ora and a titmouse chirps joyously in the thicket. Nearby on the mountainside, in a patch that must have recently burned, mustard plants are starting to bloom again in a wild, joyous rabble of fauna. Ora laughs. The flowers have clearly decided to just get on with it, and the scorched spot now buzzes with mustard plants and bees.

“And Ofer kept quiet until he was almost three. Well, not quiet, but he didn’t make much of an effort to learn how to talk.”

Avram asks hesitantly, “And that … that’s old, three, right?”

“It’s pretty late to start talking.”

Avram furrows his brow, considering the new information.

“I mean, he had a few basic words, and some very short phrases, and lots of fragments. A syllable here, a syllable there. Other than that he simply refused to learn how to talk. But he got by very well with his smiles and his charm, and those eyes of his. Which you gave him,” she adds, unable to resist.

To Ora’s surprise, Ofer had even convinced Ilan that you could live a full life without saying almost a single word correctly. “And this is Ilan, you know?” she notes with a raised eyebrow. “Ilan who told me, even before Adam was born, that he already knew he wouldn’t be capable of loving a baby — not even his own son — until the baby started talking. And then comes Ofer, and he went on like that for almost three years, quiet as a monk, and look how it turned out.”

Ilan and Ofer dug beds in the garden together and planted vegetables and flowers. They built a fancy ant farm and cared for it meticulously, and they built multisectioned LEGO castles, and spent hours making things out of plasticine and Play-Doh, and they played with Ofer’s huge eraser collection, and baked cakes together. “Ilan!” She laughs. “Imagine! And Ofer, just so you know, was crazy about taking things apart. As soon as he could do anything, he liked to take things apart and put them back together, over and over again, a thousand times. The automatic sprinkler in the garden, an old tape recorder, a transistor, a fan, and of course watches. Ilan taught him some basic technical skills, and carpentry, and electrical engineering, and all that happened almost without words. You should have heard the gargles and squeaks that came out of those two. You should have seen Ilan. It was like he took a vacation from himself.”

Avram smiles. Near happiness distorts his unaccustomed face for a moment. He really wants to hear, Ora observes once again, and her heart replies simply what she has always known about Avram: that he may never be able to or dare to connect himself to Ofer, but he certainly can and will connect to the story of Ofer.

A lighthearted, laughing Ilan emerged in Ofer’s life. An Ilan whom she loved very much. He rolled around and wrestled on the floor with him, and played soccer and tag in the living room and in the yard, and ran around the house with Ofer on his shoulders, shouting and yelling, and walked Ofer up and down the hallway perched on his own feet, and sang silly songs with him.

They stood at the mirror and made funny or scary faces. Ilan would hold his face close to Ofer’s, nose almost touching nose, and whoever laughed first lost. Then he’d disappear into the kitchen and emerge with his face covered in flour and ketchup. And the way those two horsed around in the bathtub, water fights and splashing. “You should have seen the bathroom when they were done. It looked like the scene of a water terrorist attack.”

“And what about Adam?”

“Adam, yes”—she thinks of how he keeps coming back to Adam—“of course Adam was also welcome in these games, it’s not that he wasn’t.” She tightens her arms over her chest. “It’s just so complicated …”

Because when Adam was with them, she always had the feeling that Ofer and Ilan held back a little, toned down their wildness and cheerfulness to tolerate Adam’s incessant chatter, his flood of speech, which often turned into a frightening display of physical rowdiness, a tempest of hitting and kicking, aimed at them both, over some silly little excuse or an imaginary insult. Sometimes he would throw himself down in a tantrum and pound the floor with his hands and feet, and even his head — Ora remembers the thuds with horror — and then Ilan and Ofer would try as hard as they could to calm him, to appease him, to flatter him. “It was really touching to see Ofer, all of two years old, caressing Adam, sitting next to him, leaning over him and making wordless murmurs of comfort.

“It was such a difficult period, because Adam couldn’t understand what was going on, and the more he tried to get close to them, the more they seemed to pull back. And then he’d get even more anxious and turn up his volume, because what could he do? He only had one tool to express everything he wanted, he only had what Ilan had taught him.” She shakes her head angrily. Why hadn’t she intervened more? She’d been so weak, so green. “In fact, now I think he was simply begging Ilan to come back to him, to reaffirm their covenant. I also think about Ilan, about how he just let Ofer be himself and loved everything about him. He even gave up his damned judgmentalism, just so he could absolutely love everything Ofer was, without any inhibitions.”