David Grossman - To the End of the Land

And when he did that — she knows this, though she cannot say it out loud — he turned his back on Adam. There’s no other way to describe it. She knows that Avram also understands exactly what happened. That Avram can hear the half sounds and the silences.

Ilan didn’t do it on purpose. She knows that. He probably never wanted it to happen. He loved Adam very much. But that’s what happened. That’s what he did. Ora felt it, Adam felt it, maybe even tiny Ofer felt something. It had no name, this act of Ilan’s, the surreptitious, subtle, terrible shift, but during that period, the air in their home was thick with it — with a breach of trust so profound, so convoluted, that even now, twenty years later, when she tells Avram about it, she cannot call it by its explicit name.

• • •

One morning when Adam was about five, Ilan was feeding him eggs and toast, and Adam licked his lips in between bites and said, “Toast is what I like most.”

This had been their favorite game for a while, before Ofer was born, and Ilan responded immediately: “Better than pot roast.”

Adam laughed gleefully, thought for a minute, and said, “Scarier than a ghost!”

They both laughed. Ilan said, “You’re good at this, but now you have to get dressed so we won’t be late.”

“For a very important date.”

As Ilan was dressing him in a shirt, Adam said, “Into the sleeves, like green leaves.”

Ilan smiled. “You’re the greatest, Adamon.”

When Ilan tied his shoes, Adam said, “Put my shoes on my feet, like a blanket on a sheet.”

“I see you’re full of rhymes.”

“Go eat some limes.”

On their way to kindergarten, they passed the Tzur Hadassah playground, and Adam observed that there was a bride on the slide and a king on the swing. Ilan, whose mind was preoccupied with other matters, mumbled something about how Adam was becoming a poet, and Adam replied, “You know it.”

When Ora came to pick Adam up later that day, the teacher grinned and told her that Adam was having a very special day: he was talking to the class and the teacher only in rhymes, and had even infected a few of the other children, although not all of them were as good at rhyming as Adam was. “The kindergarten was full of rhymes today! We had a school full of little poets today, didn’t we, children?”

Adam furrowed his smooth brow and said in a slightly angry voice, “Girls and boys, make some noise. And play with toys.”

As they rode home on Ora’s bike, he squeezed her waist tightly with an unfamiliar strength and answered all her questions in rhyme. Her patience for these games of his and Ilan’s was limited to begin with, so she asked him to stop. He said: “With a skip and a hop.” Ora decided he was just doing it to aggravate her, so she said nothing.

He kept it up at home. Ora threatened that she’d stop talking to him until he could behave, and he shouted, “Brave, save, wave!” He sat watching Pretty Butterfly on TV, and when Ora looked, she found him hunched forward, his hands in fists on his lap, and his lips moving after each sentence uttered by the characters on the show. She realized he was answering them in rhyme.

She took him for a drive, thinking the excursion would refresh him and make him forget the strange rhyming compulsion. They drove to nearby Mevo Beitar, and she showed him roofers fixing tiles on a roof, and he said, “Miles, piles, woof, hoof.” When they drove past the store, he shouted out, after some moments of distress: “Snore.” She stopped to let an old dog cross the road and heard a heavy silence from the backseat. When she looked in the mirror she saw his lips moving quickly and his eyes brimming with tears because he could not find a rhyme for “dog.” “Fog,” she said softly, and he breathed a sigh of relief. “And log,” he quickly added.

“Now tell me how your day was at school?” she asked when they sat in a hiding place they both liked, on the way to the Ma’ayanot River. “Cool, fool,” he blurted. She put her finger on his lips and said, “Now don’t talk, just listen to what I have to say.” He looked at her fearfully and mumbled, “Way, hay.” Ora suddenly grew concerned at the sadness and desperation in his eyes. He seemed to be begging her to be quiet, for the whole world to be quiet, not to make a single sound ever again. She gathered him in her arms and held him close, and he buried his head in her neck, his body taut and rigid. She tried to calm him, but every time she forgot herself and said even one word, he was compelled to answer with a rhyme. She took him home, fed him and bathed him, and noticed that even when she was completely silent, he made rhymes for the sounds of the water in the bath, and a distant door slamming, and the beeping of the hourly news update on the neighbors’ radio.

The next day, when she woke him up — in fact she asked Ilan to wake him, but he suggested that she go, and she went into the room with fictitious merriment and said to Ofer and Adam cheerfully: “Good morning, my dears!”—she heard Adam mumble into his pillow, “Fears, tears.” His eyes quickly sharpened out of sleepiness, and his face turned dark with terror.

“What’s wrong with me?” He sat up and asked her with a distant voice, and even before she could answer, he said, “Be strong with me, sing a song with me.” He reached out for her to hug him. “I don’t even want to speak,” he shouted. “Leak, weak, sneak.”

Ilan stood in the doorway. There was shaving cream on his face, and Adam pointed to him feebly and whispered, “Saving, waving.”

“Je ne sais quoi faire,” Ora whispered to Ilan.

“Bench, wrench,” Adam murmured, and Ora was relieved for a moment, but her heart sank when she realized he was finding rhymes for “French.”

“What’s the matter, honey?” Ilan said severely.

“Money, funny,” Adam sighed and buried his face in Ora’s neck, seeking shelter from Ilan.

“This went on for maybe three months,” Ora tells Avram. “Every sentence, every word, whatever anyone said to him and whatever sounds he heard. A rhyming machine. A robot.”

“What did you do?”

“What could we do? We tried not to say anything. Not to make him nervous. We tried to just ignore it.”

“There was that movie,” Avram says, “we saw it once at the Jerusalem Cinema, the three of us.”

“Yes, David and Lisa . ‘What do you see when you look at me?’ ”

Avram replies: “ ‘I see a girl who looks like a pearl.’ ”

“Three months,” she repeats, astounded. “Every sound in the home had a rhyme.”

With all her strength she pushes down a moan of sorrow over what is now awakening in her — the desire, the urge, the passion to go back and talk about it with Ilan, to try to understand what Adam was going through, to chew it over with him again and again in one of their kitchen conversations, or sitting on the living-room sofa hand in hand in the dark, facing a muted television, or on one of their evening walks along the village paths.

There’s no Ilan, she reminds herself sternly.

But for a moment, as it does every morning when she opens her eyes and reaches a probing hand to her side, it hits her with all its initial force: She has no partner. There’s no rhyme for her.

“From morning to night it went on this way, day after day, and at night, too. And then it somehow stopped, almost without us noticing. Like with all sorts of other crazy phases they had, he and Ofer. That’s how it goes.” She struggles to laugh. “You’re convinced that’s it, they’re stuck on some crazy notion forever. That Adam will talk in rhymes forever, or that Ofer will spend the rest of his life sleeping with a monkey wrench in his bed so he can beat up the Arabs when they come, or that he’ll wear his cowboy costume until he’s seventy, and then one day you notice that for some time now, that thing that was making the whole household crazy, that was depressing us for months on end, has just— poof —vanished into thin air.”