David Grossman - To the End of the Land

“Once, a long time ago, I had a barber friend on Ben Yehuda, and he’d do me a favor.”

“Oh.”

“But in the last few years it’s usually Neta, about once every six months.” He fingers his long, sparse hair, which flaps in the wind. “Maybe you really should straighten it out a bit.”

“You won’t feel it, it won’t hurt.”

Empty acorn caps crunch under their feet. A cool breeze laps around them. The grove is dotted with red, blue, and purple anemones. A new intimacy shakily hovers between them.

“You know,” Ora says, “since the day before yesterday, since we both came out of our shock a bit, when I felt that you were doing better too — that was around the day before yesterday, wasn’t it?”

“Yes?”

“Yes, after I wrote in my notebook that night. Since then, I’ve suddenly noticed that almost everything I see, the view, the flowers, the rocks, the color of the earth, the light at different times”—she makes a sweeping, circular motion—“everything, you know, even you, and the stories I’m telling you, and both of us, and this hyacinth here”—she greets it with a nod—“I’m trying to engrave all of this in my memory now, because you never know”—she mischievously gives Avram a clown face that does not make him laugh—“this may be my last time with them.”

“Nothing’s going to happen to him, Ora, you’ll see, he’ll be fine.”

“You promise?”

He raises his eyebrows.

“Promise me.” She bumps her shoulder against his. “What do you care — make an old lady happy.”

They pass by another lookout point, dedicated to Yosef Bukish, of blessed memory, who fell in service on July 25, 1997: So many things in the world are pretty ,

Flowers and animals, nature and city ,

And if you open your eyes and explore ,

You’ll see hundreds of wonders each day — maybe more! LEAH GOLDBERG

Remember, Avram thinks as he rushes around in his own mind, slamming against its walls. This head that you emptied, that you erased, that you sullied, that you filled with trash, with shit, will now store every word she says, everything she’s telling you about Ofer. Give her at least that, what else do you have to give? All you can give her is your damn, sick memory.

“What he said to you,” Avram suggests cautiously after a while, “I was thinking, maybe he was a little influenced by Adam’s opera?”

“About exile? Where everyone leaves in a convoy?”

“Maybe.”

She blushes from chest to neck. She had entertained that same thought herself. And now he is. It is amazing how he is learning to weave his threads into her tapestry. They stand swaying lightly. At their feet are the green expanses, forests, and rocky mountains of the Mount Meron Nature Reserve. Avram thinks again about the woman unraveling the crimson thread behind her. Perhaps it is an umbilical cord that comes out of her and keeps going forever. He imagines more and more men, women, and children streaming out of the towns and villages, the kibbutzim and moshavim, to tie their own threads to hers. For a moment he sees a red tapestry spreading out over the expanses below him, clinging to them like a fishing net, a thin, bleeding mesh that glistens in the sun.

“There’s something special about this kind of walk, isn’t there?” he says later.

Ora, lost in thought, laughs. “There’s a lot, yes, you could definitely say so.”

“No, I mean the walking itself, where you have to go from point to point, you can’t skip anything. It’s like the trail is teaching us to walk at its pace.”

“It’s so different from my normal life, with the cars and the microwave and the computers, where you can defrost a whole chicken with the click of a button, or send a message to New York. Oh, Avram”—she stretches her arms and inhales the sharp mountain air—“this heel-to-toe is much more suited to me. Maybe we can spend our whole lives just walking and walking without ever getting there.”

They leave the path and find a lovely pillow of green, where they sprawl on their backs on the warm earth, facing the sun. It’s afternoon, and near Ora’s head is a heron’s bill flower that has finished its pollination work and now sheds its blue petals before dying. An earthy, rocky, primeval strength seeps into her body from the mountain beneath her. The bitch sprawls some distance away, licking and cleaning herself thoroughly. Avram takes Ofer’s hat out of his backpack— Shelach Battalion, Company C, The Guys —and covers his face. She also shelters her face with a hat. The warm sun makes her sleepy. A deep silence plunges all around them. A tiny beetle burrows through fallen poppy leaves by her fingers. Next to her knee, an iris hurries to seduce the followers of the deceased heron’s bill by displaying its blue blossoms.

“Before, when we were standing at that lookout point,” Ora says softly under her hat, “when we looked down on the Hula Valley and it was so beautiful, with the fields in all those colors, I realized that it’s always like this for me with this land.”

“Like what?”

“Every encounter I have with it is also a bit of a farewell.”

Hidden under his hat, Avram fleetingly sees the shred of an Arabic newspaper he had found in a bucket in the latrine at Abbasiya Prison. Through the smeared excrement he had managed to decipher a brief report about the executions of deputy ministers and fifteen mayors from Haifa and the surrounding suburbs, held the previous night in the central square in Tel Aviv. For a few days and nights he was convinced that Israel no longer existed. Then he realized the fraud, but something had been damaged in him.

His eyes are wide open now. He remembers the interminable drives around the streets of Tel Aviv with Ora and with Ilan, after he got out of the hospital. Everything had seemed real and alive, but also like a big act. During one of those drives he’d said to Ora: “Okay, it’s all very well to say, If you will it, it is no dream , as Herzl said, but what if you stop willing it? What if you can’t be bothered to have the will anymore?”

“The will for what?”

“To stop being a dream.”

A flock of partridges alights with beating wings from within the nearby thicket, and the bitch emerges, disappointed.

“And in those moments,” Ora says through her hat, “I always think: This is my country, and I really don’t have anywhere else to go. Where would I go? Tell me, where else could I get so annoyed about everything, and who would want me anyway? But at the same time I also know that it doesn’t really have a chance, this country. It just doesn’t. Do you understand?” She plucks the hat off her face and sits up, surprised to find him sitting there watching her. “If you think about it logically, if you just think numbers and facts and history, with no illusions, it doesn’t have a chance.”

All of a sudden, as if in a clumsy theater performance, a few dozen soldiers burst onto the green meadow, running in two lines, and split off on either side of Ora and Avram. Ordinance Corps Officers’ Course , their sweaty shirts read. Thirty or forty young men, strong but exhausted, with a delicate-looking blond soldier jogging in front of them. She sings an irritating tune:

“Tem-em-em-em-em!”

And they answer with a hoarse roar: “All for lovely Rotem!”

“Tem-em-em-em-em!”

“All to war for Rotem!”

• • •

What do you tell a six-year-old boy, a pip-squeak Ofer, who one morning, while you’re taking him to school, holds you close on the bike and asks in a cautious voice, “Mommy, who’s against us?” And you try to find out exactly what he means, and he answers impatiently, “Who hates us in the world? Which countries are against us?” And of course you want to keep his world innocent and free of hatred, and you tell him that those who are against us don’t always hate us, and that we just have a long argument with some of the countries around us about all sorts of things, just like children in school sometimes have arguments and even fights. But his little hands tighten around your stomach, and he demands the names of the countries that are against us, and there is an urgency in his voice and in his sharp chin that digs into your back, and so you start to name them: “Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon. But not Egypt — we have peace with them!” you say cheerfully. “We had lots of wars with them, but now we’ve made up.” And you think to yourself: if only he knew that it was because of Egypt that he himself had come into being. But he demands precision, a very practical, detail-oriented child: “Is Egypt really our friend?” “Not really,” you admit, “they still don’t completely want to be our friends.” “So they’re against us,” he solemnly decrees, and immediately asks if there are other “countries of Arabs,” and he doesn’t let up until you name them all: “Saudi Arabia, Libya, Sudan, Kuwait, and Yemen.” You can feel his mouth learning the names behind your back, and you add Iran — not exactly Arabs, but not exactly our friends, either. After a pause he asks softly if there are any more, and you mumble, “Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria,” and then you remember Indonesia and Malaysia, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and probably Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan too — none of those stans sounds so great to you — and here we are at school, sweetie! When you help him get off the bike seat, he feels heavier than usual.