David Grossman - To the End of the Land

Over the following days Ofer started to listen closely to the news. Even if he was in the middle of a game, he would perk up just before the hour and again at the half-hour bulletin. Secretly, with spy-like movements, he would move toward the kitchen and stand, as if by chance, near the door, listening to the radio that was always on. She watched his little face twist into a mixture of anger and fear every time there was a report of an Israeli killed in an act of hostility. “Are you sad?” she asked him when he sobbed after another bomb went off in the market in Jerusalem, and he stomped his feet: “I’m not sad, I’m angry! They’re killing all our people! Soon we’ll run out of people!” She tried to reassure him: “We have a strong army, and there are some very big and strong countries that will protect us.” Ofer treated this information with skepticism. He wanted to know where exactly these friendly countries were. Ora opened an atlas: “Here’s the United States of America, for example, and here’s England, and here are another few good friends of ours.” She quickly waved an overgeneralizing hand near a few European countries that she herself did not particularly trust. He looked at her in astonishment. “But they’re all the way over there!” he shouted, in disbelief at her stupidity. “Look how many pages there are between here and there!”

A few days later he asked her to show him the countries that were “against us.” She opened up the atlas again and pointed to each country, one after the other. “Wait, but where are we?” A glimmer of hope shone in his eyes: Maybe they weren’t on that page. She pointed with her pinky finger at Israel. A strange whimper escaped his lips, and he suddenly clung to her as hard as he could, fought and plowed his way to her with his whole body, as though trying to be swallowed up in it again. She hugged him and stroked him and murmured words of comfort. Sharp sweat, almost an old man’s sweat, broke out all over his skin. When she managed to hold up his face, she saw in his eyes something that knotted her gut in one pull.

Over the next days he grew uncharacteristically quiet. Even Adam could not cheer him up. Ilan and Ora tried. They plied him with promises of a trip to Holland over summer vacation, or even a Kenyan safari, all in vain. He was depressed and lifeless, lost in himself. Ora realized then how much her own happiness depended on the light of this child’s face.

“His gaze,” said Ilan. “I don’t like the look in his eyes. It’s not a child’s look.”

“At us?”

“At everything. Haven’t you noticed?”

She may have noticed, of course she’d noticed, but as usual—“You know me,” she sighs as she and Avram walk down the Meron. “You know how I am with these things”—she simply preferred not to think about what she saw, to turn a blind eye to all the signs, and certainly not to say anything about them out loud, hoping they would fade away. But now Ilan would say it, he would define it, he would soberly and crudely put words to it, and then it would become real, and it would grow and multiply.

“It’s like he knows something we don’t yet have the courage to—”

“Don’t worry about it, it’s just a phase. These are normal fears at that age.”

“I’m telling you Ora, they’re not.”

She giggled joylessly. “You remember how when Adam was three, he was really preoccupied with the question of whether there were Arabs at night, too?”

“But this is something different, Ora. My feeling is that—”

“Listen, let’s take him to spend a day on the horse ranch he once—”

“Sometimes I have the feeling he’s looking at us like—”

“A parrot!” Ora fluttered desperately. “Remember he asked us to buy him a—”

“Like we’ve been given death sentences.”

And then Ofer demanded numbers. When he heard there were four and a half million people in Israel, he was impressed, even reassured. The number seemed enormous to him. But after two days a new thought came—“He was always a terribly logical child,” she tells Avram, “and that’s not from you or from me either, that analytical, purposeful mind”—and he wanted to know “how many are against us.” He wouldn’t stop until Ilan found out for him exactly the number of citizens in each Muslim country in the world. Ofer enlisted Adam, who helped him with the calculations, and they shut themselves up in their room. “What do you do with a child like that, who suddenly learns the facts of life and death?” Ora asks Avram as they pass a rocky monument for a Druze soldier. Sergeant Salah Kassem Tafesh, May God Avenge His Blood , Avram reads out of the corner of his eye — Ora hurries ahead— Fell in Southern Lebanon in an Encounter with Terrorists, on the 16th of Nissan 5752, at Age 21. Your Memory Is Engraved in Our Hearts .

“What do you do with a child like that?” she repeats with pursed lips. A child who goes out and uses his pocket money to buy a little orange spiral notebook and every day writes in it, in pencil, how many Israelis are left after the last terrorist attack. Or who at Passover Seder, with Ilan’s family, suddenly starts crying that he doesn’t want to be Jewish anymore, because they always kill us and always hate us, and he knows this because all the holidays are about it. And the adults look at one another, and a brother-in-law mumbles that it is kind of difficult to argue with that, and his wife says, “Don’t be paranoid,” and he quotes, “That in every generation, they rise up against us to destroy us,” and she replies that it’s not exactly scientific fact, and that maybe we should examine our own role in the whole rising up against us business, and the familiar argument ensues, and Ora, as usual, flees to the kitchen to help with the dishes, but she suddenly stops: she sees Ofer looking at the adults as they argue, horrified at their doubts, at their naïveté, and his eyes fill with fervent, prophetic tears.

“Look at them,” Avram had said to her once, in one of their drives around the streets of Tel Aviv after he got back. “Look at them. They walk down the street, they talk, they shout, read newspapers, go to the grocery store, sit in cafés”—he went on for several minutes describing everything they saw through the car window—“but why do I keep thinking it’s all one big act? That it’s all to convince themselves that this place is truly real?”

“You’re exaggerating,” Ora had said.

“I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think the Americans or the French have to believe so hard all the time just to make America exist. Or France, or England.”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“Those are countries that exist even without having to always want them to exist. And here—”

“I’m looking around,” she said, her voice slightly hoarse and high-pitched, “and everything looks completely natural and normal to me. A little crazy, that’s true, but in a normal way.”

Because I’ve looked at it from a different place, Avram thought, and sank silently into himself.

The next day, Ora told him now, Ofer woke up with a conclusion and a solution: from now on he would be English, and everyone had to call him John, and he would not answer to the name Ofer. “ ’Cause no one kills them,” he explained simply, “and they don’t have any enemies. I asked in class, and Adam says so too, everyone’s friends with the English.” He started speaking English, or rather, what he thought was English, a gibberish version of Hebrew with an English accent. And just to be on the safe side, he buttressed his bed with protective layers of books and toys, trenches of furry stuffed animals. And every night he insisted on sleeping with a heavy monkey wrench next to his head.