David Grossman - To the End of the Land

“I happened to look in his notebook one day, and I saw that he kept writing ‘Arobs.’ When I told him it was spelled with an ‘a’ he was amazed: ‘I thought it was A-robs, ’cause they keep robbing us.’

“Then one day he found out that some Israelis were Arabs. Well, by that time I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, you know? He discovered that all his calculations were wrong, and he had to deduct the Israeli Arabs from the number of Israelis.”

She remembers how furious he was when he found out. He stomped his feet and shouted and turned red and hurled himself on the floor and screamed: “Make them go away! Back to their own homes! Why did they even come here? Don’t they have their own places?”

“And then he had an attack, a bit like the one he had at age four, with the vegetarianism. He ran a high fever, and for almost a week I was in total despair. And there was one night when he was convinced there was an Arab with him.”

“In his body?” Avram asks in horror, and his eyes dart to the sides. She has the feeling that he has lied to her about something.

“In his room,” she corrects him softly. “It was just feverish nonsense, hallucinations.”

The hair on her skin stands on end, telling her she has to be careful, but she’s not sure of what. Avram seems to have ossified right in front of her. His eyes harden with the look of a captive.

“Are you okay?”

There is shame and terror and guilt in his eyes. For a moment Ora thinks she knows exactly what she is seeing, and the next moment she flings herself away. An Arab in his body, she thinks. What did they do to him there? Why doesn’t he ever talk?

“I’ll never forget that night,” she says, trying to abate the horror on Avram’s face. “Ilan was on reserve duty in Lebanon, in the eastern sector. He was gone for four weeks. I put Adam to sleep in our bed so Ofer wouldn’t disturb him. Adam didn’t have a lot of patience for Ofer through that whole episode. It was like he couldn’t see that Ofer was afraid of something. And just imagine: Ofer was — I don’t know, six? And Adam was already nine and a half, and it was like he couldn’t forgive Ofer for breaking down like that.

“I sat with Ofer all night, and he was burning up and confused, and he kept seeing the Arab in the room, sitting on Adam’s bed, on the closet, under the bed, peering at him from the window. Madness.

“I tried to calm him, and I turned on the light, and I brought a flashlight to prove to him there was no one there. I also tried to explain some of the facts to him, to put things in perspective — me, the big expert, right? There I was in the middle of the night, giving him a seminar on the history of the conflict.”

“And then what?” Avram asks very quietly, his face fallen.

“Nothing. You couldn’t even talk to him. He was so miserable — you’ll laugh — that I almost thought of calling Sami, our driver, you know, the one who—”

“Yes.”

“To explain to him, or something like that. To show him that he was an Arab too, and that he wasn’t Ofer’s enemy and didn’t hate him and didn’t want his room.” She falls quiet and swallows a bitter lump: the memory of her last drive with Sami.

“At nine the next morning, Ofer had an appointment with our family doctor. At eight, after I sent Adam to school, I bundled up Ofer in a coat, sat him in the car, and drove to Latrun.”

“Latrun?”

“I’m a practical girl.”

With a stern and determined look, she had climbed up the steps, walked down the gravel path, put Ofer down in the center of the huge courtyard at the Armored Corps site, and told him to look.

He had blinked hazily, blinded by the winter sun. Around him were dozens of tanks, both ancient and new. Tank barrels and machine guns were aimed at him. She held his hand and walked him to one of the larger ones, a Soviet T-55. Ofer stood facing the tank, excited. She asked if he was strong enough to climb on it. He replied in amazement: “Am I allowed?” She helped him climb up the turret, then clambered up after him. He stood there, swaying, looked fearfully around, and asked, “Is this ours?”

“Yes.”

“You mean, all this?”

“Yes, and there’s lots more, we have loads of these.”

Ofer waved his arm in the air over the semicircle of tanks in front of him. Some of them had been discontinued as long ago as the Second World War, metal toads and iron tortoises, antiquated booty tanks from at least three wars. He asked to climb on another tank, and another, and another. He ran his fingers in awe over tracks, firing platforms, equipment chambers, and transmissions and rode like a cavalier on the barrels. At ten-thirty they both sat down in the restaurant at the Latrun gas station, where Ofer devoured a huge Greek salad and a three-egg omelet.

“Maybe it was a little primitive, my instant treatment, but it was definitely effective.” Then she adds drily, “Besides, at the time I thought that what was good enough for a whole country was good enough for my child.”

In the heart of a pasture, at the foot of a giant lone oak tree, a man is lying on the ground. His head rests on a large rock, a backpack sits beside him, and Ora’s blue notebook peeks out of one of its pockets.

They stand awkwardly by his side, afraid to wake him, yet drawn to the notebook. Ora snatches her glasses off her face and hides them in her fanny pack. She quickly runs her fingers through her disheveled hair to tidy it. She and Avram try to understand — exchanging looks and furrowed brows — how the man has managed to get here ahead of them. Ora, slightly envious, admires the tranquillity and confidence with which he has abandoned himself in this open, invadable space. His dark, masculine face is so exposed. Those glasses lie on his chest like a large butterfly, tied to a string around his neck.

Avram signals to her that if she has no objection, he will take the notebook. She hesitates. The notebook is nestled comfortably in his backpack pocket.

But Avram is already approaching, and with a pickpocket’s expertise he fishes the notebook out of the bag and signals to Ora that they should move away quickly if they don’t want to get embroiled in explanations, especially with someone who, at their first encounter, had made the mistake of mentioning the news.

She hugs the notebook to her heart, soaking up its warmth. The man goes on sleeping. With his mouth half open, he snores, making soft, woolly sounds. His arms and legs are clumsily splayed out. A rug of silver hair rises out of his shirt collar and awakens in Ora a vague longing to put her head there, to give herself over to a deep, infectious slumber, like his own. In a moment’s impulse, she tears out the last page of the notebook and writes, “I took back my notebook. Bye, Ora.” She hesitates, and quickly adds her phone number, in case he wants a more detailed explanation. When she leans over to put the note in his backpack, she notices them again: two identical wedding rings, one on his ring finger, the other on his pinky.

They slip away quickly, bubbling sweetly with the success of their plot, their eyes glimmering with childlike mischief. As they walk, she leafs through the notebook, amazed to see how much she had written that night by the river. She scans her lines with his eyes.

The path appears again, bending and twisting cheerfully, and the dog circles around them, sometimes runs alongside them and at other times sprints ahead quickly, then suddenly stops for no reason. She sits on her behind, turns her head back to Ora, the black arches above her eyes slightly raised, and Ora makes a similar gesture.

“She’s a happy dog, see? She’s smiling at us.”

But as they walk down the mountain, over heaps of shattered fallen rocks, a bothersome thought nags at her. She could not have written so many pages in one night. A few steps later, next to a huge rock with a mysterious oblong shape, she has to stop. She pulls the notebook out of her backpack, puts her glasses back on, and quickly leafs through the pages. She lets out a little shriek: “Look!” She shows Avram. “Look, it’s his handwriting!”