David Grossman - To the End of the Land

It seemed to Ora, as she watched from the window, that in fact Adam was not being cruel but rather testing Ofer, to find out if he could sustain a far greater mission, which Ora could not identify at the time; she still thought it was merely the usual, sufficiently complicated mission of being Adam’s little brother.

“What do you mean?” Avram asks hesitantly.

“Wait, I’ll get there.”

“So you’re not dead anymore?” Ofer asked. “I’m alive,” said Adam, and he got up and started to run around the yard with his arms outstretched, declaring that he was alive and kicking. Ofer pranced along behind him, smiling, exhausted.

“Ilan may have betrayed Adam, but Ofer never did,” she explains.

Small, thin, and stuttering, enchanting everyone with his gaze, his large blue eyes, his golden hair, his wondrous smile. He had certainly sensed that he could capture hearts effortlessly, simply with his sweetness and the light that shone from his face. And obviously, she thinks, he’d already noticed that every time he went anywhere with Adam, everyone’s eyes immediately skipped over his older, restless, slippery, bothersome brother and were drawn to him. “Just think about what a temptation that is for a boy — to rake in the whole pot at his brother’s expense. But he never did. Never. Always, in any situation, he chose Adam.”

“From his first step,” Avram reminds her generously.

“That’s right, you remember,” she says happily.

“I remember everything.” He reaches out to embrace her shoulders. They walk on that way, side by side, his parents.

They are nine and six, one tall and thin, the other still small, walking and talking feverishly, gesticulating, climbing on top of each other’s ideas. Weird, complicated conversations about orcs and gnomes, vampires and zombies. “But, Adam,” Ofer squeaks, “I don’t get it. A wolfman is a boy born from a family of wolves?”

“It could be that way,” Adam replies gravely, “but it could be that he’s just got lycanthropy.”

Ofer is stunned for a moment, then tries out the word and stumbles. Adam explains at length about the disease that turns humans, or quasi-humans, into human-animals. “Say ‘lycanthropy,’ ” Adam says, his voice hardening, and Ofer repeats the word.

Before going to sleep, in the dark, in their beds they talk: “Is the green dragon, who breathes clouds of chlorine gas and whose chances of knowing how to talk are thirty percent, is he more dangerous than the black one, who lives in swamps and salt flats and breathes pure acid?”

Their door is open just a crack, and Ora, with a pile of laundry in her arms, stops to listen.

“Crazy Death is a creature that has completely lost its sanity.”

“Really?” Ofer whispers reverentially.

“And listen what else I made up. He can turn into a crazy undead, whose whole purpose is to kill, and anyone who gets killed by him turns into a crazy zombie in one week and walks around with Crazy Death everywhere.”

Ofer’s voice is hoarse: “But are they real?”

“Let me finish! Once a day, all of Crazy Death’s crazy zombies unite into a huge ball of death-craziness.”

“But it’s not real, is it?”

Adam replies sweetly, “I made it up, and that’s why it obeys only me.”

“So make something up for me, too,” Ofer asks urgently. “Make something up against it for me.”

“Maybe tomorrow,” Adam murmurs.

“Now, now! I won’t sleep all night if you don’t make up something for me!”

“Tomorrow, tomorrow.”

Ora hears the thin wires that twist through both voices and interweave them: wires of fear, of bared cruelty and submissive pleading, the power to save and the refusal to save, which is also, perhaps, the fear of being saved. And all these also come from her, even Adam’s cruelty, which angers her, which is so foreign to her, yet at that moment it strangely excites her, animates her wildly and seems to reveal something about herself that she had not dared to know. The two of them, Adam and Ofer, unraveling from the root of her soul in a double reel.

“Good night,” Adam says and starts to snore loudly.

Ofer whines, “Adam, don’t sleep, don’t sleep, I’m scared of Crazy Death! Can I get in your bed?”

Eventually Adam stops snoring and invents a Skort for him, or a Stark, or a hawk-man, and describes his characteristics and heroic properties in detail. As he talks, a new tenderness enters his voice, and with a rustle in her back Ora can feel how much he enjoys buttressing Ofer, enveloping him in the protective pillows of his imagination, his one and only source of power. And that padding, the kindness and compassion and protection that now emanate from Adam, are also a little bit hers, until suddenly, in the midst of Adam’s speech, she hears Ofer’s soft hums of sleep.

They are constantly scheming. In every corner of the yard and garden they set traps for androids, which Ora usually falls into, and they create fantastical creatures from painted cardboard rolls and thin wooden rods and nails. They build futuristic vehicles out of cardboard boxes and develop satanic weapons meant to annihilate the bad guys, or all of humanity, depending on Adam’s mood. In a special lab they grow plastic soldiers inside sealed glass jars full of water, with faded flower petals floating around. Every soldier in this sad phantom army has a name and a rank, a detailed biography that they can recite by heart, and a deadly mission that he will be required to carry out when the order is given. For days on end they busy themselves building cardboard fortresses for dragons and Ninja Turtles, designing battlefields of dinosaurs, drawing knightly seals in venomous black, yellow, and red. Here too Adam is usually the inventor, the fantasizer, the Dungeon Master, while Ofer is the elf — the enchanted, obedient imp, the implementer. In his slow, deliberate way, he explains to Adam the limitations of feasibility and wisely constructs the solid bricks from which his brother’s air castles will be built.

“But it wasn’t just that,” says Ora, who eavesdropped and looked in on them whenever she could. “Because Ofer learned from Adam, but he also learned him.”

“What do you mean?” asks Avram.

“I don’t know how to explain it, but I could see it happening.” Ora gives an embarrassed laugh. “I could see Ofer realize that he could figure out how Adam’s mind worked, how Adam could leap from A to M in one thought, and how he flipped ideas over midway, playing with absurdities and paradoxes. At first Ofer mimicked Adam, simply parroting his brilliant ideas. But then he learned the principle, and when Adam talked about a step walking down a staircase, Ofer would come up with an apartment moving a house, coins buying money, a path going on a hike. Or he would invent a paradox: a king who orders his subjects not to obey him. It was so lovely to see how Adam molded Ofer, but also taught him how to act with someone like him, someone special and sensitive and vulnerable. He gave Ofer the secret key that opened him, and to this day Ofer is the only one who has that key.” Her face softens and glows: she doesn’t know if there’s even any point in telling all this to desolate Avram, or whether he can understand her that far, all the way to that bend in her soul. After all, Avram was an only child, and from a very young age he didn’t even have a father. But he had Ilan, she realizes. Ilan was a brother to him. “And you should have heard those two talking. Their endless, hallucinatory conversations. If I happened to be around, I could have—”

But the pair of little faces look up at her gravely, with exactly the same resentment: “Mom, stop it! Go away, you’re bothering us!”

The blades of insult and delight dig inside her simultaneously: She’s in their way, but they already have an “us.” She feels both cut in two and multiplied.