David Grossman - To the End of the Land

After three meetings the man summoned Ora and Ilan. “Adam seems like an intelligent boy with a lot of potential. A boy with strong character. Very strong.” His voice sounded weak. “The truth is, he sat here on this chair for three hours and didn’t say a word.”

Ora was amazed. “He didn’t speak? What about the gestures?”

“No gestures. He just sat here like a statue. He looked at me and barely blinked.”

Ora suddenly remembered that when Ilan was a boy, he had blackballed his whole class.

“Not an easy experience,” the man said. “Three whole sessions. I tried this, I tried that, but there’s some kind of resistance in him.” He tightened his hand into a fist. “A bunker, a sphinx.”

“So what do you suggest?” Ilan asked rancorously.

“Of course we can try another few sessions,” the man replied without looking in their eyes. “I’m certainly willing, but I have to say there’s something in the interaction—”

“Tell us what we should do,” Ilan interrupted. The vein in his temple was turning blue. “I want you tell me in simple words, what — do — we — do — now!”

Ora looked in despair at the iron layer descending over Ilan’s face.

The man blinked as he spoke. “I’m not certain there’s an immediate solution here. I’m just trying to think out loud with you. Perhaps it would be more successful with someone else? Perhaps a woman therapist?”

“Why a woman?” Ora sat back in her chair, feeling accused. “Why does it have to be a woman?”

One evening, Ora sat poring over receipts for her income-tax return — every two months she had to report her income from the physiotherapy clinic (“But patients I see at home, I don’t report on principle,” she tells Avram with a proud sense of conspiracy between two mutineers; he doesn’t even carry an identity card!) — when Adam came up to her and asked her to help him tidy his room. This was an unusual request, especially in those days, and the mess in his room was intolerable, but she had to finish her taxes. “Does it have to be now?” she asked irritably. “Why didn’t you ask me an hour ago, when I wasn’t busy? Why is it that only my time is expendable in this household?”

Adam danced and fidgeted away in his complex of tics. Ora tried to keep sorting through her receipts, but she could not concentrate. More than anything, it depressed her to think that he had walked away without arguing. Without saying a word. As though he knew he could not waste even one drop of energy now.

As she calculated her mileage and per diem expenses, she could sense that Adam was in his room crumbling into shards of despair and loneliness. She knew his disintegration was sucking her in too, and that soon it might dissolve her and Ilan as a couple, and the entire family. We’re so weak, she thought, staring at the neat little piles of paper. How can the two of us be so paralyzed, instead of really fighting for him? It’s like — the thought punctured her — it’s like we can feel that it’s … what? Our punishment? For what?

“For you we fought a lot harder,” she says to Avram.

Avram tightens his hands around the hot cup of coffee. His body is tense, his eyes enthralled by the last glimmers of light on the stream.

Ora got up and almost ran to Adam’s room with a foreboding heart. But he was just standing there in the middle of the room he shared with Ofer, surrounded by incredible heaps of clothes, toy parts, notebooks, towels, and balls, leaning slightly forward, frozen.

“What’s going on, Adam?”

“I don’t know, I’m stuck.”

“Is it your back?”

“Everything.”

In mid-motion, while trying to erect barriers between one fragmentary movement and the next, he must have been trapped into cessation. Ora hurried over and hugged him, and rubbed his neck and back. His body was rigid. For several moments she unfroze him, just as she used to do for Avram in rehab, and miraculously did for her patients, restoring the body’s memory, replaying the music of its movement. Adam finally loosened a little, and she lowered him into a chair and sat on the rug at his feet.

“Does it still hurt?”

“No, it’s okay now.”

“Come on, let’s do it together.”

She picked up objects and clothes off the floor and handed them to him so he could put them away. He obeyed, moving robotically to the closets and shelves, then back to her. She did not say a thing about his movements and gestures. She could not stop looking.

Then Ofer arrived home from a weeklong vacation at his grandparents’ in Haifa and eagerly joined in the operation. It seemed as if a bright light had been turned on in the room, and the bad thoughts retreated. Even Adam’s face lit up. Ora, who knew how much Ofer hated untidiness and dirtiness, was amazed at how he had let Adam turn their room into a dump. He’d never complained even once that whole month. Perhaps it was time to give them separate rooms. They had talked about it a year ago. But she knew what that would mean to Adam, and she had no doubt that Ofer would refuse now, too.

With Ofer’s help, she turned the chore into a game. She asked questions about each item she fished out of the pile, and Adam and Ofer answered. They all laughed. Adam laughed tightly, with pursed lips, and every titter obligated him to perform a series of acts that probably canceled out the effect of the laughter. For two whole hours Ora sat on the floor and sorted through the material culture of their childhood. Games they no longer played, drawing papers and work papers, crumpled notebooks, depleted batteries, old election ballots Ora had once stolen for them from the polling booth, books about soccer players and TV stars, worn-out gym shoes, LEGOs, various amulets, Boglins and ugly monsters that had once filled their world, weapons and fossils, torn posters, towels, and socks with holes in them. Some toys and games they refused to give up, and they were truly hurt when she suggested giving them away to children who were smaller and had less. Ora learned for the first time about a complicated emotional relationship between her sons and a bald stuffed bear made of wool. There was also a particularly disgusting rubber snake and a small broken flashlight that reminded them of nighttime adventures she never imagined had occurred behind their closed door when she thought they were asleep.

Gradually, despite the struggles and the haggling over every old toy or moth-eaten shirt from some Spanish soccer team, the room emptied out. They filled up huge trash bags and stacked them by the door, to give away or throw away. She sensed some relief in Adam: his movements became rounder, almost at ease. He walked this way and that in the room without interrupting his steps or speech to make any gestures. No commas or periods with an elbow or a knee. Finally, when the tidying was done and Ora got up to order a pizza, he went up to her and hugged her gently. A simple hug.

But the reprieve lasted only a few moments. “You know what Ilan says: ‘Happiness is always premature.’ ”

“That’s not Ilan’s, that’s mine!”

“Yours?”

“Of course! Don’t you remember how I always used to …”

The dog lifts her head off her paws and looks up at Avram in surprise. Ora watches the little tempest brewing inside him and thinks: This is what you get angry about, of all the things he took from you?

She went on: after the lull, Adam was compelled to wash his mouth and fingers at the sink again, and you could practically see the tightropes he walked on. This time Ora’s despair was intolerable, and just as she was about to burst out and scream at him with everything that had built up inside her, she put down her slice of pizza, left the boys, who were now chattering in their usual way, and walked into Ilan’s study, where she sat by the table and let her head collapse on the receipts and invoices.