David Grossman - To the End of the Land

A heavy shadow settled in her mind. She wanted to call Ilan and ask him to come home from work. She wanted him to come home and hold her, because she was falling. What was he doing out and about when everything here was coming apart? Lately he’d hardly been at home. He left early in the morning, before the boys got up, and came home at midnight, when they were already asleep. Where are you? How can we both be this paralyzed? How can we disintegrate so quickly? Why does all this look like a curse that has waited patiently for years — the revenge of the wicked witch who wasn’t invited to the birthday party — to hurt us precisely when things are good? But she didn’t have the energy to reach for the phone.

“We’re not treating it,” she told him that night in the living room as she lay on the rug, exhausted. Ilan was sprawled on the couch, his long legs dangling over the arm. He looked weak and tired. “What’s happening to us? Tell me, explain to me, why can’t we do anything?”

“Like what?”

“Force him to get treatment, drag him to a doctor, a psychiatrist, I don’t know. I feel that the fear is paralyzing me, and you’re not helping. Where are you?”

“Make an appointment for him with someone else.” He seemed frightened. Something in his face, his chin, suddenly reminded her of the days after Adam’s birth, right before he left.

Tomorrow, she swore, first thing in the morning. She reached out and squeezed Ilan’s arm. “We don’t even know what he feels. I try to talk with him and he runs away. Just think how frightening this is for him.”

“And for Ofer. We’re so focused on Adam that Ofer is being neglected.”

“I just think that if it was some kind of normal danger, like a fire, or even a terrorist, something familiar, logical, wouldn’t I jump up to rescue him? Wouldn’t I give my own life for him? But this …”

Adam came out of his room to get a drink in the kitchen. From the dark living room, Ora and Ilan followed his progress to the fridge. When he finally managed to bring the water bottle up to his lips, Ilan cleared his throat and Adam turned to them in surprise.

“Hey, what-are-you-do-ing-there?” His voice was monotonous, angular, bionic.

“Nothing,” said Ilan. “Just resting. How are you doing, sweetie?”

“Do-ing-great,” he said dismissively. He turned and fidgeted his way back to his room, lifting his knees as he walked in a mechanical imitation of human motion, subsiding into a stutter of Adam.

And then she knew. A membrane inside her tore open all at once and she knew that something completely new had been revealed to Adam — some new knowledge or power. It suddenly seemed so clear. You only had to look at him to see it: the force of negation, of collapse, of absence, had pulled him inside and was consuming him from within. “That is what Adam was discovering, and it must have been a huge force, don’t you think?” she asks Avram in a hoarse voice. “The force of no , the force of not-being?”

Avram does not move. His hands almost crush the empty coffee mug. In the first few months after he came home — after his hospitalization and rehab — he used to walk the streets of Tel Aviv and imagine himself as one single bee amid a huge swarm. It was good for him to know that he could not understand the actions of the entire swarm.

• • •

He had one mission: to be. He needed only to move, eat, shit, and sleep. Other parts of the swarm might be experiencing emotions, or gaining knowledge or an entire consciousness, or perhaps they were not. Perhaps that wasn’t happening anywhere. That was not his business. He was just one insignificant cell, easily replaced, unflinchingly destructible.

Sometimes, though rarely, he did different things, opposite things: he would talk to himself out loud as he walked, intentionally, as though he were alone in the world, or as though the whole world were occurring only inside his mind, a figment of his imagination, which also created those boys making fun of him, the old men pointing at him, the car that screeched to a halt only inches away from him.

When Adam shut his door behind him, Ora got up and went into the kitchen. She opened the fridge with Adam’s motions, held up the water bottle to her mouth as he had done — elbow, wrist, fingers — closed her lips over the opening of the family bottle, drank, and navigated her soul to Adam. And then she knew, for one instant — enough for a lifetime — what it is like when you cannot see the line but only the dots that create it, the darkness in the blink of an eye, the chasm between one moment and the next.

“Yes,” Avram says softly, and she thinks he has not been breathing for several minutes.

She put the bottle back in the fridge, reenacting her son’s fragmentary movements, and forgot about Ilan, who lay watching her from the dark. Here was the fall between two steps. Here was the whisper of the dismantling. Here was how her Adam watched with wide eyes and, perhaps, saw what no one was allowed to see: how he himself could crumble into nothing. Into the dust from which he had come. He saw how tenuously it was all held together.

She sat down in the dark next to Ilan, who quickly wrapped her in his arms and clung to her with strange fervor and, she thought, a hint of awe.

“What?” Ilan asked in a whisper. “What did you feel?”

She did not answer. Afraid to wake up, afraid it would disappear, afraid that the place in which she had known Adam would melt away like a dream.

• • •

Ora yawns and enjoys seeing Avram unwittingly repeat her yawn. “Let’s continue tomorrow,” she says. Although he would like to hear more, Avram gets up and clears away their dinner, picks up the trash, and rinses the dishes, then rolls out his sleeping bag near hers. He does all this in silence, and she sees the thoughts and the questions darting around his forehead and tells herself: Tomorrow, tomorrow. She goes behind some bushes to do her business and thinks of Scheherazade, and then they both undress, back to back, and zip themselves up in their sleeping bags, and lie with their eyes open by the glowing embers of the fire. Avram, restless, gets up and fills two bottles at the river, douses the embers, and lies down again.

As soon as the fire goes out, all the creatures around the river awake and a chorus of toads, night birds, jackals, foxes, and crickets erupts into a deafening commotion. They wail, screech, snort, caw, yowl, and chirp. Ora and Avram lie there feeling the entire riverbed rustle and stir around them. Small and large animals pass next to them and over them, running or flying, and Ora whispers, “What’s going on?” Avram whispers back, “They’ve all gone mad.” The dog stands up restlessly, her eyes aglimmer in the dark. Ora needs Avram to come and lie next to her, even just hold her hand and calm her with a caress, with long, quiet breaths, the way Ilan does — did — but she doesn’t say a word. She won’t push him, and he does not offer, but the dog moves closer, step by cautious step, until finally she is standing beside her. Ora reaches out and strokes her fur in the dark, and the fur trembles with tension because of the sounds all around, or because of the human touch, her first contact in such a long time. Ora strokes and strokes, rubbing delightedly, feeling the warmth of this new body, but the dog suddenly recoils, unable to bear it any longer, and goes off to lounge not far away and watches Ora.

The three of them lie quiet and slightly afraid, and the commotion gradually dies down and gives way to the hum of mosquitoes. Meaty and impudent, they hack at every exposed inch of flesh. Ora hears Avram slap himself and curse, and she curls up in her sleeping bag and zips it around her head, leaving only a tiny opening for air, and she sinks down into herself, sleepily arranges her head so it nestles in her favorite place, in the round of Ilan’s shoulder, and then, subtly, like the gushing of a small spring, a longing awakens in her for the house in Ein Karem. She yearns for their house, for the scents embedded in it and the textures woven through the window lattices at different times of day, and for Ilan’s and the boys’ voices rolling through the hallways. She walks through the house, room by room.