David Grossman - To the End of the Land

“What from what?”

“What d’you get dirty from?”

“I don’t know, okay?”

“Just tell me one more thing.”

“What now?”

“When you … when you wash like that, then do you get clean?”

“Kind of. I don’t know. Now shut up!”

Silence. Ora does not dare move. She thinks of how Ofer has held it in all these weeks and not asked Adam anything. Something in his voice, in his persistence, hints that he has planned in advance what to ask, chosen the circumstances well, and perhaps carefully primed Adam’s mood for this moment.

“Adam—”

“What now?”

“Will you let me, too?”

“Let you what?”

“Do one instead.”

“One what?”

Ora can feel Ofer’s arc of boldness and audacity grating on her nerves. She does not twitch an eyelid. She wonders what risky, daring game he is playing.

“One of these.”

“Hey!” Adam makes an effort to laugh, but Ora can hear his embarrassment. “Are you crazy?”

“Just one, what do you care?”

“But why?”

“So you’ll have to do one less.”

“What?”

“Stop it, you’re getting water on my drawing!”

“What did you say?”

“That if I do one, then you’ll have one less to do.”

“You’re crazy, you know that? Totally nuts. Anyway, this doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

“Whaddayacare? Just one. A loaner.”

“Which one?”

“Whatever you say. This one, or like that, or—”

She hears a chair flung aside and quick steps. She guesses Adam’s little steps around himself on his way to the faucet, his eyes now scurrying in panic.

“Adam—”

“I’m gonna beat the crap out of you. Shut up!”

A long silence.

“Come on, Adam, just one.”

She hears steps and a thud. Panting and bodies falling to the floor. A chair turned over. Stifled grunts. She realizes that Ofer is holding back his shouts so she won’t come in to separate them and ruin his plan. She stands up.

“Give in?”

“Just let me do it once.”

“You’re such an annoying kid!” Adam screeches. “Don’t you have any friends, you midget? Pest!”

“Just once and that’s it, I swear.”

She hears the slaps, one and two, and Ofer’s deep, stifled yelp. Without realizing it, she is biting her fists.

“Now d’you understand?”

“Whaddayacare, just once each time.”

Adam lets out a high-pitched giggle of amazement.

“I’ll do it so you won’t even know,” Ofer groans.

Adam sucks his lips, blows on the backs of his hands, and spins around. Finally, he says quietly, “No. I think I have to do them all. The whole thing.”

“Then I’ll just do them next to you.”

The faucet is turned on. A quick rinse. Blows. Silence. Then the faucet again, a little longer this time, and different blowing, stronger and slower.

“Did you do it? Okay, now get lost.”

“Let me do one every time,” Ofer says with an assertiveness that amazes Ora. Then she sees him run out of the kitchen with a serious, focused look on his face.

Over the next few days, Ofer and Adam spend all their free time together. They seldom leave their room, and it’s hard to know what’s going on. When she listens behind the door, she hears them playing and blathering the way they used to when they were seven and four. They seem to be returning, together, to an earlier era, as if drawn instinctively to some moment in time when they were both little children.

One morning, after she wakes them up and lets them lie chattering in bed for a while, she walks by and hears Adam ask: “How many today?”

“Three for me, three for you.”

“But which three?” Adam’s voice sounds so submissive and soft that she hardly recognizes him.

“You do the water and the feet and the turning, and I’ll do all the rest.”

“Can I do the mouth, too?” Adam whispers.

“No, I’m doing the mouth.”

“But I have to …”

“I already have dibs on the mouth. That’s it.”

She places both hands on her temples. Ofer must have dropped an anchor inside Adam. She has no other words to describe it. He’s already there, working in the depths of Adam with that same calm determination with which he builds giant LEGO castles or dismantles old televisions.

“Aren’t I allowed any today?” Adam asks at the breakfast table, out in the open, in her presence.

Ofer thinks about it and decrees, “None. Today I’m doing them all.” Then he comes around: “You know what? You can do the one with the lip. When you fold it.”

“And everything else is you?” Adam asks. His voice is childish and obedient, and it horrifies her.

“Yes.”

“But d’you remember to do it?”

“All the time.”

“Are you sure, Ofer?”

“I never missed any till now. Come on, let’s go to the room.”

She practically runs to her post behind the closed door. Her body, she notes to Avram, remembers that station very well from childhood, when she used to eavesdrop on her parents from behind the closed door of her own room, trying to pick up hints, voices, giggles. Human traces. Forty years have gone by — declares the tight-lipped judge in her mind — and what has madam done in those four decades? I’ve changed sides at the door, your honor.

“The cop’s name will be Speed,” Ofer says.

“And the thief?”

“Let’s call him Typhoon.”

“Okay.”

“Speed rides a motorbike and he has a hovercraft.”

“And the thief?” Adam asks weakly.

“The thief will have long hair, and on his shirt there’s a black star, and he has a bazooka and a laser drill.”

“Okay,” Adam says.

Ora puts her hand to her neck. This is an ancient game. They used to play it — how long ago? Two years? Three? They would lie on the rug and make up pairs of cops and robbers, or orcs and halflings. Except that back then Adam was the creator and Ofer the nodding pupil.

“Don’t,” Ofer says casually. “I’m doing the fingers today.”

“Did I do the fingers?”

“You didn’t notice.”

“Then do it already.”

“Wait. You have to pay a fine, ’cause you did mine.”

“What’s the fine?”

“The fine,” Ofer answers thoughtfully, “is that I’m taking the eye thing from you too, where you blink hard and open them.”

“But I have to do that one,” Adam whispers.

“Well, I took it.”

“I don’t have anything left.”

“You have the hands and feet left, and the one where you blow.”

There is a long silence. Then Ofer picks up as if nothing has happened. “Now I’m bringing in a cop with an iron fist. He’s called Mac Boom Boom, and he can open his shirt—”

“How many days are you taking mine for?”

“Three days not counting today.”

“So today I can still do it?”

“No, today neither of us can.”

“Neither of us? Then who’s going to do it?”

“No one. It doesn’t get done today.”

“Is that allowed?” Adam whispers sadly.

“Whatever we decide,” says Ofer in a Dungeon Master’s voice.

Ora tells Avram she will probably never know what really went on behind Adam and Ofer’s closed door during that whole period. Because what, in fact, did happen? Two kids, one almost thirteen, the other just over nine, spent every day together, usually just the two of them, for three or four weeks during summer vacation. They played computer games and foosball, chattered for hours, made up characters, and every so often they cooked shakshuka or pasta together. “And while they did all that — don’t ask me exactly how it happened — one of them saved the other.”