David Grossman - To the End of the Land

“You were asking if they’re alike?” His question from the night before suddenly pops into her head.

“Yes, that’s what I asked.”

“Ofer, I think, is a little more … Actually, a little less, um …”

“What?”

“Oh, it’s complicated. Look, let me put it this way: Adam is kind of … Kind of what? What am I trying to say?” She pouts. “It’s funny how hard it suddenly is to describe them. Almost everything I want to say about them sounds so inaccurate.” She shakes herself off and gathers her thoughts. “Adam — I’m only talking about outward appearances now, right? Well, he’s less, say, he draws less attention at first glance. You know? But on the other hand, when you really get to know him, he’s a very charismatic young man. The most charismatic. He’s the kind of guy who can—”

“What does he look like?”

“You mean, you want me to describe him?”

“You know me — I like details.”

The detaileater: a distant relative of the anteater, a virtually extinct subspecies of the order Pilosa, survives exclusively on details . That was how Avram had defined himself in a booklet he put together in his senior year at high school, “The Class of ’69 Encyclopedia of Human Fauna.” It contained his descriptions of the students and teachers, with precise illustrations, arranged by their zoological categorizations.

“He’s a little bit short, relatively speaking. I told you that. And he has very black hair, like Ilan’s, but he parts it in the middle and it comes down in a kind of wave over his left ear.” Ora illustrates. Her face sparkles at Avram.

“What?”

“Nothing at all,” she answers and shrugs one shoulder provocatively. But the more Avram comes back to life — quiet and heavy and lacking as he is — the more he magnetizes her to an internal precision, a private nuance that spreads the kind of warm ripples through her body she hasn’t felt in years.

Two young couples pass by. The women nod hello and look at them curiously. The men are immersed in a loud conversation. “We’re mostly into biometric identification smart cards,” the taller one says. “We’re working on a card called BDA, and what it does is that a Palestinian who wants to get in just has to hold his hand and face under the biometric reader. Get it? No contact with soldiers, no talking, no nothing. Clean as a whistle. CWC — communication without contact.”

“So what’s ‘BDA’ stand for?” asks the second man.

The first one snickers. “Actually, it’s an acronym for biometric access device, but we realized that that came out BAD, so we changed it.”

“And his left ear,” Ora says when the people have gone, “is always exposed. It’s cute, like a little pearl.”

She shuts her eyes: Adam. His cheeks still look a little red beneath his shadow of stubble, a childhood souvenir. And he has long sideburns. And big, bitter eyes.

“His eyes are what stand out most. They’re big, like Ofer’s, but completely different, more sunken and black. All in all we’re a family of eyes. And his lips—” She stops suddenly.

“What about them?”

“No, I think they’re beautiful.” She concentrates on her hands. “Yes.”

“But?”

“But … but here, on the top one, he has a sort of tic, a permanent one. Not a tic, but an expression—”

“What sort of expression?”

“Well …” She takes a deep breath, girding her face. The time has come.

“You see what I have here?”

He nods without looking.

“So it’s this. Except his is turned upward.”

“Yes.”

They skip from stone to stone across a shallow creek, holding on to each other every so often.

“Tons of flies today,” Avram says.

“It must be the heat.”

“Yes. This evening it will be more—”

“Can I ask you something?”

“What?”

“Does it really stand out?”

“No, no.”

“Because you didn’t say anything about it.”

“I hardly noticed.”

“I had this thing, it was nothing, something in the nerves on my face, about a month after Ilan left. It happened in the middle of the night. I was alone at home. I was terrified. Does it look awful?”

“I’m telling you, you can hardly see it.”

“But I can feel it.” She touches the right corner of her upper lip, pushes it slightly up. “I keep thinking my face is falling to one side.”

“But you really can’t see anything, Ora’leh.”

“It’s just a couple of millimeters that I can’t feel. The sensation in the rest of my lips is totally normal.”

“Yes.”

“It should go away at some point. It won’t always be like this.”

“Of course.”

They walk down a narrow path among orchards of strawberry and walnut trees.

“Avram, tell me something.”

“What?”

“Stop for a minute.”

He stands waiting. His shoulders hunch up.

“Would you mind giving me a little kiss?”

He comes up close to her, rigid and bearish. Without looking at her, he hugs her, and plants a decisive kiss on her lips.

And lingers, and lingers.

“Ahhh.” She breathes softly.

“A-ah.” He sighs in surprise.

“Avram.”

“What?”

“Did you feel anything?”

“No, everything’s normal.”

She laughs. “ ‘Normal’!”

“I mean, like you used to be.”

“You still remember?”

“I remember everything.”

“Remember how I get dazed from kissing?”

“I remember.”

“And that sometimes I almost pass out from kissing?”

“Yes.”

“You be careful when you kiss me.”

“Yes.”

“How you loved me, Avram.”

He kisses her again. His lips are as soft as she remembered. She smiles as they kiss, and his lips move with hers.

“One more thing—”

“Hmmmmm …”

“Do you think we’ll ever sleep together?”

He presses her against his body and she feels his force. She thinks again of how much good this journey is doing him, and her.

They walk on, at first hand in hand, then they let go. Threads of new awkwardness stretch out between them, and nature itself winks behind their backs and plays nasty tricks on them, scattering yellow clods of asters and groundsel, blanketing purple clover and pink flax, erecting stalks of huge — but smelly — purple arum flowers, sprinkling red buttercups, and hanging baby oranges and lemons on the trees around them.

“Very arousing,” Ora says. “This walk, and the air. Isn’t it? Don’t you feel it?”

He laughs, embarrassed, and Ora — even her eyebrows suddenly feel warm.

He’s known Neta for thirteen years. She claims that she sat several evenings in the pub where he worked, on HaYarkon Street, and he did not take his eyes off her. He says he didn’t even notice her until she threw up and passed out on the bar one night. She was nineteen and weighed eighty-two pounds, and he carried her in his arms, against her will, on a stormy winter night — not a single cabdriver would take them — to a doctor friend in Jaffa. She squirmed in his arms the whole way, her gaunt limbs swirled around him and hit him mercilessly, and she hurled vile curses at him. When she ran out of those, she worked her way through the insults showered upon Sholem Aleichem by his stepmother, in the alphabetical order in which he had recorded them, calling him “carbuncle,” “forefather of all impurities,” “leper,” and “purloiner.” Avram himself mumbled the occasional choice curse to fill in what she omitted. When these ran out too, she started to pinch him painfully, and as she did so she laid out in detail the various uses one could make of his flesh, his fat, and his bones. Here Avram raised an eyebrow, and when she told him about the strips of wax she would be glad to produce from him, Avram — who never forgot a line he read — mumbled into her ear, “It was the idea also, that this same spermaceti was that quickening humor of the Greenland Whale.” This was a sentence he and Ilan had loved to quote in their youth, when Moby-Dick served as a particularly fertile ground for quotations. The tangle of vipers in his arms fell silent at once, gave a cross-eyed glance at the heavy monster exhaling condensation into the downpour, and noted, “There are some similarities between you and the book.”