David Grossman - To the End of the Land

“She was nineteen?” Ora asks. And thinks: I was sixteen when we met.

Avram shrugs. “She left home at sixteen and wandered around Israel and the whole world. The gypsy from next door. About two months ago was the first time she ever rented a real apartment. It was in Jaffa. Yuppified, you know.”

Ora doesn’t feel like talking about Neta now.

Reluctantly, she learns that Neta always looks starved—“not necessarily for food, but a general, existential starvation,” Avram explains with a laugh — and that her fingers almost always shake, maybe from drugs or maybe because, Avram quotes with a smile, “life zaps her at high voltage.” For years, she spent every summer living in an ancient Simca that a friend had left her. She also had a small tent, which she pitched whenever she found a place she wasn’t asked to leave. As he talks, the name “Neta” begins to etch a circle of frost in Ora’s gut, even though the sun is shining. What is this flood of speech suddenly coming out of him? What is he doing sticking Neta between us now?

“How does she make a living?” (Be generous, she commands.)

“This and that. It’s not really clear. She needs very little. You wouldn’t believe how little she needs. And she paints.”

Ora’s heart sinks a little lower. Of course she paints.

“Maybe you saw in my apartment, on the walls? That’s her.”

The huge, stirring charcoal drawings — how had she not asked him about them before? Perhaps because she had guessed the answer — prophets breast-feeding goats and lambs, an old man bending over a girl turning into a crane, a maiden being born from a wound in the chest of a godlike deer. She thinks about the drawing of a woman with a mohawk, and asks if that’s how Neta looks.

Avram chuckles. “Once, a long time ago. I didn’t like it, and now she has long hair, all the way down to here.”

“Yes. And the empty albums I saw at your place, the ones without any photos — are those hers, too?”

“No, those are mine.”

“Do you collect them?”

“I collect, I search, I aggregate. Things people throw out.”

“Aggregate?”

“You know, I put together all sorts of alte zachen .”

They are walking down the side of a cliff. The river, far below, is invisible. The dog leads, Ora walks behind her, and Avram brings up the rear as he tells her about his little projects. “It’s nothing, just something to pass the time. Like photo albums that people throw away, or albums that belonged to people who died.” He takes the photos out and puts in ones of other people, other families. He copies some of the photos onto tin boxes, right on the rust, or on the sides of ancient, rusty engines. “I’m very interested in rust lately. That place, or that moment, when iron turns to rust.”

It’s a good thing you found me, then, Ora thinks.

The path descends into the channel again, and suddenly Avram is alert and bright. He excitedly describes an atlas he found in the trash, printed in England in 1943. “If you looked at it, you wouldn’t understand anything about what happened in the world back then, because all the countries are still in their old borders, there’s no annihilation of the Jews, no occupation of Europe, no war, and I can sit looking at it for hours. So on the corners of the maps, I stuck pieces of a Russian newspaper I found in the dump, The Stalinist , also from ’forty-three, and there the war is described in detail, with battle maps and vast numbers of casualties. When I put those two objects together, I can really — Ora … I can feel electricity going through my body.”

She discovers that he and Neta do joint projects sometimes, too. “It’s this thing we have going together,” he says, blushing. They look for old objects and junk on the street, then they fantasize about what they could do with the things. “I’m always a little more practical,” he says with an apologetic snort, “and she’s much bolder.” He inadvertently drops himself from the story and describes some of what Neta has done in her brief life, her trials and tribulations, the skills she’s learned, her hospitalizations and adventures, and the men who have passed through her life. Ora thinks he is describing the life of a seventy-year-old. “She’s so brave,” he says admiringly, “much braver than I am. She may be the bravest person I’ve ever met.” He laughs softly when he remembers that Neta says she’s composed mainly of fears. Fears and cellulite.

Ora sees the crossed-out black lines over his bed, and a thick streak runs from them to the charcoal drawings in his living room. A spark lights up in her: “Avram, does she know?”

“About Ofer?”

Ora nods quickly. Her heart starts to pound.

“Yes, I told her.”

She walks ahead in confusion, with her hands held out. She steps into the stream, balancing on the slippery stones. This is the Amud River, she thinks. I hiked here in high school, on a sea-to-sea trip. It seems like it was yesterday. As if just yesterday I was still a young girl. She rubs her eyes. The hillside across the way is covered with thick growth, and a family of hyrax dots the rocks. The scene blurs, and she finds it’s best to look only to the next steps: pay attention, you’re going up again, walking on the rock ledge, and the river below plunges into a waterfall, and just don’t fall, hold on to this railing, and Neta knows.

The dog comes over and rubs against Ora’s leg as if to encourage her. Ora leans down and strokes her head distractedly. Neta knows. The secret bubble has been burst. The sealed, stifling bubble that Ora has taught herself to breathe in. Avram himself has punctured it. A stream of outside air bursts in. Such relief: a new, deep breath.

“What did she say?” Ora asks as her legs almost fail her.

“What did she say? She said I should go and see him.”

“Oh.” She lets out a thin, involuntary coo. “That’s what she said?”

“And I thought, when I called you, that evening, before you came. That’s what I wanted to tell you.”

“What?”

“That.”

“What?” She is almost suffocating. Her entire body hunches over the dog, burying ten trembling fingers in her fur.

“That if he’s finished with the army,” Avram says, hewing word by word, “I would like to, but only if you and Ilan didn’t have any objection …”

“What? Say it already.”

“Maybe see him one day.”

“Ofer.”

“Just once.”

“You would like to see him.”

“Even from a distance.”

“Yeah?”

“Without him … Look, I don’t want to interfere with your—”

“And you’re telling me this now?”

He shrugs his shoulders and plants his feet firmly on the rock.

“And when you phoned”—she finally gets it—“I told you he was …”

“Going back there, yes. And then I no longer—”

“Oh.” She moans, holds her head in both hands and presses hard and curses this war from the depths of her heart — this eternal war that has once again managed to shove its way into her soul. She opens her mouth wide and her lips roll back to expose her gums, and the cord of a sharp scream leaves her throat and shocks all the birds into silence. The dog looks up and her wise eyes expand until she can bear it no longer, and she too erupts into a heart-rending howl.

• • •

The last time he’d seen her was when he went to help paint her new apartment in Jaffa. A one-bedroom fourth-floor walk-up with a kitchenette and a rooftop. She was standing on a tall painter’s ladder with a joint in one hand and a brush in the other, and he was on an aluminum stepladder. Her three cats slunk around between the ladders. One had a kidney disease, one was retarded, and one was a reincarnation of her mother, who in this form continued to make Neta’s life a misery. Before she moved in, the apartment had housed foreign workers from China, and one whole wall was still studded with little nails hammered in a pattern whose meaning she and Avram were trying to discern. She insisted on wearing a man’s gray undershirt full of holes, which she’d found in a pile of trash left behind in the apartment. “This is how I honor the memory of the one billion,” she said, and he was just happy to see her in an undershirt.