David Grossman - To the End of the Land

“Every so often she stocks up my fridge,” he tells Ora, “and cleans my apartment. Gives me a makeover. Does this even interest you?”

“Yes, of course, I’m listening.”

With money she didn’t have, Neta bought him a first-rate stereo system, and they listened to music together. Sometimes she read entire books to him out loud. “And she doesn’t say no to any drug. She even does coke and heroin, but somehow she doesn’t get addicted to anything.”

“Except you,” Neta laughed when he suggested she quit her Avram addiction and go into rehab.

“Nothing good will come of me for you,” he’d said.

“And what are illusions, chopped liver?”

“You’re young, you could have children, a family.”

“You’re the only person I’m willing to familiate with.”

But maybe she’s fallen in love with someone else? The thought pains him far more than he had imagined it would. Maybe she finally changed her mind?

“What?” Ora asks. “What is it?”

“I don’t know.” Avram hastens his steps. He suddenly realizes that if Neta is not in his life, or he in hers, he may not have a reason to go home after this trip. “I’m a little worried about her. She’s disappeared on me lately.”

“Is that unusual for her?”

“It’s happened before. That’s how she is, she comes and goes.”

“When we reach a phone, try calling her.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe she left you a message at home.”

He walks quickly. Tries to remember her cell-phone number, but cannot. He, who remembers everything, every bit of nonsense, every stupid sentence anyone said to him thirty years ago, every random combination of numbers his eyes fall upon. In the army he could recite all the serial numbers of all the soldiers and officers in the listening bunker; and the unlisted phone numbers of all the unit commanders; and of course the names and serial numbers of all the Egyptian units and divisions and armies, and of the commanders of all the military airfields in Egypt; and their private addresses and home phone numbers, and sometimes the names of their wives and children and mistresses; and the lists of monthly code names of all the intelligence units under the Southern Command. But now, with Neta, he can’t get the numbers straight!

“She’s very young,” he murmurs. “I’m old, and she’s so young.” He laughs glumly. “It’s a bit like raising a dog who you know will die before you do. But I’m the dog, in this case.”

Ora distractedly covers the bitch’s ears with her hands.

Through Neta he has met a whole gang of people. People like her. Kind and hardworking. “Chipped mugs,” she calls them. They roam in packs. The beaches of Sinai, Nitzanim, the Judean Desert, ashrams in India, music festivals with drugs and free love in France, Spain, and the Negev.

“Do you know what an Angel Walk is?”

“Something in sports?”

He takes Ora to a “rainbow gathering” in the Netherlands or Belgium. “Everyone shares everything,” he explains enthusiastically, as if he himself has been there. “Everyone helps out with meals and pays for food with whatever they have. The only thing that costs money is drugs.”

“I see.”

“One evening she took part in an Angel Walk.” Avram gives Ora a smile that is not intended for her, the likes of which she has not seen on him since he was a boy. Like the flicker of a candle in an old, dusty lantern. The smile is irresistible. “Two rows of people stand opposite each other, very close”—he demonstrates with his hands—“and usually they don’t know each other. Total strangers. And one person goes in with his or her eyes shut, and walks all the way down between the rows.”

The two rows of hitters , Ora suddenly remembers. So many times he’d talked about them, in a thousand different contexts and digressions, until sometimes it seemed that the entire world was those two rows, into which a person is thrown when he is born, and he gets pummeled around between them as they hit and kick, until finally he is spat out, bruised and crushed.

“And they lead this one person slowly, gently, between the rows, and everyone strokes him, touches him, hugs him, whispers in his ear: ‘You are so beautiful, you are perfect, you are an angel.’ It goes on that way right to the end, and then someone is waiting for him with a big, pampering hug, and then he steps back into the rows of givers.”

“Did she get hugged like that?”

“Wait. First she was in the rows, and for a few hours she stroked and hugged and whispered all those lines, which usually make her giggle. Those kinds of words really don’t work for her.” He perks up. “Listen, you have to meet her.”

“Okay, when we have a chance. And then what happened?”

“When her turn came to receive, to walk through the lines, she didn’t go in.”

Ora nods. Even before he said it, she knew.

“She ran away to the forest and sat there until morning. She couldn’t do it. She felt that it wasn’t her time to receive yet.”

Ora suddenly knows what Avram and Neta share: they have both found that those who stroke can also hit. She hugs herself tightly as she walks. This girl Neta arouses conflicting emotions in her, because suddenly, in the last few moments, she feels affection toward her, and a maternal tenderness. And Neta knows about Ofer. Avram told her about Ofer. “Does she know anything about me?”

“She knows you exist.”

Ora swallows heavily, then finally manages to cough the pit out of her throat. “And do you love her?”

“Love? What do I know? I like being with her. She knows how to be with me. She gives me space.”

Not like me. Ora thinks about the boys and their complaints.

Too much space, Avram thinks fearfully. Where are you, Nettush?

After they’d finished painting her little apartment, they took the ladders out onto the roof and she taught him how to ladder-walk. “In her wanderings, when she travels sometimes, she makes a living as a street performer. She swallows fire and swords, she juggles, and joins street circuses.” Like two drunken grasshoppers, they’d walked toward each other under the evening sky, between the water tank and the antenna. Then she leaped up off the ladder onto the roof ledge and Avram’s blood froze.

“So what do you say?” she asked with her sweet, sad smile. “It’s not going to get any better than this. Should we get it over with now?”

He leaned over and gripped his ladder. Neta crab-walked along the edge of the roof. Behind her he could see rooftops and a bloodred sunset and a mosque dome. “You’re a tough nut, Avram,” said Neta, almost to herself. “You’ve never, for example, told me that you love me. Not that I ever asked you, as far as I can remember, but still, a girl needs to hear it from her man once in her life, or something like it, even a paraphrase. But you’re cheap. At most you’ll give me an ‘I love your body’ or ‘I love being with you’ or ‘I love your ass.’ That kind of witty sidestep. So maybe I should get the message already?”

The ladder’s legs clicked against the stone lip of the roof. Avram decided in a flash that if something happened to her, he would, without thinking, throw himself after her.

“Go into my room,” she murmured. “On the table, next to the ashtray, there’s a small brown book. Go and get it.”

Avram shook his head.

“Go, I won’t do anything until you get back. Scout’s honor.”

He got off his ladder and went into the room. He was there for a second or two, and every vein in his body yelled out that she was jumping. He grabbed the book and went back to the roof.

“Now read where I marked it.”

His fingers trembled. He opened the book and read: “ ‘ … for I had my life support in Vienna. I use this expression to describe the one person who has meant more to me than any other since the death of my grandfather, the woman who shares my life and to whom I have owed not just a great deal but, frankly, more or less everything, since the moment when she first appeared at my side over thirty years ago.’ ” He turned over the book: Wittgenstein’s Nephew by Thomas Bernhard.