David Grossman - To the End of the Land

“Keep going, but with more feeling.”

“ ‘Without her I would not be alive at all, or at any rate I would certainly not be the person I am today, so mad and so unhappy, yet at the same time happy.’ ”

“Yes,” she said to herself, her eyes closed in deep concentration.

“ ‘The initiated will understand what I mean when I use this expression to describe the person from whom I draw all my strength — for I truly have no other source of strength — and to whom I have repeatedly owed my survival.’ ”

“Thank you,” said Neta, still swaying on the ladder as if in a dream.

Avram said nothing. He seemed loathsome and despicable in his own eyes.

“Do you understand what the problem is?”

He moved his head to indicate something between yes and no.

“It’s very simple. You are my life support , but I’m not your life support .”

“Neta, you’re—”

“Your life support is her, that woman who had a child with you, whose name you won’t even tell me.”

He buried his head between his shoulders and did not answer.

“But look.” She smiled and brushed the hair away from her eyes. “It’s not such an original tragedy, what we have here. And not such a big problem, either. The world is just a very unfocused picture. I can live with that — how about you?”

He did not answer. She asked for so little, but he could not give her even that. “Come on, Neta.” He held out his hand.

“But think about it?” Her soft eyes lingered on him, full of hope.

“Okay. Now come on.”

A flock of starlings soared by with a flutter of wings. Avram and Neta stood there, both immersed in themselves.

“Not yet?” she murmured to herself after a while, as though responding to an unheard voice. “It’s not time yet?”

With two swift strokes she landed the ladder on the rooftop floor. “Look at you,” she said, sounding surprised. “You’re shaking all over. Are you cold inside? In your no-heart?”

Ora tells him more about Adam the next day. She would prefer to talk again about the old Adam, baby Adam, about the three years when he was hers alone. But he asks about today’s Adam, and without holding anything back, she describes her older son, whose eyes are always red and bloodshot, whose body is slender and a little stooped, hunched forward with troubling languor, his hands and fingers drooping to the ground, his lip pulled up with a slightly contemptuous expression of subtle, nihilistic scorn.

She is struck by the things she says about him and by the fact that she is capable of looking at Adam this way. Ilan’s objective view of the boys is now hers, too. She is learning to speak a foreign language.

Note by note, she depicts a young man of twenty-four who looks both weak and tough at the same time, conveying a quiet strength beyond his age. “I don’t quite understand it,” she says hesitantly, “this strength he has. It’s something elusive, even a bit”—she swallows—“dark.” There, I’ve said it.

“His face isn’t anything special, at least not at first sight — he’s pale, with cheeks darkened by stubble, sunken black eyes, and a very prominent Adam’s apple — still, to me he looks exceptional. I find him really beautiful from certain angles. And he has this combination of features that looks as though several of his ages are all there at the same time. I find it so interesting sometimes just to look at him.”

“But what is that strength? What do you mean?”

“How can I explain it?” She knows she must be precise now. “It’s like you can’t surprise him with anything. Yes, that’s it. Not with anything happy or anything sad, and not with something really painful or really terrible, either. You’ll never surprise him.” Having said it, she realizes for the first time how accurate her perception of him is. She also understands how different he is from her — the opposite. “He has such power,” she says in a fading voice. “The power of contempt.”

She’s seen two of his shows. One he invited her to, and the other she snuck into after he’d dropped her. There were dozens of young boys and girls there, and their faces leaned toward him in the blinding lashes of light whipped from every direction, all drawn, with their eyes closed, to his indifferent, slightly sick frailty, which sucked them out of themselves. “You should have seen them. They looked like … I don’t know what. I don’t have the words to describe it.”

Avram sees a field of albino sunflowers. Albino sunflowers in a solar eclipse.

They rest at the peak of Mount Arbel, above the thirst-quenching Kinneret Valley. The area is full of hikers. A school group of screeching girls and boys arrives. They take one another’s pictures and scurry around. Buses spit out groups of tourists, and their guides compete against one another in a shouting match. But Ora and Avram are immersed in their own affairs. A soft breeze refreshes them after the exhausting ascent. On the way up they hardly spoke — it was an especially steep climb. Carved steps and iron posts in the rock helped them, but every few steps they had to stop for a breather. From the Bedouin village at the foot of the hill came roosters’ crowing, a school bell, and the commotion of children. Above them, in the cliff side, a chain of gaping mouths: the caves where the Galilean rebels hid from Herod (“I read about it somewhere,” Avram murmured). Herod’s soldiers had cleverly propelled themselves down the mountain in cages and used rods fitted with iron hooks to hunt down the cave dwellers and hurl them into the valley.

Above the mountain, above the human tumult, a large eagle glides against the blue sky, floating on a warm, transparent air column that rises up from the valley. In broad circles, with spectacular ease, the eagle hovers above the air column until its towering warmth evaporates, then glides away in search of a new breeze. Avram and Ora take pleasure in its flight, and in the mountains of the Galilee and the Golan, glowing purple in the warm vapors, and the blue eye of Lake Kinneret, until Ora notices a plaque in memory of Sergeant Roi Dror, of blessed memory, who was killed below this cliff on June 18, 2002, during a training operation of the Duvdevan special forces unit. “He fell as gently as a tree falls. There was not even the slightest sound, because of the sand” (The Little Prince) . Without a word, they get up and flee to the opposite end of the mountaintop, but there is another monument in their new place of refuge, in memory of Staff Sergeant Zohar Mintz, killed in ’96 in Southern Lebanon. Ora reads with tears in her eyes: He loved the country and died for it, he loved us and we loved him . Avram pulls her hand but she does not move, so he forcefully tugs her away. “You started telling me about Adam,” he reminds her.

“Oh, Avram, where will this end? Tell me, where will this end? There’s no more room for all the dead.”

“Now tell me about Adam.”

“But listen, I remembered that I wanted to tell you something about Ofer.” She could feel it again. The slight push she gives Ofer to the front of the stage every time she thinks Avram is too drawn to Adam.

“What about Ofer?” he asks, but she can feel that his heart is still caught in the riddle of Adam.

They walk down the mountain heading south, toward Karnei Hittin. On either side of the path are fields of wheat ears turning golden in the sun. They find an isolated patch, like a little nest on the ground, surrounded by a meadow of purple lupines. Avram sprawls out, Ora lies down opposite him, and the dog nuzzles under Ora’s head. Ora feels the warm, breathing body, which needs her, and thinks she might break the vow she’d made after Nicotine died and adopt this dog.