David Grossman - To the End of the Land

“I wonder what it’s like in Arabic,” she says. “After all, it’s their landscape too, and they have rhonchial consonants too, that sound like your throat is choking on the dryness.” She illustrates, and the dog pricks up her ears. “Do you still remember the Arabic words you learned for all those thistles and nettles, or didn’t they teach you that in Intelligence?

Avram laughs. “Mostly they taught us about tanks and planes and munitions; for some reason they didn’t get around to nettles.”

“A grave mistake,” Ora decrees.

He’d asked whether they hug. She remembers going out to a restaurant on Adam’s birthday, not long ago. It was a new place, “a little too froufrou for my taste,” she says, on one of the moshavim in the Jerusalem hills, surrounded by fields and empty chicken coops — it occurs to her that although Avram has worked in a pub and a restaurant and God knows where else, he may not know what it’s like to go out for a family meal, being as socially illiterate as he is. So she explains, before anything else, how they choose a restaurant in her family. Adam has refined, picky taste, so first they have to call and find out if there’s anything for him to eat, course by course. Once they choose a place and get there and sit down—“You can’t imagine what an operation it is just to sit down! We have a whole settlement policy. For a simple family we’re pretty complicated.”

She talks on and on, and Avram can see it.

“First of all, Ilan has to find the perfect table: far from the bathroom and the kitchen, with the right lighting — not too bright, not too dim — and as quiet as possible, and a spot where he can sit facing the door, to be aware of any danger that might threaten his little family — and the evening I’m talking about was at the height of the terrorist attacks.”

“When isn’t it?” Avram grumbles.

“And Adam has to sit as close as possible to a wall, almost hidden, with his back to everyone, but he also has to be able to embarrass his parents with his torn pants, dirty shirts, and the quantities of alcohol he pours down his throat. And Ofer is like me: he doesn’t care about anything, he’ll happily sit anywhere as long as the food is good and there’s lots of it.” Ora herself wants privacy, of course, but also to be able to show off her family a little.

“So after we sit down comes the ordering, with Adam’s performances. The waitress always marks him straightaway as problematic, an obstacle in the rhythmic flow of her execution, because of his pedantic instructions — nothing with cream in it; can it be fried in butter? Do any of the dips, God forbid, contain eggplant or avocado, in any form? And Ilan’s usual wisecracks with the waitress.” Ora is always amazed and amused to see how utterly blind he is to the fact that the poor girl — any poor girl, at any age — goes weak when he floods her with the arctic green of his glowing eyes. And then there’s Ora’s heroic struggle with her own eye, which keeps veering to the prices. Every time anyone orders anything, she conducts a secret negotiation between gluttony and frugality — okay, let’s get all the embarrassing facts out. With her, it’s cheapness, quite explicitly. There, she’s admitted it. Somehow she finds it easy to confess to Avram what she has held back from Ilan all these years. She sighs. “Where was I?”

“Cheapness,” Avram comments with slightly malicious glee.

“Yes, use it against me, go ahead.” A spark flies between her eyes and his.

She is always the one who feebly suggests: “Why don’t we just order three entrées? We never finish everything anyway.” And they argue with her, always, as though her proposal contains a veiled slight of their appetites, perhaps even their masculinity. In the end they order four entrées and never finish even three of them. Adam orders a horribly extravagant aperitif — why does he need to drink so much? She and Ilan exchange glances — leave him alone, let him enjoy it this evening, on me! And when the waitress heads to the kitchen with their orders a sudden silence — freezing, obviating — falls on them all. The three men stare at their fingertips, study a fork, or ponder a philosophical conundrum—“an abstract, even cosmic problem,” Ora hisses.

She knows everything will be fine soon, even good. They always enjoy themselves at restaurants, and the boys like going out with her and Ilan. All in all the four of them are a great team. Soon the jokes will come, and the giggles and the waves of affection. In just a short while she’ll be able to splash around in the warm, sweet latency that commingles—“for such rare moments; far rarer than you might imagine”—complete happiness and family. But there’s always that lousy, unavoidable moment before, a sort of transit toll they charge her, the three of them, on her way to that sweetness. It is a regular torture ritual that she perceives as cunningly, conspiratorially, aimed solely at her, which she alone provokes in them, and it is precisely because they sense how much she yearns for that sweetness that they tighten ranks to withhold it from her and make her path to it a little harder. “Why? Don’t ask me, ask them.” They sit there in front of her, the three of them and their fingertips, the three of them in their eagerness for a little scheming against her, unable to resist the temptation, not even Ilan. “He didn’t used to be like that,” she says, letting out what she never meant to tell. She and Ilan used to be … well, of one mind — she almost said “of one flesh”—and when they had to, they presented a united front against the boys. He was a full partner. But the last few years—“I really don’t understand it,” she says, seething with overdue anger — since the boys started growing up, something went wrong, as though he had decided it was time for him to be an adolescent, too.

When she thinks about it now, it seems to her that recently, particularly since the time of their separation, around a year ago, she keeps finding herself faced with three rebellious adolescents who act angrily and impudently — the toilet seats were always left up in bold defiance — and she wishes she knew what it was about her that aroused this idiotic, infantile compulsion, and what turned them instantly into three ravenous kittens when a ball of conspiracy against her rolled at their feet, and why on earth it was her responsibility to rescue them from the silence at a restaurant. What if one day she partook in the grave pondering of the fingertips? What if she hummed an intricate song to herself all the way to the end, until one of them broke down — and it would probably be Ofer; his sense of justice would step up, his natural compassion, his urge to protect her would eventually overcome even the pleasure of belonging to the other two. But her heart quickly fills with tenderness for him — why would she trip him up on their men’s games? It was better for her to break down rather than him.

Again the same old thought: if only she’d had a girl. A girl would have stitched everyone back together with her cheerfulness, her simplicity, her ease. With everything Ora used to have and lost. Because Ora was a girl once, let that be clear. Maybe not as happy and lighthearted as she would have liked to be, but she certainly had wanted and tried to be that kind of girl, a joyful, carefree girl just like the daughter she never had was supposed to have been. And she remembers only too well, she tells Avram, the sudden hostile silences that often came between her parents. Silences with which her mother punished her father for sins he could not even conceive of. Back then, Ora was the magic needle that quickly scurried between her father and mother to stitch up the unraveled moment through which the three of them had almost plunged to the depths.