David Grossman - To the End of the Land

That silence in the restaurant lasts no more than a minute, Avram understands from Ora’s stammered description and her lowered eyes, but it feels like a cursed eternity. Everyone knows that someone has to talk and melt away the silence, but who will start? Who will step up? Who will proclaim that he is the most spineless, the doormat, the softy? Who will break down first and say something, even something silly? Hey, silly is what we do best, Ora knows. Even a snide remark will play well. Like her story about the plump Russian lady who had shared Ora’s umbrella earlier that week in a rainstorm. She hadn’t asked, hadn’t apologized, just said to Ora with a smile, “We walk together now awhile.” Or she could tell them about the elderly spinster who came to her clinic with a sprained ankle and laughingly told Ora her trick for making dough rise: she takes it into bed, lies down for forty winks with the dough under the blanket, and that’s how it gets its first rise! Yes, Ora would prattle on, and they’d all laugh warmly and wonder how the Russian woman had picked out Ora as a sucker even in the middle of a storm. They’d make fun of the old lady with the dough and tease her about her other patients and her job in general, which they found slightly odd: “You just come up to a total stranger and start prodding them?” And the little flame she lit would start curling and burning, and they would be warm and happy. “Do you understand what I’m getting at? Do you see the picture, or am I just …”

He nods, fascinated. Maybe he did see a thing or two in his pub after all, she thinks, or at the Indian restaurant. Or just walking the streets, or on the beach. Maybe he didn’t give up those eyes of his after all. Maybe he noticed and watched, and peeked and eavesdropped, and collected it all inside. Yes, that’s just like him, a detective gathering evidence for a crime of extraordinary scale — the human race.

“And after that everything’s all right, we’re all totally there, and we laugh and jab and talk. The three of them are sharp, witty, cynical, and horribly macabre, just like you and Ilan were.” This fills Avram with sadness, perhaps because he can also sense what she is not disclosing: she always has the feeling that something in the conversation is beyond her grasp, that a subliminal lightning bolt has flashed between them but she hears only the thunder that follows. When the food arrives, the buzz of commerce begins, and that’s what she likes most. Plates and bowls and spoonfuls are passed from hand to hand, forks peck at one another’s dishes, the four of them compare, savor tastes, criticize, and offer to share. A canopy of generosity and delight spreads above them, and this, finally, is the quiet, honeyed moment, her portion of happiness. She follows the conversation only superficially now. The conversation is not the main point — it’s even a distraction. She thinks they’re poking fun at themselves, at the dishes soaring back and forth like flying saucers, and at what the people at the other tables must think of them. Or else they’re discussing the army, or some new CD. What difference does it make? The point is this moment: embraced.

“That sucks,” she heard Ofer say to Adam. “We spent the whole summer killing flies in Nebi Musa, and it turns out we killed the weak ones, so we created a generation of resistant flies, and now their genetics are much stronger.” They laughed. They both have lovely teeth, Ora thought. Adam described the rats that run freely around the kitchen at his reserve duty unit. Ofer struck back with a winning card: a fox, maybe even a rabid one, had infiltrated his crew’s room while people were dozing and stolen a whole cake out of someone’s backpack. They spoke in loud, deep voices, as they always do when they talk about the army. “But that might also be because Ofer’s ears are always full of dust and grease,” she explains to Avram. Ora and Ilan laughed and laughed, delighted, and gobbled down pieces of herb bread. Their role here was clear: they represented the sufficiently blurry background, the sounding board against which their children repeatedly declared their maturity and independence, and from which their declaration echoed back to the children themselves, at every age, so that they could finally believe in it. The boys changed the topic to accidents, big and small. There was practically a permanent order to these conversations, Ora realizes now, an organized, gradual escalation. Adam told them about how when he started his service in the Armored Corps, one of the commanders had demonstrated what could happen to a tank driver who got stuck in the gun’s side traverse. He set a wooden crate on the hull, rotated the gun sideways, and showed how the barrel shattered the crate, “which is exactly what could happen to anyone who steps out of a tank without coordinating,” Adam cautioned his younger brother, and Ora felt a chill.

“We have this soldier,” Ofer said, “poor guy, a real screwup, he’s the company’s punching bag — everyone who walks past him gives him a punch. About a month ago, in a camouflage drill, he fell off the tank and his arm swelled up. So they sent him to rest in the DT”—the “discipline tent,” he begrudgingly translated when he saw Ora’s look—“and there an antenna fell on his head and cracked it open.” Ilan and Ora exchanged quick glances of horror, but they knew they must not respond to the story with a single word. Anything they said, any concerned expression, would be met with mockery (“skirt on the left,” Adam liked to warn Ofer against Ora), but Adam and Ofer of course picked up on their glances, and everyone got what they wanted, and now, once the foundations were laid, once the parents had been duly enlightened about the many and varied dangers from which they could no longer protect their sons, Ofer told them casually that the suicide bomber who had blown himself up two weeks earlier at the central bus station in Tel Aviv, killing four civilians, had probably passed through his roadblock — meaning, the roadblock his battalion was responsible for.

Ilan asked guardedly if they knew when exactly the terrorist had gone through, and whether anyone was holding Ofer’s battalion responsible. Ofer explained that there was no way to tell who was on shift when he’d gone through, and that he could have been carrying a new kind of explosive that was impossible to detect at the roadblock. Ora was dumbstruck, unable to speak. Ilan swallowed and said, “You know what? I’m glad he blew himself up in Tel Aviv and not on you at the roadblock.” Ofer was outraged: “But, Dad, that’s my job! I stand there precisely so they’ll blow themselves up on me and not in Tel Aviv.”

And Ora — what was she doing at that moment? Her memory is hazy, she cannot reconstruct it. All she remembers is that she suddenly felt hollow, a shell of herself. There was something stuck in her mouth, probably pine nut — studded rye bread dipped in walnut pesto. Ofer and Adam were already deep in conversation about a soldier they both knew, who on parents’ day at the end of training had come up to a strange couple with his arms outstretched and shouted, “Mom, Dad, don’t you recognize me?” Ofer and Adam, and probably Ilan too, rolled around laughing, and Ora sat with her mouth half open while nymphlike waitresses hovered around the tables and whispered: “How is everything?” And two weeks ago a terrorist packed with explosives had walked right past Ofer, and that was Ofer’s job: he stood there precisely so that terrorists would blow themselves up on him and not in Tel Aviv.

Then Ofer turned very serious, and he told Adam and Ilan about his stint in Hebron during the past week. He wasn’t allowed to talk about it, but he could give them the gist. The battalion was sent there to wage a campaign to eliminate wanted men in the kasbah — Ora was no longer really listening to him; she’d been transported — something they hadn’t done before and which had never been one of their duties. They commandeered a whole building to use as a lookout post, and locked up the residents in one apartment. “We actually treated them really well,” he said and gave her a sideways glance, but she was no longer there. Had she been listening, perhaps she could have changed something. Or perhaps not. And then — how did the conversation end up there? Only in retrospect, through a supreme effort that lasted weeks and months, was she able to piece together the fragments of that conversation into an approximate tapestry of the entire evening. Ofer asked Adam to explain something about the procedure for arresting a suspect, but here too she heard only fragments. You yell three times, in Hebrew and in Arabic, “Stop! Who’s there?” And then three times, “Stop or I’ll shoot” (Adam). “Wakef wa’la batukhak” (Ofer). And then you cock your weapon and aim at sixty degrees through the sight (Ofer again?). And then you shoot (Adam). The music of their voices, Ora dimly noticed, sounded exactly like it did when they used to study for Adam’s grammar exams together, when Adam was the teacher and Ofer the student. “You aim for the legs, yeah, knees-down, static, through the sight, and if he doesn’t stop, you go for the center of the body mass and you shoot to kill.” Ofer sheepishly admits that he doesn’t remember what that “mass” is, exactly. Adam scolds: “Didn’t you learn any physics at school?” Ofer says, “Yes, but where is it on a person?” Adam scoffs: “When I was in the Territories they told us, ‘Shoot between their nipples.’ ” Ofer said, “At my last target practice, I shot the dummy in the stomach, and the P.C. goes, ‘I told you to aim for the knees!’ So I say, ‘But, sir, won’t he go down this way, too?’ ” They both laughed, and Ofer threw Ora a cautious glance. He knew she didn’t like that kind of joke. Adam, who also knew, grinned and said, “Some soldiers are convinced that the Arabs walk around with bull’s-eyes on their faces, just like in practice.”