David Grossman - To the End of the Land

Ora sighs. “Yes. We were celebrating Adam’s birthday, and the truth is we didn’t even think they’d both be home that Shabbat until the last minute. Adam was on reserve duty in the Bik’ah, and Ofer was in Hebron and wasn’t supposed to get out for the weekend, but they let him go at the last minute, there was a vehicle leaving for Jerusalem, and he got home late and was exhausted. He even nodded off during dinner a couple of times. He’d had a hard week, we later learned, and he was so tired he barely knew where he was.”

Avram looks at her expectantly.

“It was a lovely evening,” she says, skipping tactfully over the sudden indigestion that meant she ate almost nothing the whole meal. “And then I wanted us all to toast Adam,” she continues in the same tense voice, hoping she has managed to establish for Avram the fact of Ofer’s abysmal exhaustion, his main line of defense in the inquiries and questionings held afterward, and in his endless arguments with her. “We always have a little toasting ritual when we’re celebrating something …”

She hesitates again: All these family affairs of ours, all our little rituals, do they pain you? His eyes signal back to her: Go on, go on already.

“Normally, Adam never let us toast him. We weren’t allowed to do that in public, where strangers could hear. He’s so much like Ilan that way.”

Avram smiles. “God forbid you might be overheard by all those people who booked tables months in advance so they could eavesdrop on you?”

“Exactly. But that evening Adam said yes, though only if Ofer would do it. Ilan and I quickly said, ‘Fine,’ we were so surprised he’d agreed at all. And I thought I’d give him my toast later, when I was alone with him, or I’d write it for him. I always used to write birthday wishes for him, to all of them actually, because I think, I thought, that these occasions were an opportunity to sum things up, or to summarize a period, and I knew he kept my cards — Hey, have you noticed we’re really talking now?”

“So I hear.”

“We’ll have to hike the whole country three times to fit everything in.”

“That’s not a bad idea.”

She says nothing.

“Where was I?” Avram says a while later instead of her, and replies, “The restaurant. Ofer’s toast.”

“Oh, the birthday.”

She sinks back into her thoughts. That weekend, those final moments of the careful, fragile happiness. And she realizes what she’s been doing here all these days: reciting a eulogy for the family that once was, that will never be again.

“So Ofer leaned his head between his hands and thought quietly for a few minutes. He wasn’t in any hurry. He’s always a little slower than Adam. In general, there’s something heavier, more solid about him, his movements, his speech, even his appearance. Usually strangers who see them both think he’s older than Adam. And it was so nice, the way he treated Adam’s request so seriously.

“Then he said that first of all he wanted to say how happy he was to be Adam’s little brother, and how in the last few years, since he’d started going to Adam’s high school, and even more once he joined the battalion where Adam had served, he was getting to know Adam through all the other people who knew him — teachers, soldiers, officers. At first it got on his nerves the way everyone kept calling him Adam by mistake, and treating him as just Adam’s little brother, but now …”

“Seriously,” Ofer said in his slow, raspy, deep voice, “people are always coming up to me and talking about you — what a great guy you are, what a good friend, and how you always took the initiative. Everyone knows your jokes, and everyone in the battalion has a story about how you helped him, how you cheered him up when he was bummed out—”

“This is Adam?” Avram asks carefully. “You’re talking about Adam, right?”

“Yes, we were also intrigued by this new side of him. Ilan even joked that Ofer was recklessly destroying the reputation Adam had spent years building up at home.”

“Or like the bingo you invented,” Ofer told Adam with a giggle, “which is still named after you at school.”

“What’s that?” Ilan interrupted.

“You pick seven words that are totally unlikely for a teacher to say in class. Like ‘pizza,’ or ‘belly dancer,’ or ‘Eskimo.’ And when class starts, everyone has the words written down in front of them, and they have to ask the teacher questions that sound all innocent, like they have something to do with the material, so that the teacher himself, without knowing it, says all the words.”

Ilan leaned forward with a glimmer in his eye and slowly interlaced his fingers. “And the teacher doesn’t know anything about it, of course.”

“Not a thing.” Adam smiled. “He’s just happy to see the students suddenly so interested in his boring class.”

“Ha!” Ilan said and looked admiringly at Adam. “I’ve raised a real snake.”

Adam bowed his head modestly, and Ofer said, smiling at Ilan, “An ‘inventional spark,’ don’t you think?” Ilan confirmed this, and bumped his shoulder against Ofer’s. Ora still didn’t get the rules of the game, and she didn’t like what she did understand. She was impatient to get back to what Ofer had started saying to Adam.

“And who wins?” asked Ilan.

“Whoever makes the teacher say the most words from the list.”

Ilan nodded. “Okay. Give me an example of how you get him to say a word.”

“But Ofer was in the middle of telling Adam something,” Ora reminded them.

“Hang on, Mom,” Ofer said cheerfully, “this is super cool. Go on, gimme a word.”

“You pick one,” said Adam.

“But don’t let me hear it, I’m the teacher!” Ilan laughed.

The boys leaned in, whispered, laughed, and nodded.

“But it’s a history lesson,” Adam said, adding a twist.

“Then we’ll do the Dreyfus affair,” Ilan decided. “I still remember that one a bit.”

Ilan launched into an account of the French Jewish officer accused of treason, and Ofer and Adam bombarded him with questions. He talked about the trial, about the silencing of Dreyfus’s defenders, about the conviction. They were more interested in Dreyfus’s family, its customs, its dress and food. Ilan stuck to his lecture and avoided all the traps. Theodor Herzl showed up in the audience at Dreyfus’s public humiliation. The boys’ questions grew more frequent. Ora leaned back and watched, and the three of them felt her watching them and picked up the speed. Dreyfus was imprisoned and exiled to Devil’s Island, Emile Zola wrote his J’accuse! , Esterhazy was captured and convicted, Dreyfus was released, but the boys were more interested in Herzl. Der Judenstaat was published, and then came Herzl’s meetings with the Turkish Sultan and the German Kaiser. Ilan leaned forward and licked his lips. His eyes sparkled. The boys salivated on either side of him like two young wolves closing in on a buffalo. Ora found herself swept up in the excitement, though she was entirely unsure whom she wanted to win. Her heart was with the boys, but something about the wild enthusiasm on their faces made her crumple, and she felt compassion for the new, scant grayness gradually emerging on Ilan’s temples. The First Zionist Congress convened in Basel, Altneuland was published, Britain offered the Zionists a state on a large piece of land in Uganda—“ ‘a land that will be beneficial for the health of whites,’ ” Ilan quoted, recalling his high school days — and Adam wondered what things would have been like had the offer been accepted: all of Africa would have been stricken with frenetic zeal had the Jews gone there and started stirring things up with their hyperactive nervousness. Ilan added, “And you can be sure that within sixty seconds there would already be deep-seated anti-Semitism.”