David Grossman - To the End of the Land

“And that he knows everything.”

“About what?”

“About me. About us. About what happened.”

Her fingers tightened on his forearm. “You haven’t done anything bad to him. All you ever did for Avram was good.”

“I’m afraid of him,” he whispered and hugged her more tightly. “I’m afraid of what I’ll feel when I see him for the first time, and I’m afraid he’ll look like him.” Or worse — that he’d somehow look like both of them. A mixture of her and him. And that every time he’d look at him, he’d see how alike they actually are.

She thought about little Adam, who didn’t resemble her or Ilan. Oddly, there was something of Avram in his face and expressions sometimes.

“Ora,” he whispered into her neck, “don’t you think we should tell him a bit about his dad? So he’ll know where he came from?”

“I tell him all the time.”

“How?”

“When I can’t fall asleep.”

“You talk to him?”

“I think to him.”

“About what?”

“About Avram, about us. So he’ll know.”

His fingers dug through her hair, and she arched her head into the palm of his hand. The sharp smell of her scalp had intensified during the pregnancy. Ilan loved the smell, even though it was slightly unpleasant, or perhaps because of that, because it was unprocessed, peasantlike, the simple aroma of her body. This is home, he thought, with a slight flutter at his root.

She smiled quietly and pressed her buttocks against him. “In the eleventh grade, I think, I wrote to him that even if we weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend, a couple, like he wanted, I felt we’d still be together forever, no matter how, but we would be. And he sent me a telegram, you know those yellegrams of his”—Ilan laughed into her nape—“saying that ever since he got my letter he was walking around with a rose in his lapel, and when people asked him what the occasion was, he said, ‘Yesterday I got married.’ ”

“I remember, a red rose.”

They said nothing. She stroked his fingers gently. Since Avram’s return, even fingernails were not something to be taken for granted.

“I want us to live, Ilan.”

“Yes.”

“Our lives, I mean. Yours and mine.”

“Of course, yes.”

“I want to get out of this coffin already.”

“Yes.”

“Both of us.”

“Yes.”

“You and me, I mean.”

“Yes, obviously.”

“And for us to start living.”

“Ora—”

“You can’t spend your whole life paying for one moment.”

“Yes.”

“And for a crime we didn’t commit.”

“Yes.”

“We didn’t commit any crime, Ilan.”

“That’s right.”

“You know we didn’t.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Why don’t I believe you?”

“Slowly. It will come, slowly.”

“Hold me hard, carefully …”

She took his hand and placed it on her belly. His hand pulled back at first, but then climbed up the belly and reached higher than it had meant to. Ora lay motionless. She felt that she had sprouted giant breasts in the last few months, tremendous fruits, hippopotamus-like. She felt uncomfortable with him touching them. Her skin was stretched painfully. If he pressed, the breast would crack open. She moved his hand back to her stomach: “Feel here.”

“That?”

“Yes.”

“Is that really him?”

His long fingers roamed carefully over her stomach. Since they had slept together in the shed, since he had come back to live with her and Adam, he couldn’t make love with her. She hadn’t pushed him; she found it comfortable that way, too.

“What’s this?”

“A knee, maybe an elbow.”

How will I be able to love him? he thought desperately.

“Sometimes I don’t know whether I’ll have enough love for him,” she said. “Adam fills me up so much, I don’t know how I’ll have room in my heart for another child.”

“He’s moving …”

“He always does that. Won’t let me sleep.”

“He’s tough, eh? Full of strength.”

“He’s full of life.”

They talked carefully. Through all the months of the pregnancy they had not said these simple things to each other. Sometimes, through Adam, they talked about the “baby in the belly,” and guessed things about him. Privately they said almost nothing, and the due date had come and gone nine days ago.

In fact, Ilan thought — this notion had come to him every night in recent months — there’s a concentrated, condensed little Avram in bed with us, and from now on he’ll be with us forever. Not just like a shadow, the way we’re more or less used to, but a real little Avram, alive, with Avram’s moves and his walk, maybe his face, too.

Your father, Ora thought at the fetus floating inside her, and distractedly moved Ilan’s hand around and around on her stomach, once told me that at twelve he vowed that every moment in his life would be full of interest and excitement and meaning. I tried to tell him that was impossible, that no life could be only climaxes and peaks all the time, and he said, “Mine will be, you’ll see.”

We both liked jazz, Ilan remembered and smiled onto Ora’s neck. We used to go to Bar-Barim in Tel Aviv, to hear Arale’ Kaminsky and Mamelo Gaitanopoulos, and then, on the bus back to Jerusalem, we’d always sit in the back row and scat sing our way through the whole session, and people would get annoyed but we didn’t care.

I only knew your dad from the age of sixteen, Ora thought. Now maybe I’ll know what he was like as a child.

They lay there for a long time, close to each other, and talked silently to Ofer.

One day, when he was about five —Ora writes in a leftover page of the blue notebook— Ofer stopped calling us “Mom” and “Dad” and started calling us “Ora” and “Ilan.” I didn’t mind, I even liked it, but I could see that it really bothered Ilan. Ofer said, “How come you’re allowed to call me by my name, and I’m not allowed to call you by yours?” And then Ilan said something to him that I remember to this day: “There are only two people in the whole world who can call me ‘Dad.’ Do you know how great that is for me? And think about it: Are there that many people in the world who you can call ‘Dad’? Not really, right? So do you want to give that up?” I could see that Ofer was listening, and that it spoke to him, and ever since then he really did always call him “Dad.”

“What are you writing?” Avram asks, propping himself up on one arm.

“You scared me. I thought you were asleep. Have you been watching me for a long time?”

“Thirty, forty years.”

“Really? I didn’t notice.”

“So what were you writing?”

She reads it to him. He listens, his heavy head tilted. Then he looks up: “Does he look like me?”

“What?”

“I’m asking.”

“If he looks like you?”

And for the first time, she describes Ofer to him in detail. The open, large, tanned face, the blue eyes that are both tranquil and penetrating, and the eyebrows so fair you can hardly see them, just like she used to have. The wide, lightly freckled cheeks, and the slight, ironic smile that dispels the severity of the rounded forehead. The words tumble out of her, and Avram swallows them up. Sometimes his lips move, and she realizes that he is memorizing her words, trying to make them his, but it occurs to her that they will never really be his until he writes them down himself.

She is embarrassed by her fluent gush of speech, but she cannot stop because this is exactly what she needs to do now: she must describe him in minute detail, especially his body. She must give a name to every eyelash and fingernail, to every passing expression, to every movement of his mouth or hands, to the shadows that fall on his face at different times of day, to each of his moods, to every kind of laughter and anger and wonderment. This is it. This is why she brought Avram with her. To give a name to all these things, and to tell him the story of Ofer’s life, the story of his body and the story of his soul and the story of the things that happened to him.