David Grossman - To the End of the Land

Hours go by, slowly. As though they have been preserved in some distant cellar, in jars of pickled time. They fall asleep and awake and return. They cross expanses, plains, absences, insults, longings, and regrets. And again he slows down, he slows and stops exactly at the moment she wants him to, so they can gather strength together. A quiet circle breathes heavily in the eye of the storm, and they curl up inside it, and Avram is quiet, perhaps asleep, dissipated, contracting inside her, and she remembers his deep, steep dive, now he is a prehistoric ocean creature, a fish with one half fossilized, turning over inside her, diving into her depths, and now he is there, now he will not move for a moment, he will just slowly throb, resting among the corals of her flesh, hallucinating inside her, and she waits, she waits, and he starts to move again, very slowly, and she moves with him, her lips against his shoulder, very focused, she remembers him fat and heavy and clumsy, and the dance that emerges from him, and now slowly his scent will change, she starts to smile, it’s a scent that only Avram has, and only in these moments, and you cannot describe it in words.

“One day, not now, one day,” she murmurs afterward, playing with the curls on the back of his neck, “you’ll write about our walk.”

They lie naked under the sky canopy as the wind caresses them with soft brushes.

“I wanted so badly to be filled up with you,” she says.

The dog is lying closer to them now, but she does not submit when Ora invites her to come closer, to be stroked by her free hand, and she does not look directly at the two bodies whitening in the moonlight. When her gaze meets them, she runs a tongue of discontent over her lips.

“What?” He wakes from a doze of repletion. “What did you say about the walk?”

“I’ll buy you little notebooks, like I used to, whatever you need, and you’ll write about us.”

He laughs in embarrassment. His fingers tap a light rebuke on her neck.

“About me and you,” Ora says gravely, “and about how we walked, and about Ofer. Everything I told you.” She takes his right hand and kisses his fingertips, one after the other. “And don’t stress about it. For all I care, you can take a year, two, ten, however much you need.”

Avram thinks it will be a miracle if he ever writes anything more complex than a restaurant order again.

“You just have to remember everything I’m telling you. What do you have such a big head for? Because I’ll forget, I know I will, and you’ll remember everything, every word. And in the end, you’ll see, we’ll give birth to a book.” She laughs softly at the twinkling stars.

“Do you know that Ilan went to look for you?” she murmurs into his shoulder.

“When?”

“Then.”

“When the war was over?”

“No, at the beginning.”

“I don’t understand. What …?”

“He got all the way to the Canal—”

“No way.”

“From Bavel. He just walked off the base.”

“That can’t be, Ora, what are you talking about?”

“I’m telling you.”

His back hardens under her hand, and Ora is amazed at her stupidity: all she had in her mouth were the pleasurable murmurs and purrs of afterward, and then this came out.

“On the second day of the war, or the third, I can’t remember.”

Avram sits up abruptly, his nakedness still soft and anointed in her. “No, that can’t be, we’d already lost the Canal.” He searches her face for clues. She is still dizzied by the sweetness of her body, still fluttering yet already abandoned. “It was all full of Egyptians. Ora, what are you saying?”

“But we still had a few strongholds, no?”

“Yes, but how could he … There was no way to get to them, the Egyptians were twenty kilometers into our territory. Where did you come up with this?”

She turns her back to him, hunches into a ball, and curses herself. Twenty-one years I waited with this, so why now?

“Hey, Ora?”

“In a minute.”

Why now, after they made love? Which demon had spurred her to ruin it? But the fact that we slept together, she tells herself firmly, was so good, and it was the best thing we could do for Ofer. “Just don’t regret it!” She turns to him and her heart sinks, because it’s there, that same expression she saw in his face after the last time, when they conceived Ofer. His face has fallen, emptied out.

“I don’t regret it, it’s just that you’re suddenly laying this story on me.”

“I didn’t … I didn’t think I was going to tell you. It just came out.”

“But what is the story?” he whispers.

“He left Bavel with the water tanker, on the second or third day. Forged a transit order and left. He got all the way to the HQ at Tassa. And from there he hitched a ride in a jeep, I think, with a Canadian or Australian TV crew. A cameraman and a reporter, two crazy guys in their sixties, and they were high, you know those disaster freaks.”

“But what was he thinking?” Avram wonders feverishly, and Ora gestures: I’m getting there.

“The jeep ran out of gas in the middle of the desert, so he set off alone, on foot, at night, no map and almost no water, and all around him — well, you know.”

No, Avram says voicelessly, tell me.

What she heard from Ilan one morning twenty-one years ago, she now tells Avram in detail — she remembers quite a bit, in fact — finally bringing the story full circle.

Ilan walked. He was scared of the roads and walked only on the sides, through sand that was sometimes knee-high. Every time he saw a vehicle, he fell flat and hid. All night he walked alone among the charred remains of jeeps and APCs, smoldering tanks and cracked fuel tankers. Egyptian armored vehicles passed him twice. Then he heard a wounded Egyptian soldier crying, begging for help, but he was afraid of traps and didn’t get close to him. Here and there he saw a charred body with black stumps sticking up and the head bent backward, mouth agape. A burned helicopter with its propeller missing was pinned into the side of a dune; he couldn’t tell if it was ours or theirs. Soldiers still sat inside, leaning forward, looking very intent. He walked on.

“He just walked. He didn’t even know if he was heading in the right direction. You asked what he was thinking, and he wasn’t. He walked because he walked. Because you were there at the end of the road. Because only by chance were you there instead of him. I don’t know, I think I would have done the same thing. Maybe you would have too, I don’t know.”

Because that’s exactly the way she’s walking here, Avram thinks and tries to stop the mounting tremors in his body. She is walking because she is walking. Because Ofer is there, at the end of the road. Because she’s decided that this is how she will save him, and no one will dissuade her from that. “I wouldn’t do that,” he says angrily, buttressing himself against what her story is piling up on top of him, closing in on him from one minute to the next. “I wouldn’t have gone out to find him like that, I’d have been scared to death.”

“Yes you would have. That’s exactly the kind of thing you would have done.” An act of greatness, she thinks. A misdeed.

“I’m not so sure,” he hisses through gritted teeth.

“And I’ll tell you something else. It was exactly because of everything he’d learned from you over the years that he knew it could be done.”

What he remembered from that night, Ilan told her only once, at daybreak. He squeezed her suddenly from behind, as if in his sleep, trapped her between his arms and legs, and emptied the story into her spasmodically. Now it was her turn to do the same to Avram. She hadn’t meant to tell him, Ilan had made her swear she would never, under any circumstances, in any situation, tell him. But maybe, she thinks, Ilan didn’t know the story would burst out of him either, a moment before Ofer was born. And besides, it was enough. Enough with the secrets.