David Grossman - To the End of the Land

He must have hit the instrument. Ilan pulled a chair over and sat down with his back to the room. He forced himself to calm down and think rationally: Avram is in the stronghold, one and a half kilometers from here. He seems to be alone, injured, and slightly unstable, and an Egyptian Intelligence listener could locate him at any minute and send soldiers over there.

Ilan found that his attempt to stick to logic made him even more anxious.

“And I need clean water and bandages,” Avram mumbled, exhausted. “This thing stinks. It’s a rag … Hello? Hello? Can’t hear. Why would you hear, you assholes. Well, if you don’t hear, you’ll soon smell, with this wound. Gangrene for sure, fuckit.”

Shut up, Ilan begged him. He pressed his legs together and pleaded: Just hide there and shut up.

Silence. Ilan waited. More silence. He breathed a sigh of relief. The silence continued. Ilan leaned forward, his eyes darting nervously at the flickering display. “Where are you, why did you disappear?” he murmured.

“Plant, this is Peach.” A new voice rose dimly over a rattling engine sound. “We’ve been hit on Lexicon 42. We have casualties. Requesting evacuation.”

“Peach, um, this is Plant. Copy. Sending evacuation momentarily, over.”

“Plant, this is Peach. Thanks, waiting, just hurry ’cause it’s kind of a mess here.”

“Peach, this is Plant. We are handling, we are handling, out.”

“Shakespeare, for instance, is immortal,” came the weak murmur again. “Mozart, too. Who else?”

Ilan’s finger jumped. He still could not control his initial reaction every time he picked up Avram’s voice. His skipping heart had shuddered the frequency. The signal line shrank back into bushes of analog greenery, and Ilan swore at himself furiously with some of Avram’s juiciest curses.

“Socrates is immortal too, I think. Don’t know him well enough. I started reading a little this summer, but I couldn’t get through it. Who else? Kafka? Maybe. Picasso for sure. Then again, the cockroaches will survive, too.”

A foreign voice came over the frequency in Arabic. “Division 16 lookout to Bortukal. Sighted Jewish tank hit at Kilometer 42, over.”

“Hello, hello, answer me, you sons of bitches, you quislings. You left me here to die? How could you leave me to die?”

“Bortukal to lookout. On the way to Jewish tank, Allah willing we’ll be there in five.”

“Dear listeners,” Avram suddenly said in a grotesquely seductive whisper that shocked Ilan. “Hurry up and get here, ’cause soon there won’t be any Avram left for anyone.”

“Plant, this is Peach, still don’t see the evacuation. Situation here is bad. Over.”

“Peach, this is Plant. Don’t worry, everything under control. Evacuation at yours in seven, and if needed we can call in the blues, over.”

“Thanks, thanks, blues would be great, just hurry, I have two matchsticks with severe injuries, over.”

“This is your beloved Avram.” His voice wove into the frequency again. “This is Avram begging you to hurry and save him before he lies with his forefathers, who, incidentally, adamantly refuse to lie with him, claiming his injury is considered menses—”

“I heard you found that guy from Magma,” said a grinning Yemenite soldier as he walked past Ilan. “He’s shooting the shit again, is he? We thought he’d turned in his gear by now, if you know what I mean.”

“So you heard him, too?”

The soldier snorted and a demonic flash in his eyes cracked through the mask of dust on his face. “Who didn’t? Totally hysterical. Cursed us, threatened us. Berserk. What are you laughing at?”

“No, nothing. Did he really threaten you?”

“Even General Gorodish wouldn’t talk to a grunt like that. Move over, lemme hear.” He leaned on the table, flipped one side of Ilan’s headphones out, and held it to his ear. He smiled and nodded as he listened. “Yeah, that’s him all right, blah-blah-blah. Belongs in the Knesset.”

“He’s been that way the whole time?” Ilan asked, although he knew the answer.

“No, at first he was okay. Balls of steel. He was careful on the radio, talked in hints, used code names. I think he even got through to the BG at Tassa, gave him info.”

Ilan imagined how quickly Avram would have adopted military lingo, making it sound like his mother tongue. He could hear him intoning in a deep voice, “Negative, um, negative, over,” and delightfully picturing the astonished look at HQ (“Anyone know this kid running the show at Magma on his own?”).

“But you’re on a PRC-6,” the soldier jibed. “This thing’s like a walkie-talkie; I don’t get how you even found him.”

“Someone set it up for me.”

“It’s for internal communications, anyway, for inside the stronghold. It’s just a shoddy hunk of metal, not for these ranges.”

“Are you a radio operator?”

“Can’t you see?” He smiled and pointed at his big ears.

“How long can it keep transmitting?”

The solider pouted as he considered the question, and finally decreed: “Depends.”

“On what?”

“On how many batteries it has, and how long till the penny drops on the other side that they have one of our guys alive.”

In the background, Avram sang vigorously, “My sukkah is a delight — with greenery and lights!” and the radio operator hummed along with him, bobbing his head to the rhythm. “Listen to him. Thinks he’s on Sesame Street or something.”

The song broke into a groan of pain. Avram disappeared for several seconds and Ilan searched feverishly, fiddling with the needle, slamming the radio — and that was when he realized that the sharp ring he kept hearing wasn’t coming from the scanner but from his ear, because of that one shot he had fired. When he found Avram again, there was no trace in his voice of that terrifying cheerfulness, only a quiet, docile murmur: “I don’t remember, leave me alone, my brain’s fried. I wanted to tell you … what did I want to say? Why did I even come? What am I here? I don’t even belong in this place.”

Shoulder to shoulder, ear to ear, the radio operator and Ilan stooped over the device. The radio operator said, “He’s got a chick on his mind, you hear him?”

“Yes.”

“Poor guy. Doesn’t know he’ll never see her again.”

“And there’s no food,” Avram groused, “only flies, a trillion of them. Fuck you, you sucked out all my blood. I have a fever, touch here, and there’s no water, and they won’t come, hello …”

“His problem,” the soldier said, “is that he’s keeping it turned on.”

He always keeps it turned on, Ilan thought to himself with a smile. Avram would have liked that.

“Hello, you urethra-less, testes-scalded …” Avram blathered on, but the desire was gone, and the words dropped from his mouth empty and dry. “For God’s sake, you’ve had your fun and games, I get it, now come and get me already, I want to go home.”

“What’s his deal?” the soldier asked with a grimace. “D’you understand him?”

“I understand him,” Ilan replied.

Avram whispered, “Hey, maybe you’ve got a connection at the Egyptian commando?”

The soldier moaned, “Man, it’s bad enough he’s calling them over, now he’s spreading his legs, too.”

“Maybe your aunt from Przemysl happens to have gone to school with the grandmother of Wicked Akid Khamzi from Regiment 13?”

Ilan made a hopeless attempt: “D’you think we really can’t send over a force to—”

The radio operator flipped the headphone back on Ilan’s ear, got up, and looked at him for a long time. “What’d you say your name was?”

“Ilan.”

“Okay, listen up, Johnny. Take the headphones off — take them off now —and get over him. Forget him. Khalas . Just erase that he ever was. He never was.”