David Grossman - To the End of the Land

“Forget him?” Ilan scoffed. “Forget Avram?”

“You’re better off making a clean cut.” Then he caught on. “Wait a minute, you know him?”

“He’s a friend.”

“A friend-friend or a how’s-it-going friend?”

“Friend-friend.”

“Forget what I said,” the soldier mumbled and walked away.

“Scorpion, this is Butterfly. Sighted flock of Saggers on your right, five hundred range. Fire, fire all means, over.”

“Plant, where the hell is the aerial support you promised? You keep saying ‘copy’ and ‘on the way,’ and nothing’s happening. They’re killing us here! I have one dead, one wounded, over, over.”

“Who at his predestined time and who before his time; who by water and who by fire; who by sword and who by beast.”

“Hello! What’s wrong with you? Yom Kippur was two days ago.”

“In the name of Allah most gracious and most merciful, to all units, Division 16 continues across the Canal according to plans. No serious resistance so far, inshallah we will continue to victory.”

“Abir, this is Duvdevan, in response to your question, maybe fifty men still alive along the border, one here, a couple there.”

“Plant, they’re coming at us, why don’t you answer?”

“Who by strangulation and who by stoning, who will rest and who will wander, who will live in harmony and who will be harried.”

“Jewish pilot injured in bushes near two five three.”

“Your orders are: be prepared, maintain radio silence, wait for them to come and rescue him, and only then, fire with all means, over.”

“And my mother, even though you don’t deserve to hear about her, you fuckers, abandoners of your brethren—”

Ilan pressed the sides of the machine until his knuckles turned white.

“My mother,” Avram croaked, “she’s already dead, gone in a flash. But she always …” He made a strangled sound. “She was always patient with me, I swear on my life.” He giggled. “ ‘On my life,’ what a great expression! On-my-life — do you understand what that means? On-my-life! Lechayim!”

Then another long silence, punctured by grating chirps. The green signal shrank, quivered, and split, then expanded and climbed up again.

“I used to run down Bezalel Street with her,” Avram continued, and now he sounded so weak that Ilan slumped over on the radio. “We lived near the shuk when I was little … I don’t remember, don’t remember if I told you. How come I can’t remember anything? Don’t remember faces now, I can’t remember Ora’s face … Just her eyebrows. All her beauty is in her eyebrows.”

His breathing was belabored. Ilan could feel him burning up and his consciousness rapidly slipping away.

“And with Mom we used to run down Bezalel, all the way to Sacker Park, anyone know it? Hello?”

Ilan nodded.

“She used to hold my hand, I was maybe five, and we ran all the way down, then back up, and we’d run until I got sick of it.”

He gurgled and fell silent. The background noises died down, too. A strange, terrifying silence pervaded the entire sector. Ilan imagined that everyone on both sides of the Canal had stopped for a moment to listen to Avram’s story.

“And you know how when you’re a kid, and some grown-up plays with you, you’re always afraid of when they’ll get sick of you? When they’ll look at their watch, when they’ll have something more important to do than be with you?”

“Yes,” Ilan said. “Yes.”

“But Mom, she never got sick of it before I did, not with anything. I knew that no matter what, she’d never stop a game before me.” He was floating through a mist. His voice was bare and thin like a child’s, and Ilan felt as though he was seeing Avram naked, but he couldn’t stop. “That’s something that gives you strength for your whole life. That’s something that makes a person happy, isn’t it?”

A gaunt and extremely agitated religious soldier bumped into Ilan’s chair and asked him to help pack up the religious paraphernalia. He blinked and smiled mechanically every few seconds. Ilan got up from his scanner. When he stretched, he realized he hadn’t moved for over an hour. He knelt down by the soldier and filled an empty ammunition crate with Bibles, prayer books, yarmulkes, a havdalah wine goblet, an army-issue menorah, boxes of Shabbat candles, and even a fragrant etrog for Sukkoth. The religious guy held the etrog up, then buried his face in it and inhaled the citrus scent with a wild sort of passion. He told Ilan in a broken voice that his child had been born right after Yom Kippur. The brigadier general himself had radioed to give him the news, but since he wasn’t trained to listen over the encoded phone, he wasn’t entirely sure if it was a boy or a girl, and he was embarrassed to bother the BG. God willing, he’d be fortunate enough to see his son or daughter. If it was a boy he’d name him Shmuel, after General Gorodish, and if it was a girl, Ariela, after General Sharon. He kept blinking as he talked, and his face changed expression rapidly, and all that time Ilan heard Avram calling out to him in his mind, imploring him, but still he kept encouraging the soldier, deriding himself for feeling so relieved at being free for a few moments from having to sit by the scanner and listen to Avram fade away.

Shells fell very close to the stronghold. The soldier sniffed the air and grimaced. “It’s NBCs!” he yelled. He dragged Ilan to a large iron cabinet with a label that read Nuclear-Biological-Chemical Gear — Open Only in Emergency . The soldier broke the lock with his Uzi butt and the door swung open. Inside, from top to bottom, were empty cardboard boxes. The soldier looked at them and started to scream and hit his head and stomp his feet. Ilan walked back to his listening post and put the headphones on.

“So how many more minutes do you think Avram has until his belly is cleaved? His soft, hairy belly, which he so loved to run his paws over? His belly that served him as storehouse and granary—”

“Stop,” Ilan said. “Stop it!”

“Because Avram, funny as this may sound, was actually planning to hang around for at least another forty or fifty years, he was planning to live to be an old man, a dirty old man. He was still hoping to fondle the occasional breast and thigh, to travel the world, devour the expanses, donate a kidney or an earlobe to the needy, bathe in earthly delights, write at least one book that would truly tremble on the shelf—”

Ilan shook his head. He took the headphones off and stood up. He walked through the trenches until he reached a lookout post with a view of the old Ismailia hospital. Two reservists were sitting with their feet up on the sandbags as though they were relaxing on a cruise ship. They’d both been in the Six-Day War during their regular service and looked old to Ilan. He nonchalantly considered the fact that he would not live to reach their age. They were complacent and jovial and assured Ilan that the Sixth Fleet was on its way, and soon the “A-rabs” would regret the minute they’d thought all this up. Then they broke into an uproarious and grating duet of “Nasser Is Waiting for Rabin.” Ilan sniffed the air and realized they were drunk — probably on cheap army wine. When he looked behind, he found a few empty bottles hidden among the sandbags.

He left them and stood staring at the blue water and the green gardens of Ismailia. Not far away, an endless convoy of Egyptian jeeps was crossing a bridge over the Canal. A massive torrent of humans and vehicles swarmed past, very close to the stronghold, not even bothering to stop and take it over. Ilan thought about the movie The Longest Day , which he’d seen twice with Avram. He felt that the various bits of reality he’d known could no longer be pieced together, and he simply stopped ruminating.