David Grossman - To the End of the Land

The shells pounded, and the steel netting holding down the rocks started to tear. Shattered pieces of stone began flying. The stronghold’s protective layer was wearing down, and the air was ash, soot, and dust. Ilan stood there, unable to look south toward Magma, but he guessed that the smoke he could see curling around from the corner of his eye was coming from Avram’s location. He wondered if there was any way to force the commander to send a few soldiers to rescue Avram, but he knew there was no chance. The commander wouldn’t send any of his men on a suicide mission. He felt his way back to the war-room bunker. His eyes were red and teary, and he had trouble breathing. On the way he passed his little table and glanced at the scanner. He couldn’t sit himself down there.

Inside the stifling bunker, someone remembered the manual air pump. It barely made any difference, and the noise — a feeble jackal’s howl — added to the gloom. A smoldering Egyptian MiG plummeted to the ground, and a parachute opened up as it fell. Paltry cheers came from some of the lookouts around the bunker. The pilot parachuted right onto the Canal bank and limped over to the bridge. Egyptian soldiers hurried over to him, embraced him, and seemed to shield him from a possible hit from the direction of the stronghold. The Israeli soldiers watched in gloomy silence. There was a spirit among this Egyptian gang that aroused their envy. Ilan scrubbed his filthy face with his fingers. Through all the thousands of hours he’d listened to Egyptian soldiers on the listening devices in the underground bunker at Bavel, and through all the days and nights he’d translated their conversations and been privy to their military routine and their trivial moments, their gags and lewd jokes, and their most private secrets, he had never felt how much they were real, living people, flesh and blood and soul, as sharply as he felt now, watching them hug their pilot friend.

“But I did,” Avram tells Ora. It’s the first time he’s spoken for a long time. “I was more enthusiastic about the whole listening thing than any of the other radio operators, even the senior ones. It drove me crazy that you could listen freely to anyone who opened his mouth. And the fact that you could hear what people were saying to each other behind closed doors.” He laughs. “Well, I was less interested in the military secrets, you know. I was all about the stupid things, the little intrigues among the officers, the jabs, the gossip, all kinds of hints about their private lives. There were two radio operators from the Second Army, fellahin from the Delta, and I realized at some point that they were in love, and they were sending each other innuendos over the official network. That’s the kind of thing I was looking for.”

“The human voice?” Ora suggests.

An Israeli F-4 Phantom burst onto the sky, swooped over the stronghold, and fired from both guns. No one moved. The plane’s roar filled up the entire space. It filled Ilan’s body too, wreaking havoc on it. A heavy glass ashtray danced madly across a table, then fell off and shattered on the floor. In the yard, the Jerusalemite tankist who had arrived at the stronghold with Ilan stood drinking coffee. His wide eyes peered up at the sky over the lip of his mug. His glasses shimmered, the plane tilted slightly toward him, and Ilan watched as his body was split diagonally from shoulder to waist and his two halves were pitched to opposite ends of the yard. Ilan doubled over and threw up. Others next to him vomited, too. A few soldiers waved their fists in the air, cursing at the Air Force and the entire IDF.

Then the Egyptians blanketed the skies with a red-orange carpet of antiaircraft fire. Every so often, the trail of a plummeting missile emerged. The Phantom capered among them, but suddenly flames leaped up from its tail and it spiraled down in loops of thick black smoke. The soldiers tracked it silently until it crashed to the ground. Not a single parachute opened up. Everyone in the stronghold looked away from one another. When Ilan glanced back at the yard, he saw that someone had covered the fallen soldier’s remains with two separate blankets.

“What’s up with your buddy?” the dark-skinned radio operator asked. “Have you given up on him?”

Ilan couldn’t understand what he was saying.

“The guy from Magma. It’s a good thing you dropped that.”

Ilan stared at him and his vision suddenly cleared. He took off running.

“Hello, hello, anyone hear me? Hello? I’m alone here. They killed everyone yesterday, or the day before. Twenty guys or so. I didn’t know them, I got here a few hours before all hell broke loose. They killed them in the courtyard, took them out and shot them like dogs. Some of them they beat to death. The radio operator and I hid under some barrels of diesel that rolled over on us. We pretended to be dead.”

Something had changed, Ilan noticed immediately. Avram sounded lucid and businesslike. He was talking as if he knew for certain that someone was listening, thirsty for his talk.

“I heard our guys crying. They begged the Egyptians not to kill them. I heard two guys praying, then they were gunned down in the middle. The Egyptians left and didn’t come back. There’s shelling all the time. I don’t think you can even get into this room now. It’s all destroyed. I can see that the rods holding up the doorway are completely bent.”

Ilan shut his eyes and tried to see what Avram was describing.

“Up until the first evening I was with the radio operator. He lay maybe two meters away, badly wounded, with one radio on him, and another little one next to him, and loads of batteries. He must have had at least eighty, I know because he kept counting them, he had this obsession with counting the batteries. He was hurt in his leg, and me in my shoulder. I caught some shrapnel from a grenade that blew up when the place caught fire. It’s sticking halfway out of me. I can touch it. If I don’t move, it doesn’t bleed. Just hurts. That’s such a crazy thing. There’s iron inside my body. Hello, hello?”

“Yes, I can hear you,” Ilan said softly.

“Whatever. The radio operator lost a lot of blood. He kept bleeding. I don’t know his name. We hardly talked, so that if we got taken hostage we wouldn’t know too much about each other. After a while I could see he was really not doing well, he was shaking. I tried to cheer him up, but he couldn’t hear me. At some point I crawled over and put a tourniquet on his thigh. He was talking rubbish. Hallucinating. He thought I was his kid. Then his wife. The radio still worked, and I talked to some officer at Tassa, a pretty senior one, I think. I explained what was going on here, I told him what the army had to do. He promised help was on the way and that the Air Force would send a helicopter to evacuate me. That night, I don’t know when, the radio operator died.”

Ilan found that Avram’s sudden sobriety was harder on him than the delirious chatter. He had the feeling that Avram was completely exposed now, without any insulation to protect him from what was ahead.

“After that I dug in the earth a bit, until I fell into a hole underneath. I fell maybe one meter, on my back, with the radio and all the batteries. I can’t even sit up here, so I just lie with the fucking radio on top of me, and there’s no chance of anyone hearing me from this hole, but I can turn from side to side and even roll a few feet in either direction. I stacked up some sandbags to let some air in, but it’s dark as Egypt—”

He paused, then added with a weak sigh: “Dark as Egypt, get it?”

Ilan gave an encouraging laugh.

“And I’ve got the shits like you wouldn’t believe. I don’t know what’s left to shit anymore. I haven’t had any food and barely any water for three days. Hardly slept, either. I can’t stand to think that they’ll kill me in my sleep.