David Grossman - To the End of the Land

“Just not in my sleep, dear God.”

He was slipping again, Ilan knew.

“I guess they don’t want to stop here, the Egyptian commando. They’ll come back later to finish off the job. You think so? Dunno. What do I know about it? First they’ll probably blow the whole thing up, then they’ll come in to search. Bombing is better, no? Go out with a bang. This is so screwed up. It’s unbelievable, I keep …” He let out a sudden laugh. “No, I mean, really, what am I doing here? Why me?”

Ilan cringed. He knew Avram was going to talk about the lots now.

“Hey, Ora, Ora’leh, where are you? Just to touch your forehead, to draw your eyebrows and mouth with my finger … You drove me so wild.”

Ilan put his hands over his mouth.

“Listen, I’ve had this idea for a while. It’s a great idea. I haven’t told you, or Ilan … Hello? Anyone left in the galaxy? Hello, humanity? Ilan?”

Ilan jumped out of his seat in terror.

“They burned the whole stronghold,” Avram whispered in a panic. “With the people, the equipment, the kitchen, our backpacks, everything they could see. They walked around with flamethrowers and set fire to it all. I heard them. Everything was burning. My hands and face are burned from the heat, I’m all black with soot. They burned my notebooks, too. A whole year of work gone. The whole last year, my idea, that’s it, all gone. Fuckit. Every spare minute I had on the base, on leave, driving to the base, you saw what I was like this year. Seven notebooks. Shit. Thick notebooks, two hundred twenty pages each one, all ideas—”

His voice broke and he started to cry. He talked and cried. It was hard to follow. Ilan got up and stood listening to Avram sob. Suddenly he ripped the headphones off and threw them aside.

The Egyptians stepped up their fire. Shells of 240mm mortars fell constantly. The lookouts shouted warnings: boats carrying unidentified equipment were stealing onto the shore right beneath the stronghold. A cool breeze of fear blew through the trenches, the lookout positions, and the rooms, and then the boats began to hose them with water. At first it was a relief. The jets flushed out the dust that had thickened the air everywhere — bunkers, coffee cups, sinuses — but after a while the bottom of the stronghold began to cave in. The soldiers on the lookout points shot at the boats with every available weapon and tossed grenades. The boats left, but the stronghold had sunk slightly on one side and looked like a crooked, bitter sneer.

The commander convened all the soldiers in the war-room bunker. Ilan found a corner and sat down on the ground. Avram’s voice sawed on inside his head, whispering, hallucinating, pleading for his life. The soldiers and officers sprawled along the walls. They avoided one another’s eyes. Now that the soupy dust had been sprayed with water, the air was unmistakably thick with a terrible stench of shit, a tangible sediment of terror. A soldier who looked as if he was around fifteen, with soft, smooth cheeks, lay next to Ilan with his eyes closed, curled up and mumbling quickly, devotedly. Ilan touched his leg and asked him to say a prayer for him. Without opening his eyes, the boy said he wasn’t praying. He wasn’t religious at all, he was just reciting chemistry equations. That’s how he used to quiet himself before his matriculation exams, and it always worked. Ilan asked him to say a few equations for him.

The soldiers and officers sat with their heads bowed. Outside, the desert roared — a massive, injured beast that lurched up and died down with every strike. Ilan constantly thought he could hear the Egyptian soldiers breaking down the stronghold gate. His brain produced their voices vividly. They pounded on the gate with the butts of their rifles. Then came the explosions, just beyond the wall, and their cheers after bursting in. There was shouting in Arabic, and shooting, and yelling and pleading in Hebrew, which slowly died down. A metallic taste spread through Ilan’s mouth, freezing and dulling his upper teeth and his septum. “It won’t hurt, it won’t hurt,” mumbled the young soldier. His eyes were shut tight, and a patch of wetness spread over his pants.

Ilan feverishly tried to remember something he’d once invented as a boy: the happiness method. How did it go? He used to divide himself up into different parts, separate regions, and whenever he was unhappy in one part, he’d skip to another. It never really worked, but at least he’d had that inner skipping sensation, and something like the momentum of his own private ejection seat, which could propel him for a few moments over his parents’ divorce, the parade of new men who started visiting his mother, his father’s abominations with his female soldiers in front of the whole world, the forced move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the hated school, the horrible boredom — three days and nights every week at the transport base his father commanded. Once, on guard duty with Avram under the antennas on the northern cliff of Bavel, he’d half jokingly told him about his method, making fun of the child he used to be, but he’d sensed Avram’s converging revulsion and attraction.

Avram had looked at him then as though he’d discovered something new, something very dark. He’d questioned Ilan in great detail about the method and demanded to know all the nuances of the mechanism, how he had come up with the idea and the different sensations at each stage. After luring him on mercilessly, he’d arched his eyebrows and grinned. “You know what the next stage is, right?”

Ilan had smiled wearily. “What? What’s the next stage?”

“After you divide yourself up into lots of little squares, you can’t fit into any of them anymore!” Avram conveyed an excitement that may or may not have contained slight mockery. “I’m telling you, I’ve never heard of a more elegant way to commit suicide! And without anyone noticing!”

• • •

The landline phone connected to the division HQ rang, and a familiar voice came through. The speaker did not identify himself, but he didn’t have to. He told the soldiers he was planning to reach their area with an entire division and rescue everyone trapped in the strongholds. They looked at one another, then slowly stood up and stretched out. Feet stomped, blood started flowing through dulled limbs again. “Arik is coming!” the soldiers told one another, savoring the words. They gradually sped up their movements and went back to their positions throughout the stronghold. Even Ilan repeated the line to himself and to others: “Arik is coming. Arik’s gonna screw the Egyptians. Arik will save Avram and me. One day we’ll laugh about all this.”

“Because you won’t ever be mine anyway, you’re Ilan’s,” Avram’s voice said as soon as Ilan put the headphones back on. “And me, I’ve got this imprint of you, from the first minute I saw you, and every other girl will always be just a substitute. That was clear from the start, so what do I have to look forward to? People make such a big deal out of their lives. What I’m worried about now is just the thermal discomfort, you know, those goddamn flamethrowers. Truth is, I’ve never liked shawarma . I don’t want to die, Ora.”

He laughed, he cried, and he talked to Ora, describing her body and the two of them making love. As usual, he was bolder in his imagination than he’d ever really been with her.

Ilan listened, and that morning, the day Ofer was born, he told Ora what he’d heard, for the first and last time. They never spoke of it again. She lay with her back to him and did not move. He lay close to her and quoted Avram. She heard Avram through his lips. “He was so delirious,” Ilan said. She didn’t say a word. He waited. He said nothing and asked her nothing. She lay silently. Ilan reached out and pulled down her underwear. She did not move, did not resist. At most she said his name with slight hesitation. Then he was inside her with all his force. Had he asked her whether the lovemaking was just Avram’s fantasy, she would have told him the truth. He didn’t ask. He entered her. She did not respond. She took him inside her. Her senses perked up, warning her against what she was doing, but she found that her body was eager to take him. She thought of how she had to protect the fetus inside her, but her body responded wildly, hungry for him. His arms and thighs closed in on her. His mouth burned, he bit the back of her neck, he almost went right through her. Even many years later she found it hard to believe that she’d done it. Her belly swayed, and the boy Avram had planted in her body rocked around inside her, waiting to be born, but for a few moments Ilan and she were only a man and a woman going about their business.