David Grossman - To the End of the Land

“Well, there is one big issue I haven’t completely solved yet,” Avram murmured to himself, focused and distracted at once. “Will people dismantle all the frameworks of their lives, like their families, or will they want to leave everything just like it is right up to the last minute? What do you say? I’m also wondering if people will start telling each other nothing but the truth, right to their faces, ’cause time’s running out, you know? There’s no time.”

“In this kind of situation,” he mumbled after a few moments of silence, “even the most trivial thing, like the illustration on a can of corn, or like a pen, or even that tiny spring inside a pen, suddenly looks like a work of art, doesn’t it? The essence of all human wisdom, of all culture.

“Shit, no pen. Now. I’d really start writing it right now. Now I feel like I’m right there.”

Ilan got up and hurried to the bunker. He dug through some drawers and found a few papers the Military Rabbinate had given out for Yom Kippur. They were printed on both sides, but they had wide margins.

“Sweet Queen Elizabeth,” Avram sang over the radio. Ilan wrote.

“My queen, my sweet queen.

“How I wish to protect you from the impending disaster.

“Kings must die slowly, my queen,

“With the heavy toll of bells,

“With flower-strewn carriages,

“With a dozen pairs of black horses.”

He sang and breathed into the mouthpiece. It was hard to follow. The tune was only an awkward hum, a recitation full of pathos and air, and Ilan distractedly began to ponder the musical score that could go with the song.

“But!” Avram croaked, and Ilan could have sworn he was waving his hand up high. “Perhaps we shall kill you slightly before, beloved Queen Elizabeth.

“An expressionless servant will hand you a goblet,

“So that we can see you off appropriately,

“We will lay you down to sleep three days before the rest of us,

“In a coffin of ebony,

“(or mahogany).

“So that you shall not suffer the shame

“Of common, faceless death,

“With crude screams of fear,

“With the stinking farts that we might emit in our final moments.

“And also, my queen, my queen,

“So that the noble thoughts of you

“Do not prevent us from dying cheaply,

“As we deserve to.”

Avram stopped and let the last few words echo, and Ilan unwittingly thought: Not bad for a start, but a little too Brechtian. Kurt Weill was also in the neighborhood, and maybe Nissim Aloni, too.

“These kind of scenes, you see, Ora. I had dozens, maybe hundreds, in the notebooks. Fuck them. How am I going to reconstruct—

“Listen, there’s a line that Ilan and I like. Maybe I should say liked , because one of us, and regrettably that would be me, has to start practicing the past tense: I was, I wanted, um … I fucked, I wrote—”

His voice broke off and he started weeping softly again. It was hard to understand what he was saying.

“It’s a line written by the great Thomas Mann in Death in Venice,” he continued after a few minutes, and his voice was rigid and strained again, a poor imitation of his joking and acting voice. “It’s a great line, you have to hear it. The writer guy, the old one, whatshisface, Aschenbach, he had ‘the artist’s fear,’ you know? ‘Fear of failing to achieve his artistic goals — the concern that his time might run out before he had given fully of himself.’ Something like that. I fear, my darling, that due to the circumstances my memory is limp, and so is everything else. When they hang you, at least you’re promised one good ejaculation, but somehow I don’t think that’s the arrangement with a flamethrower—

“Hang on—

“What should we do about prisoners? Let them go? Let out murderers and thieves and rapists? How can you keep someone in prison in that state? And what do I do with death-row inmates?

“And schools?” he asks after a painful silence. “I mean, there’s no point in teaching anymore, or preparing anyone for the future when it’s obvious they don’t have one, they don’t have anything. Besides, I imagine most kids would leave school. They’d want to live, to be inside life itself. On the other hand, maybe the adults will go back to school? Why not? Yes, that’s not bad.” He giggled in delight. “There’ll probably be loads of people who want to reconstruct that time in their lives.

“This rag stinks to high heaven, but at least it’s stopped bleeding. Hard to move my arm. The excruciating pain has come back in the last few minutes. Fever’s going up, too. I’m dying to take my clothes off, but I don’t want to be naked when they come. Mustn’t give them any ideas.”

He was panting like a dog. Ilan could feel him willing the story to trickle back into him, to revive him with its touch.

“And children will get married at nine or ten, boys and girls, so they’ll have a chance to feel something of life.”

Ilan put down his pen and rubbed his aching eyes. He saw Avram lying on his back, underground, in the little womb he’d built for himself, while the Egyptian army swarmed around him. Invincible Avram, he thought.

“They’ll get little apartments, the kids, and they’ll run their own lives. In the evenings they’ll go walking in the squares, arm in arm. The adults will look at them, sigh, and not be surprised.

“Lots of things are coming to me now.

“It’s all alive in front of my eyes.

“Hey!” Avram suddenly exclaimed with a peal of laughter. “If anyone’s listening, write down this idea with the kids for me! I don’t have a pen, what a bummer.”

“I’m writing,” Ilan mumbled. “Go on, don’t stop.”

“Maybe the governments will start drugging the citizens, in small doses, without their knowledge. Through the water supply? But why? What does that give me?

“To blur the fear?

“Have to think about that.”

Ilan remembered that Avram always joked that if he had a good idea, he was capable of working on it even inside a blender.

“He was right, that Chinese guy,” Avram said wondrously. “There’s nothing like the proximity of a flamethrower to sharpen your mind.

“And people will get rid of their cats and dogs.

“But why? Pets give comfort, don’t they?

“No, think about it. In their state, people can’t give love to anyone. They have no reserves.

“So it’s an age of total egoism?

“I don’t get it … You mean people become completely wild? Gangs on the streets? Absolute evil? Homo homini lupus est?

“No, that’s too easy. It’s trite. I want to maintain the frameworks. Especially toward the end. That’s the power of it. That will be the power of a story like this, that people still manage to somehow keep the—”

He muttered, intermittently excited and fading, and Ilan struggled to keep up, and knew that no one had ever opened up to him like this before, not even Ora, not even when he slept with her. As he scribbled, something was being written inside him: a new, cool, lucid knowledge that he himself was not a true artist. Not like Avram. Not like him.

“And I forgot to tell you that babies will be abandoned, too.

“Yeah, yeah, parents will abandon their babies.

“Why not — my dad did it when I was five.

“Holy shit, there are so many possibilities. One year, man, one whole year I was stuck with this. It kept not working, it just stuttered and seemed unrealistic and hackneyed, and now, all at once—”

Ilan wrote it all down. And he knew, with total acceptance, that if he got out of there alive he would have to look for a new path. What he had thought of becoming, he would never be. He would not make movies. He would not make music, either. He wasn’t an artist.