David Grossman - To the End of the Land

Suddenly they heard shouts in Arabic. An Egyptian armored vehicle was driving nearby, shining a spotlight to track the sides of the road.

“Turns out we’d walked into an Egyptian parking lot,” Ilan told Ora that dawn. His body had quieted down, but he was still enfolded in her and his hands dug into her shoulders. “I even stepped on the blanket of someone sleeping there.”

She lay stunned, her flesh still fluttering around his.

“We didn’t move, we didn’t breathe. The armored vehicle went on. They hadn’t seen us. Hadn’t seen anything. We lay there, thirty-three men, and they didn’t see us. We got up and ran back to the sand to get away from the road.” She could feel his warm breath against the back of her neck. “We kept going east and walked all night at a half run. I ran with my gun and the bazooka. It was hard, but I wanted to live. As simple as that.”

She wanted him to pull out of her right away. She couldn’t speak.

“Then the sun rose. We didn’t know where we were, or whether it was our territory or theirs. Or where the IDF was, if it even existed. I saw tire marks in the sand, and I remembered that the IDF only uses APCs with chains, but these tracks were from a Soviet BTR, which the Egyptians used. I told the commander, and we quickly changed course. We walked and walked until we reached a small wadi with hills and mounds, and we sat down to rest. We were dead tired. Tanks were burning on the hills around us. Giant torches. We didn’t know whose they were. The whole area reeked of scorched flesh. You can’t imagine it, Ora.”

She flinched, and he tightened closer to her body. He was barely letting her breathe. The fetus felt as if it was throbbing too quickly. She wondered if it might somehow absorb anything of what Ilan was telling her.

“On the radio they told us they couldn’t reach us. We had to wait some more. We waited. After a few hours they told us to try to reach this mountain range. They gave us a code map. We walked until we could see the range straight ahead. But see, the Egyptians are shooting at us all the time, from all the hilltops, and they’re not hitting us. It’s all miracles. We’re walking with bullets whistling past us like in the movies. When we got to the mountain range we realized it was swarming with Egyptians. We thought it was all over.”

“I can’t breathe this way, Ilan—”

“But a minute later, our tanks arrived and stormed them. A battle started. Gunfire. We just sit on our asses and watch the movie. Everything’s on fire. Burning people jump out of tanks. People getting killed ’cause they came to rescue us. We sit on our asses and watch. And we feel nothing — nothing!”

“Ilan, you’re really suffocating me—”

“They yelled at us over the radio to shoot up flares so they could see where we were. We shot a flare and they found us. One tank came down from the range, and it’s a steep incline, a wall. It came all the way to us. An M60 Patton. An officer sticks his head out the turret and motions for us to come quickly and get in the tank. We shout at him: ‘What should we do? How?’ And he gestures: Climb up, there’s no time. ‘You mean, all of us?’ ‘Get up. Get up!’ ‘What do you mean get up? Where?’ ‘Get up already!’ And there’s thirty-three of us. Ora, what did you say?”

“Ilan!”

“Sorry, sorry. Did I hurt you?”

“Pull out, pull out now.”

“One more minute, please, just a minute, I have to tell you—”

“It’s not good, Ilan—”

“Listen, just give me one more minute. Please, Ora, that’s all.” He spoke quickly, firmly. “We climbed up on the tank, every guy grabbed on to something, people glued themselves to the MAG hatches, ten guys crowded into the turret basket, I jumped up on the back and grabbed on to the leg of the guy above me, someone else took hold of my shoes, and the tank rolled. Not just rolled but barreled, in zigzags, to get away from the Saggers, and we barely held on. And the whole time I just kept thinking: Don’t fall, don’t fall.”

This child, Ora thought, the things he’s hearing before he’s even born.

“The tank is jumping around like crazy,” Ilan murmured and clutched her again, convulsing. “Your bones are breaking, you can barely breathe, dust everywhere, stones flying, you just stop up all your holes and just stay alive.”

Dust penetrated her mouth, her nose. Yellow desert streams. She choked and coughed. She felt as though the fetus inside her was also shrinking, fighting to turn over, to turn his back. Stop, stop, she groaned inside, stop poisoning my child.

“It went on that way for a few kilometers, stuck onto the tank, and then all of a sudden — that’s it. Over. We were out of the line of fire. I could barely let go of the other guy’s leg. My hand wouldn’t open.”

His muscles relaxed. His head plunged onto her neck, heavy as a rock. His fingers slowly disengaged from her body and lay open in front of her face. She did not move. He slid out of her. A moment went by, and then another. He breathed heavily. His face was up against her and he lay in an utterly helpless huddle. A spasm went through her body.

“Ilan,” she murmured. Her temples began to throb, and little beads of sweat glistened on her skin. Her body was telling her something. She lifted herself up on her elbow as if she were listening. “Ilan, I think—”

“Ora, what have we done?” she heard him whisper in a panic. “What have I done?”

She touched her wet thighs and sniffed. “Ilan, I think this is it.”

HE ASKS ABOUTthe deep cracks that had run through the walls even in his day, mainly in the kitchen, but also in the bedrooms. He wonders if the house continued to sag over the years and how she and Ilan dealt with the lintels that protruded from their frames. He asks if the huge bureau that used to be in his room still exists, and she tells him that until the family left the house and moved to Ein Karem, the bureau ruled the room like an old patriarch. The bedroom closet had also stayed. “We hardly touched that house. Just a little work in the kitchen, like I told you, and downstairs in the basement sewing room when the boys got older.”

The path is hard going, and the day is very hot even this early. Tabor turns out to be the steepest of all the mountains they’ve climbed. Sometimes they turn to face down the incline and walk backward. “You let the quadriceps rest and make these two guys here work a little”—Ora pats her rear end with both hands—“the gluteus maximus and the gluteus medius. Let them do their part, too.”

As they walk backward, facing Kfar Tavor and the Yavne’el Valley sprawling below, Avram goes through the house with her, room by room. He asks about the sunken floor in the hallway, the redundant step up into the bedroom, and the clumsy water pipes, some of which were exposed. He remembers every fault and defect as well as every beauty spot in that home, as though he’d never stopped walking through it and caring for it. He asks if the manhole in the basement kept overflowing every time it rained.

“That was Ofer’s domain. He used to declare flood duty whenever it rained and prepare mops and buckets and rags. Later he got more sophisticated and installed a little pump.” Ora laughs. “You should have seen it, with an engine and two hoses. But he solved a problem that I think had started when the house was built.

“He also built a bed for us,” she says. She had sensed this was something she should not tell him, but they were in a good mood, and why not?

“He built a bed himself?”

“When he was in eleventh grade, yes. Or was it twelfth?” She stops to catch her breath and leans against a boldly slanting pine tree. “Never mind, I was just thinking about it. Listen to what else I remembered”—she slyly changes the topic because when he asked, she thought Avram had a stab of pain, and she tells him about how Ofer, when he was around three, used to come up to her and announce: “I want to tell you a story.” She would say, “I’m listening,” and then wait and wait while Ofer stared into some corner of the room for a long time. Then his face would take on a ceremonial look, he’d fill his lungs with air and say in a voice hoarse with excitement: “And then …”