David Grossman - To the End of the Land

They walk side by side, Ora scolds and strokes, and the dog flicks up her tail and curls it into a loop and skips lightly around them again. Ora thinks about the night before, and about the night ahead, and looks at Avram’s back. Only last night she’d discovered that his eyebrows were not as soft and velvety as she’d remembered. And his fleshy earlobes — Ofer is the only one in the family who has them, and Ilan and Adam always make fun of his Dumbo ears; Ofer won’t even let her touch them, but now she knows their touch. Five years, she thinks. It was only five years ago that Ilan and I inaugurated the bed. Ilan was afraid it would creak. He went downstairs to the living room and shouted, “Now!” and Ora, upstairs, jumped all the way up and down the bed like a madwoman. She almost lost consciousness from jumping so hard and laughing hysterically (and not one creak could be heard downstairs).

“I like him,” Avram says suddenly.

“What?”

He shrugs, and his lips curl with slight surprise. “He’s so …”

“Yes?”

“I don’t know, he’s such …” His hands, raised in front of his body, sketch and sculpt Ofer, living matter, dense and solid and masculine, kneading him in an imaginary embrace. Were he to tell her now that he loved her, she would not be this moved.

“Even though he isn’t …” She starts but changes her mind.

“Isn’t what?”

“He isn’t — I don’t know — an artist?”

“An artist?” Avram sounds surprised. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Nothing, never mind, forget it. Wait, I didn’t even tell you — wow,” she lets out a gasp, “you really stunned me with that.” She stops and holds his hand to her chest. “Touch here, feel. The way you said, you know, that you like him, and there’s still so much I haven’t told you about him.”

She laughs and shakes her head. “He saved a well, you know. Never mind, I’m just showing off a bit.”

Avram responds immediately, a bit insulted: “That’s called showing off?”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s telling me about him.”

She speeds up, walks in front of him, and spreads out her arms. There’s so much oxygen she can barely breathe.

“They found a well, Ofer and Adam. They were hiking at the foot of Mount Adar, near Beit Nekofa, and they found a little well that was completely stopped up with mud and stones and hardly had any water. There was just a trickle. Ofer decided he was going to restore it, and for a whole year — d’you get this? — when he came home on leave from the army, he would go to this place. Sometimes Adam went with him — Adam wasn’t really into the project, but he was afraid for Ofer to be there alone, it’s right on the border, and the two of them would go together.”

Avram has already noticed that a warmth spreads through his loins almost every time she says “the two of them.”

“They removed the stones and rocks that were blocking the spring, and dirt and mud and silt and roots”—she is so radiant when she talks, and Ofer fills her with life, and now she is certain that it’s good, that it will be good, that her crazy plan may work—“and after they cleaned it out they dug a small holding pool, about a meter and a half deep. We spent a lot of time there too, we didn’t want them to be alone. We used to go on Saturdays and take food, and their friends went too, and some of our friends — I have to take you there one day, there’s a huge mulberry tree over the pool, and Ofer was the foreman and we all worked for him.”

“But how? How did he know how to do it?”

“First he built a little model at home. Ilan helped him”—she remembers the feverish enthusiasm that took hold of the two of them and how the house filled with sketches and computations of water supplies, flow angles, and volume, with constant experiments and simulations—“and then, you know, all you have to do is …”

“What? What do you have to do?”

“Build it,” she explains gravely. “Reinforce walls, concrete, plaster. All the stages. You need a special kind of plaster. Ilan lugged a ton and a half of plaster and sand in his car. And just so you understand, he wouldn’t have sacrificed his Land Cruiser for anyone but Ofer. And then he planted a little orchard of fruit trees. We helped him. We took a plum tree, and lemon and pomegranate and almond, and a few olive trees, and now there’s a real little oasis there, and the well is alive.”

She stretches her arms out and her steps are light: she has so much to tell.

They leave Shibli behind, and the trail crosses through fields and groves, hidden paths rich with cascading greenery that shelters them on either side. Ora drags a little, burdened by some shadow she cannot clearly see, an unfocused pain. The tiny hope from earlier has melted away and seems foolish and hollow.

Avram thinks about Ofer, who is out there now. He tries to picture him there, forces himself to see the streets and alleyways, but there is only one permanent war play in his mind, staged continually in an utterly empty auditorium that he never enters. Avram has five of these auditoriums, all empty and dark, and in each one a different play is performed nonstop — when he sleeps and when he wakes. The plays must always go on, and their sounds are distant and vague when they reach his ears, and he does not go inside.

A new fear trickles into Ora with each step. Perhaps she is wrong. Perhaps she has the whole thing upside down. Perhaps the more stories she tells Avram about Ofer, the less will remain of Ofer’s life. And in a state of suffocation she lets out: “I just wonder what kind of person he’ll be when he gets back.”

“Yes,” Avram whispers beside her. “I was just thinking that.”

“I can’t force myself to imagine what he’s seeing and doing there.”

“Yes, yes.”

“He may come back a completely different person.”

They walk on, bowed, dragging heavy weights.

But maybe Ofer’s immune now, she wonders. Maybe after the thing in Hebron he can withstand anything. What do I know? What do I really know about him? Maybe he really is more suited to life here than I am.

’Cause if I’d only kept my big mouth shut, she thinks, I might still have a family today. The three of them, Ilan and Adam and Ofer, had warned her so many times. They’d sent a thousand little signals to tell her that there are some situations, some issues, that it’s better to keep quiet about. Just put a sock in it. You don’t have to pour out a live broadcast of your whole stream of consciousness, right? But only when it was all over did she get it: they were constantly preparing themselves for every situation— every situation . And they knew ahead of time, and beyond any doubt, that there would in fact be a “situation.” It wasn’t difficult to assume, after all, given that Adam and Ofer served there for six years, three each, with patrols and checkpoints and chases and ambushes and night searches and demonstrations to suppress, that it was impossible for a “situation” not to arise. It was this annoying, exasperating, male wisdom that made Ora seethe. And the three of them were all decked out in protective gear while she walked around naked, like a little girl. “You’re not in Haifa anymore, Dorothy,” Adam spat at her during one family argument. What was it about? Something to do with Ofer’s problem, or a different matter? Who can remember? And by the time she realized what he was talking about and what he was insinuating, they’d already changed topics. They changed topics remarkably quickly back then, switching the subject like cardsharps when she started up with her business. She wonders what Avram would say about it.

Avram quickly checks in on all his auditoriums: five, like the fingers on one hand. Once there were more, lots more, but over the years he’d managed with great effort to reduce the number. It was beyond his powers to keep them all active simultaneously; it was beyond his means. He scurries back and forth past the row of closed doors, counts them on the fingers of both hands — the second hand is just backup — and pricks up an ear to detect the dull murmur coming from inside, the soundtrack of plays produced continuously, day and night, for twenty-six years now, never losing their novelty. He grabs a line here and a line there; sometimes all he needs is one word to know what point in the plot they’re at. Sometimes he wishes he could shut them down for good, turn the lights off. On the other hand, the thought of the silence that would then prevail was utterly terrifying — a hollow sound, the whistling wind of an infinite plunge into the abyss.