David Grossman - To the End of the Land

He secretly counts his fingers again, running the thumb over each digit. He has to do that periodically, at least once an hour, as part of his duties, his maintenance routine. There’s the play about the war, and the one about after the war, with the hospitalizations and the operations, and the one with the interrogations in Israel with Field Security and the Shabak and the Ministry of Defense and the Intelligence GHQ, and the one with Ilan and Ora and their children’s lives, and the one about the POW prison, of course, in Abbasiya, which he really should have noted earlier, before anything else, in Auditorium One. He forgot to start with that one, which is not good. The thoughts about Ofer must have thrown him, the thoughts about Ofer who is fighting now. Not good.

He runs over his fingers again. The thumb, the counter, is of course the POW one, which he mustn’t insult under any circumstances, and obviously there will have to be a small sacrificial offering for his grave mistake, the unforgivable insult, the hurtful, impudent humiliation he has just caused it. The second one is the war. The hospital and treatments are in Three. And the interrogations in Israel are in Four. And Ora and Ilan’s family, Five.

For good measure, he thrusts his hand into his pocket and pinches himself, twisting the flesh of his thigh and digging his nails in, thumb and ring finger, as if into foreign flesh — how dare you, how could you forget to start with the POW prison! Still walking, he falls on his knees and begs the moustached interrogator, the tall one, Doctor Ashraf, the one with the terrifying, sinewy hands. It almost never happens, he explains. It’s happened so rarely. It won’t happen again. And deeper inside, through the tearing skin: well done, now you’re talking, now you understand your mistake. And the dampness is spreading through the fabric and his fingertips.

Ora is holding his face in her hands. “Avram!” she yells at him as if into an empty well. “Avram!” He looks at her with dead eyes. He is not here. He is frantically flitting among his dark auditoriums. “Avram, Avram,” she calls in to him, alarmed, fighting, not giving up, she has the power to do it. And he slowly comes back in hesitant waves, rises up and appears again through his pupils, smiles with miserable submission.

“Once every three weeks or so, he’d come home on leave,” Ora says. She would pounce on him as soon as he walked through the door, press her whole body against him, then remember to hold her chest away and feel his soft stubble on her cheeks. Her fingers would recoil from the metal of the gun slung over his back and search for a demilitarized space on that back, a place that did not belong to the army, a place for her hand. She would shut her eyes and thank whoever needed to be thanked — she was willing to reconcile even with God — for bringing him home in one piece again. And she would sober up when he gave her three quick slaps on her back, as if she were just a friend, a male friend. With that thwack-thwack-thwack he would both embrace her and mark the boundaries. But she was also well versed and would soon drown out the whisper of insult with cheers of joy: “Come on, let’s have a look at you. You’re tan, you’re sunburned, you don’t use enough sunscreen. Where’s this scratch from? How can you lug all that weight around, are you telling me everyone goes home with a backpack this heavy?” He’d mumble something, and she’d resist reminding him that he always used to take the whole house on his back to school as well. She should have guessed he would end up in the Armored Corps.

He slowly removed his Glilon rifle and fastened the magazines with a thick khaki band. He looked giant, as though the house were too small for him. His shaved head and round forehead gave him a menacing look, and for a fraction of a second she was meekly handing him her identification card at a checkpoint. “But you must be hungry!” she said cheerfully with a dry throat. “Why didn’t you let us know you were coming at lunchtime? We thought you’d only get here in the afternoon. You could have at least phoned on the way, so I would have had time to defrost a steak for you.”

“To this day I’m still not used to him eating meat,” she tells Avram. “At age sixteen or so, he just changed his mind. And the fact that he gave up his vegetarianism was somehow harder for me than for him. Do you understand that?”

“Because being vegetarian is … what?” Avram asks curiously. “It’s special? It’s character?”

“Yeah, I guess so. And it’s also a kind of cleanness. I won’t say purity, because Ofer, even when he was vegetarian he was always”—a moment’s hesitation: Should she tell him? Can she? May she? — “kind of earthy” (at least she managed not to say “corporeal”), “and I had the feeling that part of his maturation was to turn around all at once, with all his strength, in that direction, to the opposite of vegetarianism, a kind of anti.” She laughs awkwardly. “I don’t know what I’m saying.”

“Anti what?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s more of a who .”

“Anti who?”

“I have no idea”—but she has a guess—“maybe delicacy? Fragility?”

Avram suggests: “Adam?”

“I don’t know, maybe. It’s like he decided to be as … I don’t know … as rigid as possible? And masculine. With two feet planted firmly on the ground, and even a little, intentionally, corporeal?”

The day grows hotter and they walk silently, comfortable that way. What has not been recounted now will be told in the evening, or tomorrow, or maybe years from now. Either way, it will be told. They climb to the top of Devorah Mountain and lie down for a snooze on a shady patch of grass. They sleep for almost two hours, exhausted from the mountains, and when they awake they are surrounded by families who’ve come to spend a leisurely day at this spot looking out onto Mount Tabor and the Gilboa, Nazareth and the Jezreel Valley. Loud Arabic music blares from car radios in all directions, smoky aromas rise up from grills, nimble-fingered women chop meat and vegetables and roll kibbeh on long wooden tables, babies laugh and coo, men smoke bubbling hookahs, and a group of young boys nearby aim stones at glass bottles, shattering them one after the other. Ora and Avram leap to their feet into this vision, amazed at the abyss into which their sleep has rolled them. They have the strange sensation of having let their guard down, and they quickly gather up their backpacks and walking sticks and pass through the revelers without saying a word. They slip away with inexplicable secrecy, the dog with her tail between her legs as well, and they walk down the path toward a nearby Arab village. The muezzin is calling, and the echoes of his voice engulf them, and Avram remembers the muezzin at Abbasiya, with whom he used to sing along in his cell, composing Hebrew lyrics to the tune.

Low and ruddy, the sun hovers over the land, inflaming the colors with one final touch. “It’ll be dark soon, we should find a place to sleep,” Avram says. The trail markers have been erased, or else someone has intentionally knocked them down or even turned the wooden posts in the wrong direction. “But it’s so beautiful here,” Ora whispers, and there is shame in her voice, as though she is peeking into someone else’s scene. The path, which may no longer be their path — perhaps they have been exiled onto a different route — winds through olive groves and fruit-tree orchards, and a stream runs alongside. Ora feels the bristle of Sami and their drive with Ofer to the army that day, and Yazdi who had slumped on her, and the woman who had breast-fed him, and the people who sat on the floor in the underground hospital, warming up food on little gas burners. And the man who knelt down and bandaged the foot of a guy sitting on a chair in front of him.