David Grossman - To the End of the Land

He finds it difficult even to let go of the stinking uniform and the dirt that has stuck to his flesh and that, Ora guesses, protects him a little. Three weeks in the field, on patrols, fixing tanks, checkpoints, ambushes. He has a strong odor. His fingers are rough and full of cuts. His fingernails are black. His lips look as if they are constantly bleeding. His gaze is distracted and vacant. She sees the house through his eyes. The cleanliness, the symmetry of the rugs and the pictures and the little knickknacks. He seems to find it hard to believe that such refinement exists in the world. The softness is almost unbearable to him. When she looks at Ilan, she feels clearly how he sees himself now in Ofer’s eyes, all nonchalant citizenry, demilitarized, almost criminal. Ilan crosses his arms over his chest, juts his chin out slightly, and murmurs to himself in a deep voice.

Ofer sits down at the kitchen table and holds his head in his hands. His eyes almost close. Gradually, a casual conversation begins to hum among the three of them, crumbs of speech that no one listens to, whose purpose is only to give Ofer a few minutes to adapt, to connect the world he has come from with this world, or perhaps, she thinks, to detach them from one another.

She knows — she explains to Avram — that she and Ilan cannot even guess the effort it takes to erase, or at least to suspend, his other world so that he can come into the house without getting burned in the transition. The thought must pass through Ilan’s mind at that moment too, and they glance at each other. Their faces are still full of joy, but somewhere deep in their eyes, they avoid each other like accomplices to a crime.

Suddenly Ofer gets up and stands there rubbing his shaved head vigorously. He slowly moves between the kitchen and the dining area, back and forth, back and forth. Ilan and Ora watch him with sidelong looks; he isn’t here, that’s obvious. He’s walking a different track, one that is imprinted in his mind. They concentrate on slicing bread and frying food. Ilan turns the radio on loud, and the sounds of the midday news program pour into the room. Ofer revives immediately and sits back down at the table as though he had never gotten up. A young soldier from the Jalameh checkpoint is telling the interviewer how she caught a seventeen-year-old Palestinian boy that morning trying to smuggle explosives through in his pants. She giggles that today happens to be her birthday. She’s nineteen. “Happy birthday,” says the interviewer. “Cool!” the soldier laughs. “I couldn’t have thought of a better birthday present.”

Ofer listens. Jalameh is no longer in his sector. He served there about eighteen months ago. It could have been him who had found the explosives. Or not found them. After all, that’s his job, to stand there so the terrorist blows himself up on him and not on civilians. Ora’s breath is short. She feels something approaching. She recites to herself the names of the checkpoints and posts where he’s served. Hizmeh and Halhul and Al Jab’ah, those ugly names. And all that Arabic, she thinks as she pads from one foot to the other, with the gurgles and grunts and yammers. Why were Ilan and Avram so into it in high school and the army? She riles herself up even more: I mean, almost every word in that language has something or other to do with tragedy or catastrophe, doesn’t it? She shoves Ilan: “Look at how you’re chopping those vegetables. Don’t you know he likes his salad chopped really fine? You set the table, do me a favor!” Ilan throws his hands up with an obedient smile, and Ora attacks the vegetables. She grabs a sharp knife, swings it, and lands it down furiously to dice Abd al-Qader al-Husseini with Haj Amin al-Husseini and Shukeiri and Nimeiri and Ayatollah Khomeini and Nashashibi and Arafat and Hamas and Mahmoud Abbas and all their kasbahs and Qaddafis and SCUDs and Izz ad-Din al-Qassam and Qassam rockets and Kafr Qasim and Gamal Abdel Nasser. She slaughters them all together: Katyushas and intifadas and martyr’s brigades, and the sacred and the sanctified and the oppressed, Abu-Jilda and Abu Jihad, Jebalia and Jabaliyya, Jenin and Zarnuga, and Marwan Barghuouti, too. God knows where all those places are, anyway. If they could at least have normal-sounding names. She sighs. At least if their names were just a little nicer! Feverishly brandishing the knife, she finely chops up Khan Yunis and Sheikh Munis, Deir Yassin and Sheikh Yassin, Saddam Hussein and al-Qawuqji. All they bring is trouble, from the very first minute it’s been nothing but trouble with them, she growls through gritted teeth. And what about Sabra and Shatila, and what about Al-Quds and the Nakba, and jihad and the shaheeds and Allahu akbar , and Khaled Mashal and Hafez al-Assad and Kōzō Okamoto? She pounds them all indiscriminately like a hornet’s nest that must be destroyed, and she adds Baruch Goldstein and Yigal Amir, and with a sudden revelation she also throws in Golda and Begin and Shamir and Sharon and Bibi and Barak and Rabin, and Shimon Peres too — after all, don’t they have blood on their hands? Did they really do everything they could so she could get five minutes of peace and quiet around here? All those people who razed her life, who keep nationalizing another one of her children every second — she stops when she notices Ofer’s and Ilan’s looks. She wipes the sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand and asks angrily, “What? What is it?” As if they too are to blame for something. Then she quiets herself. “It’s nothing, never mind, I just remembered something, something was getting on my nerves.” She dresses the salad generously with olive oil and a quick dash of salt and pepper, squeezes a lemon, and puts the lovely bowl down in front of Ofer, a kaleidoscope of colors and scents. “Here you go, Ofer’ke. An Arabic salad, just the way you like it.”

Ofer arches his eyebrows to express his opinion of her curious performance. He is still moving very slowly. His distracted look gets trapped by a newspaper on the table and he stares at a cartoon without comprehending it, without knowing the context. He asks if there was anything on the news this week. Ilan gives him a report and Ofer flips through the paper. He’s not interested, Ora thinks. This country, which he is protecting, doesn’t really interest him. She’s sensed that in him for a while now: it’s as though the connection between the outer layer, where he spends most of his time, and the interior one, here, has been severed. “Where’s the sports?” he asks, and Ilan extricates the sports section from the recycling pile. Ofer buries his head in it. Ora asks cautiously if he hears the news over there, if he’s been following what’s going on in Israel. He shrugs one shoulder wearily but also with a strange bitterness: all those arguments, right, left, same difference, who can be bothered.

He gets out of his chair, kneels, unfastens the straps of his backpack, and starts emptying it out. His skull amazes her: so large, full of power, and solid. Such a complex structure of heavy, mature bones. She stands there wondering when he had time to develop bones like that and how this head could have passed through her body. When he opens the backpack, a sharp stink of dirty socks fills the air. Ora and Ilan laugh awkwardly. The smell speaks volumes: Ora has the feeling that if she focuses on it, if she splits it into its filaments, she will know exactly what Ofer has gone through these past few weeks.

As though hearing her thoughts, he looks up at her with a pair of large eyes that are dark with exhaustion. For a moment he is very young again, needing Mom to read him. “What is it, Ofer’ke?” she asks feebly, alarmed at his expression. “Nothing is it,” he answers habitually, and forces a tired smile. Pussycat, pussycat, where have you been? she thinks. I’ve been to Halhul and the kasbah in Hebron. Pussycat, pussycat, what did you there? I lay in an ambush and shot rubber bullets at kids throwing stones .