David Grossman - To the End of the Land

“I’m begging you,” she’d said to him roughly a year earlier, even before the whole thing happened, maybe a month before. “Don’t ever, ever shoot at them.”

“Then what am I supposed to do?” he asked with a smirk. He skipped and danced around her, his broad chest bare and red, holding up a filthy khaki undershirt and writhing like a matador avoiding a bull. Every so often he leaned down and planted a light kiss on her forehead or cheek. “Just tell me what to do with them, Mom. They’re a risk to people driving along the road!”

“Scare them,” she said cunningly, as though she were trying out a new theory of warfare. “Slap them, punch them, anything, just don’t shoot them!”

“We aim at the feet,” he explained calmly, with that same amused superiority she knew from Adam and Ilan and the military analysts on television and the government ministers and the army generals. “And don’t worry about them so much. The most a rubber bullet can do is break an arm or a leg.”

“And if you miss and take someone’s eye out?”

“Then that someone won’t throw stones again. Let me give you an example: one of our guys shot three boys throwing stones at the pillbox this week, bang-bang-bang , broke their legs, one each, very elegantly done, and believe me, those kids won’t be back there again.”

“But their brothers will! And their friends will, and in a few years their children will!”

“Maybe you should aim so they’ll never have any children,” Adam suggested as he walked by, quiet and shadowy.

The boys laughed with slight embarrassment and Ofer glanced awkwardly at Ora.

She grabbed his hand and dragged him into Ilan’s study and stood facing him. “Now! I want you to promise me right now that you will never shoot someone to hurt them!”

Ofer looked at her and the anger began to rise. “Mom, khalas , stop it, what are you … I have instructions, I have orders!”

Ora stomped her feet. “No! Never, do you hear me? You will never shoot to hurt a human being! For all I care, aim at the sky, aim at the ground, miss in every direction, just don’t hit anyone!”

“And if he’s holding a Molotov cocktail? If he has a gun? Huh?”

They’d already had this conversation, or one like it. Or maybe that was with Adam when he started his service. She knew all the arguments, and Ofer knew them, too. She had sworn to herself that she’d keep quiet, or at least be very careful. She was always afraid that at the decisive moment of battle, or if he were taken by surprise, ambushed, her words would enter his mind and fail him, or delay his reaction for a split second.

“If your life is in danger then okay, I’m not saying that. Then you try to save yourself any way you can, I’m not arguing about that, but only then!”

Ofer crossed his arms over his chest in Ilan’s broad, relaxed posture, and widened his grin. “And how exactly am I supposed to know whether my life is in danger? Maybe I could ask the guy to fill out a declaration of intent?”

She was trapped in the loathsome feeling she always got when he — when anyone — played with her, exploited her well-known lack of debating skills, the rickety assertions that came to her in such moments.

“Really, Mom. Wake up. Hello! There’s a war going on there! And anyway, I didn’t think you were exactly crazy about them.”

“What difference does it make what I think of them?” she screamed. “That’s not the point. I’m not arguing with you now about whether we should even be there or not!”

“Well, for all I care, we can get out of there today and let them live their fucked-up lives on their own and kill each other. But at this point in time, Mom, when I have the lousy luck of having to be there, what do you want me to do? No, tell me. D’you want me to lie there and spread my legs for them?”

He had never talked to her that way before. He was burning with rage. Her spirits fell. There must be a winning argument that would counteract all these claims of his. Her fingers spread in a mute scream next to her ears. Wait a minute. She exhaled and tried to gather her ragged thoughts. Soon she’d get it together and clarify to herself exactly what she wanted to say. She’d arrange the words along the right thread, the simple one. “Listen, Ofer, I’m not any smarter than you” (she wasn’t) “or any more moral than you” (even the word scared her; secretly she felt she didn’t really understand its true meaning, unlike everyone else, who apparently did), “but I do have — and this is a fact!” (she shrieked this in a slightly cheap way) “I do have more life experience than you!” (Really? Suddenly this too melted away: Do you really? With everything he’s going through in the army? With everything he sees and does, with everything he faces every single day?) “And I also know something that you simply cannot yet know, which is—”

Which is what? What? She could see the flash of amusement in his eyes, and swore she would not react to it. She would focus on the main point, on saving her child from the barbarian standing opposite her.

“That in five years — no, not five: one year! One year from now, when you get out, you’ll look at this situation in a totally different way. Wait! I’m not even talking about whether or not it’s just, I’m only talking about how one day you will look back at what happened there”—she heroically ignored his sniffle and the smirk spreading over his lips—“and you’ll thank me,” she said stubbornly; she was a little stuck, and they both knew it, stuck and desperately searching for the elusive winning argument. “You’ll see that you’ll thank me one day!”

“If I’m still alive to thank you.”

“And don’t talk to me like that!” she screamed, her face turning red. “I can’t stand those kinds of jokes, don’t you know that?”

Dad’s jokes, they both knew.

Tears of fury came to her eyes. She had almost grasped a brilliant answer in her mind, a logical, organized point, but as usual she lost her train of thought, dropped the stitch, and so she just reached out and held his arm pleadingly and looked up at him: a final argument that was in fact a plea for mercy, if not charity. “Promise me, Ofer, just don’t try to hurt someone intentionally.”

He shook his head, smiled, and shrugged his shoulders. “No can do, Mom. It’s war.”

They looked at each other. Their estrangement terrified them. A memory flashed in her mind. That same cold burn of terror and failure from almost thirty years ago, when they took Avram from her, when they nationalized her life. She felt the same old story again: this country, with its iron boot, had once again landed a thundering foot in a place where the state should not be.

“Okay, Mom, enough. What’s up with you? I’m just joking. Stop, enough.” He reached out to hug her, and she was seduced — how could she not be? A hug of his own initiative. He even held her whole body to him, until she felt the mechanical signal on her back: thwack-thwack-thwack .

And throughout the squabble, she tells Avram with her gaze lowered, she actually did have one crushing argument, which of course she didn’t tell Ofer, and which she is never allowed to use. Because what was really raging in her was not the eyes or the legs of some Palestinian kid, with all due respect, but rather her absolute certainty that Ofer could not hurt a human being, because if that happened, even if there were a thousand justifications, even if the guy was about to detonate an explosive device, Ofer’s life would never be the same. That was it. Quite simply, and irrefutably, he would have no life after that.

But when she took a step back and looked at him, at the strength of his body, at that skull, she wasn’t even certain about that.