David Grossman - To the End of the Land

Now, in the kitchen, he tells them he hasn’t changed his clothes or even showered for a week. His speaks tightly, hardly moving his lips, and Ora and Ilan strain to decipher his words. Ora watches Ilan surreptitiously move to the balcony, to close a window or open a door, or just stand there on his own for a moment. She leans over the damp, sticky, greasy pile that has tumbled out of Ofer’s backpack and gathers up uniforms, stiff socks, a military belt, undershirts, underwear. When she picks up the mess, sand leaks from pockets, and one bullet and a crumpled bus ticket fall out. She shoves the clothes into the machine and turns the dial to the most vigorous cycle. When the machine buzzes and the drum starts spinning, she feels the first sense of relief, as though she has finally revved up the process of domesticating this stranger.

And he sits at the table laid out for him, his head buried in the newspaper, and he can’t find the strength to talk. He hasn’t slept for thirty-some hours. There was lots of activity this week, but he’ll tell them later. They quickly concur:

“Of course, yes, the main thing is that you’re here,” Ora says, “we almost lost our minds waiting.”

“Mom’s been cooking for you all morning.”

“Don’t exaggerate! Dad’s exaggerating as usual, I haven’t had time to make anything at all. It’s a good thing I baked the brownies yesterday.”

“Oh come on,” Ilan moans, and presents his argument for Ofer to judge: “She was out shopping all afternoon yesterday. Robbed the greengrocer, looted the butcher. By the way, how’s the food over there?”

“Better, there’s a new cook and we don’t have rats in the kitchen anymore.”

“Are you with the same guys from training?”

“More or less. A few new ones came from another battalion, but they’re all right.”

“And did everyone go home this weekend?”

“Please, Dad, let’s talk later. I’m dead tired now.”

A strange silence falls on them. Ilan squeezes oranges and Ora heats up the meatballs. A strange boy with a strange smell sits at the kitchen table. Long threads untangle behind him all the way to a place that is difficult to see and hard to think about. Ilan is telling her something. Some minutiae about a deal he’s been working on for two years between a Canadian venture-capital fund and two young guys from Beersheba who are developing a way to prevent drunk driving. Everything was ready to be signed, almost a done deal, and then at the last minute, when they took their pens out …

The words fail to penetrate her. She cannot act out her role in this play, all of whose actors are real. Her lines are familiar, but the space in which the play is staged — the shell of Ofer’s tired, depressed silence — makes everything ridiculous and broken, and eventually Ilan also ebbs away and stops talking.

Standing over the sink, Ora shuts her eyes for a stolen moment, concentrates, and says her usual prayer — not to an exalted God, but the opposite. A pagan at heart, she makes due with little gods, day-to-day icons, and small miracles: If she gets three green lights in a row, if she has time to bring the laundry in before it rains, if the dry cleaner doesn’t discover the hundred-shekel note she left in her jacket, then … And of course there are her usual bargains with fate. Someone rear-ends her bumper? Excellent: Ofer just won immunity for a week! A patient refuses to pay a two-thousand-shekel debt? Penance! Another two thousand credits for Ofer are recorded somewhere.

From within the unpleasant silence a new round of domestic chatter starts up.

“Where’s the onion left from the salad?”

“Do you need it?”

“I was thinking of frying some up with the meatballs.”

“And put black pepper on it, he likes black pepper, don’t you, Ofer?”

“Yes, but not too much. Our cook is Moroccan, his shakshuka sets my mouth on fire.”

“So you eat shakshuka ?”

“Three times a day.”

And the strand thickens furtively, slyly, weaving back and forth, and then Adam calls and says he’s two seconds from home, he’s just stopping to buy the paper and some snacks and they shouldn’t start eating without him. The three of them exchange grinning looks — Adam, operating us all by remote control. Ilan and Ora blather on about everything that’s changed in the house in the weeks since Ofer left. “He was always involved in all the goings-on at home,” she tells Avram on a path near Tzippori that cuts through an open field covered with thousands of brown-orange woolly-bear caterpillars squirming in unison inside their silk cocoons, so that the entire field seems to be dancing. “He always wanted to know about every piece of furniture we were thinking of buying and demanded that we report to him whenever an appliance broke and how much it cost to fix and what the repairman was like. He made us swear we would never, God forbid, throw out any broken appliance, or even the old parts, until he could examine them. When he started the army he even asked us to keep minor repairs for him to do when he was on leave — electrical work, plumbing, stopped-up drains, broken blinds, and yard work, of course.” But it seems to Ora that he’s a little tired of that now. The mundane defects of the house no longer concern him.

The table is set and the food is ready, and Ilan says something that manages to bring the first spark of a smile to Ofer’s face, which they both treat as though it were an ember they have to breathe life into. Ofer tells them they have a cat with two kittens in the pillbox, and he’s decided to adopt the mother. He blushes slightly: “I was thinking, you know, just so I’d have something maternal there.” He gives an embarrassed laugh, and Ora hovers over the frying pan odors, and here is Adam, finally home. “Everything’s cold,” she complains, but everything’s still steaming hot, and the boys hug, and the sounds of their voices mingle, and they laugh together, a sound unlike any other. “Sometimes, here, on this journey,” she tells Avram, “I dream about that sound, and I can really hear the two of them laughing.”

Ofer’s face lights up when he sees Adam, his eyes follow him wherever he goes, and only now does he seem to understand that he’s home, and he begins to awaken from his three-week slumber. And when Ofer awakes, they do, too. The four of them come to life, and the kitchen itself, like a reliable old machine, joins them in tracking Ofer’s movements, loyally running in the background, humming with the quiet commotion and the jingle of its unseen pistons and wheels. Listen to the soundtrack, she thinks. Believe in the soundtrack. This is the right tune: a pot bubbles, the fridge hums, a spoon clangs on a plate, the faucet flows, a stupid commercial on the radio, your voice and Ilan’s voice, your children’s chatter, their laughter — I never want this to end. From the pantry comes the rhythmic whirr of the washing machine, now augmented by the sound of metal clicking; probably a belt buckle, or a screw left in a pocket, but not, Ora hopes, another misplaced bullet, which will suddenly explode and fly at us all in the third act.

One day about a year ago she asked the secretary at her clinic to cancel her next patient. She’d had a rough day, hardly slept all night—“the stuff at home had already started,” she says, and Avram listens tensely: there is something in her voice — and she thought she might pop over to one of the boutiques on Emek Refaim to buy a scarf or a pair of sunglasses or something to cheer her up. She walked down Jaffa Street toward the parking lot where she left her car every day. The street was uncharacteristically still and the eerie silence disquieted her. She wanted to turn around and go back to the clinic, but she kept walking, and noticed that people on the street were walking quickly, without looking one another in the eye. A moment later she herself began to act the same way, lowering her eyes and avoiding people, except to steal secret glances, to scan and sort. Mostly, she looked to see if they were carrying anything, a package or a large bag, or if they looked nervous. But almost everyone looked somehow suspect, and she thought perhaps they saw her that way, too. Perhaps she should let them know that she posed no danger? That they could be calm around her and save themselves a few heartbeats? On the other hand, maybe she should not disclose that sort of information so casually here. She pulled back her shoulders and forced herself to straighten up and look right at people’s faces. When she did, she saw in almost every person a note that hinted at some latent possibility — the possibility of being a murderer or a victim, or both.