David Grossman - To the End of the Land

When had she learned these movements and these looks? The nervous glances over her shoulder, the footsteps that seemed to sniff out their path and make their own choices. She discovered new things about herself, like symptoms of an emerging disease. It seemed as though the others, walking around her, everyone, even the children, were fitfully moving to the sounds of a whistle that only their bodies could hear, while they themselves were deaf to it. She walked faster, and her breath grew short. How do you get out of this? she wondered. How do you get away from here? When she reached a bus stop, she halted and sat down on one of the plastic seats. It had been years since she’d waited at a bus stop, and even this act of sitting on the smooth yellow plastic was an admission of defeat. She straightened up and slowed her breath. In a minute she would get up and keep walking. She remembered that in the first wave of suicide bombings, Ilan had gone with Ofer — Adam was in the army by then — to scout out safe walking routes from his school downtown to the stop where he got the bus for home. The first route was too close to where a terrorist had blown himself up on the 18 bus, killing twenty passengers. When Ilan suggested that Ofer could walk up the Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall, Ofer reminded him of the triple explosion on the mall, where five people were killed and a hundred and seventy injured. Ilan tried to outline a slightly longer route, which would go around the back and come out near the Mahaneh Yehuda market, but Ofer pointed out that this was exactly where a double suicide bombing had occurred: fifteen dead and seventeen injured. And anyway, he added, all the buses from town to Ein Karem go past the central bus station, where there had also been a bombing — the 18 again, twenty-five dead and forty-three injured.

And so the two of them roamed from street to street — as she recounts the story to Avram, she has the horrifying thought that Ofer may still have his orange spiral notebook where he writes the numbers of dead and wounded — and the streets and the alleyways where there hadn’t yet been a bombing seemed so foreordained and vulnerable that Ilan was amazed nothing had happened on them yet. Finally he gave up, stopped in the middle of a street, and said, “You know what, Oferiko? Just walk as fast as you can. Run, even.”

And the look Ofer gave him — he told Ora later — he will never forget.

As she was contemplating all this, a bus stopped at the station. When the door opened, Ora dutifully got up and stepped in, and only then realized she had no idea what the bus fare was or which route she was on. She hesitantly held out a fifty-shekel note, and the driver growled at her for change. She dug through her purse but couldn’t find any, and he hissed a curse, handed her a handful of coins, and hurried her in. She stood looking at the passengers, most of whom were older and had weary, gloomy faces. Some were on their way back from the market, propping crammed baskets between their feet. There were a few high school students in uniform who were strangely quiet, and Ora looked at them all with bewilderment and muted compassion. She wanted to turn around and get off—“I never meant to take the bus,” she tells Avram — but someone behind her pushed her farther in, and Ora padded a few steps ahead. Since there were no vacant seats, she stood holding the overhead bar, leaned her cheek on her arm, and watched the city through the window. What am I doing here? she thought. I don’t have to be here. They passed the jumble of shops on Jaffa Street, the Sbarro restaurant, and then Zion Square, where a booby-trapped refrigerator had blown up in 1975, killing, among many others, the artist Naftali Bezem’s son, whom she’d known in the army. Ora wondered if Bezem had been able to paint after his son’s death. At the YMCA stop, a few seats opened up, and she sat down and decided she would get off at the next stop. She stayed on as they passed Liberty Bell Park and Emek Refaim, and when the bus drove past Café Hillel she said, half out loud, Now you’re getting off and going in for a cup of coffee. And she kept going.

It was amazing to her how quiet the passengers were. Most of them gazed out the windows as she did, as though not daring to look at their fellow passengers. Every time the bus stopped at a station, they all sat up a little straighter and stared at the people getting on. The new passengers, in turn, scanned them with squinting eyes. It was a very quick exchange of glances, for a fraction of a second, but there was the wondrously complex labor of sorting and cataloging going on, and Ora stayed on the bus through the Katamonim neighborhood and the Malha Mall, until they reached the last stop and the driver looked at her in the rearview mirror and called out, “Lady, end of the road.” Ora asked if there was a bus back to town. “That one over there,” the driver said and pointed to the 18. “But run, ’cause he’s about to move. I’ll honk at him to wait for you.”

She got on the empty bus, and her eyes refracted a split-second scene that was torn, shattered, and bloody. She wondered where the safest seat was; had she not been embarrassed, she would have asked the driver. She tried to remember the many reports she’d heard about bus bombings and couldn’t decide whether most of them occurred when the terrorist got on the bus, in which case of course it would be in the front part, or whether he went farther inside, and then, once he was standing in the middle of the bus, surrounded by most of the passengers, he called out his Allahu akbar and pressed the button. She decided to sit in the back row and pushed away the thought of how the shrapnel and the metal studs would somehow be stopped before they reached her. But after a minute she felt too lonely, and she moved one row forward. Wondering if this simple switch might seal her fate in just a few moments, she met the driver’s probing eyes in the mirror. “And suddenly it occurred to me,” she tells Avram, “that he might end up thinking I’m the suicide bomber.”

After an hour of traveling she was exhausted but afraid to let down her guard. Her eyelids drooped and she fought the urge to lean her head on the window for a quick nap. For the last few days she had felt like a child who discovers, unhappily and too quickly, the grown-ups’ secrets. A week earlier, she’d sat down one morning at Café Moment when the place was neither full nor empty, and a short, stocky woman wearing a heavy coat had come in, holding a baby covered with a blanket on her shoulder. She was not a young woman, around forty-five, and perhaps that was what seemed suspicious, because suddenly a whisper of “It’s not a baby” flew through the air, and the place turned upside down in an instant. People leaped up, overturned chairs as they fled, knocked over plates and glasses, fought one another to get to the door. The woman in the coat observed the commotion with a baffled look and did not seem to comprehend that it was all because of her. Then she sat down at a table and placed the baby on her lap. Ora, unable to move, watched the woman, transfixed. She unwrapped the blanket, unfastened the buttons of a little purple coat, and smiled at the chubby, sleepy face that peered out. She cooed at the baby: “Ah-googoo, googoo, googoo.”

The next afternoon — Ora tells him on their way up to the Reish Lakish lookout point, as they step in the footprints of ancient Rabbinic sages on a glaring hot day; the level path winds comfortably through carob and oak trees, and plump cows graze in the distance — she asked her secretary to cancel her next session again, walked to the 18 bus stop, and took the bus to the last station. Since her afternoon was free and she didn’t feel like being alone at home, she took the bus back all the way to the first stop, in the Kiryat HaYovel neighborhood, where she changed to another bus and took it back downtown. She got off and walked around for a while, watched the reflection of the street behind her as she window-shopped, scanned the passersby, and forced herself to move slowly.