David Grossman - To the End of the Land

The next morning, before her first patient, she got the 18 at the central bus station, and this time she sat in front. Every three or four stops, she got off and changed to a different bus. Sometimes she crossed the street and rode the other way. She tried to sit in a different place every time, as though her body were a pawn in an imaginary game of chess. When she realized she was late for her third patient, she had a brief moment of fear that her clinic directors would call her in for another talk, but she postponed the thought to a time when she would have more energy. She was so tired during those days that the moment she sat down she would let her head droop, and sometimes she’d doze off for several minutes. Every so often she would drowsily look up at the people on the bus through a haze. Voices from conversations between strangers and phone calls penetrated her slumber. If they stopped at a station and no one got on, relief would immediately spread through the bus, and the passengers would talk to one another. A heavyset elderly man adorned with Red Army medals who sat next to Ora on one of her journeys pulled a large brown envelope from his shopping basket and showed her an X-ray of his kidney, which had a growth on it. Through the X-ray, Ora could dimly make out two Ethiopian soldiers from Border Patrol checking the papers of a young man who might or might not have been Arab. He kept kicking at the sidewalk.

They stop and take a breath. Hands on waists. Why have we been running like this? they ask one another silently. But something is already kicking at their heels, stirring pins and needles in their souls, and they merely glance at the beautiful Netofa Valley and walk on quickly through a forest of terebinth, oak, and birch trees. Ora walks silently, her eyes on the path. Avram throws her a few cautious looks and his face constricts and closes up from one step to the next. “Look,” she whispers, pointing. On the path, at their feet, a crowded series of hieroglyphics emerges, a crosshatch that flows and runs from all directions until it congregates in a cluster of snails on one branch of a bush.

By the second week, some of the drivers recognized her. But since there was nothing suspicious about her, they filtered her out of their minds so they could focus on more important things. She began to identify a few regular passengers and knew where they got on and where they got off. If they talked on their cell phones, or with their fellow travelers, she also knew something about their ailments and their families, and what they thought about the government. An elderly couple drew her attention in particular. The man was tall and thin, the woman very small, shriveled, and almost translucent. When she sat down, her feet swung without reaching the floor of the bus. She always had a bad, phlegmy cough, and the man would worriedly examine her used tissues and replace them with fresh ones. Ora woke up a little every time the couple got on, at the market. They took the bus to the last stop, the way she did, and to her surprise they almost always switched with her to the bus going back and got off at the same station where they had originally boarded, on the other side of the street. She couldn’t understand the meaning of their route.

Day after day, for three or four weeks, Ora took the 18 bus and spent at least an hour traveling around the city. She discovered that the bad thoughts loosened their grip on her while she was on the bus. Most of the time she did not have a single complete thought, merely transposing her body from one stop to the next. She grew accustomed to the jolting, the screeching brakes, the potholes, and the religious radio stations blasting their admonitions at full volume. And she realized that Ilan never asked her what she did for long stretches of the day, and she could keep her activities from him. Sometimes, when they sat down for dinner, she would stare at him and silently scream with her eyes: How can you not sense where I am and what I’m doing? How can you let me go on like this?

“Just then, the thing with Ofer happened,” she says cryptically to Avram, who has been quiet for a long time. “We had a crazy month, with the constant questionings in the battalion and the brigade, and the inquiries and investigations. Don’t ask.” She sighs and swallows her saliva. Here comes the moment when I have to tell him. He has to hear it, to know, to judge for himself.

In those days it seemed to Ora that every word she uttered, every look she gave, and even every silence were perceived by Ofer, Ilan, and Adam as a provocation, the premise for a fight. On these bus journeys, she felt a slight reprieve from them, and from herself too, from her strange insistence on bickering with them over and over again, and from her petty, circuitous questions, which were honestly starting to drive her mad. They burst out of her like acidic hiccups every time she so much as thought about what had happened there, when she merely heard the beeps signaling the hourly radio news, or even when she just thought about Ofer. “It’s like I couldn’t think of him without going through the incident first.”

“But what happened?” Avram asks.

She listens inside herself, as though the answer will come, finally, from there. Avram holds his backpack straps with both hands — grips them.

One day Ora left the clinic, apologized distractedly to a couple in the waiting room, and hopped on the 18 bus for a quick ride. When they were near the Mekasher bus depot, she heard a very loud explosion. Then there was a moment of bottomless silence. The passengers’ faces slowly foundered and turned to pulp. A powerful stench of excrement spread through the air, and Ora was flushed with cold sweat. People started to shout, curse, and cry, and begged the driver to let them out. The driver stopped in the middle of the street and opened the doors, and the passengers streamed out, fighting one another, kicking and punching to get out first. The driver looked in the mirror and asked, “Are you all staying?” Ora turned back to see who else he was talking to, and there was her elderly couple, huddled against each other, the woman’s tiny, almost bald head buried in the man’s body as he leaned over her and caressed her shoulder. Their expressions were difficult to describe: a mixture of shock and fear and also terrible disappointment. The radio immediately switched to emergency broadcast format—“First of all, allow me to express my condolences, to wish a speedy recovery to the injured, and to grieve with the families,” said ministers and security experts one after the other. The explosion had occurred on a bus going the opposite way, near Davidka Square, which Ora’s bus had driven past only moments before. The ambulances were already roaring to Shaare Zedek and Hadassah hospitals.

The next morning, soldiers and policemen manned all the bus stops, and the few passengers were even more nervous, irritable, and suspicious than usual. There were outbursts of anger at anyone who pushed in line, trod on a toe, or bumped into someone. People talked loudly on their cell phones. Ora felt they were using the phones as breathing tubes to the outside world. When the bus passed the site of the attack, there was a silence. Through the window she saw a bearded Orthodox man, a volunteer from the victim-identification unit, standing in a treetop and using a cloth and tweezers to peel something gently off a branch and place it in a plastic bag. A group of kindergarten children got on the bus in Beit HaKerem, and a few of them were holding colorful balloons. They laughed and chattered and ran around, and everyone stared at the balloons. When one inevitably popped, although everyone could see it was just a balloon, a bitter screech of panic pierced the bus, and a few of the children burst into tears. The passengers, ashamed and exhausted, avoided one another’s eyes.