David Grossman - To the End of the Land

“Here, this is how I live,” he finally says quietly, perhaps honestly, perhaps as a modest bribe of candor.

“How?” Her voice above him is grating, scratching.

“Like this. I watch.”

“Then maybe it’s time you went in,” she hisses and starts walking again.

“What? Wait—”

“Listen, Ofer’s fine,” she cuts him off, and Avram rushes after her excitedly. “What? How do you know?”

“I called home from the grocery store to pick up my messages.”

“You can do that?”

“Of course you can.” Then she mutters to herself, “You can do a lot more than that.”

“And? Did he leave a message?”

“Twelve.”

She lurches forward again, cutting like a razor. Fine strands of a morning spiderweb graze her face, and she brushes them away angrily. The ghost of an adolescent, grumbling girl flashes in her movements.

“At least until last night he was fine,” she reports. “The last message was from eleven-fifteen.” She glances at her watch. Avram looks to see how high the sun is. They both know: eleven-fifteen is good, but meaningless now, like yesterday’s newspaper. As soon as he was finished leaving the message, an hourglass turned over somewhere, and the timer started from zero again, with no advantage to hope over fear.

“Wait, why didn’t you just call him on his cell phone?”

“Him?” She shakes her head, giggles nervously. “No, no way.” She half turns her head to him, like a doe to a hunter, and asks wordlessly, with her desperate eyes: Do you really not understand? Do you still not get it, that I can’t, I absolutely can’t, until he’s home?

The path grows difficult and stubborn, and Avram is anxious. Ofer is suddenly so close, his voice still echoing in Ora’s ears. Even his clothes, which swathe Avram, rustle as though Ofer’s spirit blows through them.

“But what did he say?”

“He said all kinds of things. Joking around. Ofer, you know.”

“Yes,” Avram says, smiling to himself.

“What do you mean ‘yes’?” she spits. “What do you even know about him?”

“Whatever you tell me,” Avram replies in bewilderment.

“Yes, stories. Stories we have plenty.”

He sinks into himself as he walks. Something happened, that’s obvious. Something bad.

As far as the eye can see, stalks of sage soar in purple and white, campions glow in a rosy hue, and buttercups take over the red shift from aged, shedding poppies. Pine needles are dotted with beads of dew. The sound of bells tinkling: a herd passes nearby, lambs tremble on spindly legs, the bellies of pregnant sheep dangle, almost touching the ground. Ora glares at Avram as he gazes at the udders and bellies, and for a moment he is embarrassed, as though caught red-handed at something.

They walk on, panting and groaning up the vertical path. Avram is restless, almost frightened. They’d shared a night of total love, and it seemed their bodies had finally been able to trust again and to believe they would not be separated for many years to come. All night they’d made love and slept and talked and dozed and made love and laughed and made love. Neta had come and gone, leaned in and faded away, and with his body he had told Ora about her. A rare tranquillity had engulfed him, and as if in a dream he had imagined them swinging him between them, very slowly, from one to the other. When he lay by her side afterward he felt happiness return to him with slow steps, like blood to a deadened limb.

“One thing I know, which I never imagined,” he said during one of those hours, with her head resting on his chest.

“Hmmm?”

“You can live an entire life without purpose.”

“Is that what this is?” She lifted up on her elbows and looked at him. “Without any purpose at all?”

“Once, when I was still the dearly departed me, if you’d told me this was what I could expect, a whole life of this, I’d have done myself in on the spot. Today I know it’s not that terrible. That you certainly can. I’m living proof.”

“But what does that mean? Explain it to me. What do you mean, a life without purpose?”

He pondered. “I mean that nothing really hurts you and nothing really makes you happy. You live because you live. Because you happen not to be dead.”

She managed to resist asking what he would feel if something happened to Ofer.

“Everything passes in front of you,” he said. “It’s been that way for ages.”

“Everything?”

“There’s no desire.”

“And when you’re with me like this?” She moved her hips against him.

He smiled. “Well, there are moments.”

She turned over and lay on him. They moved slowly against each other. She arched her back a little and opened to him, and he did not enter. He was happy this way, and he wanted to talk.

“And lots of times I thought—”

She stopped moving abruptly: something in his face, in his voice.

“If you have a child, say,” he mumbled quickly, “that’s a purpose in life, isn’t it? That’s something worth getting up for in the morning, no?”

“What? Yes, usually. Yes.”

“Usually? Not always? Not all the time?”

Ora thought back to some of the mornings this past year. “Not always. Not all the time.”

“Really?” Avram asked wonderingly. “But I thought …”

They lay silently again, moving over each other’s bodies carefully. His foot curled over her shin, his hand caressed the back of her neck.

“Can I tell you something weird?”

“Tell me something weird,” she hummed and held her whole body against his.

“When I got back from there, right? When I started to understand what had happened to me, you know, all that”—he waved his hand dismissively—“I suddenly realized that even when I’d had it, I mean the desire, and a purpose in life, I somehow, in some recess, always knew it was only borrowed. Only for a limited time.” He paused. “Only till the truth emerged.”

“And what is the truth?” she asked, and thought: the two rows of hitters. The cruel decree.

“That it’s not really mine,” said Avram stiffly. He propped himself up on his arms and gazed at her intently. “Or that I don’t even deserve to have it,” he added, like someone deciding to confess to a horrible crime at the end of a trivial questioning.

A notion flitted through her mind: And if he has a child?

“What happened?” Avram asked.

“Hold me.”

If he has a child, she thought feverishly, his own child, whom he’ll raise. How did I never think of that? Of the possibility that he will be a father one day—

“Ora, what’s up?”

She breathed into his neck. “Hold me, don’t leave me. You’ll walk with me all the way home, right?”

“Of course. We’re walking together, what are you—”

“And we’ll always, always be together?” She tossed him the fragment of a sentence that had suddenly floated to the surface of her memory, a promise he’d sent her by telegram on her twentieth birthday.

“Until death us do join,” he completed the sentence without hesitation.

And then, at that moment, Avram felt that Ofer was in danger. He had never known the sensation before: something dark and cool slashed his heart. The pain was intolerable. He held Ora hard. They both froze.

“Did you feel it?” she whispered in his ear. “You felt it, didn’t you?”

Avram breathed into her hair, mute. His body was bathed in cold sweat.

“Think about him,” she whispered and clung to him with her whole body until she put him inside her. “Think of him inside me.”

They moved slowly, gripping each other as in the eye of a storm.

“Think about him, think about him!” she cried out.

“Listen,” she says angrily a few hours later, on the path from Yagur up to the Carmel. “He left me a message yesterday. Ofer. ‘I’m okay, the bad guys not so okay.’ ”