David Grossman - To the End of the Land

“Didn’t he ask where you were, where you’d disappeared to, how you were doing?”

“Yes, of course, several times. He’s a terrible worrier. The biggest worrier of all of us. And he always has to know”—she doesn’t feel like telling him anything now, but it tumbles out of her anyway, so that he’ll know this too, so that he’ll remember—“he has this need, it’s really compulsive, ever since he was a child, to know exactly where each of us is, so no one will disappear on him for too long. He needs to hold us all together—”

She stops talking and remembers how, as a child, Ofer used to get scared every time an argument broke out, even a tiny one, between her and Ilan. He would dance around and push them at each other, force them to be close. How, then, did he end up being the reason we broke up? she wonders. She lurches forward again in a sudden surge, butting the air with her forehead, and Avram wonders if Ilan left her a message, too. Or perhaps it was Adam who called and said something that hurt her.

The dog rubs up against him as though to strengthen him and to seek refuge from Ora’s fury. Her tail droops and her smile is gone.

“What was it you said? ‘I’m okay, the bad guys—’ ”

“The bad guys not so okay.”

Avram repeats the words silently. Tasting the arrogance of youth, he thinks—

But Ora is already muttering out loud what he was thinking: “ ‘Back in Pruszkow, they didn’t say things like that.’ ”

Avram throws up his hands: “I can’t win with you! You know it all.”

His attempt at flattery falls flat. She sticks her chin out and lopes ahead.

In the shift logs kept by the translators at Bavel, he had written a regular column entitled “Our Town of Pruszkow,” in which he logged his reports using the trembling, suspicious grumblings of the shtetl-dwellers Tzeske, Chomek, and Fishl-Parech. An Egyptian MiG-21 transferred from Zakazik to Luxor, a Tupolev grounded due to rudder problems, battle rations issued to commando fighters — all these were adorned with churlish, defeatist, and bitter commentary from the three elderly Pruszkowites invented by Avram. He constantly expanded and enriched their characters, until the base commander uncovered “the Jewish underground,” as Avram called it, and sentenced him to a week of night-guard duty next to the flag in the parade courtyard, to strengthen his nationalist convictions.

“But Ora,” he says, to exploit quickly the sweetness of memory that might be softening her heart toward him.

“Well, what is it?”

With a stifled grunt, almost sobbing. Without even turning her face to him. Are her shoulders trembling or is it just his imagination?

“Were there any other messages?”

“A few, nothing important.”

“From Ilan, too?”

“Yes, he deigned to call, your friend. Finally heard what was going on here, and all of a sudden he’s terribly worried about the situation in Israel, and even about my disappearance. Imagine.”

“But how did he know you—”

“Ofer told him.”

Avram waits. He knows there’s more.

“And he’s coming back to Israel with Adam. But it’ll take them a few days, he’s not sure when they’ll get on a flight. They’re in Bolivia now, on some salt flats.” She sniffs angrily: There’s enough there for all my wounds.

“And Adam?”

“What about Adam?”

“Did he also leave you a message?”

She stops, amazed, and realizes: I can’t believe it.

“Ora?”

Because only now does she remember that Ilan said Adam sent his regards. She was so caught up with herself, with what she was doing, that she almost forgot. He specifically said, “Adam says hi.” And she’d forgotten that. Adam is right, he really is. An unnatural mother.

“Ora, what happened?”

“Never mind, forget it.” She’s almost running again. “There weren’t any important messages at my place.”

“Your place?”

“Leave me alone, okay? What’s with the interrogations? Just leave me alone!”

“I’m leaving,” he murmurs, with a sinking feeling in his gut.

A cloud of gnats accompanies them, forcing them to breathe through their noses and keep quiet for a long time. Avram notices exposed tree roots surrounded by mounds of damp earth: there were wild boars here last night.

Later, they come across a big dark rock with letters carved deep: Nadav . A stone next to it reads: A grove in memory of Captain Nadav Klein. Fell in the War of Attrition in the Jordan Valley. 27 Sivan 5729. July 12, 1969 . Across the way, among pine needles and pinecones, a monument and a plaque: In memory of Staff Sergeant Menachem Hollander, son of Chana and Moshe, Haifa, Kfar Hasidim. Fell in the Yom Kippur War in the battle for Taoz on 13 Tishrei 5734, at the age of 23 .

A short while later there is a huge concrete relief depicting the entire Canal region in 1973, marked with Our Forces’ Positions —Magma is there too, so tiny — and through the long, serrated leaves of a group of cactuses, they see gilded statues of a doe and a lion, and a monument bearing the names of eight soldiers who fell in the battle for the Suez Canal on May 23, 1970. Ora looks out of the corner of her eye to make sure Avram is able to cross these hurdles of memory in one piece, but he seems to be troubled only by her now, and she wonders how to tell him, where to start.

She walks too fast for him to keep up. The dog stops every so often, pants, and looks questioningly at Avram. He shrugs his shoulders: I don’t get it, either. From the main road of Usafia, opposite the Shuk Yussuf greengrocers, they turn to follow the marker down a path that leads through a sparse grove of pine trees. The earth is covered with mounds of trash and filth, tires, furniture, old newspapers, shattered televisions, dozens of empty plastic bottles.

“They throw this stuff here on purpose,” she hisses. “I’m telling you, it’s their twisted revenge on us.”

“Whose?”

“Theirs.” She sweeps her arm broadly. “You know exactly who.”

“But then they’re just making their own place dirty! This is their village.”

“No, no, inside their houses it’s all sparkling, glimmering, I know them. But everything on the outside belongs to the state, to the Jews, and it’s a commandment to junk that up. That’s probably part of their jihad, too. Look here — look at this!” She kicks an empty bottle, misses, and almost falls on her rear end.

Avram cautiously reminds her that Usafia is a Druze village, and they’re not obligated by the jihad commandment. “And anyway, when we came down from Arbel, and also near the Kinneret, and at the Amud River, we saw piles of trash, totally Jewish trash.”

“No, no, it’s their protest. Don’t you understand? Because they don’t have the guts to really revolt. I honestly would respect them a lot more if they just came out against us openly.”

She’s feeling bad, Avram senses, and she’s taking it out on them. He looks at her and sees her face turn ugly.

“Aren’t you angry at them? Don’t you have any anger or hatred about what they did to you there?”

Avram thinks. The old man from the meat locker comes to his mind, lying naked on the sidewalk, banging his head against it, twitching in front of the soldiers.

“What do you have to think about for so long? Me, if someone did to me a quarter of what they did to you, I’d run them down to the corners of the earth. I’d hire mercenaries to take revenge, even now.”

“No,” he says, and runs a vision of his tormentors in front of his eyes: the chief interrogator, Lieutenant Colonel Doctor Ashraf, with his sly little eyes and his sickeningly flowery Hebrew, and the hands that tore Avram to shreds. And the jailors in Abbasiya, who beat him whenever they could, who were drawn to torture him more than the others, as though something about him drove them crazy. And the two who buried him alive, and the guy who stood on the side and took photographs, and the two men they brought in from outside — Ashraf told him they were trucked in especially for him, two guys from death row, rapists from a civilian prison in Alexandria — even them he doesn’t hate anymore. All he feels when he thinks of them is insipid despair, and sometimes simple, raw sadness at having had the misfortune to end up there and see the things he saw.