David Grossman - To the End of the Land

The path seems to be trying to shake off the filth, curving sharply to the left and spitting them out into the Cheik riverbed, then descending and plunging into the belly of the earth. They have to watch their steps because the rocks are slippery from the morning dew and the path is crisscrossed with sinewy tree roots. The sun dances through the foliage in tiny pieces of light.

How come Adam said hi to me? she wonders. What happened that made him do that? What is he feeling?

Oak trees and terebinths and pine trees, grandfathers and grandmothers by the looks of them, lean in from both banks of the riverbed, and ivy tumbles down their branches. Here and there is an arbutus, and then a massive pine tree on the ground, hewn, its pinecones dead and its trunk turning white across the path. In unison, Avram and Ora look away.

Next to a dried-up reservoir filled with giant, blighted reeds, two tall boys with unkempt hair come toward them. One has thick, dark dreadlocks, while golden curls tumble from the other’s head, and they both wear tiny yarmulkes. Their faces are welcoming, and they carry large backpacks with sleeping bags rolled on top. Ora and Avram are experts at these encounters by now. They almost always say a quick “hello,” lower their eyes, and let the other hikers pass. But this time Ora greets the boys with a broad grin and takes off her backpack. “Where are you from, guys?” she asks.

The boys exchange somewhat surprised looks, but her smile is warm and inviting.

“Feel like a little coffee break? I just bought some fresh biscuits. Kosher,” she adds piously with a glance at their yarmulkes. She chatters and giggles with them, abounding with motherly warmth and a certain flirtatiousness. They accept her invitation, even though only an hour ago, on Mount Shokef, they’d had coffee with a doctor from Jerusalem who’d asked them all sorts of funny questions and written their answers in a notebook. Ora tenses up.

At her request, after a moment’s hesitation, they tell her what the doctor had told them when they sat down for coffee with him—“amazing coffee the guy makes,” the dark one notes. It turns out that he and his wife had planned for years to make this journey together as a couple, all along the trail, from the north down to Taba, almost a thousand kilometers. But his wife got sick and died three years ago — the boys interrupt each other, excited by the story, and perhaps by Ora’s transfixed look — and before she died she made him swear that he’d still do the hike, even on his own. “And she was always looking for something else for him to do along the way,” the golden-curled boy adds with a laugh. “In the end she had this idea”—the dark one snatches the story from his friend’s mouth—“that every time he met someone, he’d ask them two questions.” It seems as though only now, recounting the story, the boys allow its true meaning to penetrate them.

Ora smiles but she is hardly listening. Deep inside, she tries to picture the woman. She must have been very lovely, with a ripe, glowing beauty, spiritual yet corporeal, with flowing, honey-colored hair. For a moment she forgets her troubles and clings to this stranger — Tammi, Tamar, he’d called her, Tamyusha — who had tried, on her deathbed, to find that “something else” for her man. Or some one else, she thinks, and smiles with affection and subtle appreciation for this woman who knew her husband so well (that shirt of his, honestly, it looked like a tablecloth in an Italian trattoria) and equipped him with two questions that no woman could resist.

The two boys gather branches and straw. They light a fire and place a charred finjan on the embers and offer their collection of tea leaves. Ora takes more and more food out of her backpack. “Like a magician’s hat,” she laughs, delighting in her horn of plenty. Avram watches with some concern as she spreads out everything she bought that morning in the supermarket. Cans of hummus and labaneh , cracked green olives, a few pitas, still warm and soft. She urges them to taste everything, and they gladly comply. They haven’t had a meal this good for ages, they say with their mouths full. They boast of their frugality on the trip, of how industriously they are managing their little household, and she watches affectionately as they gobble down the food. Only Avram feels slightly out of place.

They compare notes on the long route from the south and from the north. Helpful advice and important information flow back and forth about surprises and obstacles waiting for both parties on the way. Ora thinks it was good that she left her phone number on the note for that man. If he calls, she can deliver the pages he’d written in her notebook.

Eventually Avram warms up. After all, the trail is like a home for him too, and to his surprise he even senses a hikers’ camaraderie that he’s never known before. And perhaps he, like Ora, enjoys the boys’ healthy appetites, and the fact that they are dining at his table, so to speak, and it seems completely natural to them. This is the way of the world: impoverished youngsters, frugal and ascetic by necessity, should occasionally enjoy the generosity of affluent adults they meet on their paths, and in this case, of a friendly, decent-looking couple — despite Avram’s flapping white sharwals and his ponytail tied with a rubber band — a man and a woman who are no longer young but not yet old, and are surely parents to grown children, perhaps even grandparents to one or two little ones, who have taken a little vacation from their full lives and set off on a short adventure. Avram is excited to tell them about the steep climb to the peak of Tabor, and the rock steps and the iron pegs on the ascent to Arbel, and he has some advice and a few warnings. But almost every time he wants to say something, Ora beats him to it and insists on telling the story herself, embellishing slightly, and suddenly it seems to him that she wants to prove at any cost how good she is at animating young people and speaking their language. He dwindles as he watches her, all bustling chumminess, as clumsy as an elbow in a rib, her conduct foreign and grating, until it occurs to him that she is doing this to spite him, that she is still angry at him about something and that she is defiantly pushing him, step by step, out of the little circle she has woven around herself and the two boys.

And he does retreat. He extinguishes his light and sits inside himself in the dark.

The young boys, who live on the settlement of Tekoa, sense nothing of the silent battle being fought so close to them. They talk about the wonders of the road from Eilat — the Tzin River at sundown, the daffodils in the cisterns of the Ashkelon River, the ibex at Ein Avdat — and Ora explains that she and Avram are only planning to go as far as Jerusalem. “Maybe one day,” she says, and her gaze wanders off, “we’ll do the southern part of the trail too, all the way to Eilat and Taba.” The boys grumble about the military practice zones in the Negev, which push the trail away from the wadis and mountains to plain old roadsides. They warn Ora and Avram about the Bedouins’ feral dogs—“they have tons of dogs, those people, make sure you protect yours,” and the conversation circles around, and suddenly Avram feels something hovering over his face, and when he looks up he sees that it is Ora’s gaze, a tortured, disconnected stare, as though she is suddenly seeing something new and extremely painful in him. He reaches up distractedly to brush a crumb from his face.

As they talk, they discover that Jerusalem is about ten days’ walk away. “It might take you a bit longer,” the boys say.

“It’ll zoom by at the end,” laughs the curly-haired one. “From Sha’ar HaGay you’ll start to feel the pull of home.”