David Grossman - To the End of the Land

She stands up quickly. She must not sit. Not be a sitting target for the beam already probing for her, for the huge fishing net slowly descending. She cocks her head to the door. Nothing. Through the window she sees a strip of road and sidewalk. She scans it but there is no unfamiliar car, no car with military plates, no nervous barks from the neighbors’ dogs, and no band of evil angels. Besides, it’s too early. Not for them, she replies. Those people come even at five in the morning, that’s exactly when they come, they get you sleepy, dazed, defenseless, too weak to throw them down the steps before they can deliver their punch line. But right now it really is too early, and she honestly doesn’t think anything has happened there in the few hours since they parted. She rubs the back of her neck. Relax, he’s still with his friends in the Gilboa, there are procedures, paperwork, debriefing, lots of complicated processes. Before anything can happen they have to mix everyone’s smells together, ignite the powerful lightning in their eyes and the beating pulse in their necks. She can feel Ofer renewing himself with them, with his friends, with their measured aggression, their battle thirst, their thick sap of warfare, their well-hidden fear; he receives and delivers these important things with a quick hug, half-chest pressed to half-chest, two pats on the back, slaps of identity, tickets punched. She distractedly drags herself into his room, where everything would freeze from this day onward, and she discovers that the room has beat her to it and already taken on the vacant expression of an abandoned place. The objects seem orphaned: his sandals with their splayed straps, the chair at his computer desk, the history textbooks he keeps by his bed because he liked history — likes, of course she means likes, and will continue to like — and all the Paul Auster books on the shelf, and the D & D books he liked as a kid, and the posters of Maccabi Haifa soccer players whom he worshipped at twelve and refused to take off the wall even when he was twenty-one, twenty-one, when he was twenty-one.

Perhaps she should not move around the room, not break the still-hanging threads of his motion, not silence the faint echo of his childhood vapors that still sometimes waft up from a pillow, a balding yellow tennis ball, a toy commando soldier equipped with endless miniature battle accessories, which she and Ilan used to bring him and Adam from their trips overseas, bought in toy shops they stopped visiting once the boys grew up, and hoped to return to in a few years, for the grandchildren. Their dreams were small and modest, yet they had quickly become so complicated and virtually unattainable. Ilan left, off to breathe in some bachelor air. Adam left with him. Ofer is away now. She steps sideways out of the room, careful not to turn her back on his belongings, and stands looking in with the yearning of the exiled. A crumpled Manchester United shirt, an army sock tossed in the corner, a letter peeking from an envelope, an old newspaper, a soccer magazine, a picture of him with Talia by some waterfall in the north, the small five-kilo iron weights on the rug, a book lying open, facedown — what was the last sentence he read? What would be the last picture he saw? A narrow alleyway, a stone block sailing through the air, and the masked face of a young man, eyes burning with fury and hatred. From there her mind skips quickly to an office at the army compound, where a soldier walks over to a filing cabinet full of personnel files — but that was how they did things in her day, in prehistoric times; these days it’s a computer: one click, a flicker on the screen, the soldier’s name, contact details for notification in case of a tragedy. Has he already let them know about the split in his parents’ addresses?

The phone gives a wrenching ring. It’s him. Overjoyed. “Did you see us on TV?” Friends had called to tell him.

“Listen,” she whispers, “you haven’t left yet, have you?”

“I wish! We’ll still be here tomorrow night at this rate.”

She hardly hears the words. Attentive only to the foreign deepness of his voice, the echo of his new treachery, the treachery of the one and only man who had always been loyal to her. Since yesterday, perhaps since he’d tasted the pleasure of betrayal, of betraying her , it seemed he wanted to savor the taste again and again, like a puppy eating meat for the first time.

“Hang on Mom, one sec.” He laughs and calls out to someone standing near him: “Why are you making such a big deal? We’ll go in, rattle our guns at them, and get out.” Then he comes back to her fast and frantic, outflanking her and enjoying it. “Um, Mom, can you tape The Sopranos for me tomorrow? There’s an empty tape on the TV, you know how to work the VCR, right?” As they talk she rummages through the drawer of tapes looking for the scrap of paper on which she once wrote down the instructions he dictated. “You press the far left button, then the one with the picture of an apple …”

“But what are you doing there meanwhile?” she asks, mourning for these precious wasted hours that he could have spent at home, with her. On the other hand, what could she offer him here with her funereal face? Pretty soon, she thinks, he’ll want to rent a room somewhere, or move in with Ilan like Adam did. And why not? With Ilan everything’s such fun, good times, the three adolescents can party all they want without any annoying parents getting in the way. Meanwhile, Ofer is telling her something and she can’t separate the words. She shuts her eyes. She’ll find an excuse to phone Talia later that evening; Talia has to talk to him before he leaves.

He tries to drown out the chaos in the background. “Shut up already, it’s my mom!” Then come roars of joy and admiration, and they howl like jackals in heat, sending warm regards to his awesome mom. “Tell her to send her rugelach !” Ofer walks to a quieter place. “Animals,” he explains, “tank loaders, the lot of them.”

She can hear his breath as he walks. At home he also walks when he’s on the phone, and so does Adam. They learned that from Ilan — my genes are as soft as butter, she thinks. Sometimes the boys and Ilan would hold three simultaneous phone calls, each on his cell, all walking briskly around the large living room, crossing one another’s paths in quick diagonals, never colliding.

Now it’s suddenly quiet. Perhaps he’s found a hiding place behind one of the tanks. The silence makes her nervous, and he seems to feel the same, facing her alone now without the entire Israel Defense Forces to protect him. He quickly tells her that 110 percent of the forces showed up, “all raring to go, jonesing to lay into them”—he militarizes himself as he talks. “The adjutant says he doesn’t remember a call-up like this”—in that case they can do without you, Ora thinks, but manages to keep quiet—“and the problem is, there aren’t enough ceramic vests for everyone, and some of the guys don’t have vehicles to team up with, ’cause half the transporters are stuck in traffic in Afula.” Whoever shoved this gravel into his mouth is probably the same person who makes her ask if he has any idea when it will be over. Ofer lets her question echo for a moment until its total pointlessness and stupidity is exhausted. That was also one of Ilan’s little tricks against her. Kids pick up these things and use them without understanding what sort of multigenerational weapon they’ve activated. Ofer, at least, comes back to her quickly, but she’s already wondering when that will end too, when he will jab her with one of Ilan’s long needles and not come back to recover the casualty. “Nu , really, Mom.” His voice is warm and healing like his embrace. “We won’t stop until we eliminate the terrorism infrastructure”—here she can hear him start to smile, mimicking the prime minister’s arrogant intonation—“and until we defeat the murderous gangs and sever the head of the snake and burn out the nests of—”