David Grossman - To the End of the Land

She quickly pushes her way into the crack of his laughter. “Oferiko, listen, I think I might go away for a few days after all, up north.”

“Hang on, the reception here’s lousy. Wait — what’s that?”

“I’m thinking of going up north.”

“You mean, to the Galilee?”

“Yes.”

“Alone?”

“Alone, yes.”

“But why go alone? Don’t you have anyone who …” He immediately realizes his unfortunate phrasing. “Maybe you could go with a girlfriend or someone.”

She chokes down his so-accurate tactlessness. “I don’t have anyone who, and I don’t feel like going with girlfriends or anything, and I don’t feel like being at home now, either.”

His voice wrinkles. “Wait, Mom, I’m not following. You’re really going away alone?”

Suddenly the lid flips off her mouth. “Who have I got to go with, in your opinion? My partner bailed on me at the last minute, decided to volunteer for the Jewish brigades—”

He interrupts impatiently. “So you’re going to go to our places, the ones we planned?”

She bravely overcomes the pilfered our . “I don’t know, I only just now thought of it.”

“Well, at least you have a backpack ready to go,” he snickers.

“Two.”

“Honestly, though, I really don’t get it.”

“What is there to get? I just can’t be here now. I’m suffocating.”

A huge engine turns on somewhere behind him. Someone shouts to hurry up. She hears his thoughts. He needs her at home now, that’s the thing, and he’s right, and she almost gives in, at that very moment, but she realizes just as quickly and urgently that she has no choice this time.

A gluey silence. Ora fights to make herself turn her back on him, and the map of memory with its countless little marks of blame spreads out inside her: Ofer at age three, undergoing complicated dental surgery. When the anesthesiologist placed the mask on his nose and mouth, she was told to leave the room. Ofer’s terrified eyes pleaded, but she turned her back and left. When he was four, she left him screaming for her, clinging with all ten fingers to the preschool fence, and his shouts stayed with her for the rest of the day. There were many more of these little abandonments, escapes, eye-shuttings, face-hidings, and today, undoubtedly, is the hardest of them all. But every moment she spends at home is dangerous for her, she knows it, and dangerous for him too, and he can’t understand that and there’s no point hoping he will. He’s too young. His desires are simple and crude: he needs her to wait for him at home without changing anything about home or about herself, preferably without moving at all for all these days — the way he pulled back from her and flailed in anger, she recalls, when he was five and she had her curls straightened! — so that if he comes home on leave, he will hug her and defrost her and he’ll be able to use her, to impress her with the splinters of horror that he’ll scatter around with affected indifference, revealing secrets he should not divulge. Ora hears his breath. She breathes with him. They both feel the unbearable stretching of tendons — the tendons of her back-turning.

“So how long d’you think you’ll be gone for?” he asks in a voice touched by anger and weakness and a shred of defeat.

“Ofer, don’t talk like that. You know how much I wanted this trip with you, you know how much I looked forward to it.”

“Mom, it’s not my fault there’s an emergency call-up.”

She heroically refrains from reminding him that he had volunteered. “I’m not blaming you, and you’ll see, we’ll take our trip when you’re finished, I promise. I won’t give up on that. But right now I have to get out of here, I can’t stay here alone.”

“Sure, no, sure, I’m not saying, but”—he hesitates—“you’re not going to sleep in the field, like, alone?”

She laughs. “No, are you crazy? I won’t sleep alone ‘in the field.’ ”

“You’ll have your phone, right?”

“I don’t know, I haven’t thought about it.”

“But listen, Mom, what was I going to ask you … Does Dad know you’re—”

“What about Dad? What does this have to do with Dad? D’you think he tells me where he is?”

Ofer retreats. “Okay, okay, Mom, I didn’t say anything.”

A thin sigh inadvertently leaves his lips, the sigh of a little boy whose parents have suddenly lost their minds and decided to separate. Ora can hear it, and she feels his battle spirit dissipate, and she thinks with alarm: What am I doing? How can I send him to battle when he’s confused and dejected? A sourness fills her throat: Where did phrases like “sending him to battle” even come from? What do they have to do with her? She is not one of those mothers who sends her sons to battle, not part of one of those military dynasties like the communities of Um Juni or Beit Alpha or Negba, or Beit HaShita or Kfar Giladi. Yet she is now surprised to discover that that is exactly what she is: she escorted him to the battalion “meetery” and stood there hugging him with measured restraint, so as not to embarrass him in front of his friends, and she shook her head and shrugged her shoulders as required, with a proud grin of helplessness at the other parents who were making all the same moves — where did we learn this choreography? And how do I obey it all, obey them, those people who send him there? She was poisoned by the words Ofer whispered to her when the TV camera caught them. His final request. Her mouth had gaped in terrible pain, not only because of what he said but also because he had said it with a sort of matter-of-factness, completely lucid, as though he had rehearsed every word ahead of time, and as soon as he said it he hugged her again, but this time it was to hide her from the camera. She’d already embarrassed him once before, at the ceremony when he finished his training course, when she sat in the quad at Latrun and wept as the parade walked past the long wall inscribed with thousands of names of fallen soldiers. She had wept loudly, and the parents and commanders and soldiers looked at her, and the corps officer leaned over and whispered something to the division commander. But this time, well trained, Ofer threw himself on her like a blanket on a fire, almost strangling her with his arm, and probably glanced awkwardly over her head in all directions. “Stop, Mom, you’re making a scene.”

“Okay,” he sighs now. “What’s the story, Mom?”

He sounds defeated, and it shows and it pinches, and she says, “No story, there’s no story.”

“To tell you the truth, it’s weird for me to hear you like this.”

“What’s weird? What is so weird? Going on a hike in the Galilee is weird, but going into the kasbah in Nablus you think is normal?!”

“But when I get home will you be there?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“What d’you mean you don’t know?” He snorts. “You’re not going to, like, disappear or something?” And now it’s his familiar, worrying, almost fatherly voice, aimed squarely at her deepest thirst.

“Don’t worry, Ofer’ke, I’m not going to do anything dumb. I just won’t be here for a few days. I can’t sit on my own and wait.”

“Wait for what?”

She cannot say, of course, but he finally understands, and there is a long silence, and Ora makes up her mind with irrefutable simplicity: twenty-eight days exactly. Until his emergency call-up is over.

“But what if everything’s over in a couple of days and I come home?” he asks with renewed annoyance. “Or let’s say I get injured or something — where do they find you?”

She doesn’t answer. They don’t, she thinks, that’s exactly the point. And something else flickers in her: if they don’t find her, if they can’t find her, he won’t get hurt. She can’t understand it herself. She tries to. She knows it makes no sense, but what does?