David Grossman - To the End of the Land

She phones the Character — phones him at home, despite the time and the explicit prohibition. She does not ask if he can talk, ignores his huffs of anger and alarm, informs him that she’ll be gone for a month and that they’ll see what happens when she gets back. Then she hangs up, delighted with his muffled whispers. She records a message on the answering machine: “Hi, this is Ora. I’m going away probably until the end of April. Don’t leave a message ’cause I won’t be able to pick it up. Thanks and goodbye.” Her voice sounds tense and too serious, not the voice of someone leaving on an exciting and mysterious vacation, so she records a new message, this time with the cheerful tone of a skier or a bungee-jumper, and hopes that Ilan will hear it when he finally gets wind of the situation in Israel and wants to find out how Ofer is, and that he will be filled with jealousy and amazement at the wild time she must be having. But then she realizes Ofer might call home too, and that sort of tone might rag him, so she records a third message, using the most toneless, formal pitch she can muster, although she is betrayed by her exposed and always slightly wondrous voice. She grows angry at herself for being preoccupied with such things, and in a state of distraction she dials Sami’s number.

After leaving Ofer at the meeting point, she had sat down next to Sami in the taxi and apologized for the shameful mistake she had made by calling him. With utter simplicity she explained what state she had been in that morning and, in fact, for the rest of the day as well. Sami drove while she spoke at length, until she had completely unburdened herself. He said nothing and did not turn to face her. She was a little surprised by his silence and said, “What I’d like most now is to just scream about the fact that you and I have even reached this point.” Expressionless, Sami opened her window with the button on his side and said, “Go ahead, scream.” She was embarrassed at first, but then she put her head out the window and screamed until she was dizzy. She leaned back against the headrest and started laughing with relief. She looked at him with eyes tearing from the wind and a flushed neck. “Don’t you want to yell?” she asked. And he said, “Trust me, it’s better if I don’t.”

The whole way back he sat hunched forward, focused on driving, and said nothing. She decided not to pester him anymore, and was so tired that she dozed off and slept until they got home. She has replayed their conversation countless times since then — if it could be called a conversation; he had barely spoken — and concluded that she did the right thing, because even though he didn’t say anything, she was really talking on his behalf too, loyally representing his side in the little incident without letting herself off easy. When Sami finally pulled up in front of her building she had said, without looking at him, that now, after today, she owed him a favor beyond any of their ongoing scores. In her fluttering heart she thought: a Righteous Gentile’s favor. He listened gravely, his lips slightly parted and moving, as if he were memorizing her words, and when he drove away and she walked slowly up the steps, she had the feeling that despite everything that had happened, despite his strange silence the whole way back, their friendship had actually deepened today, having been tempered by a more genuine fire: the fire of reality.

BUT WHEN SHE CALLS, even before explaining that she has to make a very urgent trip to Tel Aviv, Sami answers with crushing coldness that he isn’t feeling well. He threw his back out right after getting home from their trip and he has to lie down for a few hours. Ora senses the lie in his voice and her heart sinks. The thing she has kept pushing away since they parted, which has tormented her with regular bites of mockery and doubt, now solidifies and slams her, revealing her own naïveté, her own stupidity. She wants to say that she understands and will call another taxi, but she hears herself trying to persuade him to come.

“Mrs. Ora, I need to rest now. I’ve had a rough day, and I can’t do two big trips in one day.”

She is deeply hurt by his “Mrs. Ora” and almost hangs up. But she doesn’t, because she feels that until she clears up what happened between them today, she will have no peace. Patiently, without losing her temper, she says that she too, as he well knows, has had a difficult day, but Sami cuts her off and offers to send one of his drivers. At this point she pulls herself together and remembers that she has her dignity too, if only a little. She says haughtily that there is no need, thank you, she’ll manage. The coldness in her voice must have alarmed him, and he asks her please not to take it personally, and then he pauses. Hearing the new acquiescence in his voice, she cracks and says, “But what can I do, Sami? I always take you personally.” He sighs. She waits quietly. She can hear someone, a man, talking loudly and excitedly in Sami’s house. Sami wearily tells the man to be quiet. And because of the fatigue in his voice, or perhaps because of a shadow of desperation that accompanies it, she suddenly feels a great urgency to see him again, immediately. She has the feeling that if she can just spend a little more time with him, even a few moments, she can straighten out everything that went wrong. What I did before wasn’t really mending, she thinks. This time I’ll talk with him about completely different things, things we’ve never talked about, the roots of my mistake today, the fears and the hatred we both drank with our mothers’ milk. Maybe we haven’t even started talking, she thinks oddly: maybe in all those hours that we drove and talked so much, and argued and jabbed each other and laughed, we never really started talking.

The yelling in Sami’s house grows louder. There is a heated argument among three or four people, and a woman is shouting. It might be Inaam, Sami’s wife, although Ora does not recognize the voice. She begins to wonder if it has something to do with her and what happened between them today, and if it is possible — a crazy thought, but on a day like this, in a country like this, anything is possible — that someone has informed on Sami for driving a soldier to the operation.

“Wait a minute,” says Sami, and addresses the young man in sharp, quick Arabic. He shouts with a violence that Ora has never imagined in him, but instead of getting riled up, the man replies in an accusatory tone full of contempt, grunting his words in a way that sounds to Ora like a spray of poison. She hears the sobs of a small child, much smaller than Sami’s youngest, and then there is a thud. Perhaps someone kicked a table or even threw a chair. She increasingly feels that the incident is connected to their trip and wants to end the call and disappear from his life without doing any more damage. He slams the receiver down on the table, and she hears his footsteps receding and almost hangs up, yet continues to listen, transfixed: the fabric of their privacy has been ripped open, providing a rare porthole, and she is drawn to it. This is what they’re like when they’re alone, she thinks, without us, if it really is without us, if they even have a without us. Then she hears a bitter, wild yell, and she cannot tell if it came from Sami or from the other man, and then there are two loud smacks, like hands clapping or cheeks being slapped, and then silence, broken only by the thin, desperate wail of the boy.

Ora leans weakly against the kitchen table. Why did I have to call him again? she thinks. How stupid. What was I even thinking — that after driving me to the Gilboa and back he’d be able to drive me to Tel Aviv? I just keep making mistakes. Whatever I touch goes wrong.

His voice comes back to her, frightened and cracked. Now he speaks rapidly, almost whispering. He wants to know where exactly she needs to go in Tel Aviv and asks if she minds making a stop in the south of the city, where he has to take care of something. Ora is confused. She was about to tell him to forget the whole thing, but she senses that he must need her very much, and his neediness presents an opening for mending, and she swears to herself she will only go as far as Tel Aviv with him and then take a different cab to the Galilee, no matter the cost. He asks urgently, “Is that okay, Ora? Can I come? Are you ready to leave?” The commotion in the background has started up again, and now it is no longer an argument. The other man is shouting, but he seems to be shouting at himself, and a woman laments in a desperate sort of prayer — Ora now thinks it probably is Inaam — a prolonged, defeated wail. For a moment the sound is suffused with a distant moan that Ora has heard once before. It has been decades since she’s recalled the sobbing of the Arab nurse from the isolation ward, in the small Jerusalem hospital where she stayed with Avram and Ilan.