David Grossman - To the End of the Land

Her body sinks down again, and her face trembles uncontrollably, because she is pierced by his desertion. Not the loneliness or the insult, but the amputation itself, the phantom pain of the empty space Ilan left at her side. In the dark she sees her reflection in the window and feels the unfamiliar yet sharp sorrow of her skin, which has not been truly loved for a long time, and her face, which no one has looked at with the kind of love that has intensified over years. The Character, Eran, who got her the job with the museum in Nevada, is seventeen years younger than she, a meteoric computer genius full of entrepreneurial projects, and she doesn’t even know how to define him: Friend? Lover? Fuck? And what is she to him? “Love” is undoubtedly a generous term for what they have, she thinks, laughing silently, but at least he is proof that even after Ilan her body still emits the particles that attract another person, another man. She sinks deeper and deeper into her thoughts, and all the while they drive in a long snarl of traffic that moves with unnatural silence through the valley of Sha’ar HaGay and becomes even thicker around the airport. “Checkpoints everywhere today,” Sami suddenly throws out. Something in his voice seems to signal her. She waits for him to say something else, but he keeps quiet.

The boy has fallen asleep. His forehead glistens with sweat, and his head rocks with strange ease on his delicate neck. She notices that Sami has spread out a thin old blanket under him, probably so he won’t soil the new upholstery with his sweat. His wafer-thin right hand suddenly rises and flutters in front of his face, then above his head, and Ora reaches out and hugs the boy to her. He freezes and opens his eyes, which look dark and almost blind, and stares at her uncomprehendingly. Ora does not move, hoping he will not reject her. He breathes quickly and his gaunt chest moves up and down, and then, as though having lost the power to understand or resist, he shuts his eyes and falls limply against her body, and his warmth spreads to her through their clothing. After a few moments she dares to readjust her arm around him and feels his birdlike shoulders tense up at her touch. She waits again, presses his head gently against her shoulder, and only then resumes breathing.

Sami straightens up and looks at them in the rearview mirror. His eyes are expressionless, and Ora has the peculiar sensation that he is comparing what he sees to some imagined scene. She grows uncomfortable under his gaze, and almost detaches herself from the boy, but she does not want to wake him. She finds the embrace pleasant, despite the intense heat he emits and the sweat pooling between his face and her shoulder and the thread of saliva smeared on her arm — or perhaps it is because of all these things, because of the heat and the dampness, like a forgotten stamp of childhood that now returns to imprint her. She glances at him sideways: his hair is cut crudely, and through the short bristle she can see a long sickle-shaped scar from a hurt that did not heal properly. His small face, crowded against her, is stubborn. He looks like a tiny, embittered old man, and she is happy to see that his fingers are long and thin and beautiful. He places them unconsciously on her hand, and after a few minutes he turns his hand over in his sleep, revealing a soft, cherubic palm.

Ora feels a pang: Ofer. She hasn’t thought of him for almost an hour.

She will not have Ofer’s hands today. Not the large, broad hands with the prominent veins and the black lines of gun grease under bitten fingernails that even three months after his release — she knows from Adam — will not completely disappear. Nor will the hard calluses covering every knuckle and joint, or the channels of healed cuts, and the scars, and the layers of skin that have been grazed, burned, scratched, cut, torn, stitched, grown and peeled, smeared and bandaged until they finally look like a brown, waxy coating. That military hand, still so expressive in its movements, in the generosity of its touch, in the fingers embracing one another, in the childlike habit of the thumb repeatedly smoothing over its brethren as if counting them, in the distracted gnawing of the skin around the little fingernail— You’re wrong, Mom , he tells her as he gnaws, but she can’t remember what they were talking about. Just a fragmentary image of his biting, furrowing his brow. You’re absolutely wrong about that, Mom .

Now, as the boy leans on her with amazing trust and sows modest but unfounded pride in her, she seems to be getting confirmation of something she herself had begun to doubt. “You’re an unnatural mother,” Adam had explained not long ago, before he left home. Just like that, so simply and almost without any color in his voice, he had crushed and refuted her with an assertion that sounded scientific, objective. A lasso of distant memory floats over and tightens softly around her throat, and she sees Ofer’s swollen little fist right after he was born. They placed him on her chest while someone did something to her down below, digging, stitching, talking to her, joking. “We’ll be done in a minute,” the man had said. “Time flies when you’re having fun, huh?” She was too tired even to ask him to take pity on her and be quiet, and she tried to draw strength from the large blue eyes looking up at her with uncommon tranquillity. From the moment he was born he always searched for eyes. From the moment he was born she drew strength from him. And now she saw his tiny fist— fistaloo , Avram would have said had he been with her in the delivery room; even now she finds it hard to accept that he wasn’t there with her and Ofer; how could he not have been there with them? — with the deep crease around the wrist, and the bold red of the tiny hand itself, which until moments ago had been an internal organ and still looked like it. The hand slowly opened and revealed to Ora for the first time its conch-like, enigmatic palm — What have you brought me, my child, from the deep, dark universe? — with the thicket of lines drawn all over it, covered with a white, fatty layer of webbing, with its translucent pomegranate-seed fingernails, and its fingers that closed up again and gripped her finger tightly: You are hereby betrothed to me with the wisdom of thousands of years and ancient epochs.

The boy gurgles and his tongue explores his lips. Ora asks Sami if he has any water. In the glove compartment is her bottle from the previous trip. She holds it to the boy’s lips and he drinks a little and splutters. Perhaps he doesn’t like the taste. She pours some water into her palm and touches his forehead lightly, and his cheeks, and his dry lips. Sami looks at her again with that same tensely observing gaze. It is the gaze of a director, she realizes, examining a scene he has set up. The boy shivers and his body burrows more deeply into hers. He suddenly opens his eyes and looks at her without seeing, but his lips part in a strange, dreamy smile, and for a moment he contains both poise and childishness, and she leans forward again and asks Sami in a firm whisper what his real name is.

Sami takes a deep breath. “What for, Ora?”

“Tell me his name,” she repeats, her lips white with anger.

“His name is called Yazdi. Yazdi, he’s called.”

The boy hears his name and trembles in his sleep and lets out fragments of Arabic words. His legs jerk sharply, as though he is dreaming of running, or fleeing.

“He needs to see a doctor urgently,” Ora says.

“The people near Tel Aviv, the family, they have the most specialist doctor for his illness.” Ora asks what his illness is, and Sami says, “Something with his stomach, he wasn’t born right with the stomach, digestion, something about that. There’s only three or four things he eats, everything else comes out.” Then he adds, as if in a forced confession, “And he’s not right, here.”