David Grossman - To the End of the Land

“Where?” The side of her body touching the boy tenses up.

“In the head. A retard. Around three years ago, all of a sudden, retarded.”

“All of a sudden? That’s not something that happens suddenly.”

“With him it did.” Sami purses his lips.

She turns to face the window. She can see her reflection with the boy leaning on her. They are driving very slowly. A sign alerts them to a roadblock three hundred meters ahead. Sami moves his lips quickly, as though arguing with someone in his mind. He raises his voice briefly: “What do I need this, everyone on me, yechrabethom , they think I’m some kind of …” Then his voice is swallowed up in incomprehensible mumblings.

Ora leans forward. “What’s the story?” she asks quietly.

“No story.”

“What’s the story with this kid?” she demands.

“There’s no story!” he suddenly shouts and hits the wheel with his hand. The boy grasps her and stops breathing. “Not everything always has to have a story, Ora!” She senses the contempt wrapped around her name in his voice. It seems to her that as he speaks, almost from one word to the next, he is shedding his Israeli, sabra accent, and a different sound, rough and foreign, is sneaking in. “You people,” he hisses through the rearview mirror, “you’re always looking for a story in everything. So you’ll have it for your telefision show or a movie for your bestivals , not so? Ha? Not so?”

Ora pulls back as though she’s been slapped. “You people,” he called her. “Bestival,” he said, brandishing the accent of Palestinians from the Territories, whom he’s always derided. He was defying her with a put-on “dirty Arab” persona.

“And this kid, it’s just a sick kid, just nothing. Sick. A ree -tard. You can’t make a movie about him! There’s no story here! We take him, we drop him at a house down there, with some doctor, we go to wherever you need, we drop you there, and khalas , everyone’s happy.”

Ora’s cheeks are flushed. It was the way he shoved her into that “you people” that riled her up and, as though she really is not facing him alone — as though she is with them —she says slowly, almost spelling out each letter, “I want to know who this child belongs to. Now, before we reach the checkpoint, I want to know.”

Sami does not reply. She senses that her voice, her authority, has restored his wits and reminded him of a thing or two, things she has never before wanted or needed to mention explicitly. There is a long silence. She feels her will and his arch their backs at each other. Then Sami lets out a long breath and says, “He’s the kid of a guy I know, an okay guy, there’s nothing on him in the, you know, in the security. Don’t worry. You got nothing to worry about.” His shoulders droop and crumple. He runs his hand over his bald spot, touches his forehead, and shakes his head in dismay. “Ora, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m tired, beat. You made me crazy today, the lot of you. I’ve had enough. I need some quiet. Just quiet, ya rab .”

She leans her head back. Everyone’s going out of their minds, she thinks. He’s allowed. Through half-closed eyelids she can see him throwing nervous glances at the passengers in the cars on either side. The three lanes merge into two, then into one. Up ahead they can see blue flashing lights. A police jeep is parked diagonally on the side of the road. Without moving her lips Ora says, “If they ask me, what do I say?”

“If they ask, tell them he’s your boy. But they won’t ask.” He stares ahead and tries not to meet her eyes in the mirror.

Ora nods quietly. So that’s my role, she thinks. That’s why he’s wearing these clothes, the jeans and the Shimon Peres. She presses the boy to her and his head falls on her chest. She says his name quietly into his ear and he opens his eyes and looks at her. She smiles, and his eyelids shut again, but a moment later he smiles at her as if in a dream. “Turn the heat on, he’s shivering.”

Sami cranks the heat up. She is boiling, but the boy’s shivering subsides a little. She wipes his sweat with a tissue and smoothes her hand over his hair. The fever speaks to her skin. About a year ago, an eccentric old man from the village of Dura was left in a meat locker in Hebron. He spent almost forty-eight hours there. He did not die and may even have fully recovered. But since that day her life, her family’s life, had slowly begun to unravel. The blue lights are flashing everywhere now. There are six or seven police vehicles. Patrolmen and police officers and army officers dart on the shoulders of the road. Ora is dripping with sweat. She reaches into her blouse and pulls out a thin silver chain with a shiviti amulet, an enamel pendant bearing the inscription “I have set the Lord always before me.” Gently, almost stealthily, she places the shiviti on the boy’s forehead and holds it there for a moment. Her friend Ariela gave it to her years ago. “Everyone needs a little churchagogue,” she said when Ora laughed and tried to reject the gift. But in the end she started wearing it every time Ilan went overseas, and when her father was hospitalized, and in other can’t-do-any-harm situations — a superstitious belief in God, she explained to anyone who asked — and she kept wearing it throughout Adam’s army service, and then Ofer’s. Now, in order to do the right thing with everyone and not convert the little Muslim without his knowledge, she whispers to herself, I have set Allah always before me .

The police cars close in on their lane. Lengths of barbed wire zigzag all over the road. The cops are jumpy. They shine powerful flashlights into the cars and examine the passengers for a long time, constantly shouting to one another. A few officers stand along the side of the road talking on cell phones. This is worse than usual, Ora thinks. They’re not usually this edgy. There is only one car in front of them, and Ora leans forward and says urgently, “Sami, I want to know now, who does this child belong to?”

Sami looks ahead and sighs. “He’s no one, really, just the son of a guy who does plaster work for me, from the Territories. Honestly, he’s an IR, you know. Illegal resident. And since yesterday night he got like this. Sick all night, and this morning, throwing up all the time, and with blood in … ya’ani , in the bathroom.”

“Didn’t you get him any help?”

“Sure we did. We brought a nurse from the village, ya’ani , and she said for his disease we have to go to a hospital urgent, but how can we go to a hospital with him illegal?” His voice dies down and he grunts and murmurs to himself, perhaps reconstructing some conversation or argument, and then he slams the wheel with his hand.

“Calm down,” Ora says sharply. She runs a hand quickly to smooth over her disheveled face. “Calm down now, it’ll be all right. And smile!”

A young policeman, almost a kid himself, comes up to them and vanishes from Ora’s sight when the brilliance of his flashlight hits her. She blinks painfully; this sort of light is torture for her defective retinas. She smiles broadly in the general direction of the light. The officer makes quick circles with his other hand, and Sami rolls down his window. “All is good?” says the policeman in a Russian accent and thrusts his head into the car to scan their faces. Sami, in a pleasant, rich, masterly voice, replies, “Good evening, everything is excellent, baruch hashem .”

“Where are you coming from?”

“From Beit Zayit,” Ora says, smiling.

“Beit Zayit? Where’s that?”

“Near Jerusalem.” Even without looking at Sami, Ora feels a spark of astonishment at the policeman’s ignorance pass between them.