David Grossman - To the End of the Land

“Near Jerusalem,” the officer repeats, perhaps to gain time for scanning them. “And where are you headed now?”

“Tel Aviv,” Ora replies with a pleasant smile. “To visit family,” she adds without being asked.

“Trunk,” says the officer, backing away from the car window. He walks around to the trunk and they hear him rummage and shake the two backpacks. Ora sees Sami’s shoulders tense up, and a thought flies through her mind: Who knows what he’s carting back there? Possibilities flash in her mind like scenes from a deranged movie. Her eyes quickly scan Sami’s body, gather information, sort, weigh, rule out. A completely impersonal mechanism has been activated in her, a complex array of acquired reflexes. She barely has time to realize what she is doing. A fraction of a second, no more. She flits around the whole world and back, and nothing on her face moves.

Sami might or might not have noticed what she went through. There is no way to know from his expression. He’s had a lot of practice too, she thinks. He sits there, rigid and chunky, one finger drumming rapidly on the gearshift.

The policeman’s face — sharp, fox-like, ears pulled back, the face of a boy whom life has chiseled too soon — reappears, this time in her window. “Whose are those two backpacks, missus?”

“Mine. I’m going to the Galilee tomorrow, on a hike.” She smiles broadly again.

The policeman looks at her and the boy for a long time and turns back with half his body, apparently wanting to consult with someone. One of his fingers rests sloppily on the open window beside her. Ora looks at it and thinks: amazing how a thin finger can stop, prevent, decide a fate. How thin the fingers of arbitrariness are sometimes. The cop calls out to one of the officers, but he is busy on the phone. Deep down Ora knows that she is the one arousing suspicion. Something about her signaled to the policeman that there is guilt here. His face turns back to her. She thinks that if he looks at her that way for one more minute she will collapse.

The boy wakes up and blinks in confusion at the flashlight. Ora grins and grasps his shoulders tightly. The boy slowly moves his spindly arms in the ray of light, and for a moment he looks like a fetus swimming in amniotic fluid. Only then does he notice the face and the uniform behind the light and his eyes widen, and Ora feels a strong jerk through his body and she holds him tighter. The policeman leans in and examines the boy. A note of bitter abandonment stretches from his face to the boy’s. The beam of light drops to the boy’s body, lighting up the words Shimon Peres, My Hope for Peace . The cop pulls the corners of his mouth into a smirk. Ora feels a heavy weariness descend upon her, as though she has despaired of understanding what is going on. Only Yazdi’s wild heartbeats against her arm keep her sitting up straight. She wonders how he knows that he must keep quiet now. How can he keep so wonderfully quiet? Like a baby partridge that freezes and camouflages itself when it hears its mother’s warning chirp.

And how do I know how to be a mother partridge? she thinks. An utterly natural mother partridge.

A car honks behind them, and then another. The policeman sniffs. Something is bothering him. Something isn’t right. He is about to ask another question, but Sami, with acrobatic swiftness, beats him to it. He laughs heartily, jerks his head back at Ora, and says to the cop, “Don’t worry, buddy, she’s one of ours.”

The policeman curls his lip in slight revulsion, moves his flashlight around, and waves them through. The little interrogation had lasted for only a few minutes, but Ora’s body is bathed in sweat — her own and the boy’s.

“An IR?” she asks later, when she regains her voice and Sami starts accelerating toward the Ayalon freeway. “You employ workers from the Territories?”

Sami shrugs. “Everyone has workers from the Territories. Them ones are the cheapest, the dafawim . You think I can afford a plasterer from Abu Ghosh?”

She sits back more comfortably. The boy, too. Ora wipes off his sweat and her own. She keeps looking to her side, thinking she can still see the policeman’s finger on her window ledge, pointing at her. She doesn’t think she will ever be able to go through a roadblock experience like that one again. “And what you said to him about me being ‘one of ours’?”

Sami smiles and licks his lower lip. Ora knows the gesture: he is savoring a good quip even before it comes out. She smiles to herself and massages her neck and stretches her toes. For a moment it feels as though they are putting the house back in order after a rampage.

“ ‘One of ours,’ ” says Sami, “means ‘even though you look like a lefty.’ ”

The boy relaxes a little and falls asleep again. Ora puts his head on her lap. She leans back and breathes slowly. This may be her first quiet moment of the day.

Since Sami has always been a sort of distant extension of Ilan for her, and more recently a connecting thread to him, she begins to feel homesick. Not for the house she rented in Beit Zayit after the separation, nor for the house in Tzur Hadassah that she and Ilan had bought from Avram. The home she misses achingly is the last home she and Ilan had in Ein Karem, an expansive old two-story house with thick, cool walls, surrounded by cypress trees. It had big arched windows with deep ledges, and decorative floor tiles, some of which wobbled. Ora had seen it for the first time as a student. It stood there, empty and closed up, and it was love at first sight. With Avram’s encouragement she wrote a love letter. “My dear, despondent, lonesome house,” she began, then proceeded to tell the house about herself and explain how well suited they were for each other. She promised to make it happy. In the envelope she placed a photo of herself with long, curly, copper hair, wearing orange sweats and laughing as she leaned on a bike. She sent it with a note to the owners saying that if they ever decided to sell — and they did.

She and Ilan had become increasingly affluent, even becoming wealthy over the years — Ilan’s office flourished: leaving his job twenty years ago to focus on the slightly esoteric field of intellectual property was a hugely successful gamble. Since the mid-eighties the world had filled with ideas, patents, and inventions that needed protection, requiring knowledge and swift action wherever legislation and legal loopholes were concerned in various countries; new computer applications, inventions in communication and encoding, genetic medicine and engineering, all kinds of World Trade Organization treaties and agreements; Ilan was there one minute before everyone else — and although they could afford to renovate and beautify and build and design whatever they wanted to, Ilan let her nurture and tame the house as she wished, and so she allowed it to be itself, to grow at its own pace, and happily mount into a plethora of disparate styles. For several years there was a huge glass-doored refrigerator in the kitchen, an extremely efficient eyesore that Ora had bought at a liquidation sale from a man who sold equipment to supermarkets. She got the dining-room chairs for a steal at the Jerusalem café Tmol Shilshom, because Adam once mentioned in conversation how comfortable they were. The shadowed living room was a lair of thick rugs, huge cushions, and pale bamboo furniture, with overflowing bookshelves covering three walls. The massive dining table, the hostess’s pride and joy, which could seat fifteen guests without elbows touching, was carved and adorned by Ofer as a surprise for her forty-eighth birthday. Ofer made it round: “That way, no one ever has to sit at a corner.” The house itself was finely attuned and responsive to Ora’s moods. It carefully, hesitantly shed its age-old gloominess, stretched its limbs, and cracked its stiff joints, and when it realized that Ora was permitting it to retain the occasional pocket of charming abandon and even some healthy neglect, it grew into a comfortable unkemptness, until at times, when a certain light hit, it almost looked happy. Ora felt that Ilan was also content in the house, with the collegiate mess she created in it, and that her taste — meaning, her assortment of tastes — was to his liking. Even when things suddenly went bad between them, and their togetherness emptied out with alarming speed, she believed that his affection for the home she had made for them still pulsed inside him. And she remains convinced that beneath the layers in which he began to cloak himself — his impatience and grumbling and constant criticism of everything she did and said, of everything she was; beyond his back-turning, beyond his polite concern and insulting shell of decency toward her, beyond the small and large denials with which he tried to repudiate her and their love and their friendship, and despite his claim that he’d run his course with the relationship — that despite all this he still remembered and knew that he had no better wife or friend or lover than she, and that even now, as they both approach fifty and he has traveled to the far corners of the earth to get away from her, he knows deep in his heart that only together can they continue to bear everything that happened to them when they were young, practically children.