David Grossman - To the End of the Land

“It’s yours. Let’s start walking, we’ll talk on the way.”

“No,” Avram insists, and his unkempt beard bristles a little. “I’m not moving until you explain what—”

“On the way,” she interrupts, and starts marching. Her shoulders are hunched and her whole body looks as though an unskilled puppeteer is pulling her strings. “I’ll tell you everything on the way; we can’t stay here anymore.”

“Why not?”

“I mustn’t,” she replies simply, and as she utters the words she knows she is right, and that this is the law she must now obey: not to stay in one place for too long, not to be a sitting target — for people or thoughts.

Terrified, he watches her walking away toward a path. She’ll be back soon, he thinks, she’ll be right back. She won’t leave me like this. She wouldn’t dare. Ora keeps walking without looking back. His lips tremble with anger and insult. Then he stomps his feet and lets out a short, bitter screech that might be her name and might be fuck-you-you-bitch and who-the-hell-do-you-think-you-are and you-psycho and mommy-wait-for-me all in one breath. Ora walks on. Avram weakly lifts up the backpack, slings it over his left shoulder, and starts after her, dragging his feet on the ground.

The path winds through fields and groves. Poplars whiten, and wild mustard towers on both sides of the path in fragrant yellow clusters. It’s lovely here, Ora thinks. She keeps walking. She has no idea where she is or where she is going. She can hear his stuttering steps behind her. She peeks over her shoulder: lost and frightened, he feels his way along the open space. She realizes that he moves in light the way she does in darkness, and she recalls the way he looked last night, a hunched, slow shadow in the depths of a dark apartment.

When he opened the door after she’d knocked and kicked for several minutes, she realized that he was in the habit of not turning any lights on. The bell had been yanked out of its casing. There wasn’t a single bulb in the stairwell. She’d felt her way up the four flights of steps along crumbling walls and a greasy stone banister, through various stenches that lingered in the air. When he finally opened the door — she quickly removed her glasses, which were new to him — she saw a lump. In the darkness he looked hugely broad, so much so that she wasn’t sure it was him at first, and she said his name dubiously. He did not answer, and she said, “I’m here,” and searched for more words with which to fill the deepening chasm in her stomach. She was frightened by the darkness in the apartment behind him and by the sense that he was coming out to her like a bear from its den. She boldly reached a hand into the apartment, felt along the wall, and found a switch. They were both flooded with murky yellow light, and their eyes immediately exchanged unmerciful information.

She, ultimately, had been better preserved. Her short-cropped curly hair had turned almost entirely silver, but her expression was still open and innocent and it went out to him — he could feel it even in his dim state — and her large brown eyes still held a constant, serious question. Nevertheless, something in her was slightly dried up and dulled, he could see, and there were a few faint lines, footprints of a bird in the sand, around her lips. Something about her posture was diminished, that upright boldness she’d always had, like a foal. And the generous, laughing mouth, Ora’s great mouth, now seemed limp and skeptical.

He had lost a lot of hair in the last three years, and his face had swelled and looked less open. Week-old stubble covered his cheeks and chin. His blue eyes, which used to make her feel parched, had darkened and seemed smaller and sunken. He still did not move, almost blocking the doorway with his body, his thick penguin arms held stiffly at his sides. He stood there in a faded T-shirt from which his body was bursting and grunted to himself and sucked his lips with such irritability that she had to demand: “Aren’t you going to let me in?” He walked into the apartment, dragging his bare feet, grunting and growling to himself. She shut the door and followed him into a smell that was an entity unto itself, as if she were entering the folds of a thick blanket. It was the smell of the inside of suitcases and closed drawers and unaired linen and socks under beds and clumps of dust.

And there they were: the heavy breakfront with the peeling polyurethane lacquer, the bald fraying rug, and the awful red armchairs whose upholstery had been ripped and worn even thirty-five years ago. It was his mother’s furniture, his only possessions, which he still moved around as he roamed from one apartment to the next.

“Where were you?” he grumbled. “You said you’d be here in an hour.”

She hit him with the offer immediately, in a loud and anxious voice, with the defiance and awkwardness of someone who knows exactly how inappropriate her words are, but must somehow nail down her fancies and see what happens. He seemed not to hear her at all. He did not look at her, either. His head, bowed to his chest, moved right and left in delayed little jerks. “Wait, don’t say no yet,” she said. “Think about it for a minute.”

He looked up at her. All his movements were very slow. In the light of the bare bulb she again saw what the last few years had done to him. He spoke heavily: “Regretably, I can’t do it now. Maybe another time.”

If it hadn’t been so sad, she would have burst out laughing. Regretably , he said, like a beggar wallowing in trash and sticking his pinky up while drinking tea from a can.

“Avram, I—”

“Ora, no.”

Even this monosyllabic speech was beyond his strength. Or maybe it was the taste of her name in his mouth. His eyes suddenly turned red and he looked as though he were sinking even deeper into his flesh.

“Listen to me.” She berated him with a new aggression that drew on her confrontation with Sami. “I can’t force you to do anything, but hear me out and then make up your mind. I’ve run away. Do you understand? I cannot sit there and wait for them to come.”

“Who?”

“Them.” She peered deep into his eyes and saw that he understood.

“But you can’t sleep here,” he mumbled angrily. “I don’t have another bed.”

“I don’t want to sleep here. I’m going to keep traveling. I came to get you.”

He nodded for a long time, even smiled slightly, with the politeness of a tourist in a land whose customs he did not understand. She could see: he wasn’t taking in the words at all. “Where’s Ilan?” he asked.

“I’m going up north for a few days. Come with me.”

“I don’t know her, what’s the matter with her? Why is she even—”

To her amazement, he spoke his thoughts out loud. Once, years ago, this had been one of his tricks: “Ora doesn’t want me anymore, thinks Avram forlorn and wishes he were dead,” he would say to her, and grinningly deny that he’d said it, even accuse her of invading his private thoughts. But this was different, troubling, a private, internal conversation that hiccupped from him uncontrollably. He sought out the armchair and collapsed into it, leaning his head all the way back to reveal a thick, red, stubbly throat. “Where’s Ilan?” he asked again, half pleadingly.

“There’s a cab waiting for me downstairs. I want you to come with me.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know, we’ll go up north. The main thing is not to be here.”

One of his fingers moved weakly, as if conducting a tune that played in his mind. “What are you going to do there?”

“I don’t know, don’t ask me. I have a tent and a backpack and food for the first few days. I have everything for you, too. It’s all packed, even a sleeping bag, so come with me.”