David Grossman - To the End of the Land

“You’re wearing socks and shoes now,” said Ora, straightening up. “Come on, give me your hand and try to stand.”

He breathed slowly, heavily, with his eyes closed and his face strained. If only he could concentrate, if only she would be quiet for a minute. He was almost there, just a matter of seconds, and she must have known that too, because she wouldn’t give in. She was chasing him all the way there — how could she be allowed in there? Calling his name over and over, shaking him, rocking his shoulders, such strength she had, she’d always been strong, thin and strong, she used to beat him at arm wrestling. But he mustn’t think, mustn’t remember, because beyond her shouting he could finally feel the blurry dizziness waiting, and there was an indentation in the shape of his body, as soft as a palm, and a cloud would cover everything.

Ora stood facing the man asleep in the armchair. Three years I haven’t seen him, she thought, and I didn’t even hug him. Sprawled out with his chin pressed to his chest, the patches of stubble protruded around his mouth and made him look like a drunken troll, and it was hard to decide if he was kindly or bitterly cruel. “Look at something weird,” he’d said to her once, standing naked before her, when they were twenty-one. “I’ve just noticed that I have one good eye and one bad eye.”

“Stop,” she said now to the fallen heap of his flesh. “You have to come. It’s not just for me, Avram, it’s for you too, isn’t it? You understand that, don’t you?”

He snored softly, and his face grew calmer. In his bedroom she’d seen weird scribbles in black pencil all over the wall above his bed. At first she thought it was a childish sketch of train tracks or an infinitely long fence that twisted back and forth along the width of the wall and came down from the ceiling in rows, zigzagging all the way down to the bed. The fence poles were joined at their midpoints by short, crooked beams. She cocked her head to one side and examined it: the lines also looked like the long teeth of a comb or a rake, or some ancient beast. Then she discovered little numbers scattered here and there and realized they signified dates. The last one, right by the pillow, was the day that had just come to an end, and it had a little exclamation point next to it. Ora stood there and looked back and forth at the lines and could not stop until she had verified that each of the many vertical lines was crossed out with a horizontal one.

A shock of cold water slapped his face, and he opened a pair of stunned eyes. “Get up,” she said. His temples started to pound. He licked the water off his lips and strained to lift a hand up to protect his face from her gaze. It scared him to be looked at by her eyes in this way. Her stare turned him into an object, a lump whose size and weight and center of gravity she was examining, planning how to move him from the armchair to a place he did not even dare to imagine. She put the toes of her shoes up against his, placed his limp hands on her shoulders, bent her knees, and pulled him toward her. She let out a moan of pain and astonishment when he fell on her with his full weight. “There goes my back,” she announced to herself. She shuffled back with one foot, afraid she would tumble down with him at any moment. “Come on, let’s go,” she squeaked. He snorted into her neck. One of his arms hung down her hunched back. “Don’t fall asleep,” she croaked in a stifled voice. “Stay awake!” She felt her way across the room, rocking with him in a drunkard’s dance. Then she pulled him through the doorway like a huge cork and slammed the door shut. In the dark stairwell she searched for the edge of the step with her heel. He mumbled again for her to leave him alone and expressed certain opinions about her sanity. Then he went back to snoring and a strand of his saliva dribbled down her arm. In her mouth she held the plastic bag with his sleeping tablets and toothbrush, which she’d grabbed from the top of a bureau, and she was already regretting not having taken some clothes for him. Through the plastic bag, with gritted teeth, she spoke and grunted at him, fighting to awaken him, to pull the edge of him out of the dark mouth that was swallowing him up. She panted like a dog, and her legs shook. She was trying to do it the right way, reciting to herself silently as she did during a particularly complicated treatment: the quadriceps extend, the gluteus contracts, the gastrocnemius and Achilles extend, you’re doing it, you’re in control of the situation — but nothing was working right, he was too heavy, he was crushing her, and her body could not take it. Finally she gave up and simply tried to hold him up as much as she could, so the two of them wouldn’t roll down together. As she did so — and she had no control over this either — she began to emit fragments that had not passed her lips for years. She reminded him of long-forgotten things about him and herself and Ilan and told him a pulverized yet complete life story over sixty-four steps, all the way to the building entrance. From there she dragged him down a path of broken tiles and trash and shattered bottles, all the way to the taxi where Sami sat watching her through the windshield with impassive eyes, and did not come out to help her.

She stops and waits for him, and he comes over and stands one or two steps behind her. She waves her hand over the broad plain glowing in bright green, glistening with beads of dew, and over the distant, mauve mountains. There is a hum, and not just of insects: Ora thinks she can hear the air itself teeming with a vitality it can barely contain.

“Mount Hermon,” she says, pointing to a pure white glow in the north. “And look here, did you see the water?”

“Do me a favor,” Avram spits out, and walks on with his head hanging.

But there’s a stream here, Ora thinks to herself. We’re walking alongside a stream. She laughs quietly at his back as he recedes. “You and me by a stream, could you have imagined?”

For years she had tried to get him out of the house, to take him to places that would light up his soul and bathe him in beauty, but at most she’d managed to drag him to dull meetings in cafés he chose, a couple of times a year. It had to be one he chose, and she never argued, even though the places he picked were always noisy, crowded, mass-produced (his word, the old Avram’s), as if he enjoyed seeing her aversion, and as if through these places he was confronting her, for the thousandth time, with his distance from her and from who he used to be. And now, in a completely unexpected way, it’s just the two of them and the stream and trees and daylight.

On his body the backpack looks shrunken and smaller than hers, like a child clinging to his father’s back. She stands looking at him for a moment longer, with Ofer’s pack over his shoulders. Her eyes widen and brighten. She feels the first rays of sun slowly smoothing over her bruised wings.

Mist rises from the fragrant earth as it warms, and from the large, juicy rolls of excrement left by the cows that preceded them. Elongated puddles from the recent rains reply to the dawn sky, emitting modest signals, and frogs leap into the stream as they walk by, and there is not a human being in sight.

A moment later they come up against a barbed-wire fence blocking the path, and Avram waits for her. “I guess that’s it, then?”

Ora can hear how relieved he is that the hike is over relatively quickly and painlessly. Her spirits fall — what is a fence doing in the middle of the path? Who would put a fence in a place like this? Her Moirae gather to determine her fate, to circle her in a dance of mockery and rebuke — for her ungainliness , her appliance dyslexia , and her user-manual illiteracy —but as she wallows in their juices, she notices some thin metal cylinders on the ground. She takes her glasses out and puts them on, ignoring Avram’s look of amazement, and realizes that part of the fence is in fact a narrow gate. She looks for the tether that secures it and finds a twisted, rusty wire.