David Grossman - To the End of the Land

Avram stands next to her without lifting a finger, either because he hopes she will not be able to open it or because he is once again too weak to understand what is going on. But when she asks for his help he pitches in immediately, and after she explains what needs to be done — namely, to pick up two large stones and pound the wire on either side until it gradually gives way and breaks — he studies the tether for a long time, hoists the loop over the fence post in one swift motion, the barbed wire falls to the ground at their feet, and they walk through.

“We have to shut it behind us,” she says, and Avram nods. “Will you do it?” He locks the gate, and she notes to herself that he needs to be constantly activated and have his engine started; he seems to have given up his volition and handed the keys to her. Nu , she thinks in her mother’s voice, it’s the blind leading the blind. After they go a little farther, something else occurs to her, and she asks if he knows why there was even a fence there. He shakes his head, and she explains about the cows and their pasture areas. Since she knows very little, she talks a lot, and is unable to determine how much of it he is taking in, or why he is listening with such stern concentration — whether he hears what she was saying or is simply lapping up the sounds of her voice.

She notices that he is becoming irritable again, throwing nervous glances behind him and jumping every time a crow caws. After losing focus on him for a moment, she turns to find that he has stopped walking and is standing a ways back, staring at the earth. She walks over and finds the rotting corpse of a little songbird at his feet. She cannot identify it, but it has black feathers, a white stomach, and brown glassy eyes. Ants, white maggots, and flies are swarming all over it. She calls Avram’s name twice before he snaps awake and follows her. How much farther am I going to be able to drag him, she wonders, before he erupts or falls apart? What am I doing to him? What did I do to Sami? What’s happening to me? All I do is cause trouble.

The path curves sharply and plunges into the stream. Ora stands close to the water and spots the path emerging on the opposite bank in a charming, innocent-looking zigzag. When she was planning the trip with Ofer, she had read something about how, in spring, “you’ll need to wet your feet in the streams once in a while.” But this is a torrent, and there is no other visible path. She cannot turn back — this is another new rule, a trick against her persecutors: she must not reverse her tracks . Avram stands next to her and stares at the glistening green water as though it were a huge mystery bustling with clues. His thick arms hang by his sides. His helplessness suddenly angers her, and she is angry at herself too, for not looking into what to do in such a situation before the hike. But before the hike she’d had Ofer. Ofer was supposed to navigate and lead, he would build bridges over the water for her, and now she is here alone with Avram. Alone.

She edges closer to the stream, careful not to slip. A large leafless tree is growing out of the water, and she leans in as far as she can and tries to break off a branch. Avram does not move. He stares hypnotically at the current, horrified when the dry branch snaps and Ora almost falls into the water. She angrily sticks the branch into the streambed, then pulls it out and measures it against her body. The ring of water reaches up to her waist. “Sit down and take off your shoes and socks,” she says. She sits down on the path and takes off her own shoes, sticks her socks in a side pocket on the backpack, ties the shoelaces together after threading them through a loop on top of the pack, and rolls her pants up to her knees. When she looks up, Avram is standing over her, looking at her feet the way he stared at the stream.

“Hey,” she says softly, a little surprised, and wiggles her pink toes at him. “Yoo-hoo!”

He sits down quickly to take off his shoes and socks. He rolls his pants up to the knees, exposing thick, pale legs that are slightly bent but look surprisingly powerful. She remembers those legs well — the legs of a horseman, and also, as he himself once said, the legs of a stretched-out dwarf. “Hey,” he growls. “Yoo-hoo.”

Ora looks away and laughs, excited by the flicker of old Avram from within his flatness, and perhaps also by his suddenly bared flesh.

They sit and watch the water. A translucent purple dragonfly flits by like an optical illusion. There was a time, Ora thinks, when I was at home in his body. And then there were years when I was in charge of it: I washed and cleaned and dried and clipped and shaved and bandaged and fed and drained and whatever else.

She shows him how to tie his shoes to the backpack, next to Ofer’s pair, and suggests that he empty out his pockets so his money and other stuff won’t get wet.

He shrugs.

“Not even an ID?”

Avram mumbles: “What do I need it for?”

She walks down to the water first, holding the branch, and lets out a yelp when she touches the cold torrent. She wonders what she will do if Avram gets swept away and thinks perhaps he shouldn’t even walk into a current like this in his condition. But she decides, of her own accord, by unanimous proclamation, that it will be all right, because there is simply no choice. She puts one foot in front of the other, fighting the flow of water that reaches up to her stomach now and is so powerful that she is afraid to lift her feet off the bottom. But Avram will be fine, she determines again, frightened. He will walk into this water and nothing will happen. Are you sure? Yes. Why? Because. Because for the last hour, really the last day and night, she’s had a continuous resolve, desperate yet determined, and she has used it countless times to force people and events to proceed exactly as she wished, because she needs them to, because she has no leeway for bargains or compromises, because she demands blind obedience to the new rules that her mind is constantly legislating — the regulations of this emergency state that has befallen her. And one of the rules, quite possibly the most important one, is that she has to keep moving, has to be constantly in motion. Besides, she must keep moving because the water is freezing her entire lower half.

Her feet grope pebbles and silt, and slippery weeds float around her ankles. Every so often her toes grasp a little stone or rock. They examine it, hypothesize, draw conclusions, and a primeval fishlike sensation flutters in her spine. A long thin branch floats by near the surface and suddenly whips into a twist and slithers away. Droplets of water spray her glasses, and she gives up wiping them off. Every so often she dips her swollen left arm into the water and delights in the cold relief. Avram wades in behind her, and she hears his gasp of pained surprise when the water envelops him with its coolness. She keeps going, already halfway across. Torrents of water flow and part around her body and lap against her thighs and waist. The sun warms her face, and a field of blue and green rays dances in her eyes and in the drops on her glasses, and it feels good to stand in this transparent bubble of the moment.

She climbs up the opposite bank through deep, doughy mud that enfolds her feet and sucks at them with its quivering lips, and clouds of gnats rise from the indentations left by her soles. Another few steps and she is on dry land, where she collapses against a rock with her backpack. She feels a new lightness; in the water, in the current that surged through her, she’d felt as though a stone had been rolled from the mouth of a well she thought was dry. And then she remembers: Avram. Stuck in the middle of the stream with half-closed eyes and a face distorted with fear.