David Grossman - To the End of the Land

“And the kids?” Avram blurted.

Ora slowed her steps. He wasn’t even willing to say their names. “The kids,” she annunciated, “are grown now, the kids are independent. They can make up their own minds whom to be with and where.”

He shot her a quick sideways glance, and for a moment a screen lifted and his eyes plunged into hers. He looked at her and knew her to the depths of her aggrievedness. Then the screen covered him over again. Within the sorrow and the pain, Ora felt a thrill: there was still someone inside there.

They kept on this way till the evening, walking a little then stopping to rest, avoiding roads and people, eating food from Ora’s backpack, picking the odd grapefruit or orange and finding pecans and walnuts on the ground. They filled and refilled their water bottles from brooks and springs. Avram drank constantly, Ora hardly at all. They walked this way and that like a pendulum, and she wondered if he understood that they were intentionally disorienting themselves so they could not find their way back.

And they barely spoke. She tried to say something a few times about the separation, about Ilan, about herself, but he would put his hand up in supplication, almost pleading — he did not have the strength for it. Maybe later. Tonight or tomorrow. Preferably tomorrow.

He was growing weaker, and she too was unaccustomed to such exertion. Calluses developed on his heels, and jock itch set in. She offered him Band-Aids and talc, and he refused. In the afternoon they napped under the shade of a leafy carob tree, then meandered a little more and stopped to doze again. Her thoughts grew unfocused. She thought it might be because of him: just as he had once awakened her and turned her inside out, his presence was now extinguishing and uninspiring. At dusk, when they sprawled on the edge of a pecan grove on a bed of dry leaves and nutshells, she looked up at the sky — empty apart from two noisy, stationary helicopters that had been hovering for hours, probably watching the border — and thought that she really wouldn’t mind meandering like this for the rest of the twenty-eight days, even a whole month. Just to stupefy herself. But what about Avram?

Perhaps he wouldn’t care, either. Perhaps he also felt like roaming now. What do I know about what he’s going through and what his life is like and who he’s with? she thought. As for me, it’s really not bad this way, it’s less painful. She noted with surprise that even Ofer had somewhat quieted in her over the last few hours. Maybe Avram was right and you didn’t have to talk about everything, or about anything. What was there to say, anyway? At most, if the right moment came along, she would tell him a bit about Ofer, carefully — maybe out here he wouldn’t be so resistant — just a few little things, maybe the easy things, the funny things. So at least he’d know who Ofer was in general outlines, in chapter headings. So at least he would know this person he had brought into the world.

They pitched their tents in a small wooded area, among terebinth and oak trees. Ofer had drilled her at home on setting up the tent, and to her amazement she did it with almost no difficulty. First she set up her own, then she helped Avram, and the tents did not stealthily attack her or slyly wrap themselves around her and did not pull her inside them like a carnivorous plant, as Ofer had predicted they might. When she had finished there were two round little tents, hers orange and his blue, about three or four yards apart, two bubbles that looked like little spaceships, impervious to water and to each other, and both had tiny windows covered with long nylon foreskins.

Avram still avoided opening Ofer’s backpack. Even the outside pockets. He said he didn’t need to change his clothes, which had been washed several times on his body in the stream that day, and he could lie down just as he was, on the ground, he didn’t need a pad, and anyway he wouldn’t rest for long because Ora hadn’t brought the sleeping pills he usually used, which were kept in a drawer next to his bed. The ones she’d brought, the homeopathic ones she’d found in the bathroom, were not his. “Whose are they, then?” Ora asked without moving her lips. “Um …” Avram dismissed the question. “They don’t have any effect on me.” Ora thought about the woman who used the vanilla-scented deodorant, who had purple hair, and who for a month, apparently, or so she thought he’d told her on the phone, had not lived with him.

At seven, when they could no longer bear the silence, they went to their tents and lay awake for hours, dozing off occasionally. Avram was exhausted from the day’s efforts and almost managed to fall asleep with the help of the ludicrous pills, but eventually he overcame them.

They tossed and turned, sighed and coughed. Too much reality was bustling inside them: the fact that they were out in the open, lying on earth that felt uncomfortably knobby with stones and dimples, and frighteningly new, and the unseen but tense quivering of a large animal, and a nervousness instilled in them by the twinkling stars, and breezes — first warm, then cool, then damp — that kept moving in different directions like soft breaths from an invisible mouth. And the calls of nocturnal birds and the rustling all around and the buzz of mosquitoes. At every moment it seemed as if something was crawling on their cheeks or down their legs, and the sound of light steps came from the nearby thicket, and the jackals called, and once there was the yelp of a creature being preyed upon. Ora must have fallen asleep despite all this, because she was awoken early in the morning by three people in military uniform standing on the stoop outside her front door. They squeezed against the wall to allow the senior member to pass by and knock. The doctor felt in his bag for a tranquilizer, and the young officer readied her arms to catch Ora if she passed out.

Ora saw the three of them straighten up and clear their throats, and the senior one raised his hand and hesitated for an instant. She watched his fist, transfixed, and it occurred to her that this was a moment that would last a lifetime, but then he knocked on the door, knocked firmly three times, and looked at the tips of his shoes, and as he waited for the door to open he silently rehearsed the notification: at such-and-such time in such-and-such place, your son Ofer, who was on an operational mission—

Across the street a series of windows slammed shut and drapes were drawn closed, with only their corners pulled aside for someone to peek out. But her door would remain shut. Ora finally managed to move her feet and tried to pull herself into a seated position in the sleeping bag. She was bathed in cold sweat. Her eyes were closed and her hands felt rigid, unmovable. The senior officer knocked three times again and was so averse to doing it that he knocked too hard, and for a moment he seemed to want to break down the door and burst in with the news. But the door was closed and no one was opening it to receive his notification, and he looked awkwardly at the document in his hand, which stated explicitly that at such-and-such time in such-and-such place, your son Ofer, who was on an operational mission. The female officer walked backward on the stoop to check the house number, and it was the right house, and the doctor tried to peer through the window to see if there was a light on inside, but no light was on. Two more weaker knocks, and the door remained shut, and the senior officer leaned on it with his whole weight as if seriously considering breaking the door down and hurling his notification inside at any cost. He looked at his colleagues with a confused expression, because it was becoming clear to them that something had gone wrong with the rules of this ritual, that their businesslike and professional desire, their essentially logical desire, to deliver the notification, to rid themselves of it, to vomit it out, and above all to embed it quickly into the person it belonged to by law and by destiny, namely, that at such-and-such time in such-and-such place, your son Ofer, who was on an operational mission — this desire of theirs was now encountering a wholly unexpected yet equally powerful force, which was Ora’s absolute unwillingness to receive the notification or accommodate it in any way, or even to acknowledge that it belonged to her at all.