David Grossman - To the End of the Land

Now the two other members of the team joined in the effort to push down the door, and with rhythmic grunts, wordlessly spurring each other on, they stormed the door again and again, ramming it with their bodies, and Ora still lay somewhere on the outskirts of her dream. Her head jerked from side to side and she wanted to shout but no sound came out. She knew they would never dare to do something so extraordinary unless they sensed the resistance projected onto the door from the inside, and this is what was enraging them, and the unfortunate door heaved and groaned between the willingness and the unwillingness, between their mature military logic and her childish obstinacy, and Ora fluttered and grew entangled in the folds of her sleeping bag until suddenly she froze, opened her eyes, and stared at the little window in her tent. She could see through the edges that it was getting light outside, and she ran her hand through her hair — so wet, as if she’d washed her hair in sweat — and lay down and reassured herself that her heart would stop racing soon, but she had to get out.

Much as she wanted to, she could not sit up. The sleeping bag was twisted and wrapped around her like a huge, tight, damp bandage, and her body was so weak that it did not have the power to resist this shroud, so full of life as it tightened around her. Perhaps she would just lie here a little longer, calm herself and gather strength, close her eyes and try to think about something more cheerful. But she soon felt a hushed grumble erupting from the team of notifiers, because they knew that they had to deliver their notice, if not now then in an hour or two, or in a day or two, and they would have to come all the way out here again and prepare themselves again for the difficult moment. People never think about the notifiers and the emotional burden they must bear; they pity only those receiving the news. But perhaps the notifiers are the ones who are angry, because as sad and sympathetic as they may be, they have, after all, begun to feel a certain tension — not to say excitement — and even a festive air, in anticipation of the moment of notification, which, even after they’ve experienced it dozens of times, is not and cannot be routine, just as there can be no routine execution.

With a stifled yell, Ora tore herself away from the damn sleeping bag and ran, fleeing from the tent. She stood outside with a horrified look in her wild eyes. Only after a few moments did she notice Avram sitting on the ground not far away, leaning against a tree, watching her.

They made coffee and drank silently, he wrapped in his sleeping bag, she in a thin coat. “You were shouting,” he said.

“I had a nightmare.”

He did not ask what it was about.

“What was I shouting?”

He got up and began to tell her about the stars. “This one’s Venus, those are the Big and Little Dipper, and see how the Big Dipper points to the North Star?”

She listened, slightly hurt, slightly amazed at his new enthusiasm and unshackled voice.

“See?” He pointed. “There’s Saturn. Sometimes, in summer, I can see it from my bed, with the rings. And that one’s Sirius, the brightest—”

As he talked and talked, Ora remembered a line she and Ada had loved, from S. Yizhar’s “Midnight Convoy”: “You cannot point out a star to someone without putting your other hand on his shoulder.” But as it turned out, you could.

They folded up their little encampment and set off. She was happy to put some distance between her and the place where the nightmare had come, and the hint of sunrise in the sky — the light ascended as if from a slowly unclasping pair of hands — revived her a little. We’ve been on the road for a whole day and night, she thought, and we’re still together. But her feet soon began to feel very heavy, and a dull pain coursed through her body.

She thought it was the exhaustion. She had barely slept for two days. Or perhaps it was sunstroke — she hadn’t worn a hat the day before or had enough to drink. She hoped it wasn’t an ill-timed bout of spring flu. But it didn’t feel like flu or sunstroke. It was a different, unfamiliar sort of ache, stubborn and persistent and consuming, and at times she even thought it was a flesh-eating bacteria.

They sat down to rest near a ruin. Part of the structure was still standing; the rest had crumbled into a heap of chiseled stones. Ora closed her eyes and tried to calm herself by breathing deeply and massaging her temples, chest, and stomach. The pain and distress grew worse, her heartbeat pounded through her body, and then it occurred to her that her pain was Ofer.

She felt him in her stomach, beneath her heart, a dark and restless spot of emotion. He moved and shifted and turned inside her, and she moaned in surprise, frightened by his violence and desperation. She thought back to the attack of claustrophobia he’d suffered when he was about seven, when the two of them got stuck between floors in the elevator in Ilan’s office building. When Ofer realized they were trapped, he started yelling at the top of his lungs for someone to help them, shouting that he had to get out, he didn’t want to die. She tried to calm him and gather him in her arms, but he slipped away and thrashed against the walls and door, hitting and screaming until his voice cracked, and eventually he attacked her too, beating and kicking. Ora always remembered how his face had changed in those moments, and she remembered the twinge of disappointment when she realized, not for the first time, how thin and fragile his cheerful, vivacious surface was, this child who was the brighter and clearer of her two — that was how she had always thought of him: the brighter and clearer of her two — and she remembered that Ilan said at the time, half joking, that at least they knew Ofer wouldn’t join the Armored Corps when he enlisted; he would never let himself be closed up inside a tank. But that prophecy was disproven, like so many others, and Ofer did join the Armored Corps, and he was closed up inside a tank, and there was never any problem with that — at least not for him. Ora was the one who felt suffocated almost to the point of passing out when she got inside a tank, at Ofer’s request, after the military display that his battalion put on for the parents at Nebi Musa. And now she felt him, she felt Ofer, just as she had felt him that day in the elevator, terrified and wild with fear, sensing that something was closing in on him, trapping him, and that he had no way out and no air to breathe. Ora jumped up and stood over Avram. “Come on, let’s go.” Avram couldn’t understand — they’d only just sat down — but he didn’t ask anything, and it’s a good thing he didn’t, because what could she have told him?

She walked quickly, not feeling the weight of her backpack, and she kept forgetting about Avram, who had to call out for her to slow down and wait. But it was hard for her, it was intolerable, to walk at his pace. All morning she refused to stop even once, and when he rebelled and lay down in the middle of the path, or under a tree, she kept circling around him to dull herself more and more with continuous walking and sun exposure, and intentionally made herself thirsty. But Ofer would not let up, he raged inside her with rhythmic and painful spasms, and toward noon she started to hear him. It was not speech exactly, just the music of his voice carrying over all the sounds of the valley: the hums and the twitters and the chirping of crickets and her own breath and Avram’s grunts and the hiss of the huge sprinklers in the fields and the distant tractor engines and the small planes that sometimes circled above. His voice came to her with strange clarity, as if he were right here walking beside her, talking to her without words — he had no words, only his voice, he was playing for her with his voice, and every so often she picked up the slight, endearing stammer in his sh sounds, especially when he was excited: sh … sh … She did not know whether to answer him and just start talking or ignore him as much as she could, because from the moment she had shut the door to her house in Beit Zayit behind her, she had been tormented by a very familiar fear, the fear of what she might perceive and what her imagination might show her when she thought of him, and what might slip out of her head and wrap itself around Ofer’s hands and over his eyes precisely at the moment when he needed all his vigilance and strength.