David Grossman - To the End of the Land

“I wonder what she’s thinking thoughts deeper than the ocean itself about, Avram speculated nervously.”

“She’s thinking to herself that she really wants to see him, just for a minute — and then Ora, sly as a fox, revealed to him that apart from a chair, she had also today prepared this .”

A scratch, and another scratch, a flare, and a spot of light shines in the room. A long, fair, slender arm reaches out, holding a matchstick torch. The light sways on the walls like liquid. A large room with many empty, naked beds, and trembling shadows, and a wall and a doorframe, and in the heart of the circle of light is Avram, shrinking back a little from the glare of the match.

She lights another and holds it lower, as if not wanting to embarrass him. The flame reveals a young man’s thick, sturdy legs in blue pajamas. Surprisingly small hands grasp each other nervously on the lap, and the light climbs up to a short, solid body and cuts a large round face out of the darkness. Despite the illness, the face contains an almost embarrassing lust for life, curious and intense, with a bulbous nose and swollen lids, and above them a wild bush of black hair.

What astounds her more than anything is the way he presents his face for her perusal and verdict, closing his eyes tightly, strenuously wrinkling all his features. For a moment he looks like someone who has just tossed a very fragile object into the air and is now waiting fearfully for it to shatter.

Ora gasps with pain and licks her burned fingertip. After a moment’s hesitation, she lights another match and holds it with severe candor in front of her own forehead. She shuts her eyes and quickly runs the light up and down in front of her face. Her eyelashes flutter, her lips protrude slightly. Shadows break on her long, high cheekbones and around the defiant, swollen ball of her mouth and chin. Something dark and imbued with sleep hovers over this lovely face, something lost and unweaned, but perhaps it’s just the illness that makes it look that way. Her short hair glistens like burnished brass, and its brilliance glows in Avram’s eyes even after the match goes out and the darkness once again envelops her.

HEY—

What, what?!

Avram?

What?

Did you fall asleep?

Me? I thought you did.

Do you really think we’ll get better?

Of course.

But there must have been a hundred people in isolation when I got here. Maybe we have something they don’t know how to cure?

You mean — both of us?

Whoever is left here.

That’s just the two of us, and the other guy, from my class.

But why us?

Because we have the complications of hepatitis.

That’s just it. Why us?

Don’t know.

I’m falling asleep again—

I’m staying.

Why do I keep falling asleep?

Weak body.

Don’t sleep, watch over me.

Then talk to me. Tell me.

About what?

About you.

They were like sisters, she told him. People called them “the Siamese twins,” even though they looked nothing alike. For eight years, ages six to fourteen, first grade to the end of the first trimester in the eighth grade, they sat at the same desk. They didn’t part after school either, always together, at one or the other’s house, and in the Machanot Olim youth movement, and on hikes — Are you even listening?

What …? Yes, I’m listening … There’s something I don’t get — why aren’t you friends anymore?

Why?

Yes.

She isn’t—

Isn’t what?

Alive.

Ada?!

She heard him flinch as though he’d been hit. She folded her legs in and wrapped her arms around her knees and started rocking herself back and forth. Ada is dead, Ada’s been dead for two years, she said to herself quietly. It’s all right, it’s all right, everyone knows she’s dead. We’re used to it now, she’s dead. Life goes on. But she felt that she had just told Avram something secret and very intimate, something only she and Ada had really known.

And then, for some reason, she relaxed. She stopped rocking. She began to breathe again, slowly, cautiously, as if there were thorns in her lungs, and she had the peculiar notion that this boy could carefully remove them, one by one.

But how did she die?

Traffic accident. And just so you know—

An accident?

You have the same sense of humor.

Who?

You and her, but exactly the same.

So is that why—

What?

Is that why you don’t laugh at my jokes?

Avram—

Yes.

Give me your hand.

What?

Give me your hand, quick.

But are we allowed?

Don’t be stupid, just give it to me.

No, I mean, because of the isolation.

We’re infected anyway.

But maybe—

Give me your hand already!

Look how we’re both sweating.

It’s a good thing.

Why?

Imagine if only one of us was sweating.

Or only one was shaking.

Or scratching.

Or only one had—

What?

You know.

You’re gross.

It’s true, isn’t it?

Then say it.

Okay: shit—

The color of whitewash—

And with blood, loads of it.

She whispered: I never knew I had so much blood in my body.

What’s yellow on the outside, shakes like crazy, and shits blood? There, now you’re laughing … I was getting worried …

Listen to this. Before I got ill I thought I didn’t have any—

Any what?

Blood in my body.

How could that be?

Never mind.

That’s what you thought?

Hold my hand, don’t leave.

APART FROM THE COLORof their hair, they were very different, almost opposites. One was tall and strong, the other short and chubby. One had the open, glowing face of a carefree filly, and the other’s was crowded and worried, with lots of freckles and a sharp nose and chin, and big glasses — like a young scholar from the shtetl, Ora’s father used to say. Their hair was completely different too: Ada’s was thick, frizzy, and wild, you could barely get a comb through it. I used to braid her hair, Ora said, in one thick braid, and then I’d tie it around her head like a Sabbath challah, that’s how she liked it. And she wouldn’t let anyone else do it.

Ada’s head was truly red, much redder than Ora’s, and it always stuck out in acclamation. Ora curled up on the bed now and saw it: Ada, like a match head, like a blotch of fire. Ora peeked at her, peeked and closed her eyes, unable to face the fullness of Ada. I haven’t seen her that way for a long time, she thought, in color.

She always walked on this side of me, Ora told Avram as she grasped his hand in both of hers, because Ada could hardly hear out of her right ear, from birth, and we always talked, about everything, we talked about everything. She fell silent suddenly and pulled her hands away from his. I can’t, she thought. What am I doing telling him about her? He isn’t even asking anything, he’s just quiet, as if he’s waiting for me to say it on my own.

She took a deep breath and tried to find a way to tell him, but the words wouldn’t come. They pressed on her heart and could not come out. What could she tell him? What could he even understand? I want to, she thought to him. Her fingers moved and burrowed into her other palm. That was how she remembered them together, she remembered the togetherness, and she smiled: You know what I just remembered? It’s nothing, just that a week before she — before it happened — we were doing a literary analysis of “The Little Bunny.” You know, the nursery rhyme about the bunny who gets a cold.

Avram shook himself awake and smiled weakly. What, tell me. Ora laughed. We wrote — actually Ada wrote most of it, she was always the more talented one — a whole essay about how dreadful it was that the plague of the common cold had spread to the animal kingdom, even to the most innocent of its creatures …