David Grossman - To the End of the Land

She felt it immediately when he changed his tactic, because he started to simply say Mom , time after time, a hundred times, Mom, Mom , in different tones, at different ages, nagging at her, smiling to her, telling her secrets, tugging at her dress, Mom, Mom , angry at her, ingratiating, flirting, impressed, clinging, jabbing, laughing with her, opening his eyes to her on an eternal morning of childhood: Mom?

Or lying in her arms, the baby he used to be, alert and tiny, his thin waist in a diaper, staring at her with that look he had even back then, embarrassingly tranquil and mature, with a constant speck of irony, almost from birth, perhaps because of the shape of his eyes, which leaned —lean —toward each other at a sharp and skeptical angle.

She tripped and pulled herself forward with outstretched arms, and looked as if she were feeling her way through an invisible swarm of hornets. There was something ominous in the vitality with which he had suddenly emerged inside her, rocking frantically. Why is he doing this? she asked herself feebly. Why is he feeding and sucking on me? Her entire body throbbed and exhaled his name like a bellows, and it was not that she missed him — there was no nostalgia. He was tearing her up from the inside, flailing around and beating his fists against the walls of her body. He claimed her for himself unconditionally, demanded that she vacate her own being and dedicate herself to him eternally, that she think about him all the time and talk about him incessantly, that she tell anyone she meets about him, even the trees and the rocks and the thistles, and that she say his name out loud and silently over and over again, so as not to forget him even for a moment, even for a second, and that she not abandon him, because he needed her now in order to exist —she suddenly knew that this was what his biting meant. How could she not have realized before that he needed her now, in order not to die? She stood with one hand on her aching waist and let out an astonished breath. Was that it? Just as he had once needed her to be born?

“What’s the matter with you?” Avram asked breathlessly when he caught up. “What’s gotten into you?”

She lowered her head and said softly, “Avram, I can’t go on like this.”

“Like what?”

“With you not even willing to … That I can’t even say the name in front of you.” And then a knot came untied in her. “Listen. This silence is killing me and it’s killing him, so make up your mind.”

“About what?”

“About whether you’re really here with me.”

He looked away. Ora waited quietly. Since Ofer’s birth, she had hardly talked with Avram about him. Avram always made a hand gesture that was quick and repellant, like brushing away a bothersome fly, every time Ora couldn’t resist talking about Ofer when they met, or even when she merely mentioned his name. She always had to protect him from Ofer, that was his stipulation, his condition for these pathetic meetings. She had to act as if there were no Ofer in the world and never had been. And Ora had grit her teeth and concluded that she was more or less over the insult and the anger and accepted his refusal and rejection and told herself that over the years she’d even grown a little accustomed to the total and arbitrary demarcation he demanded from her — after all, there was a certain relief in the clear boundaries, the total separation of authorities: Avram on this side, she on the other, and everything else over there. And in recent years she’d discovered, with a slight sense of shame, that the thought of any other option made her more nervous than the idea that this state of affairs would continue. Yet even so, with every rude push he gave, she was insulted to the depths of her soul and had to remind herself again that Avram’s tenuous equilibrium seemed to be based on a total, hermetic self-defense against Ofer, against the fact of Ofer, against what, to him, was undoubtedly the mistake of his lifetime. This too always aroused a fresh wave of anger in her, the thought that Ofer was anyone’s mistake of a lifetime, and worse, that Ofer was Avram’s mistake of a lifetime. But on the other hand — and this is what had confused and maddened her these last two days — there were the etched lines on the wall above his bed, the countdown calendar of Ofer’s army years, three years, more than a thousand lines, one line for every single day, and he must have crossed out the day every evening with a horizontal line, and how could she reconcile these two things — the mistake of a lifetime and the countdown — and which of the two should she believe?

“Listen, I was thinking—”

“Ora, not now.”

“Then when? When?”

He turned away sharply and walked quickly ahead, and she hated him and disdained him and pitied him and realized she must have truly lost her mind to have believed he could help her or be with her in her time of trouble. The whole idea was fundamentally sick, sadistic even — to inflict this sort of trek on him, to expect that suddenly, after twenty-one years of erasure and separation, he would want to start hearing about Ofer. She swore she would put him on the first bus to Tel Aviv in the morning, and from now on she would not say a word about Ofer.

By evening the pain of him became so strong that she shut herself up in her tent and sobbed quietly, secretly, trying to muffle the noise. The contractions — that was how she felt: they were like labor contractions — came frequently and sharply and grew into a constant, blinding pain, and she thought that if this continued she would somehow have to get to an emergency room. But what would she say when she got there? And besides, a doctor might persuade her to go home immediately and wait for them .

Avram, in his tent, heard her and decided not to take a sleeping pill, not even his girlfriend Neta’s pills, because Ora might need him during the night. But how could he help her? He lay awake, motionless, his arms crossed over his chest and his hands in his armpits. He could have lain that way for hours, almost without moving. He heard her sobbing to herself, a long, monotonous wail. In Egypt, in Abbasiya Prison, there was a short, thin reservist from Jerusalem who came from a family of Cochin Jews. He used to cry for hours every night, even if they hadn’t been tortured that day. The guys almost lost their minds because of him, even the Egyptian wardens couldn’t stand it, but the Cochin guy wouldn’t stop. One day when he and Avram were standing in the corridor waiting to be taken to an interrogation, Avram managed to communicate with the man through the sacks over their faces, and the Cochin guy said he was crying out of jealousy for his girlfriend, because he could sense that she was being unfaithful. She had always loved his older brother, and his imaginings of what she was doing now were eating him alive. Avram had felt a strange reverence for this gaunt man, who within the hell of captivity could find such dedication to his own private pain, which had nothing to do with the Egyptians and their tortures.

Avram stepped quietly out of the tent and walked away until he could barely hear her, then sat down under a terebinth to try to focus. During the day, with Ora next to him, he could not think at all. Now he wrote the indictment of his pathetic and cowardly conduct. He dug his fingers into his face, his forehead and cheeks, and groaned softly: “Help her, you shit, you traitor.” But he knew that he wouldn’t, and his mouth twisted with loathing.

As he did whenever he thought about himself honestly, he simply found it difficult to comprehend why he was still alive. What made life hold on to him and preserve him? What was there in him, still, that justified such persistent effort on life’s part, such stubbornness, or perhaps just vengefulness?