David Grossman - To the End of the Land

He closed his eyes and tried to conjure up the figure of a boy. Any boy. Recently, as Ofer’s discharge date had grown closer, he would sometimes pick out a boy at the right age in the restaurant where he worked, or on the street, and observe him stealthily, even follow him for a block or two, and try to imagine how he saw things. He allowed himself more and more of these hallucinations, these Ofer-guesses, these shadows.

A thick nocturnal silence enveloped him. Soft breezes passed silently over him, plowing furrows through all of space. From time to time a large bird called out, sounding very close. Ora, in her tent, felt it, too. She listened as something seemed to flitter over her skin. Thousands of cranes made their way through the night sky heading north, and neither of them saw or knew. For a long time there was a huge invisible rustle, like the sighing of waves on a beach full of shells. Avram leaned against the tree with his eyes closed and saw the shadow of Ofer’s back slip away in the image of young Ilan — for some reason it was Ilan who popped up, walking half a step in front of him and leading him through the paths of the despised army base where he’d had to live with his father, winking at the whitewashed graffiti on the walls of the stone huts. Then Avram tried to imagine a male version of the young Ora, but all he could see was Ora herself, long and fair, with red curls that bounced on her shoulders. He wondered if Ofer was also a redhead, like she used to be — she did not have even a drop of red left now — and he was surprised that this was the first time he’d ever entertained the utterly logical possibility that Ofer was a redhead. He was even more surprised that he was daring to indulge in such fantasies, more than he ever had before. Then, in a flash, he saw an image of Ofer that looked like him, like the twenty-one-year-old Avram, and the seventeen-year-old, and the fourteen-year-old. In a heartbeat he skipped among his various ages — for her, he thought feverishly, with prayer-like devotion; only for her — and saw the twinkle of a round, red-cheeked face that was always alert and eager. He felt a springy, agile dwarfishness that he hadn’t felt for years, and the heat of a constant blaze coming from the tangled head of hair, and the glimmer of a sluttish wink, and then he was repelled, thrown from the spectacle, from his own self, as if tossed out by a rough bouncer. He sat panting, bathed in sweat, and for a few more moments his heart beat wildly and he was as excited as a young boy, a boy wallowing in forbidden fantasies.

He listened: total silence. Perhaps she’d finally fallen asleep, her torments lifted. He tried to understand what exactly had happened between her and Ilan. She hadn’t explicitly said it was Ilan’s fault. In fact she’d denied that. Perhaps she was the one who had fallen in love with someone else? Did she have another man? If so, why was she here alone, and why had she chosen to take him along?

She’d said that the children, the boys, were grown up now, and that they would decide who they wanted to live with. But he’d seen her lips tremble, and he knew that she was lying and could not figure out why. “Families are like calculus for me,” he sometimes told Neta. Too many variables, too many parentheses and multiplications of products by powers, and just the whole complication of it — this is what he grumbled whenever she raised the topic — and the constant need to be in a relationship with every other member of the family, at every moment, day and night, even in dreams. When she turned gloomy and withdrew, he would try to appease her: “It’s like being subjected to a permanent electrical shock, or like living in an eternal lightning storm. Is that what you want?”

For thirteen years he had not tired of telling Neta that she was wasting her youth, her future, and her beauty on him and that he was only holding her back, blocking her view. She was seventeen years younger than he. “My young girl,” he called her, sometimes affectionately and sometimes sorrowfully. “When you were ten,” he liked to remind her with strange glee, “I’d already been dead for five years.” And she would say, “Let’s bring the dead back to life, let’s rebel against time.”

He avoided her again and again with the age excuse. “You’re much more mature than I am,” he would say. She wanted children, and he laughed in terror: “Isn’t one enough? You have to have multiple children?” Her narrow devilish eyes glimmered: “Then one child, okay, like Ibsen and Ionesco and Jean Cocteau were the same child.”

Lately it seemed he had gotten through to her, because she hadn’t been around or even called for a few weeks. Where was she? he wondered half silently, and stood up.

Sometimes, when she made some money from her strange jobs, she just up and left. Avram could sense it approaching even before she could: a murky hunger started to surround her irises, a shadowy negotiation in which she apparently lost, and so had to travel. Even the names of the countries she chose scared him: Georgia, Mongolia, Tajikistan. She would call him from Marrakesh or Monrovia, nighttime for him, for her still day—“So now,” he’d point out, “on top of everything else you’re another three hours younger than me”—and with strange, dreamlike lightness she would recount experiences that made his hair stand on end.

He started walking around the tree. He tried to think, finally to ask himself when exactly he’d last heard from her, and found that it had been at least three weeks. Or more? Maybe it really had been a month since she’d disappeared. And what if she’d done something to herself? He froze and remembered her dancing with a ladder on the railing around the rooftop of her apartment building in Jaffa, and he knew that her potential in this area had been nagging at him for days now, and that his fear for her had existed alongside his profound confidence in her. He finally acknowledged how much the nerve-racking anticipation of Ofer’s release must have scrambled the rest of his mind and even caused him to forget about her.

He sped up his circles around the tree and calculated again. The restaurant had been closed for renovations for a month now. And it was roughly since then that she hadn’t been around. I haven’t seen her or heard from her or looked for her since then. What was I doing all that time? He remembered long walks on the beach. Street benches. Beggars. Fishermen. Waves of longing for her that he forcefully repressed by beating his head against the wall. Alcohol in quantities he was not used to. Bad trips. Double doses of sleeping pills, starting at eight p.m. Bad headaches in the morning. Whole days of one album, Miles Davis, Mantovani, Django Reinhardt. Hours of digging through the garbage dumps of Jaffa looking for junk, work tools, rusty engines, old keys. There were a few days of occasional work that had generated some decent income. Twice a week he shelved books in the library of a college in Rishon LeZion. Once in a while he served as an experiment subject for pharmaceutical and cosmetic companies. In the presence of friendly, polite scientists and lab technicians, who measured and weighed him and recorded every detail and gave him various forms to sign and finally handed him a voucher for coffee and a croissant, he swallowed brightly colored pills and slathered himself with creams that may or may not ever be used. In his reports, he invented physical and emotional side effects that the developers had never imagined.

For the past week, as Ofer’s release date approached, he had not left the house. He stopped talking to people. Answering the phone. Eating. He felt that he needed to reduce the space he occupied in the world as much as possible. He hardly moved from his armchair. He sat waiting and diminishing himself. And when he got up and walked around the apartment, he tried not to make any fast movements, so as not to rip, not to disturb the gossamer thread from which Ofer now hung. And on the last day, when he thought Ofer was done, he sat motionless by the phone and waited for Ora to call and tell him it was over. But she didn’t call, and he froze up more and more and knew that something bad had happened. The hours went by, evening fell, and he thought that if she did not call right now he would never be able to move again. With his last remaining strength he dialed her number and heard what had happened and felt himself turning to stone.