David Grossman - To the End of the Land

She spoke, but he could not make out her words. Her hands were palm-down on the sides of her head like grasshopper feet. Her short-cropped hair, speckled with earth and dust, trembled on the back of her neck. Her voice was a dim, crushed lament, like a person pleading before a judge. But it was a cruel and coldhearted judge, Avram thought, a cowardly judge, like me. From time to time she raised her head and opened her mouth wide for air, without looking at him, without seeing anything, then buried her face back in the ground. The morning flies were drawn to her sweat. Her legs, in dirty walking pants, moved and twitched every so often, and her entire body was tensed and bound up, and Avram, on the earth’s surface, began to dart back and forth.

The Hula Valley turned golden at their feet, flooded with sunlight. The fish hatcheries glistened and the peach groves blossomed pink. Ora lay facedown and told a story to the belly of the earth and tasted the clods of soil and knew they would not sweeten, would be forever bland and gritty. Dirt ground between her teeth, dirt stuck to her tongue, to the roof of her mouth, and turned to mud. Snot ran from her nose, her eyes watered, and she choked and gargled dirt, and she beat her hands on the ground at either side of her head, and a thought drove like a nail, deeper and deeper into her mind — she had to, she had to know what it was like. Even when he was a baby she used to taste everything she made for him to make sure it wasn’t too hot or too salty. Avram, above her, breathed rapidly, twitching, and absentmindedly bit the knuckles of his tightly clenched fists. He wanted to take hold of Ora and pull her out, but he did not dare touch her. He knew the taste of dirt in his eyes and suffocation in his nose and the sting of clods thrown from above — one of them, the bearded black man, had had a shovel, and the other one had used his hands to rake piles of earth dug from the pit. Avram himself had dug it, his hands covered with blisters. He had asked them to let him wear his socks on his hands. They’d laughed and said no. He’d been digging for over an hour and still couldn’t believe they were going to do it. Three times already they’d made him dig his own grave, and at the last minute they’d laughed and sent him back to the cell. And this time, even when they tied his hands behind his back and shackled his feet and pushed him inside and told him to lie there without moving, he refused to believe it, perhaps because they were just two lowly soldiers, fellahin, and the dhabet , the officer, wasn’t even there this time, and Avram still hoped they wouldn’t go through with something like this on their own. He did not believe it even when they started throwing in handfuls of loose earth. First they covered his legs, very slowly and with strange carefulness, then they piled earth on his thighs and stomach and chest, and Avram squirmed and jerked his head back, searching for the dhabet who would order them to stop, and only when the first handful of dirt hit his face, on his forehead and eyelids — he can still remember the shocking slap of a clump landing straight on his face, the sting in his eyes, specks trickling quickly down behind his ears — only then did he realize that this time it might not be another show, another stage in the torture, but that they were actually doing it, burying him alive, and a ring of cold terror tightened around his heart, injecting paralyzing venom: time is running out, you’re running out, one moment from now you’ll be gone, you won’t be anymore. Blood burst from his eyes and from his nose, and his body convulsed under layers of earth, heavy, heavy earth, who knew it was so heavy and burdensome on the chest, and his mouth shut to keep out the dirt, and his mouth ripped open to breathe in the dirt, and the throat is dirt and the lungs are dirt, and the toes stretch to inhale, and the eyes pop out of their sockets, and suddenly inside all this like a slowly crawling translucent worm, a sad little worm of thought about the fact that strangers, in a strange land, are pouring earth on his face, burying him alive, throwing dirt into his eyes and mouth and killing him, and it’s wrong, he wants to yell, it’s a mistake, you don’t even know me, and he grunts and struggles to open his eyes to devour one more sight, light, sky, concrete wall, even cruelly mocking faces, but human faces — and then, above his head to the side, someone takes a photograph, a man stands with a camera, it’s the dhabet , a short, thin Egyptian officer with a large black camera, and he takes meticulous pictures of Avram’s death, perhaps as a souvenir, to show the wife and kids at home, and that is when Avram lets go of his life, right at that moment he truly lets go. He had never let go when he was left in the stronghold alone for three days and three nights, nor when the Egyptian soldier pulled him out of his hiding place, nor when the soldiers put him on a truck and beat him within an inch of his life with fists and boots and rifle butts, nor when Egyptian fellahin stormed the truck on the way and wanted to attack him, nor in all the days and nights of interrogations and torture, when they denied him food and water and withheld sleep and made him stand for hours in the sun and held him for days and nights in a cell just large enough to stand in, and one by one they pulled out his fingernails and toenails, and hung him by his hands from the ceiling and whipped the soles of his feet with rubber clubs, and hooked electrical wires to his testicles and nipples and tongue, and raped him — throughout all this he always had something to hold on to, half a potato that a merciful warden once snuck into his soup, or a bird’s chirping he heard or imagined every day at dawn, or the cheerful voices of two little children, perhaps the prison commander’s children, who once came to visit their father and chattered and played in the prison yard all morning; and above all, he had the sketch he wrote while he was on duty in Sinai, until the war started, with its complex plots and multiple characters, and he kept returning to a secondary plot that had never preoccupied him before he was taken hostage, but this was what saved him over and over again. It was the story of two neglected children who find an abandoned baby, and to his surprise Avram found that the imaginary characters did not fade while he was a prisoner the way the real people did, even Ora and Ilan, perhaps because the thought of the living people was intolerable, and quite simply crushed his remaining will to live, whereas thinking about his story almost always pumped a little more blood through his veins. But there, in the ugly yard next to the prison’s concrete wall, with its hedges of barbed wire, and now, with the gaunt officer who took another step closer and leaned right over Avram to capture the last moment before all of Avram was covered with earth and swallowed up in it, Avram no longer wanted to live in a world where such a thing was possible, where a person stood photographing someone being buried alive, and Avram let go of his life and died.

Back and forth he walked wildly by Ora’s body, grunting and shouting and tugging at his face and beard with both hands, yet at the same time a thin voice whispered inside him: Look at her, look, she can go all the way into the earth, she isn’t afraid.

Ora had, in fact, quieted a little, as though she had learned how to breathe in the belly of the earth. She had stopped slamming her head and beating her hands. She lay still, and very quietly told the earth things that came to her, nonsense, little bits of it, things you’d tell a girlfriend or a good neighbor. “Even when he was little, a year or younger, I tried to make sure that everything I gave him to eat, every dish I made for him, looked pretty, because I wanted things to be nice for him. I always tried to think not only of the flavors but also the colors, the color combinations, so it would be cheerful for him to look at.” She stopped. What am I doing, she thought. I’m telling the earth about him. And she realized with horror: Maybe I’m preparing her for him, so she’ll know how to take care of him. A great weakness filled her. She was on the verge of fainting, and she sighed into the belly of the earth and for a moment she was a tiny, miserable puppy snuggling into a large, warm lap. She thought she could feel the earth softening a little, because her scent grew sweeter, her deep exhalation came back to Ora. She took her in and told her how he liked to make figures out of his mashed potatoes and schnitzel, little people and animals, and then of course he would refuse to eat them because how could he, he would ask sweetly, eat a puppy or a goat? Or a person?