David Grossman - To the End of the Land

Ora looked up and a strange happiness began to gurgle inside her, perhaps because of how she had spoken into the earth — she could still taste it on her tongue — or perhaps because always, even at home, after she had these outbursts, when enough was enough, when her guys had really crossed the line, a physical sweetness always spread through her body. Ilan and the boys would still be looking at her in shock, frightened, full of peculiar awe and so eager to appease her, and she would spend several long minutes floating on a pall of satisfaction and deep pleasure. Or perhaps she was so happy because of the people in the procession, who imbued her with a dreamlike tranquillity despite their strangeness and forlornness and their broken bodies. From dust we were taken . She suddenly felt it down to the roots of her flesh. Just like that, from pure mud. She could hear the pat-pat sound of her own self being scooped out by the handful, back at the dawn of time, out of the muddy earth, to be sculpted — too bad they were stingy and did such a poor job with the boobs, and they made her thighs too thick, completely disproportionate, to say nothing of her ass, which this year, with all her desperate binge-eating, had really flourished. When she had finished denigrating her body — which was, incidentally, delightfully attractive to Akiva, judging by the glimmer in his eye, and this was not lost on her — Ora smiled to think of how Ilan had been sculpted: thin, strong, upright, and stretched out like a tendon. She longed for Ilan here and now, without thinking, without remembering or resenting, just his flesh boring into hers. She felt a sudden yearning in the sting. She roused herself quickly and thought of how Adam was sculpted, how delicately and meticulously they had worked on his face, his heavy eyes, his mouth with all its expressions. Her hand ran longingly over his thin body with the slightly hunched back that seemed almost defiant, and the cloudy shadows on his sunken cheeks, and the prominent Adam’s apple that somehow gave him a scholarly look. She also thought about her Ada, making room for her, as always, and imagined what she would look like today if she were alive. Sometimes she saw women who resembled her on the street, and she had a patient who looked like her, a woman with a herniated disc whom she treated for a whole year, working miracles on her. And only then did Ora dare to think about Ofer: strong, solid, and tall he had emerged from the lump of mud — not immediately, not in his first years, when he was small and meager, little more than a huge pair of eyes and bony ribs and matchstick limbs, but later, when he grew up, how beautifully he had risen from the mud, with his thick neck and broad shoulders, and the surprisingly feminine ankles, such a delightful finish to the oversized, powerful limbs. She smiled to herself and looked quickly at Avram, ran her eyes over his body, examined, compared — similarities, dissimilarities — and was overcome with joy in the depths of her gut. It occurred to her, incidentally, that Avram fit in with this crowd quite well, and it seemed to her that he was also finding unexpected relief, because a new smile, the first smile, was spreading on his lips, almost a smile of exaltation. But then a shock wave ran through the hobbling procession, hands pulled back and disconnected, and Ora watched with alarm as Avram’s mouth opened wide, his smile broadened, ripped open, and his eyes glimmered and his hands waved wildly, and he kicked and jumped like a horse and grunted.

After a moment he stopped himself, buried his head back down between his shoulders, and walked on, dragging his feet and swaying from side to side. Akiva looked at Ora questioningly, and she motioned for him to keep going. Then she forced herself to walk on too, shocked by what she had seen in Avram, by the sliver of secret revealed to her from inside him, as though for an instant he had allowed himself to try out a different possibility, a redemptive one. He had looked so distorted, she thought, like a boy playing with pieces of himself.

After a while they reached a small moshav hidden behind a hill and a few groves. Two rows of houses, most with tacked-on balconies and flimsy storehouses, were abutted by chicken coops and feed silos and separated by yards piled with crates, iron pipes, old fridges, and all sorts of junk. Avram’s eyes lit up as he scanned the options. Concrete bomb shelters jutted out of the ground like snouts, covered with lettering in chalk and paint, and here and there a rusty tractor or a pickup truck with no wheels was propped up on blocks. Among the patchworked houses, the occasional sparkling new building stood out, towering castles of stone with turrets and gables and signs announcing luxurious guest rooms in a charming Galilee atmosphere, including Jacuzzis and shiatsu massage. Adults and children started to pour out of the houses as they arrived, shouting, “Akiva’s here! Akiva’s here!” Akiva’s face lit up, and he stopped at various houses to deliver a member of the gang to a woman or a child. At every house they asked him to come in just for a moment, for something to drink or nibble, and lunch would be ready soon, but he refused: “The day is short and there is much work to be done.” He walked the length of the main street — it was the only street — in this fashion, until he had dispersed his flock and was left only with Avram and Ora, whom no one came to claim. Children and young boys walked beside them and asked who they were and where they came from, and whether they were tourists or Jews. They agreed among themselves that they were Jews, albeit Ashkenazim, and wondered about their backpacks and sleeping bags and about Ora’s scratched, dirty face. Mangy, malcontented dogs ran after them and barked. They both longed to get back to their path and their solitude, and Ora could barely hold back the talk about Ofer, but Akiva was somehow unwilling to let them go. As he talked and jumped around he seemed to be searching for a place where he could help them, and between waving to an old man and giving a quick blessing to a baby, he told them that for him this was both a mitzvah and a living. The local council had arranged a special job for him as “gladdener of the dejected”—that was what his pay stub actually stated — and he did this every day, six days a week. Even when they cut his salary in half this year, he did not cut down on his work; on the contrary, he added two hours a day, “For one must multiply acts of holiness, not diminish them.” Besides, he said, he remembered Avram from the pub on HaYarkon Street. Back then, neither of them had a beard, and Akiva’s name was Aviv, and Avram sometimes used to belt out “Otchi Tchorniya” and Paul Robeson songs from behind the bar. If he remembered correctly, Avram had developed a fairly interesting theory about the memories that old objects had, whereby if you put together all sorts of junk, you could make them play out their memories. “Did I remember correctly?” “You did,” Avram grunted, and glanced at Ora evasively. Ora pricked up her ears, and Akiva walked quickly and told them that he had found religion five years ago. Before that, he was getting his doctorate in philosophy in Jerusalem. Schopenhauer was half God for him, the love of his life — or actually, the hatred of his life. He let out a green-eyed laugh. “Do you know Schopenhauer? Such a masking of the divine face! Such total blackness! And you, what about you guys? What’s with the gloom and doom?”

“Forget it,” Ora laughed. “You won’t cheer us up with a blessing or a dance, we’re a really complicated case.”

Akiva stopped in the middle of the street and turned to face her with his vivacious eyes and his strong high cheekbones, and Ora thought, What a waste.

“Don’t be condescending,” he said. “Everything here is really complicated too, what did you think? These are things that can break the strongest faith. In this place you’ll hear stories that only the most misanthropic author could write, maybe Bukowski on a really bad day, or Burroughs jonesing for a fix. And if you’re a believer, where does that leave you, hey?” There was no jocularity on his face. His lips trembled for a brief moment, in anger, or from heartbreak. Then he said quietly, “Once, when I was like you, maybe even a lot more cynical than you — a Schopenhauer freak, you know? — once I would say about these kinds of things: God is cracking up with laughter.”