David Grossman - To the End of the Land

He nodded once and looked away.

She sat down, crushing her fingers together, suddenly feeling flustered and a little frightened. He sat down opposite her. The room bustled and hummed around them, and for a long time they both watched something out there, in a time that had no time.

Should we stay for lunch? Ora asked Avram soundlessly, with only her lips moving.

“Whatever you want,” he whispered, salivating at the dishes.

“I don’t know, we just fell on them out of nowhere—”

“Of course you’ll stay for lunch!” The housewife laughed — an unfortunately expert lip-reader. “What did you think, that we’d just let you go? It’s an honor for us to have you eat here. All of Akiva’s friends are our guests.”

But start from a distance , he warned her, and she doesn’t know what kind of distance he needs, whether he meant distance in time or space, and besides — what is distant for him now, where he is? She walks behind him, looks at the worn heels of his ancient Converse sneakers, so unsuited for this nature walk, and resists asking when he’s planning on finally switching to Ofer’s heavy hiking boots, which dangle from his backpack. But perhaps they would be too big for him, she thinks, and perhaps that’s what worries him. He had, and still has, small hands and feet —footlets , he used to call them, my footlets and handlets —which always embarrassed him, and of course that was the reason he called himself Caligula, “little boot.” She remembers how he marveled at the way her breasts fit perfectly in his cupped hands, although today they probably would not, having been suckled by two children and the mouths of many men — but not that many, in fact. Let’s see. What is there to see? You know exactly how many, but some wicked little creature inside her has already started to count them off on its fingers as she walks: Ilan is one, Avram is two, and Eran, the Character, makes three — no, wait, four, with that Motti guy she brought home one night to the house in Tzur Hadassah, years ago, who sang in the shower at the top of his lungs. So that makes four men. Fewer than one per decade, on average. Not a monumental achievement, considering there were girls who by the age of sixteen — but forget about that now!

The air bustles and hums. Flies, bees, gnats, grasshoppers, butterflies, and beetles hover and crawl and leap from the foliage. There is so much life inside every particle of the world, Ora thinks, and this profusion suddenly seems threatening, because why should the abundant, wasteful world care if the life of one fly, or one leaf, or one person, were to end at this very moment? The sorrow of it makes her start talking.

In a soft, flat voice she tells him that until recently Ofer had a girlfriend, his first one, and she left him, and he still hasn’t gotten over it. “I really liked her. You could say I adopted her a bit, and she adopted me, too. We became very close, which was probably a mistake on my part, because it’s not good to get so close to your boys’ girlfriends”—well, this is really useful information for him, she thinks. “Everyone warned me, but Talia, that was her name, I just fell in love with her as soon as I saw her. And by the way, she wasn’t all that beautiful, although to me she was, she had — she has , I have to stop thinking about her in the past tense, I mean she’s still around, she’s still alive, right? So why do I …”

For a few seconds the only sounds are their footsteps, the path crunching under their feet, and the buzzing hum. I’m talking to him, Ora thinks with astonishment. I’m telling him these things, I don’t even know if this counts as starting from a distance, but it’s the farthest from Ofer that I can be now, and Avram’s not running away.

“And Talia’s face … how can I describe it to you”—descriptions were always your thing, she thinks at him—“a face with strength, and character. A strong nose, full of personality, and big lips, which I love, and a large, feminine bust. And she had wonderful fingers.” Ora giggles and waves her own fingers before her eyes. They used to be lovely too, until recently, when their joints grew thick and crooked.

In her wallet, secretly, behind a little picture of Ofer and Adam with their arms around each other — it was taken the morning Adam enlisted; they both had long hair, Adam’s dark and straight, Ofer’s still golden, curly at the edges — she keeps a picture of Talia. She can’t bring herself to remove it, and she’s always afraid Ofer might find it and get angry. Sometimes she pulls it out of its hiding place and looks at it. She tries to guess what sort of children might have been born from a combination of Talia and Ofer. Occasionally she slides the photo into the empty clear plastic slot that, until six months ago, had contained a picture of Ilan, and looks from the boys to Talia and back again, imagining Talia as her daughter, and then it dawns on her: it looks so possible and natural.

“She’s a totally levelheaded girl. She even has a bit of an old person’s bitterness. You would have liked her”—she smiles at his back—“but don’t think she was so … how should I put this? She wasn’t the easiest person. Well, what do you expect, that Ofer would choose someone easy?”

She thinks the back of his neck grows denser between his shoulders.

They are walking down a riverbed on a worrisome rocky slope — a double-X trail, the boys would have called it: Extra Extreme. When they started their way down and she saw Avram slip and grab on to a jutting rock, she mumbled that she hoped this was just a little deviation from the path and immediately winced at the echo of her words in his mind and wondered if someone inside him would say, in that clownish nasal voice and with a wicked trollish smile: Avram is actually quite fond of little deviations . But she felt no voice or echo of a smile in him, and his eyes did not glimmer, and perhaps there really was nothing there, no one. Get that through your head already, she told herself, and just accept it.

Now they’re on an escarpment of slippery rocks, which pulls them deep down into a gorge, and that too is a word that once would have tickled him and prompted him to say something gorgey, gorgeous, gorging , to delight in the way his tongue touched the roof of his mouth … Stop — She cuts herself off. Let him be, he’s really not inside there anymore. But on the other hand, he clearly has been listening to her for the last several minutes as she talked about Ofer. He isn’t brushing her off the way he usually does, so maybe he really is giving her an opening, a crack. And for her, these sorts of cracks have recently become a familiar nesting spot. She is now a creature of the cracks. After living with two well-armored adolescent boys, and lately, seeing Eran, who allocates at most ninety minutes a week to her, this seems easy.

“She became part of the family immediately,” Ora continues as they descend, and she holds back a little sigh, because something changed at home when Talia came, when she started having meals with them and staying over and even going on vacations abroad with them (all of a sudden I had someone to go to the bathroom with when we were on trips, she remembers). But how can she tell him this? How can she describe to a man like him — that apartment of his, the darkness, the solitariness — the slight shift that occurred in the balance between men and women at home, and her feeling that womanhood itself had been given, for the first time perhaps, its rightful place in the family? How can she recount something like that, and what could he, in his state, understand? And what business is it of his anyway? Truth be told, she does not yet feel ready to admit to him, to an almost stranger, how amazed she was, and how it taunted her even to see how this young woman effortlessly attained something she herself had never even tried to demand from her three men: their full recognition of the fact that she was a woman, her discrete self-definition as a woman in a house of three men, and the fact that being a woman was not just another of her annoying whims, nor a pathetic defiance of the real thing, which was how the three of them often made her feel. Ora quickens her steps, her lips move soundlessly, and a slight headache starts to hum, as in her high school days when she faced a page full of equations. What Talia had brought about, God only knows how, through the very light motions of her being! Ora snickers to herself, because even Nicotine, the family dog, of blessed memory, experienced a slightly embarrassing change when Talia was around.