David Grossman - To the End of the Land

“I was very hurt when she left. And you know, I felt something just before it happened. I felt it before anyone else did, because she stopped coming over whenever she had a spare moment. She avoided me, and suddenly she didn’t have time to sit with me over morning coffee, or just chat on the balcony. Then she came up with the idea that maybe she wouldn’t do her army service and would go to London for a year instead, to sell sunglasses and make some money and study art and experience things. And when she said ‘experience things,’ I immediately told Ilan that something was going on. Ilan said, ‘No way, she’s just dreaming a little, she loves him, and she’s a girl with a good head on her shoulders. Where else would she find a guy like him?’ But I was nervous, I had the feeling that all of a sudden her plans did not include Ofer, or that she was getting a little tired of him, or I don’t know what”—that she’d run her course with him—“and Ofer was totally surprised when it came, he was really in shock, and I’m not sure he’s out of it yet.”

Ora purses her lips. You saw it all, you with your eagle eye — she stabs herself and twists the knife around — the only thing you missed were the signs in Ilan. He ran his course with you.

How happy she used to be, Avram thinks and glances at her face. She used to be such a giggler. He remembers how he came to visit her when she was in basic training, at Bahad 12. He walked along the edge of the parade ground, suddenly finding it difficult to stand proudly upright in front of all these hundreds of girls — in his fantasies, the legendary city of girls had a constant soundtrack of sighs and damp moans and longing gazes, but this one buzzed like a hornet’s nest of giggles and sneers, sideways Cleopatra eyes — and suddenly, from afar, a tall, crumpled soldier draped in a sack-like uniform, with red bouncy curls cascading under a crooked cap and cherry lips, ran toward him with open arms, legs slightly askew, laughing joyfully and calling from one end of the camp to the other, “So very very much Avram!”

“Because I was so insulted by her,” Ora continues a sentence whose beginning Avram has missed — she ran to him so happily on the base, he remembers, and she wasn’t ashamed of him in front of all the girls—“she didn’t even call me to explain, to say goodbye, nothing. From one day to the next she was out of our lives. And the truth is that other than the insult, what hurt were the thoughts about why they broke up, why she left him. Because the whole time she was with us, I learned to rely on her judgment so much, and on her perception, and I’m trying to understand if it was something about Ofer that made her leave, something that I myself can’t see.

“Maybe it’s because he shuts himself off,” she murmurs, thinking of the slight whiff of anger that has emanated from Ofer recently, repelling and belittling, especially toward anything and anyone who was not connected to the army. “But even before the army he was pretty closed off. Very closed off, even. And Talia made him open up, to us too; he really blossomed with her.”

I’m talking, she marvels again, and he’s not stopping me.

There’s this guy, a person, who is Ofer, Avram thinks strenuously, as if struggling with both hands to stick a label that says “Ofer” onto a vague and elusive picture that constantly squirms in his soul as Ora speaks. And she is telling me a story about him now. I’m hearing Ora’s story about Ofer. All I have to do is hear it. No more. She will tell the story, and then it will be over. A story can’t go on forever. I can think about all sorts of things in the meantime. She will talk. It’s only a story. One word followed by another.

Ora tries to pick and choose what to tell Avram. She wonders why she even slammed him with this stuff about Talia — why start with that? Why did she depict Ofer in his weakest state? She has to take him quickly to more uplifting places. Maybe she’ll tell him about the birth, everyone likes hearing about births. But on the other hand — she gives him a sideways glance — what interest could he have in births? A birth would terrify him, push him even farther away, and to be honest, it’s too early for her to lie naked and unraveled before him. And she certainly won’t tell him about what preceded the birth, that dawn, the one she erased from her book of life, and every time she thinks about it she can’t believe the way she and Ilan were seized by some kind of madness, and for years that memory was mingled with fear and bitter guilt — how could she have been tempted? How could she not have protected Ofer in her belly? How could she not have had the instinct that must exist — is supposed to exist — in every normal, natural mother? For all she knows it might have caused some damage to Ofer. Maybe his childhood asthma started with that? Maybe the attack of claustrophobia in the elevator was because of that? Her mind pulls back from the memory, but the pictures maddeningly resurface, the strange fire in Ilan’s eyes, the grip that locked them into each other, the growls that escaped from them, and her belly, her earth-belly that trembled and bumped as two skinned beasts struggled and mated over it.

“Let’s sit down, I’m a little dizzy.” She leans her head back on the rock face and takes quick sips of water, then passes him the canteen. She has to find something light and amusing, quickly, something that will make him laugh and fill him with affection and warmth for Ofer. And here it is, she’s found it: Ofer, at age three, used to insist on going to day care in his cowboy costume, which included twenty-one items of clothing and weaponry (they counted them once), and for one entire year they were not allowed to forgo even a single accessory. Her eyes brighten and the commotion in her head quiets down a little. This is exactly the sort of thing she should tell him: sweet slices of life, trivial Ofer episodes, nothing complicated or heavy, just calmly describe the mornings of that year, when Ilan and she darted around Ofer with guns and ammunition belts, and Ilan crawled under the bed to look for a sheriff’s star or a red bandana. The meticulous daily construction of a brave fighter, erected on the fragile scaffolding of little Ofer.

But that won’t really interest him, she retorts, all the minutiae, the thousands of moments and acts from which you raise a child, gather him into a person. He won’t have the patience for it, and ultimately these details are fairly boring and dreary, especially for men, but really for anyone who doesn’t know the child in question, although there are of course some stories that are, one might say, unusual, that might draw Avram to Ofer—

But why, for God’s sake, do I need to draw him in at all? she wonders angrily, and the headache that had subsided lunges back boldly and digs its claws into the familiar spot behind her left ear. Am I supposed to be marketing Ofer to him now? Tempting him with Ofer? She sighs, stands up at once, and starts walking briskly, almost running. How do you tell an entire life? A whole decade would not be enough. Where do you start? Especially she, who is incapable of telling one story from beginning to end without scattering in every direction and ruining the punch line — how will she be able to tell his story the right way? And what if she discovers that she doesn’t have that much to tell?

There are an infinite number of things she can say about him, yet she suddenly panics at the thought that if she talks about him for two or three hours straight, or five hours or ten, she might cover most of the important things she has to say about him, about his life. She might sum him up— exhaust him. And perhaps this is the fear that is pressuring her brain, the discomfort that has been eating away at her for some time: she doesn’t really know him. She doesn’t really know her son, Ofer.