David Grossman - To the End of the Land

Avram stands up and looks out into the distance. A falcon glides in circles high up in the sky above his head.

“It’s terrible how much of a stranger you are,” she murmurs. “What am I even doing here with you?” She lets out a bitter laugh. “If I weren’t so afraid to go home, I would get up this minute and leave.”

Perhaps because he is standing above her, she remembers: Ofer was a year old. She was lying on her bed, rocking him on her upturned feet and arms in a game of airplane. He laughed and his whole body quivered, and his fine halo of hair softly fell and rose as he sailed. The sunlight coming through the window shone through his ears, and they were orange and translucent. They stuck out from his head, just as they do today. She moved him into the light and saw a delicate braid of veins and soft twists and bumps. She became quiet and focused, as if someone were about to tell her an indescribable secret. Her face must have changed, because Ofer stopped laughing and looked at her gravely, and his lips lengthened and protruded in a wise, even ironic old man’s expression. She marveled at the precision in each of his limbs. A sweetness filled her. She spun him slowly on the soles of her feet, moved him this way and that, catching the entire wheel of the sun in one of his ears.

The wound was as deep as a fist, and it discharged an endless stream of thick pus. It was very close to the spine, and the doctors were unable to heal it for months. There was something terrifying and hypnotizing about the never-ending flow, as though the body itself were ridiculing the abundance that had always streamed from Avram. For many months, almost a year, the wound was the focal point of concern for Ora and Ilan, and for a succession of doctors. The word “wound” was uttered so often that it sometimes seemed Avram himself was fading away, leaving only the wound as his primary being, while his body became merely the platform from which the wound produced the fluids it needed to survive.

For the hundredth time that day, Ilan dipped a gauze bandage in the pus, carefully twisted it in the crater of flesh, soaked up the fluids, and threw it away. Ora, sprawled on a chair near Avram’s bed, looked at the precise movements of Ilan’s hand, and wondered how he was able to dig into the wound without causing pain. Later, when Avram fell asleep, she suggested they take a short walk for some fresh air. They meandered through the paths among the little buildings and talked, as usual, about Avram’s condition, his upcoming surgery, and his complicated financial dealings with the Ministry of Defense. They sat on a bench near the X-ray center, with some distance between them, and Ora talked about Avram’s balance problem, whose cause the doctors had not yet determined. Ilan murmured, “We need to look into his ingrown toenail, that could drive him crazy. And I think the Novalgin is giving him diarrhea”—and she thought, Stop, stop with that now, and turned to him and jumped over the void and kissed him on the mouth. It had been such a long time since they’d touched each other that Ilan froze, then hesitantly took her in his arms. For a moment they moved cautiously against each other, as if they were covered in shattered glass, amazed at the force with which their bodies ignited as though they had only been waiting for someone to come to them for comfort. That night they drove to Avram’s empty house in Tzur Hadassah, where they had been living since he was released from the POW prison, and which they had turned into a sort of private headquarters for all matters concerning his treatment. There, in his boyhood room, with the sign on the door from when he was fifteen, saying Only the Mad May Enter , on a straw mattress on the floor, they conceived Adam.

She doesn’t know how much Avram remembers of the period when he was hospitalized, operated on, rehabilitated and treated, and periodically investigated by agents of the Shabak and Field Security and Military Intelligence, who tormented him relentlessly with their suspicions about information he might or might not have given away as a POW. He was indifferent to it all and devoid of any volition, yet still, from the depths of his absence, he consumed her and Ilan like a baby, and not just because of the many complications, medical and bureaucratic, that resulted from his situation and that only they could handle for him. It was his actual existence — empty, hollow — that devoured them constantly, so she felt at the time, and sucked the life out of them. Almost without moving, he turned them into shells, like he himself was.

Adam’s birth, she says. They are sitting side by side in a rocky hiding place above the valley, surrounded by a yellow sea of acacia and spiny broom whose blossoms make the bees frantic. The lichen-covered rocks glisten red and bright purple in the sun, and she knows that she can talk with greater ease about Adam. She can even tell him about Adam’s birth and ostensibly start from a distance .

“I had a difficult labor with him. It was long and hard. I was in Hadassah Mount Scopus for three days. Women came and gave birth and left, and I lay there like a rock. Ilan and I joked that some women who were barren had already come in and had babies, and I was still lying there waiting. Every doctor and resident had checked me and looked at me and measured me, and there were regular medical staff meetings around me, and they kept arguing over my head about whether or not to induce labor, and how I would respond to this or that. They told me I should walk around. They said the movement would induce labor. So we walked together, me and Ilan, two or three times a day. Me with the Hadassah robe and a belly like a whale, walking arm in arm and hardly talking. It was nice. There was a pleasantness between us, or so I thought.”

Start from a distance . She smiles to herself and remembers that on the night she and Avram first met, as teenagers, he sailed in large circles around the room where she lay in the dark, in the isolation ward, coming closer and then receding, as if he were secretly practicing routes for getting nearer and farther away from her.

“After the birth, Ilan drove us home in the Mini Minor — you remember it, my parents bought it for me when I started going to university. When you were in rehab, I sometimes used to drive you around Tel Aviv.”

She gives him a sideways glance and waits, but if he does remember he gives no sign, and it’s as if all those endless, dreamlike drives never existed. He needed them in order to “believe,” he had explained laconically. Hours of driving in circles to look at streets, alleyways, squares, people, people. And the suspicion and doubt that were constantly in his eyes, in his furrowed brow. And the city, which seemed to be going out of its way to convince Avram of its existence, its reality.

“We put Adam in a car seat with padding all around, and Ilan drove all the way home on eggshells and did not say a word. I didn’t stop talking. I was in seventh heaven. I remember how happy I was, and proud, and positive that from now on everything would start to fall in place for us. And he drove silently. At first I thought it was because he was so focused on the road. You see, I felt that the whole world had completely changed from the moment Adam was born. Everything may have looked the same, but I knew everything was different, that some new dimension had been added — don’t laugh — to everything and everyone in the world.”

I didn’t laugh, Avram thinks, and leans his head back. He tries as hard as he can to see them in the little car. He tries to remember where he was back then, when Ora and Ilan had Adam. Don’t laugh, she’d said. Nothing could be further from him now than laughter.

“And I remember that I looked at the street and thought, Silly people, blind, you don’t even know how different everything is going to be now. But I couldn’t tell Ilan that, because I’d already started to feel his silence, and then I fell silent, too. All of a sudden I was incapable of uttering a word. Even when I wanted to talk, I couldn’t. I felt completely smothered, like something was grabbing my throat. And it was you.”