David Grossman - To the End of the Land

He glances at her, his forehead upturned.

“You were with us in the car. We felt you sitting there in the back next to Adam’s seat.” She pulls her knees into her stomach. “And it was impossible to bear. It was intolerable in the car, and all my happiness burst like a balloon and splattered over me. I remember that Ilan sighed loudly, and I asked, ‘What?’ And he wouldn’t say and wouldn’t say, and finally he said he hadn’t imagined it would be so difficult. And I thought about how this wasn’t the drive I’d pictured when I dreamed about the trumpets that would sound when I went home with my first child.

“Look,” she says a moment later in surprise, “I haven’t thought about that for years.”

Avram says nothing.

“Should I go on?”

I’ll take that as a yes, she tells herself, that jerk of the head.

The closer they got to home, to Tzur Hadassah, the more tense and nervous Ilan grew. She noticed that from a certain angle his chin looked weak, evasive. She saw the damp marks his fingers were leaving on the wheel — Ilan, who almost never sweated. He parked the car opposite the rusty gate, took Adam out, and handed him to her without looking in her eyes. Ora asked if he wanted to carry Adam into the house himself, for the first time, but he said, “You, you,” and pushed the baby into her arms.

She remembers the short walk down the paving stones through the garden, the lopsided little house with its sharp textured walls dotted with cement spots. It was a “Jewish Agency house” that Avram’s mother had inherited from a childless uncle and lived in with Avram since he was ten. She remembers the neglected garden, which became overgrown with weeds and tall thistles during the years when Ora and Ilan could only tend to Avram. She even remembers thinking that as soon as she recovered she would go into the garden and introduce Adam to her beloved fig and grevillea trees. And she remembers the feel of her crooked steps as she duck-walked painfully around her stitches. She talks softly. Avram listens. She sees that he’s listening, but for some reason she feels as though it is mostly herself she is talking to now.

Ilan walked quickly ahead of her up the three uneven steps, opened the door, and stood aside to let her go in with Adam. There was something chilling and hurtful in his courtesy. She made a point of taking the first step in on her right foot, and said out loud, “Welcome home, Adam”—she felt, as she did every time she said or thought his name, a secret caress of Ada inside her — and carried him to his room, where his crib was already set up. Although he was sleeping, she turned him around in all directions to show his translucent eyelids the bureau, the chest of drawers with a changing pad, the box of toys, and the bookshelves.

Then she discovered a piece of paper taped to the door: Hello Baby-o , it said. Welcome. Here are a few instructions from the hotel management .

She placed the baby in his crib. He looked tiny and lost. She covered him with a thin blanket and stood gazing at him. Something prickled at her back, causing unease. The paper taped to the door seemed full of words, too many words. She leaned over and stroked Adam’s warm head, sighed, and walked back to the door to read it:

The hotel management asks that you respect the peace and quiet of the other lodgers .

Remember: the proprietress belongs solely to the hotel owner, and your use of her is limited to her upper portion only!

The hotel management expects guests to leave when they reach the age of 18!

And so on and so forth.

She crossed her arms over her chest. She suddenly felt tired of Ilan and his wisecracks. She reached out and ripped the paper off and crumpled it tightly.

“You didn’t like that?” Ilan piped up, sounding annoyed. “I just thought … Never mind. It didn’t work. Want to drink something?”

“I want to sleep.”

“And him?”

“Adam? What about him?”

“Should we leave him here?”

“I don’t know … Should we take him into our room?”

“I don’t know. Because if we’re asleep and he wakes up here, alone …”

They looked at each other awkwardly.

She tried to listen to her instincts and couldn’t hear anything. She had no desire, no knowledge or opinion. She was confused. Deep in her heart she had hoped that when the baby was born she would immediately know everything she needed to know. That the baby would infuse her with a primal, natural, and unimpeachable knowledge. Now she realized how much she had looked forward to that throughout the pregnancy, almost as much as to the baby itself — to the acuteness of knowing the right thing to do, which she had lost completely in recent years, since Avram’s tragedy.

“Come on,” she said to Ilan, “we’ll leave him here.”

She felt the pain of unraveling again, as she had whenever she’d had to part with Adam in the hospital. “Yes, he doesn’t need to sleep with us.”

“But what if he cries?” Ilan asked hesitantly.

“If he cries we’ll hear him. Don’t worry, I’ll hear him.”

They went to their room and slept for two whole hours, and Ora woke a minute or two before Adam made a sound and immediately felt the fullness in her breasts. She woke Ilan to go and bring the baby to her. She arranged the pillows on the bed and leaned back heavily, and Ilan came in from the other room holding Adam, his face glowing.

She breast-fed him and was once again amazed at how small his head looked against her breast. He sucked strongly, firmly, almost without looking at her, and she felt blades of unfamiliar pleasure and pain turn over clods of body and soul. Ilan stood looking at them the whole time, mesmerized, all corporeality stripped from his face. Every so often he asked if she was comfortable, if she was thirsty, if she felt the milk coming out. She pulled the child away from one nipple and moved him to the other breast and wiped her nipple with a cloth. Ilan stared at her breast, which she thought looked huge, moonlike, and webbed with bluish veins, and there was a new awe in his expression. He suddenly looked like a little boy, and she asked, “Don’t you want to take pictures of him?”

He blinked as though awakening from a dream. “No, I don’t feel like taking pictures now. The light in here isn’t good.”

“What were you thinking about?”

“Nothing, no one.”

She could see what looked like a dark spider settle down over his face. “Maybe you’ll take some later,” she said weakly.

“Yes, of course, later.”

But he hardly took any pictures later, either. Sometimes he would bring the camera, take off the lens cover, aim and focus, but somehow he didn’t like the lighting, or didn’t think the angle would work. “Maybe later,” he’d say, “when Adam is more alert.”

Avram clears his throat to remind her of his existence. She smiles at him in surprise: “I got carried away. I suddenly remembered all sorts of … Do you want to keep walking?”

“No, it’s okay here.” He leans back on his elbows, even though his entire body is bubbling with a desire to leave this place.

They sit looking down at the verdant valley. Behind Avram, in his shadow, is a silent commotion. Ants bustle along a dry stem of fennel plant, gnawing at the wood and the crumbs of congealed honey left by last year’s bees. A tiny scepter of orchid stands tall, purple and light as a butterfly, its pair of tuberous roots in the earth — one slowly emptying out, the other filling up. A little farther away, in the shade of Avram’s right upper back, a small white deadnettle, engaged in its complicated affairs, sends out olfactory signals to insects that constantly flit between it and other plants, and it grows fertile sepals, for self-pollination, in case the insects fail it.