David Grossman - To the End of the Land

“And one night, when Adam was about a month old, he woke up hungry. Ilan got up to bring him to me, but when I fed him Ilan didn’t stay with us in the room. It was strange. I called him, he was in the living room, and he said he would be right with us. I couldn’t understand what he was doing there, in the dark. I didn’t hear any noise or movement. I had the feeling he was standing by the window looking out, and I got nervous.”

Scenes she hasn’t thought of for many years rise up before her eyes, and they are sharp and alive, more lucid than ever. She realizes that perhaps she is no less afraid to tell these things than he is to hear them.

“When I finished feeding, I took Adam back to his crib, and then I saw Ilan standing in the middle of the living room. He was just standing there, as if he’d forgotten where he was going. I saw him from behind, and I knew straightaway that something was wrong. His face was awful. He looked at me as if he was afraid of me, or wanted to hit me. Or both. He said he couldn’t do it anymore, he couldn’t take it. That you—” She swallows. “Look, are you sure you want to hear this?”

Avram grunts something, pulls himself up into a seated position, and rests his head on his arms. She waits. His back heaves. He does not get up and walk away.

“Ilan said his thoughts about you were destroying him. That he felt like a murderer— ‘I have killed and also taken possession,’ he said — and that he couldn’t look at Adam without seeing you and thinking about you at the stronghold, or in prison camp, or in the hospital.”

The back of Avram’s neck contracts.

She asked him, “What do you want us to do?” Ilan did not answer. The house was heated, but she was still cold. She stood barefoot in her robe and shivered and leaked milk. She asked again what he proposed doing, and Ilan said he didn’t know, but he couldn’t go on this way. He was starting to scare himself. “Before, when I brought him to you—” He stopped.

“It’s not our fault,” she mumbled — that was their mantra during those years. “We didn’t want it to happen, and we didn’t invite it. It just happened, Ilan, it’s just a terrible thing that happened to us.”

“I know.”

“And if it hadn’t been him there, in the stronghold, it would have been you.”

He snorted. “That’s just it, isn’t it?”

“It was you or him, there was no other option.” She walked over to hug him.

“Stop it, Ora.” He raised a hand to keep her away. “We’ve heard it, we’ve said it, we’ve talked about it. I’m not to blame and you’re not to blame, and Avram is certainly not to blame, and we didn’t want it to happen, but it did happen, and if I wasn’t such a nothing I would kill myself right this minute.”

She stood silently. Everything he said she had thought of countless times before, in his voice and hers. She couldn’t gather up the strength to tell him not to talk such nonsense.

As she tells these things to Avram now, she feels cold in the day’s intensifying heat, and her voice trembles a little from the tension. She cannot see his face. His face is hidden in his arms, and his arms embrace his knees. She has the feeling that he’s listening to her from within the depths of his flesh, like an animal in its lair.

“And the fact that we’re living here,” Ilan said.

“It’s just until he gets back,” she murmured. “We’re just looking after his house.”

“I keep telling him that when I’m with him,” Ilan whispered, “and I don’t know if he even understands that we’re actually living here.”

“But as soon as he gets back, we’ll leave.”

Ilan sneered. “And now our kid is going to grow up here.”

Ora thought that if Ilan didn’t come over and hold her immediately, her body would fall to the ground and shatter.

“And I can’t see any way out of it, or any chance that anything will ever work out for us”—he was shouting now—“and just think about it, we’ll live out our lives here, and we’ll have another child and maybe another, we once talked about four, including one we’d adopt, right? To repay a kindness to humanity, didn’t we say? And every time we look into each other’s eyes we’ll see him . And all that time, through all our lives, and his; twenty, thirty, fifty years, he’ll sit there in his darkness, do you understand?” Ilan seized his head with both hands and hammered with his voice, and Ora was suddenly afraid of him. He bellowed: “There will be a child here who’ll grow up and be an entire world, and over there he’ll be a living dead, and this child could have been his, and you could have been his too, if only—”

“And then maybe you would have been a living dead somewhere.”

“You know what?”

And she did.

“Is this hard for you?” Ora asks Avram in a muffled voice.

“I’m listening,” he answers, his jaws breaking the words up into tight syllables.

“Because if it’s too difficult—”

He lifts his head and his face looks as though a firm hand is crushing it. “Ora, it’s my finally hearing from the outside something I’ve been hearing inside my head for years.”

She wants to touch his hand, to absorb some of what’s overflowing from him, but she doesn’t dare. “You know, it’s strange, but it’s the same way for me.”

• • •

She had no strength left. She collapsed on the couch. Ilan came and stood facing her and said he had to leave.

“Where to?”

“I don’t know, I can’t stay here.”

“Now?”

He was suddenly very tall. It was as though he stretched out more and more from above and looked all stiff and his eyes glistened.

“You mean you’re going to walk out and leave me alone with him?”

“I’m no good here, I’m poisoning the air, I hate myself here. I even hate you. When I see you like that, so full, I just can’t stand you.” Then he added, “And I can’t love Adam. I can’t manage to love him. There’s a glass wall between him and me. I don’t feel him, I don’t smell him. Let me go.”

She said nothing.

“Maybe if I think quietly a bit, for a few days, maybe I’ll be able to come back. Right now I have to be alone, Ora, give me one week alone.”

“And how am I supposed to manage here?”

“I’ll help you, you won’t have to worry about anything. We’ll talk on the phone every day, I’ll find help for you, a nanny, a babysitter, you can be totally free, you can go back to school, find a job, do anything you want, just let me go now, it’s not good for me to stay here even for ten minutes.”

“But when did you think about all this?” Ora murmured dully. “We were together the whole time.”

Ilan spoke rapidly, organizing her bright future in a blink. “I could actually see,” she tells Avram, “how in a second that mechanism of his was turned on, you know? The cogwheels in his eyes?”

She looked at Ilan and thought that as smart as he was, he didn’t understand anything, and that she had made a terrible mistake with him. She tried to imagine what her parents would say and how devastated they would be.

“And I thought about how they always warned me about you,” she tells Avram, “and how they admired him , mainly my mother, who in my opinion always wondered what a guy like him saw in me.”

Avram smiles, his face hidden in his arms. Hochstapler , her mother used to call him, and Ora had translated: a guy with holes in his pockets who thinks he’s a Rothschild.

“And I lay on the couch and tried to figure out how I would manage alone with Adam. And think about it, I was still barely able to move, to go out of the house, to keep my eyes open. And I thought this couldn’t be happening, it was just a nightmare and I would wake up any minute. And all the time I also felt that in fact I understood him so well, and I wished I could do that too, run away from myself, and from Adam and from you and from everything, from the whole mess. And I felt sorry for Adam, sleeping calmly without knowing that his life was being screwed up.