David Grossman - To the End of the Land

“I lay there with my robe open, just the way I was, I didn’t care about anything. I heard Ilan moving around the bedroom quickly. You know how he moves when he’s decisive”—they smile at each other, a glimmer between them, a tiny thread—“I heard closets opening, doors, drawers. He was packing, and I lay there thinking that for the rest of our lives we would keep on paying for one minute, for a stupid coincidence, for nothing.”

She and Avram both look away quickly.

“Take a hat,” Ilan and Avram had told her cheerfully over the military phone from the base in Sinai, “and put two slips of paper in it, but identical ones.” Then they’d both laughed: “No, no, you don’t have to know what you’re drawing lots for.” That laughter still rings in her ears. They haven’t laughed that way since. They were twenty-two, in the last month of their regular army service, and she was already in Jerusalem, a first-year student, studying social work, which was opening up a whole new world for her, and she thought how lucky she was to have found her calling at such a young age. “No, no,” Ilan repeated, “it’s better if you don’t know what the lottery is for, that way you’ll be more objective.” When she insisted, they softened: “Okay, you’re allowed to guess, but do it silently. And quickly. Ora, they’re waiting for us, there’s a command car outside.” (And then she got it: A command car? One of them is going to be allowed home. Who? She quickly ran to get a hat, one of her old military caps, and found a piece of paper and tore it into two equal halves, and inside she was bubbling: Which of the two did she want to come home?) “Two identical slips,” Ilan repeated impatiently. “One with my name and one with fatso’s name.” Then she heard Avram: “Write ‘Ilan’ on one, and ‘Jehovah’ on the other. Wait, on second thought, just write ‘His armies.’ ” Ilan interrupted: “Okay. Desist all chatter. Now pick one out. Did you do it? Which one? Are you sure?”

Ora weighs a pointy little stone in her hand, and slowly, methodically cleans the dirt off it. Avram sits hunched over, his hands grasping each other, his knuckles turning white.

“Should I go on?”

“What? Yes, all right.”

“Then he stood over me. I couldn’t even get up, I was so weak. I felt like an avalanche. I didn’t even have the strength to cover myself. He didn’t look at me. I felt that I was disgusting him. I was disgusting myself, too.” She speaks in a narrow, contracted voice, as if forced to report everything, down to the last detail. “And he said he’d hang around outside for a while that night, go to some all-night café, there was one on Queen Helena Street back then, and he’d call the next morning. I asked if he wasn’t going to say goodbye to Adam. He said it was better if he didn’t. I felt that I had to get up and fight, if not for me, for Adam, because if I didn’t do something right then, it would no longer be possible to change anything. Because with Ilan these kinds of decisions spread like lightning, you know him, within seconds there’s already a new reality, a fancy settlement with red rooftops and paving stones, and you cannot uproot it.

“And look how wrong I was,” she mumbles in astonishment, and for a moment, in her eyes, Ilan and Adam row a little wooden boat up a green river, making perfectly coordinated strokes, through a jungle thicket. “Look how in the end everything turned out differently than I thought. It came out the exact opposite.”

“He called in the morning to say he was staying at a hotel and was planning to rent a small apartment. ‘Not far from you two,’ he said. Do you understand? ‘From you two’! It had only been a few hours and already he was not one of us. Not even one of me.

“He rented a studio apartment in Talpiot, as far away as he could get, on the other side of town. He called twice a day, morning and evening, decent, responsible, you know him. Killing me softly. And I would cry to him over the phone to come home. I was so stupid, I really humiliated myself, and I probably made him hate me even more with all that sobbing, but I didn’t have a drop of energy to put on heroic shows for him. I was a wreck, body and soul. I don’t even know how I made enough milk to breast-feed or how I managed to take care of Adam. My mom came to stay with me, a bundle of good intentions, but after about two days I realized what was going on and what she was doing to me, how she was starting in with the comparisons between Adam and other babies, and he always lost, of course. I asked my dad to come and take her home. I didn’t even say why, and the worst thing was that he understood immediately.

“And there were the girlfriends, who came right away, an emergency call-up. They helped and cooked and cleaned, and of course it was all done gently and tactfully, but all of a sudden I was once again surrounded by this cluster of girls, like when I was fourteen, and they all knew exactly what was best for me, and what I really needed, and they reminded me of how much I always, always, except for Ada, got along much better with boys.

“It was mainly their venom toward Ilan that I couldn’t stand, because I’m telling you that despite everything, I understood him, and I knew that I was the only one who could understand what was really going on. In all the world, only he and I could understand, and maybe you too, if you even had any understanding at all back then.”

Avram nods to himself.

“Ugh.” She stretches and rubs her stiff neck. “It’s not easy, all this.”

“Yes,” he says, and distractedly massages his own neck.

She checks in to make sure she can abandon Ofer for this long. An internal ray beams out, probes, touches lightly: womb, heart, nipples, the sensitive spot above the navel, the curve in the neck, upper lip, left eye, right eye. Quickly she weaves the feeling of Ofer inside her like a game of connect the dots, and she finds that things are all right, that in some dim way Ofer is even growing a little stronger while she talks, while Avram listens.

“Adam was on me most of the time,” she tells him as they get up and continue walking on the narrow path down the mountainside. “From the minute Ilan left, he simply refused to be alone. He clung to me like a little monkey, day and night, and I didn’t have the strength to resist. I would put him down to sleep in our bed — I mean, in mine. I mean ours — mine and Adam’s.

“I slept with him for almost two years, and I know, it was against the instructions, but I’m telling you, I didn’t have the strength to fight him when he was screaming, and I didn’t always have the strength to put him back in his crib after feedings. And the truth is that I kind of liked it when he fell asleep with me after feeding, the two of us melting away together, and it was nice to have another living, warm body in the bed.”

She smiles. “It was as though after a short period of separation we went back to our natural state, one body, one organism that more or less supplies all of its own requirements and doesn’t need any favors from anyone.”

Mom and I were a little bit like that, Avram thinks. In the beginning, for the first few years after he left us.

You and your mom might have been like that, she says with her eyes. I always remembered what you told me. I thought about the two of you a lot then.

“Ilan kept calling every day like clockwork, and I would talk to him, or actually I would mostly listen. Sometimes — I told you, like that Cocteau woman of yours, that lamebrain, except in Hebrew — I would even give him advice about things, like how to get out an ink stain, or whether he could iron this shirt or that one. I would remind him to get his teeth cleaned and listen to him grumble about how difficult it was without me. If someone had listened in on one of our phone calls, they would have thought it was an ordinary conversation between a little wifey and her husband away on a short business trip.