David Grossman - To the End of the Land

“And sometimes I would just stare with my ears while he told me what he was doing, how his studies were going, how the criminal justice professor already had his eye on him, and the contract law tutor told him that with grades like his he could get a clerkship at the supreme court. I would hear him and think about how I was focused on Adam’s poop and problems with the diaper service and my cracked nipples, and there he was, floating in a sky of diamonds—”

“But he gave up the filmmaking,” Avram says softly.

“As soon as the war was over.”

“Yeah?”

“You know, after you came back.”

“But he wanted it so badly.”

“That’s exactly why.”

“I was always sure he’d be—”

“No, he cut it off, like only Ilan knows how to cut things off.” She slices the air with her hand and feels herself falling on the other side of the knife.

“Because of me? Because of what happened to me?”

“Well, not just that. There were other things.” She stops walking and looks at him in despair. “Tell me, Avram, how will we have time for everything?”

The mountain towers above them in a bed of forest, and Avram sees her brown eyes colored green, sees how those eyes still sparkle, still, still.

“And don’t forget,” she continues after a while, “that during the first months after Adam was born he also took care of you on his own. He would drive to the hospital every single day, and to all the convalescent homes where they sent you, and every day he gave me a detailed report. We had long telephone conferences every evening about your treatments, the medications, the side effects. And those interrogations, don’t forget that.”

“Aha,” Avram says and looks out into the distance.

“And you, you never even once asked him about me. How I was doing. Where I’d suddenly disappeared to.”

He breathes deeply, straightens up, widens his steps. She has to work hard to keep up.

“You didn’t even know that I’d had Adam. Or at least that’s what I thought at the time.”

“Ora?”

“What?”

“Did he take any interest in Adam?”

“In Adam?” She lets out a thin laugh.

“I was just asking.”

“Well,” she stretches, preparing to massage an old insult. “At first he definitely asked about Adam. Or rather, made a point of asking. Then he asked a little less, and I could tell that he found it difficult even to say his name. And then one day he started talking about ‘the boy.’ How does the boy sleep at night, how is his digestion, that sort of thing. And that was when I lost it. Even a sucker like me has some kind of limit, I guess.

“I think it was then, when he started calling him ‘the boy,’ that I began to feel like myself again. I told him to stop calling me. To get out of my life. I was finally able to tell him what I should have said months before. I’m stupid, you know, what can I say. For maybe three months I kept dragging out that twisted arrangement. Just imagine. When I think about it now—”

They stop in a patch of shade on a vista that looks out onto the entire Hula Valley. All the muscles in their bodies are aching now, and not just from walking. Avram collapses to the ground and doesn’t even have the strength to take his backpack off. Ora notices that every time he stops walking and moving, he takes on a sort of heavy, rock-like lumpiness. Secretly, through her teenage girl’s eyes, she watches him: he avoids looking fully at the broad valley spread out at the foot of the mountain, at the mountain itself as they walk down it, at the expanse of sky. She remembers that Ilan once said about Avram, “He just turned himself off and he’s sitting inside himself in the dark.” And here too, on the path, in the sun, his skin is fair and reddens easily, but his body seems impervious to light.

And to beauty. And to Ofer.

She briskly wipes her glasses off and breathes on them. She wipes them again. Calms herself.

“But as soon as I hung up on him, he called back. He said he could definitely understand me throwing him out of my life. He totally deserves that. But I can’t remove him from the joint responsibility we share for our second child.”

“What? Oh.”

“Yes, well.”

So that’s how they thought of me, Avram muses. Very soon, in a minute or two, he will ask her to stop talking. There’s no room left in him for all this.

“And then we had another conversation. One of the most outlandish ones we’ve ever had. We figured out how we’d keep taking care of you, and how we’d hide what was happening to us from you, because it was obvious that the last thing you needed was this sort of crisis with us, with the parents, you know.” She laughs feebly.

Avram remembers for some reason that when he was about thirteen, years after his father got up one morning and disappeared, he convinced himself to believe that his real father, the secret one, was the poet Alexander Penn. For weeks, every night before bed, he would read Penn’s poem “The Abandoned Son” in a whispered voice.

“And we talked like total strangers, Ilan and me. No, like the lawyers of total strangers. With a matter-of-factness that I could not believe I was capable of, with him or at all. We opened our calendars and settled exactly how long Ilan would keep caring for you alone, and when I would start doing shifts again, and we agreed that we’d keep pretending that everything was okay when we were with you, at least until you recovered a little. We knew it wouldn’t be much of an effort, because you didn’t show any interest in anything anyway. You barely knew what was happening around you — or is that what you wanted everyone to think, so they’d leave you alone? Hey? So they’d give up on you?”

His eyes move sideways under his half-closed lids.

“In the end you got what you wanted,” she says drily.

And then, in mid-breath, she freezes, because she is suddenly unable to recall Ofer’s face. She jumps up quickly and starts walking, and Avram groans and gets up to follow her. She stares straight ahead without seeing anything, her eyes burning like black chimneys in the daylight, but they cannot see Ofer. As she walks, his face breaks up inside her head into a whirlwind of fragmentary expressions and features. At times they swell and burst, as though someone has shoved a huge fist behind his skin and cleaved him from the inside. She knows she is being punished for something, but she does not know what. Perhaps for continuing her journey instead of going home right away to receive the bad news? Or for not being willing to accept any compromise (a minor injury? A moderate one? One leg? From the knee down? From the ankle? A hand? An eye? Both eyes? The penis?). Almost every single hour of the day, behind all the things and the words and the acts, these propositions have hummed inside her, dispatched from far away: You can live a pretty good life with one kidney, even with one lung. Think about it, don’t be quick to say no, it’s not every day you get these kinds of offers, and you’ll be sorry one day that you rejected them. Other families took them and now they’re happy, relatively speaking. Think about it again, think good and hard: if it’s a phosphorus burn, for example, they can do skin grafting. They can even rehabilitate the brain these days. And even if he’s a vegetable, he’ll still be alive, and you can take care of him yourself, you can use all the experience you gained after Avram was injured. So please, reconsider. He’ll have a life, sensations, emotions. It’s not the worst bargain you could make in your condition.

And for all those days and nights she has pushed away these buzzing communications. Now too she holds her head up and walks between them, careful to look away from Avram, to protect him from the gorgon face she feels she has taken on. She won’t be cutting any deals. And she will not be accepting any bad news of any kind, of any kind whatsoever . Go on, keep going. Talk, tell him about his son.