David Grossman - To the End of the Land

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“A different life started for me then. I didn’t have the strength for it at all, but I had a baby who simply forced me to live and came into my life with the determination of a … well, of a baby, who is convinced that everything was created for his benefit, especially me. We were together all the time, he and I, almost twenty-four hours a day. For the first year I didn’t have a nanny or much help, just a few girlfriends who came on shifts, twice a week, when I started going to see you again in Tel Aviv. But the rest of the time, days and nights, he and I were alone.”

Her look hovers somewhere in the distance. There are some things that are futile to try to explain to him: the murmured conversations between her and Adam while he nursed, before bed, half asleep in the middle of the night, when the whole world was asleep and it was just the two of them, eyes to eyes, learning each other. And the peals of laughter they shared when he got the hiccups. And the way their gazes grasped each other when evening fell and shadows grew long in the room. And his quiet expression of bewilderment when he saw tears in her eyes, and his lips that curled and trembled around questions he did not know how to ask.

Avram walks beside her, nodding to himself, hunched inward like a question mark.

“It was also a wonderful time. Our age of wonders. Mine and Adam’s.”

And to herself she thinks: The happiest years we had.

“I slowly got to know him.” She smiles, remembering his grumpiness when she dared to pull him off one nipple, until his mouth locked in on the other. He would scream bloody murder, with furious eyes, and his entire head would turn red with insult. “And the lovely humor in his looks and his games and the way he played around with me. I never knew babies had a sense of humor, no one told me.”

Avram keeps nodding to himself, as though reciting an important lesson. Ora realizes: We’re practicing together, Avram and I. Practicing on Adam, before we get to Ofer. Exercising vocabulary, boundaries, endurance.

“And with me, there was always turmoil inside. It was like all my systems had gone awry, body and soul. I was very sick too, with endless infections and bleeding, and I was terribly weak. But I also felt a crazy sense of power, lots of power, don’t ask me why. I had attacks of sobbing and joy and desperation and euphoria, all within three minutes. I used to wonder how I would get through another hour with him when he was running a high fever and screaming in my ear, and it was two o’clock in the morning and the doctor wouldn’t pick up the phone, but at the same time — I could do anything! I could carry him by my teeth to the farthest corners of the earth. Terrible as an army with banners .”

Avram lights up for an instant and smiles to himself. He seems to be tasting the words silently with his lips: Terrible as an army with banners . Her shoulders relax, opening up to him like a freshly sliced challah — he sometimes used to call her that, but he also called her “malted spirits,” or “wool gabardine.” These names had no meaning, apart from the endearment with which he enveloped her in the words, the sweet exotic sounds, as though covering her shoulders with a shawl so fine that only she and he could see it. He loved to pepper his speech, sometimes expediently and sometimes not, with dudgeon wood and jasper stones, curtilages and sippets, pedicels and ovules. “That’s Avram’s,” she and Ilan used to say to each other in the years after Avram, when somewhere in the conversation, or on the radio, or in a book, a word that had simply been born for him would pop up — a word that bore his seal.

“And one day he calls to tell me his address and phone number have changed, like I’m his reserve duty office. The apartment in Talpiot is too cold, he says, so he’s renting a different one, on Herzl Boulevard in Beit HaKerem. ‘Good for you,’ I say, and cross out his old number on the note on the fridge.

“Two months later, in the middle of a regular conversation about you, about your condition, he gives me a new number. What happened? Did you get a different phone? No, but they’ve been doing roadwork outside his place for three months now, digging up the street and paving it over day and night, and there’s a terrible racket, and you know how noise makes him crazy. ‘So where does your new number live?’ ‘In Evan Sapir, near Hadassah Hospital. I found a nice little apartment in someone’s backyard.’ ‘Is it quiet there?’ I ask. ‘Like a graveyard,’ he assures me, and I change the number on the fridge.

“A few weeks later, another call. His landlord’s son bought a drum set. He holds the phone out the window, so I can enjoy it, too. Huge drums, apparently. A tom-tom, at the very least. A person can’t live this way. I agree with him and walk to the fridge with pen in hand. ‘I’ve already settled on a little place in Bar Giora,’ he says in a nasal voice. Bar Giora? That’s pretty close, I think, it’s right across the valley. I feel my stomach contracting, and I can’t tell if it’s excitement or alarm at his sudden proximity. But a week goes by, and another week, and I see no change in our relationship. He’s over there, we’re over here, and there starts to be more and more of an ‘us.’

“After a while, another phone call. ‘Listen, I had a slight falling-out with the landlord, he has two dogs, murderous rottweilers. I’m moving again, and I thought you’d want to know: it’s quite close to you.’ He giggles. ‘It’s more or less in Tzur Hadassah itself, I mean, if that won’t bother you.’ ‘Hey, Ilan, are you playing hot and cold with me?’ ”

Ilan had laughed. Ora knew him and his systems of laughs, and in this laughter there was something weak and pathetic, and she felt once again how strong she was. “I’m telling you,” she says to Avram, “I didn’t even know up to then that I was such a lioness. But I’m also a dishrag, as you know, and a doormat, and I missed him almost all the time and everything reminded me of him — Adam’s suckling used to make me so horny for Ilan.” She laughs quietly to herself as she remembers. “I would pick up Ilan’s smell from Adam at night and it woke me. And all that time I felt as though he were just a couple of meters away.”

When she says that, she can hear the music in which Ilan spoke to her on the phone all the years they were together, with a firm sort of sharpness and a rousing “Ora!” Sometimes, when he said her name that way, she had a vague sense of guilt — like a soldier asleep on guard duty whose officer calls him out — but there was almost always something daring in the way he addressed her too, and teasing, and arousing and inviting: Ora! She smiles to herself: Ora! As though he were establishing a decisive, solid fact that she herself often doubted.

“So I pretend to be strong and ask softly, ‘What’s going on, Ilan? Is this like some kind of Monopoly game for you, renting and selling houses in all sorts of streets around town? Or is my learned friend a little homesick?’ And without even blinking, he says yes, that he’s had no life since he left home, that he’s going crazy. And then I hear myself say, ‘Then come back,’ and straightaway I think, No! I don’t need him and I don’t want him here. I don’t want any man getting under my feet around here.”

She smiles broadly when Avram briefly lifts his heavy eyelids and an ancient spark glimmers slyly in his eyes. “There you are,” she says.

“Sometimes at night,” Ilan told her back then, “I drive to the house. It’s some kind of force … It just gets hold of me, wakes me up at one o’clock in the morning, or two, throws me out of bed, and I get up like a zombie and get on my motorbike and drive to you, and I know I’ll be with you in one minute, in your bed, begging you to forgive me, to forget, to erase my madness. And then, when I’m twenty meters from the place, the counter-force kicks in, always at the same point, as if that’s where the magnet’s poles get reversed. I can actually feel something physically pushing me, and it says: Move away, get out of here, it’s no good to be here—”