David Grossman - To the End of the Land

“Is that really what happens?”

“I’m going crazy, Ora, I have a child and I can’t see him?! Am I sane? And I have you, and I’m one thousand percent sure that you’re the only person I’m able and willing to live with, the only person who can stand me, and so what? What am I doing? I thought maybe I just needed to escape this place, to get out of Israel, maybe go to England, finish my studies there, get a change of air, but I can’t do that either! Because of Avram I can’t leave this place! I don’t know what to do, tell me what to do.”

“And then,” Ora tells Avram, “when he said that to me, it occurred to me for the first time that you were definitely the reason for his running away from us, but you may also have been the excuse.”

“Excuse for what?”

“For what?” She lets out a thin, unpleasant snicker. “For example, his fear of living with us, with me and Adam. Or of just living.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Oof,” she grunts, shaking her head firmly a few times. “You. The two of you.”

“He rented a house next to the children’s park, you know, the one that all the parents in Tzur Hadassah built, a hundred meters from our house as the crow flies. And he didn’t call for maybe three weeks. I turned into a bundle of nerves again, and of course Adam picked up on it immediately. I would push him around the neighborhood for hours in his stroller, that’s the only way he would calm down at all, and no matter which direction I set off in, I always ended up at Ilan’s house.”

Avram walks next to her with his head bowed, not looking at her or at the view. He sees the young woman, lonely and restless, pacing about with the stroller. He leads her along the paths of the village he grew up in, down the loop road and the side street that splits off past houses and yards he knows.

“Once we met face-to-face. He was just coming out, and we happened to run into each other at the gate. We said cautious hellos and both got stuck. He looked at me as if he was about to bed me right there on the sidewalk — I knew that hunger of his so well. But I wanted him to look at Adam, too. Adam was a mess that day — he had a cold and he was kvetchy, with sleep and gunk in his eyes, but Ilan threw him such a fleeting glance that I thought he’d barely noticed a thing.

“But as usual I was wrong. He said, ‘It’s him,’ and got on his bike, hit the gas, and sped away, waking up Adam. Only after he was gone did it occur to me that he’d meant something completely different. I pulled back all the blankets covering Adam to look closely at his face, and for the first time, I saw that he looked like you.”

Avram perks up and turns to her in surprise.

“Something in his eyes, something in the general expression. Don’t ask me how it’s possible.” She chuckles. “Maybe I was thinking about you a bit when we made him, I don’t know. And by the way, to this day I can sometimes see a certain similarity to you in him.”

“How?” Avram laughs awkwardly and his feet almost trip over each other.

“There is such a thing as inspiration in nature, isn’t there?”

“That’s in electricity,” he replies quickly. “There’s a phenomenon where a magnet creates an electrical current.”

“Hey, Avram,” she says softly.

“What?”

“Just … Aren’t you hungry?”

“No, not yet.”

“Do you want some coffee?”

“Let’s keep going for a while. This is a good path.”

“Yes, it’s a good path.”

She walks in front of him, spreads her arms out, and inhales the clear air.

“A week later, Ilan called at eleven-thirty at night. I was asleep, and without any introductions he asked if it would be all right with me if he came to live in the hut in the yard.”

“In the hut?” Avram splutters.

“That shed, you know, where all the junk is, where you had your studio.”

“Yes, but what—”

“Without even thinking about it, I told him to come. I remember that I put the phone down and sat up in bed, and I thought about how this game we’d been playing for two years was just like us, this push-pull force that was working on him, and that gravitational force of Adam’s.”

“And yours,” Avram says without looking at her.

“You think so? I don’t know …”

The only sound now is their footsteps on the dirt. Ora tastes the idea: my gravitational force. She giggles. It’s nice to remember. She had never felt it as strongly as she did in those days, when it drove Ilan frantically all over town.

“Oh well.” She sighs. (Now he’s gone all the way to Bolivia and Chile, all light and airy, a traveler without cargo, a bachelor.)

“The next morning I went to the shed and started emptying it out. I threw out piles of two-thousand-year-old junk and crap, I mean it was the scrapyard of everyone who ever lived in that house of yours, from the beginning of the century, it seems. I found crates full of your sketches, texts, and reels of tape. I kept that, I kept all your stuff, I have it, if you ever want—”

“You can throw it out.”

“No no, I’m not throwing it away. If you want, throw it out yourself.”

“But what’s in there?”

“Thousands and thousands of pages full of your handwriting. Maybe ten crates full.” She laughs. “It’s unbelievable, it’s as if your whole life, from the moment you were born, all you did was sit and write.”

Later, after a silence that goes on for an entire hill and half a valley, Avram says, “So you cleared out the shed—”

“I worked there for a good few hours while Adam crawled around near me on the lawn, naked and happy as can be. Maybe he sensed that something was happening. I didn’t explain anything to him, because I couldn’t exactly explain it to myself. And when there was a huge pile on the path outside the shed, I stood and looked at it with a matronly sort of satisfaction, and then I got this zap in my heart — what was the name of that woman in the Cocteau story?”

“I don’t think she had a name.”

“Serves her right.”

Avram laughs deeply, tickling something inside her.

“And I started putting everything back inside. Adam probably thought I’d lost my mind. I shoved it all in and could barely push the door shut with my shoulder, and I locked it, and I felt that I had saved myself from glorious humiliation.

“A few days later, on Sukkoth, when I was at my parents’ in Haifa with Adam, Ilan turned up and cleared out the shed himself. He put his stuff in, brought someone in to build him a little kitchenette and bathroom and hooked up to my power and water. When I got back, it was night and Adam was asleep on me, and from a distance I could see the piles of trash and junk around the Dumpster. I walked down the path through the garden and saw a light on in the shed. I didn’t look right or left. What can I tell you, Avram.

“Then came the days. I don’t even know how to tell you about them. It was like torture. Me here and him there. Maybe ten meters between us. The light goes on his place and I jump into position by the window, behind the curtain, thinking maybe I’ll catch a glimpse of him. His phone rings, and I swear to you, I embodied the expression ‘I’m all ears.’

“Sometimes, in the morning, I would see him slip away just after sunrise, so — God forbid — he wouldn’t run into me with Adam. And he usually came home very late, almost running down the path, in such a hurry, with a student’s satchel under one arm, fleeing for his life. I had no idea what he did all day, if he had a girlfriend, where he hung out after school so as not to be here while Adam and I were awake. All I knew is that he went to see you three or four times a week. That was the only sure thing: he took care of you on the days I didn’t.