David Grossman - To the End of the Land

She was paralyzed for a moment. Then she pulled her wallet from her purse and took out a picture.

His face trembled. His lips twitched uncontrollably. When she was about to put the picture back in her wallet, he reached out and grasped her wrist, bending it hard, and shivered as he looked at the picture.

“He looks like both of you,” he finally said.

“Avram, I’m so sorry,” she said, trying not to cry. “I didn’t know that you knew.”

“When you look at him you can see how alike you are.”

“Me and him? Really?” Ora had felt happy for a moment. She saw almost no similarity between herself and Adam.

“You and Ilan.”

“Oh.” She released her hand from his grip. “How long have you known?”

He shrugged his shoulders and said nothing. Ora quickly calculated: she’d stopped coming to see him as soon as she’d started showing, and Ilan had taken care of him alone. She suddenly became furious. “Just answer me this — when did he tell you?”

“Ilan? He didn’t tell me.”

“Then how?”

Avram stared at her with expressionless eyes. “I knew. I knew from the start.”

She had a crazy thought: He knew as soon as I found out.

“And Ilan doesn’t … doesn’t know that you know?”

A conspiratorial flicker ran over his face. His old cunning, his love of plot twists.

They’ve been walking for several minutes on a narrow side road, but the surprising amount of traffic makes them both unquiet. It’s been at least two days since they’ve walked on a road, and the cars seem to be zooming by far too close. They see their own reflection in the drivers’ looks: two weathered refugees. For a few hours they forgot that’s what they are — escapees, persecuted. Avram drags his feet again and grumbles incessantly. Ora is troubled by a vague, silly, yet stubborn suspicion that this remote road is ultimately connected, through infinite streets and intersections, to its brothers in faraway Beit Zayit, and that some bad news may trickle back through the asphalt network’s nervous system. They both calm down at once when they spot an orange-blue-and-white marker, which they have started seeing and learned to trust. It directs them to turn left after a small concrete bridge and depart from the road to an inviting field. It does her good, Avram too, to feel the live earth beneath their feet again, and the easily trampled weeds and bushes that respond to their footfalls and add a spring to their steps, and the little pebbles that fly up like sparks from the labor of walking.

Their backs straighten, their senses awake. She can feel her body rousing, like a wild animal. Even the steep incline — a narrow goats’ path through what seems like a massive rockslide — does not frighten them now. Giant oaks erupt from the rocks, their branches slope down to the escarpment, and Ora and Avram walk in silence, concentrating on the difficult descent. They help each other, careful not to slide on the rocks made slippery by a flow of spring water.

Later — neither of them has a watch, and for days they have had neither minutes nor hours, their time measured only by the light’s refraction on the prism of each day — Avram leans his back and backpack against a tree trunk and slowly sits down with his legs sprawled out in front of him. His head droops a little, and for a moment it looks as though he’s asleep. Ora rests her head on a cool rock and listens to the gently flowing stream somewhere nearby. Without opening his eyes, Avram says, “We’ve walked a lot these past days.”

“I can barely move my feet.”

“It must be thirty years since I’ve walked this much.”

It’s his voice, she thinks. He’s talking to me. When she opens her eyes, he is looking at her. Straight and clear into her.

“What?” she asks.

“Nothing.”

“What are you looking at?”

“At you.”

“What do you see?”

He does not reply. His eyes avoid her. She is certain that her face is no longer beautiful to him. She thinks he sees her face as another broken promise.

“Ora.”

“What?”

“I was thinking today while we were walking. I was thinking — what does he … look like?”

“What does he look like?”

“Yes.”

“What does Ofer look like?”

Avram pouts worriedly. “Isn’t that a good question?”

“No, it is, it’s an excellent question.”

She turns her face this way and that, to dry her eyes.

“I have a little picture of him in my wallet, together with Adam, if you—”

“No, no.” He sounds alarmed. “Tell me.”

“Just with words?” She smiles.

“Yes.”

A bold, joyous chirping sound suddenly fills the crevice. An invisible bird sings from within the thicket, and Ora and Avram lower their heads to absorb the tiny gaiety, a soul full of life and stories. A whole plot is narrated, perhaps the events of the passing day, praise for food, the tale of a wonderful and convoluted rescue from the claws of a predator, and in between, a chorus made entirely of claims and responses, a bitter settling of scores with a petty adversary.

“When I saw you walking,” Ora says after the singing dies down a little and turns to secular chirping, “even today, just a few minutes ago, I thought about how Ofer’s walk has changed over the years.”

Avram leans forward, attentive.

“Because up until he was about four, he walked exactly like you do, with the … you know, rocking to the sides, arms like a penguin, just like you walk.”

“You mean that’s how I walk?” Avram seems hurt.

“You didn’t know?”

“Still today?”

“Listen, why don’t you try those shoes? Try them on, what do you care?”

“No, no, I’m comfortable in these.”

“So you’re just going to carry them the whole time?”

“So you say he walks like me?”

“That’s when he was little. Four or five. Afterward he went through all kinds of periods. You know that kids mimic what they see, too.”

“They do?” He thinks about Ilan’s supple, battle-ready stride.

“And in adolescence — do you really want to hear?”

“I’m hearing,” Avram murmurs.

“He was terribly thin up to then, and small. If you saw him now, you’d never believe it was the same person. But he made this giant leap, at around sixteen and a half, in breadth and height. Until then he was”—she draws a figure in the air, a thin reed or a twig—“he had matchstick legs, it broke your heart to see them. And he always used to walk around — I just remembered this — in huge, heavy hiking boots, a bit like the ones tied to your backpack now. From morning to night he never took them off.”

“But why?”

“Why? Do you really not know why?”

Of course he does, she thinks immediately. Don’t you understand? He just needs to hear it from you, word for word.

“Because they gave him some height, and they probably also gave him the feeling that he was stronger, more solid, masculine.”

“Yes,” Avram murmurs.

“I’m telling you, he was really small.”

“How small?” Avram scoffs in disbelief. “How small?”

She signals to him with her eyes: Very small. Tiny. Avram slowly nods, for the first time digesting with his eyes the Ofer reflected in her gaze. A wee boy. Like Thumbelino. She wonders who he’s been seeing in his mind’s eye all these years.

“Didn’t you think he—”

“I didn’t think anything.” He cuts her off, his face closing up.

“And you never tried to imagine how—”

“No!”

They sit quietly. The bird has also stopped singing. A very small child, Avram muses, and something in him moves, crushed. A weak boy, a passing shadow. I wouldn’t be able to take it, the sorrow of such a child, his envy of other boys. How can he survive at school, on the street. How do you let him out of the house. Cross the street alone. I would never be able to take it.