David Grossman - To the End of the Land

“What did you think?”

“I didn’t think anything,” he repeats, this time so feebly that his voice is barely audible. “I hardly thought, Ora. Every time I tried …” He spreads both hands out in a gesture that might indicate a wish, or perhaps an explosion cracking open.

She resists asking, Then what were you so afraid of, if you didn’t think anything? Who were you protecting from afar, just so long as you didn’t know anything about him?

“And how old is Adam now?”

“Twenty-four and a bit.”

“Wow, a big boy.”

“Almost my age,” she says, attempting one of Ilan’s jokes. Avram looks at her, finally gets it, and smiles politely.

“And what’s going on with him?”

“Adam? I told you.”

“I didn’t … I must not have been paying attention.”

“Adam is with Ilan now, touring the world. South America. Ilan took a year off. They’re having the time of their life, those two, it seems. They don’t want to come home.”

“But Adam,” Avram probes, and Ora thinks his tongue is straining to learn the music of the questions. “What does he do normally? I mean, does he work? Is he studying?”

“He’s still searching, you know. These days they spend a lot of time searching. And he has a band, did I tell you?”

“I don’t remember. Maybe.” He shrugs helplessly. “I don’t know where I was, Ora. Tell me again, from the beginning.”

“He’s an artist. Adam is really an artist in his soul.” Ora’s face brightens as she talks.

A silence thickens, rustles, and one question goes unasked. Ora feels that if she could tell Avram that Ofer was also an artist, an artist in his soul, things might be a little easier.

“A band? What band?”

“Some kind of hip-hop thing, don’t ask me too many questions.” She waves her hand. “They’ve been together for ages, he and his guys. They’re working on their first CD. They even have a company that wants to produce them. It’s a kind of hip-hop opera, I really don’t understand it, it’s very long, three and a half hours, something about exile, a kind of voyage of exiles, lots of exiles.”

“Oh.”

“Yes.”

Ora and Avram’s shoes scratch through the bushes as they walk.

Ora remembers something that caught her ear by chance, when Adam was on the phone with a friend. “And there’s a woman in it. She walks along with a length of string, unraveling it behind her.”

“A string?”

“Yes, a red one. She unravels it behind her on the ground.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“What an idea,” he murmurs, and the skin around his eyes reddens.

“Adam and his ideas,” she giggles, somewhat repelled by Avram’s sudden excitement.

“You mean, it’s like the land was ripped apart? Unraveled?”

“Maybe.”

“And this woman is giving the earth a string …” Avram latches on to the idea.

“Yes, something symbolic like that.”

“That’s powerful. But exiles from where?”

“They’re a very serious bunch, his band. They did their research, read about places around Israel, about early Zionism, dug through kibbutz archives, and on the web, and they asked people what they would take with them if they had to flee suddenly.” This is the sum of what she knows about the topic, but she doesn’t feel comfortable with Avram knowing that, at least not yet, and so she chatters on. “It’s him and a group of guys, and they write everything together, lyrics and music, and they do gigs all over the place.” She smiles with visible effort. “By the way, Ofer played music once, too. Drums, bongos. But he stopped pretty quickly, and at the end of the tenth grade, for his final project — this is actually interesting — he made a movie.”

“Who are the exiles?”

“And Ofer was in a little band too, when he was eleven.”

“Exiled from where, Ora?”

“From here.” She gestures with a suddenly feeble hand over the brown mountain cliffs that encircle them, the oak, carob, and olive trees, the thickets of shrubbery that curl around their feet. “From here,” she repeats quietly. In her ears she can hear the words Ofer whispered to her in front of the TV cameras.

“Exiled from Israel?” Avram seems upset.

Ora takes a deep breath, straightens up, and puts on a weary smile. “You know how they are at that age. They want to astound people at any cost, to shock them.”

“Have you heard it?”

“The opera? No, I haven’t had the chance.”

Avram gives her a questioning look.

“He hasn’t played it for me,” she says, giving in, emptying out. “Look, Adam and I — forget it, he doesn’t tell me anything.”

“The Hornies,” thinks Ora, her lips pursed, as she walks on, turning her back on Avram and his sudden, irritating eagerness. Why is he so hung up on Adam? Ofer started his band with three guys from school. They had four drum sets and no guitar or piano. They wrote wild songs, with most rhymes involving “schmuck” and “fuck,” she recalls as she rubs her arms to pump some blood into them. They put on a show for the families once, in one of the boys’ basements. Ofer was frozen and reserved for most of the show — at that age, he almost always shrank away in the presence of strangers — but every so often, especially after the band sang a rude word, he would peek at her with the defiant boldness of a young chick, and her insides would flutter.

Toward the end of the gig he finally let loose and suddenly started banging on his bongos with a strange, violent glee, bursting out of his own skin. His three band mates were at first amazed by the outburst, and then, exchanging glances, hurried to keep up with his pace on their own drums, and the whole thing became a noisy commotion, a jungle of beating drums and screaming and groaning, the three of them against Ofer. Ilan shifted in his seat, about to get up and put an end to it, but it was she — who usually did not read situations well at first, and had real dyslexia when it came to comprehending basic human interactions — Wasn’t that what he’d said? Weren’t those the central tenets of his I’ve run my course speech? — who’d placed a hand on his arm and stopped him, because she noticed something, a very slight change in Ofer’s rhythm, a new channeling of the streams of violence and competitiveness that flowed between him and the three others, and she had the feeling (unless she was wrong as usual) that Ofer was infiltrating the other three without them realizing it. At first he mimicked them, doing a perfect impersonation of their apish rowdiness, and then he started to echo them with his own gentler drumming, just a hairsbreadth behind them, and she thought he was letting them hear themselves in a softer, more ironic version. He had that seemingly perplexed look on his face, the eyes drawn diagonally upward in an innocent slant, an expression that was entirely Avram, and then she knew she was right: he was seducing them with a subtlety and cunning that she did not know he had, with a whispered rhythm that was new to them. They responded immediately, unable to resist the temptation, and they too whispered and murmured, and suddenly they were engaged in a conversation of hints and secrets that only eleven-year-old boys could understand.

A breeze of enjoyment blew through the basement. The parents exchanged looks. The four boys’ eyes shone, beads of sweat glistened on their faces, and they wiped them away with a sleeve or a tongue darting over lips, and kept on chattering and mumbling in drum-speak, in a thick whisper she had never heard before, which circled around her, approaching and retreating.

A minute went by, and another, until the four of them could no longer continue whispering, and all at once they burst out in a storm of thunder and lightning, and sang the opening song again at the top of their lungs, and the audience sang with them and went wild. Ofer retreated to his usual position, gathered up his forces, and shut the door, looking serious and somewhat gloomy, but his forehead still bore the occasional wrinkle, in which she could read something of his tempestuous thoughts. A flush of pride burned on his cheeks, and she thought: Avram, you are so much with us. Ilan put his hand on her thigh. Ilan, who almost never touched her in public.