David Grossman - To the End of the Land

“Yes.”

“Are you interested?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“No.”

She sighs. “Where was I?”

“It was quiet in the living room.”

“Yes.” She takes a deep breath and chooses not to respond to the insult. At least he’s honest, she says to herself. At least he says exactly what he feels.

“I realized immediately that I wasn’t getting the signal. And so did Ilan. Ilan had the instincts of an I-don’t-know-what. Of an animal,” she says, and Avram picks up what she isn’t saying: Ilan took good care of your boy. Ilan was a good choice. For both of us. She can barely resist describing what she now remembers, a series of scenes in which Ilan uses his teeth to remove a tiny splinter from Ofer’s foot; Ilan licks a speck out of Ofer’s eye; Ofer lies on Ilan, who lies in the dentist’s chair and strokes and hypnotizes Ofer with soft purring breaths—“Ofer got the injection and my whole mouth went numb,” he tells her later.

“So I rush to the living room and I see Ofer standing in the middle of the room with his back to me, and it was obvious that he’d already taken a few steps.”

“On his own?”

“Yes. From the round table, you remember that low wooden table we found in a field once, when the three of us were hiking, a kind of round thing that was used to store cable?”

“Something from the electrical company …”

“You and Ilan rolled it all the way home.”

“Yes, sure.” He smiles. “That thing still exists?”

“Of course it does. When we moved to Ein Karem we took it with us.”

They both laugh in astonishment.

“And Ofer,” she continues, and draws a thin line in the dirt with her finger, “must have moved from that table to the big brown couch—”

I remember, Avram’s face says.

“And from there he walked to the floral armchair—”

“I still have its sister to this day,” Avram murmurs.

“Yes, I saw that,” Ora notes with a grimace. “And from there, I guess, he went toward the bookcase, the brick bookcase—”

“The red bricks—”

“That you and Ilan used to pick up all over the place—”

“Ahh, my bookcase.”

Ora wipes the dirt off her hand. “This is all guesses, you see, ’cause I don’t really know exactly how he walked, what his route was. By the time I got to the living room he was already standing a few steps beyond the bookcase, and then he didn’t have anything more to hold on to, nothing, so he was walking in an open space.”

It takes off inside her now, the greatness and the wonder of the act, the bravery of her little astronaut.

“And I actually stopped breathing. So did Ilan. We were afraid to startle him. He stood with his back to us.” She smiles, her gaze lost in that room, and Avram steals a look and draws his face in the same direction. And Ilan, she remembers, came up and hugged her from behind. He steadied her and crossed his arms over her belly, and they stood together quietly, swaying in a sort of muted coo.

A feathery quiver in her back climbs up and spreads around her neck and takes hold of the roots of her hair. She silently allows Avram to look at the scene: the room he knows so well, with its jumble of furniture, and Ofer standing there, a crumb of life in an orange Winnie-the-Pooh T-shirt.

“And of course I couldn’t help it, and I laughed, and the sound startled him and he tried to turn around and fell over.”

The soft, padded bump as his diaper hit the rug. The heavy head rocking back and forth. The insult at being surprised in this way, and then the wonderment on his face as he turned to her, only to her, as though asking her to interpret what he had just done.

“And where was Adam?” Avram asks from somewhere in the distance.

“Adam? He was still in the kitchen, I suppose, probably kept on eating—” She stops: How did he realize so quickly that Adam was left on his own, abandoned? Why did he rush to take his side? “But when he heard my laughter and Ilan’s cheers, he jumped up and came running.”

Alive and lucid she sees it: Adam grabs Ilan’s pants with his fist, head cocked to one side to examine his little brother’s achievement. His lips curl into a grimace that gradually, over the years, through the slow process of sculpting the soul in the flesh, would become a permanent feature.

“Listen, the whole thing lasted three or four seconds, it wasn’t some kind of saga. And the three of us quickly ran over to Ofer and hugged him, and of course he wanted to get up again. From the minute he learned how to stand up, you couldn’t stop him.”

She tells him how hard it was to put Ofer down at night. He kept standing up, holding on to the wooden bars and pulling himself up, and he would stand there, then collapse with exhaustion, then stand up again. In the middle of the night, confused, crying, longing to sleep, he’d get up and just stand there. And when she changed his diaper, or tried to sit him in his chair to eat, or when she strapped him into the car seat, he constantly squirmed and pushed his way up, as if a big spring were launching him, as if gravity were reversed in him.

She sighs. “Do you really want to hear all this, or is it just to make me feel good?”

He produces a slightly diagonal nod, which she has trouble interpreting. Perhaps he means both things? And why not, in fact? This is something, too. Take what there is.

“Where was I?”

“He fell.”

“Oh,” she groans in painful surprise, the air slashed out of her in one sweep. “Don’t say that.”

“I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry, Ora.”

“No, it’s okay. You should know that when I talk about him with you, he’s all right, he’s protected.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. That’s what I feel. He’s preserved.”

“Yes.”

“Does that sound crazy?”

“No.”

“Should I tell you more?”

“Yes.”

“Say it with words.”

“Tell me more. About him.”

“About Ofer.”

“About Ofer, tell me about Ofer.”

“So we helped him up”—her eyes flutter for a moment, having seen an ungraspable picture: he said “Ofer”; he touched Ofer—“and we stood him on his feet and held out our arms and called him to us, and he walked again, very slowly, wobbling—”

“To who?”

“What?”

“To which one of you?”

“Oh.” She strains her memory, surprised by his new sharpness, the dim flash of determination in his face. Just like long ago, she thinks, when he was intent on understanding something new, an idea, a situation, a person, and he would circle around and around in a slow gallop, very lightly, with that predatory glint in his eye.

Then she remembers. “To Adam. Yes, of course. That’s who he walked to.”

How could she have forgotten? Tiny Ofer, very serious and focused, looking intently ahead with his mouth open and his arms straight in front of him. His body rocked back and forth and one hand dropped and grasped the wrist of the other, declaring himself a closed, independent, self-sufficient system. She can see it alive and sharp: she and Ilan and Adam stand across from him, some distance from one another, holding their hands out, calling, “Ofer, Ofer,” laughing, tempting him, “Come to me.”

As she recounts the story, she realizes something she missed at the time: the moment of Ofer’s first choice between them, and his distress when they forced him to choose. She shuts her eyes and tries to guess his thoughts. He had no words, after all, just the inner push-and-pull, and she and Ilan and Adam cheered and danced around him, and Ofer was torn as only a baby can be torn. She rushes away from his distress, and her face is already lighting up with Adam’s astonished glee when Ofer finally turned to him. His amazement and happiness and pride momentarily erased the grimace and turned it into an excited smile of disbelief at being chosen, at being wanted. A stream of pictures, sounds, and smells churns inside her, everything coming back now — how Adam had welcomed Ofer when she and Ilan brought him home from the hospital, just over a year before that day. She has to tell Avram about that, but maybe not now, not yet, she mustn’t flood him, but she tells him anyway: “Adam jumped up and down and went wild, and his eyes burned with electric fear, and he hit his own cheeks with both hands, slapping himself hard and shouting wildly, ‘I’m happy! I’m so happy!’ ”