David Grossman - To the End of the Land

Then Adam made the same high squeaks that used to erupt from the depths of his body every time he went near Ofer’s crib for the first few months, a series of small uncontrollable shrieks, an almost animalistic mixture of affection and jealousy and uncontainable excitement. That was exactly how he chirped that day, when Ofer wobbled over to him at the first moment of choice. Or perhaps they were different chirps. “What do I know? Maybe he was guiding and encouraging Ofer in a language only the two of them knew.”

Ofer took another step, then another. He walked without falling, and perhaps thanks to his brother’s chirps, to which he had tied his willpower, he managed to maintain some stability. Like a tiny airplane in a storm, homing in on a beam of light from a control tower, he walked over and collapsed into his brother’s arms, and the two of them rolled on the rug, embraced and squirmed and shrieked with laughter. She suddenly feels like writing down this little memory so it won’t slip away for another twenty years. She just wants to describe the seriousness of Ofer as he walked, and Adam’s screeching excitement, and his huge relief, and above all, their puppy-like embrace of each other. That was the moment they truly became brothers, the moment Ofer chose Adam, the moment Adam, perhaps for the first time in his life, truly believed he had been chosen. Ora smiles, bewitched by the heap of her children on the rug, and thinks how clever Ofer was, because he knew how to give himself to Adam, and because he carefully avoided getting trapped in the thicket of secrets and silences that lurked between her and Ilan’s open arms.

“So that was how he walked for the first time,” she sums up hastily, exhausted, and gives Avram a strained smile.

“The second time.”

“What do you mean?”

“You said so.”

“What?”

“That you didn’t see the first time, the real first steps.”

She shrugs. “Oh, yes, that’s true. But really what does it—”

“No, nothing.”

She wonders whether this is some strange insistence on historical accuracy, or perhaps a hint of haggling with her and with Ilan, a sort of “I didn’t and you didn’t, either.”

“Yes,” she says, “you’re absolutely right.”

They look at each other for a moment, and she knows: it’s haggling. And perhaps even more than that, it’s the settling of accounts. The discovery is frightening, but also exciting, like the first sign of an uprising, the rousing of someone who has been depressed and silenced and dormant for too long. Then it occurs to her that when Ofer rolled over onto his back for the first time, no one was there, either. Is that true? She checks quickly with herself. True. I swear: Ilan went over to his crib one afternoon and found him lying quietly on his back, looking at his blue elephant mobile — she even remembers the mobile, in its every detail, with utter clarity now. It’s as though someone has come along and removed a cataract that had covered her eye for years. And when he sat up for the first time he was alone too, she thinks with increasing bewilderment. And when he stood up for the first time.

For one moment, no longer, she hesitates, and then she gives Avram a simple reportage of facts, the facts that now belong to him too, because he has finally come to demand them. His eyes narrow: she can almost see the wheels in his mind straining.

“Somehow the first time he did all these things — turning over, sitting up, standing, walking — he really was alone.”

“So,” Avram murmurs, staring at his fingertips, “is that something, you know, unusual?”

“Honestly, I’ve never thought about it before. I never made a list of all the first things he did. But for instance, when Adam sat up for the first time, or stood up or walked, I was with him. Well, I told you that for the first three years of his life we were never apart. And I remember how he glowed every time he accomplished something like that, and Ofer, yes, Ofer is—”

“Alone,” Avram quietly finishes, his features suddenly softening.

Ora gets up and hurries to her backpack, digs through it urgently, and pulls out a thick notebook with dark blue binding. From a side pocket she takes out a pen. Without introductions, still standing with her head slightly tilted, she writes on the first page: Ofer walked funny. I mean, his walk, at first, was strange. Almost from the moment he started walking he used to veer around all sorts of obstacles that no one else could see, and it was really funny to watch. He would avoid something nonexistent, or draw back from some monster that must have been lurking for him in the middle of the room, and you could absolutely not convince him to step on that tile! It’s a bit like watching a drunk walk (but a drunk with a method!). Ilan and I agree that he has a private map in his head, and he always follows it .

She cautiously walks back to her spot, puts the open notebook on the ground, and sits down next to it, very straight, then looks at Avram.

“I wrote about him.”

“About who?”

“Him.”

“What for?”

“I don’t know. I just—”

“But the notebook—”

“What about it?”

“Why did you bring it?”

She stares at the lines she wrote. The words seem to scurry about on the page, wagging their fingers at her, calling her to go on, not to stop now. “What did you ask?”

“What did you drag a notebook along for?”

She stretches, tired suddenly, as though she’d written whole pages. “I don’t know, I was just thinking I’d write down all sorts of things we saw on the way, Ofer and I. A kind of travel diary. When we used to go on vacations abroad with the boys, we always wrote our experiences together.”

She was the one who used to write. Every evening in the hotel, or on rest stops, or during long drives. They refused to cooperate — Ora hesitates, and decides not to tell Avram this — and the three of them affectionately mocked her endeavor, which they thought was unnecessary and childish. She insisted: “If we don’t write things down, we’ll forget them.” They said, “But what is there to remember? That the old man in the boat threw up on Dad’s foot? That they brought Adam eel, instead of the schnitzel he ordered?” She wouldn’t answer, thinking, You’ll see how one day you’ll want to remember how we had fun, how we laughed — how we were a family, she thinks now. She always tried to be as detailed as possible in those diaries. Whenever she didn’t feel like writing, when her hand was lazy, or her eyelids drooped with exhaustion, she would imagine the years to come when she might sit with Ilan, preferably on long winter evenings, with a mug of mulled wine, the two of them wrapped in plaid blankets, reading each other passages from the scrapbooks, which were decorated with postcards and menus and tickets from tourist sites, plays, trains, and museums. Ilan guessed it all, of course, including the plaid. She was always so transparent to him. “Just promise you’ll shoot me before that happens to me,” he told her. But he said that about so many things …

How did it happen, she wonders, that while I only softened with the years, the three of them grew tougher? Maybe Ilan’s right, maybe it’s because of me that they hardened. They hardened against me. A good cry would do me some good now, she notes to herself.

When she opens her eyes, Avram is sitting across from her, leaning with his backpack against a rock, delving into her.

Once, when he used to look at her like that, she would immediately open herself to him, allowing him to see into her inner depths unhindered. She did not let anyone else see inside her like that. Not even Ilan. But she was easy with Avram — such a horrible word, “easy”; she was always easy with Avram, letting him see all of her, almost from the first moment she met him, because she had a feeling, a conviction that there was something inside her, or someone, perhaps an Ora more loyal to her own essence, more precise and less vague, and Avram seemed to have a way to reach her. He was the only one who could truly know her and could pollinate her with his look, with his very existence, and without him she simply did not exist, she had no life, and so she was his, she was his prerogative.