David Grossman - To the End of the Land

So I said, “Call him.” Ilan murmured a slightly faded “Ofer.” I said to Ofer: “That’s your dad.” I felt Ilan’s fingers freeze in my hand. I thought it was all coming back. Now he’ll get up and leave, it’s some sort of reflex with him, to leave me when I give birth. Ofer fluttered his eyelids a few times, as though he was goading Ilan to talk already! And Ilan had no choice at that point, so he smiled crookedly and said, “Listen, pal, I’m your dad and that’s that, no arguments.”

She looks up at Avram and smiles distractedly, though with a glimmer of distant happiness, and sighs.

“What?” asks Avram.

“It’s good.”

Avram props himself up slightly. “What’s good?”

“To write.”

“So I hear,” he says dismissively and turns away.

He, who wrote all his life, right up to the last minute, until the Egyptians came and more or less took the pen out of his hand. From six in the morning until ten at night, every day. And he wrote more than ever after he met Ilan and their bond was forged. She knows that that was when his engine was really started, because there was finally someone who truly understood him and competed with him and stimulated him. She thinks about everything that poured out of Avram in the six years after he met Ilan in the hospital — well, Ilan and her. Plays, poems, stories, comedy sketches, and mostly radio plays, which he and Ilan wrote and recorded on the clunky Akai reel-to-reel in the shed in Tzur Hadassah. She remembers one series — it had at least twenty episodes; Avram liked horribly long epics — about a world in which all human beings are children in the morning, adults at noon, elderly in the evening, and back again. And there was a serial play that described a world where humans only communicate honestly and openly in their sleep, through dreams, and know nothing about it when they awake. One of their more successful series, in her opinion, was about a jazz fan who is swept into the ocean and reaches an island inhabited by a tribe that has no music at all, not even whistling or humming, and he gradually teaches them about what they lack. Avram and Ilan created a world in almost everything they did. Avram usually came up with the ideas, and Ilan would try to anchor him to reality as much as he could. Ilan collaborated on the writing and added “musical embellishments” on his saxophone, or with the help of his many albums. A Sambatyon River of ideas and inventions burst out of Avram—“My Golden Age,” he called it once, after he had dried up.

For his twentieth birthday, she bought him his first idea book. She was sick of watching him turn the house upside down and his pockets — and hers — inside out as he desperately searched for his scraps of paper. A constant foliage of notes whirled around his head wherever he went. She scribbled a limerick on the first page of the notebook: “There was a young man who could write / Like a spring he gushed out, day and night. / All day long he would wander / Imagine and ponder / This notebook will be his delight.” Within two months he’d filled up the entire thing and asked her to buy him a second one. “You inspire me,” he said, and she laughed, as usual: “Moi? A bear of little brain like me?” She honestly could not understand how she could inspire anyone, and he looked at her warmly and said that now he knew what Sarah’s laugh had sounded like, when she was told at the age of ninety that she would give birth to Isaac. He added that she didn’t understand anything, about him or about inspiration. After that, Ora always bought his idea books. They had to be small enough to fit in the back pocket of his jeans, and he took them everywhere. He slept with them too, and kept at least one pen in every bed he slept in, so he could jot down nocturnal ideas. He wanted the notebooks to be very simple, no bells and whistles, although he did like the fact that she varied the colors and styles. The most important thing to him was that they came from her. They had to come from her, he stressed, and looked at her with such gratitude that it churned her insides. She felt ceremonious whenever she went to buy a new notebook. She browsed in different stationery shops, first in Haifa and then, after her army service, in Jerusalem, her new city, looking for a notebook that would be just right for the particular period, for the specific idea he was writing about, for his mood. She moans distractedly, tightens her legs together, and her stomach excites at the open pleasure with which he used to hold her notebooks: she liked to see him weigh the new notebook in his hand, feel it, smell it, flip through the pages quickly and greedily, like a card player, to see how many pages it had — how much pleasure was in store for him. A titillating, exposed, shameless pleasure. Once he told her — she never forgot it — that every time he wrote a new character he had to understand its body, that’s where he started. He had to wallow in the character’s flesh and saliva and semen and milk, feel the makeup of its muscles and tendons, whether its legs were long or short, how many steps it took to cross this or that room, how it ran for a bus, how tight its ass was when it stood facing a mirror, and how it walked, and ate, and how exactly it looked when it took a shit or danced, and if it climaxed with a shout or with modest, prudish moans. Everything he wrote had to be tangible and physical—“Like this!” he yelled, and held up one cupped hand, fingers spread, in a gesture that from anyone else would look rude and cheap, but from him, at least at that moment, was an overflowing basin of fervor and passion, as though he were palming a large, heavy breast.

Regretting the pain she has caused him, she quickly explains that she was just writing down a few lines about how Ofer was born. Just straight facts. “For posterity,” she snorts.

Avram, in a more appeased voice, says, “Oh, well, that’s good.”

“Do you really think so?”

He straightens up on one elbow and prods the embers with a branch. “It’s good to have it written down somewhere.”

Ora, very carefully, asks, “Hey, have you written anything since then, over the years?”

Avram shakes his head briskly. “I’m done with words.”

“I didn’t make a baby book for Ofer. I didn’t have the patience to sit down and write back then, and I always felt bad for not doing anything”—but what he just said diffuses inside her like poison. If he’s done with words, how can she even dare to write anything? — “because if you don’t write it down immediately, you don’t remember. That’s the way I am, and also so many things happen in the first few months. The child changes by the minute.”

She’s blathering, and they both know it. She is trying to dilute his avowal. Avram stares at the embers. All she can see is one cheek and one glimmering eye. This was exactly the cadence he used when he told Ilan he didn’t want anything to do with life.

“For example,” she says after a long silence, “I remember that he never gave himself over easily, Ofer. He wouldn’t let you hug him. You could only hug him if he really wanted it. And he’s still like that today,” she adds, thinking about how lately he envelops her gingerly, carefully holding his body away from her breasts, bending over in a ridiculous arch as if God knows what! But when she was a girl, and her awkward father hugged her on rare family occasions, she would also arch her body so that he wouldn’t really touch her. She longs so badly for one full, simple hug with her father now, but it’s too late. Maybe she’ll write about that too, in a few words, just so that one memory remains of that physical motion between her and her father.

Oh well, she thinks, and slams the notebook closed. This could go on forever. It’s like walking around with a bucket of whitewash.