David Grossman - To the End of the Land

“When Ofer was a baby, he used to make this strong, sudden movement with his body”—she stops and sucks the tip of the pen—“or if I tried to breast-feed him when he was full, then he’d arch his whole body back and throw his head to one side.” She demonstrates Ofer’s stance, and unwittingly, her own embrace of him, linking her hands together away from her chest, and Avram stares at the empty space between her arms.

“He had such sharp movements. Full of character and willpower.” Then she laughs. “You know, most of the time I completely idolized him. The way he knew exactly what he needed to know. The way he was perfect as a baby, while I”—she hesitates, her lip curling—“was a lousy mother.”

“You?”

“Forget it. I don’t want to get into that now. We’re talking about Ofer. Listen to something else”—but she keeps it in her heart: “You?” A real outcry. What should she take from that? “He was a climbing baby. Ilan used to call him ‘Ivy.’ ” She remembers with delight as it all comes back, wave upon wave, filling up with life, filling Ofer with life too, somewhere out there.

“I would hold him on me, and within a second he would start to climb up, slithering through my hands like a fish. He couldn’t stay where I wanted him for one second. And always up, climbing, higher up, and it annoyed me sometimes, that motion of his, and the determination, like he was using me to get to something else, or someone else, someone more interesting.” She laughs. “A bit like you, when you wanted something. When you had some new idea.”

He says nothing.

“The way you would hunt, you know, when I told you about someone interesting I’d met, or a conversation I’d overhead on the bus. I’d see your wheels start to spin, so you could find out if it was right for a story, or a sketch, and in your mind you’d be trying out the different characters you could give the line to, or my laughter, or my breasts.” Why torture him with this talk? she thinks. Yet she cannot stop. It’s as though her nostalgia for him has become a strange, infectious aggression. “Or when you asked me to pose for you naked so you could write me, with words, not draw. I remember how I sat — I swear, I can’t believe I did that — on the veranda facing the wadi, because it had to be outside, you insisted, remember? You said the light was better there. And I agreed of course, I did everything you asked back then, and I let you draw me with words, on the veranda, and of course God forbid Ilan should know about it. That was what we played at back then, or that was how you played me, and Ilan, with your parallel dimensions. So there I was, facing the wadi, naked, with the shepherds from Hussan and Wadi Fukin who may have been out there, you didn’t care, you didn’t care about anything when you needed something for your writing, when you were on fire”—Shut up, she thinks. Why are you attacking him? What’s gotten into you? There’s a statute of limitations on these things, isn’t there? — “and me, I swear, I had chills all over from the way you broke me down into words. I wanted it so badly — you must have felt that — but at the same time I felt so exploited, as though you were looting my most private things, my skin and my flesh, and I didn’t dare tell you, I mean it was impossible to talk to you when you were in that state.” She shakes her head in bewilderment. “I was even a little afraid of you. You looked like a cannibal in those moments, but I loved that about you, the fact that you had no control over yourself, that you had no choice. I loved that so much about you.”

“I wanted to write you like that every year,” Avram suddenly grunts, and Ora stops, breathless. “I thought it was something I would do with you over the years, many years. Fifty years like that is what I wanted.” His voice is dull and weary and seems to be coming from a great distance. “I thought … my plan was, once a year I would describe your body and face, every part of you, every change in you, word by word, throughout our lives together, and even if we weren’t together, even if you kept being his. That you’d be my model, but for words.”

She folds her legs beneath her body, agitated by the long, surprising monologue.

“I really only had time to do it twice: Ora at twenty, and Ora at twenty-one.”

She doesn’t remember that being his plan. Maybe she hadn’t even known about it. He wasn’t always capable of talking about his ideas. Sometimes he didn’t want to. And usually, when he was in heat with creativity — that’s how he referred to it — he could only let out slivers of thoughts, sentence fragments that did not always cohere outside his mind. When she didn’t understand, he would start to dance around her in circles, whether they were in his room, on the street, in bed, in an open field, or on a bus. He would grimace with impatience and anger and gesticulate wildly, like someone gasping for air. She would feel her eyes glaze over: “Explain it again, but slower.” Desperation darkened his look, and the loneliness — the exile — into which he felt pushed by her doubts, her caution, her clipped wings. He had such hostility toward her in those moments, perhaps because of his being doomed to fall deeply in love with a woman who could not understand him instantly—“with a hint and a wrinkle,” he said, quoting Brenner, but she hadn’t read Brenner: “All that breakdown and bereavement stuff is too depressing for me,” she said. He loved her anyway, despite Brenner, despite Melville and Camus and Faulkner and Hawthorne. He loved her and lusted and longed for her and held on to her as though his life depended on it. And that was another thing she wanted to talk to him about on this journey, tomorrow or the next day. She wanted him to explain finally what he’d seen in her, to remind her of what she had possessed back then, so that perhaps she could take a little of it for herself now.

She grows irritable. Sparks of thought fly through her. She unfolds herself and gets up: “Is there a ladies’ room around here?”

He points with his forehead into the darkness. She takes a roll of paper and walks away. She crouches down next to a thick shrub and pees. Drops splash on her shoes and pants. First thing tomorrow I have to take a shower and do some laundry, she thinks. For a moment she dares to contemplate what she lost: the ability to sit facing him, nude, another twenty-eight times, to look into his eyes and see the way he saw her. To see how, year after year, the words that described her slowly changed, different shadows cast on a familiar landscape. Perhaps it would have hurt less to grow old in his words. But no, she has no doubt. It would have hurt more.

After she finishes, she leans against a thin tree trunk in the dark and hugs herself, suddenly lonely. Pictures of herself over the years flutter by. Ora the teenager, Ora the soldier, pregnant Ora, Ora and Ilan, Ora with Ilan and Adam and Ofer, Ora with Ofer, Ora alone. Ora alone with all the years to come. What does he see in her today? Vicious words appear before her eyes: dry, shriveled, veins, moles, fat, lips, that lip of hers, breasts, limpness, stains, wrinkles, flesh, flesh.

From the darkness she sees him dissolve in the embers’ red glow. He gets up and takes out two mugs from her backpack. He wipes them with his shirt. He pours water into the sooty finjan . He’s making coffee for her. He pushes the notebook away so it doesn’t get wet. His fingers hover on the blue binding, touching its texture. She thinks she can see him secretly assessing its thickness with his thumb.

Over the days and weeks after she slept with him in his apartment in Tel Aviv, Avram began to decline again, spending hours staring at the window or the wall, neglecting his body, not bathing or shaving, not answering the phone. And he withdrew from Ora. At first he made up excuses, then asked her explicitly not to come. When she came anyway, he tried to get her to leave. He was wary of being alone with her at home. She was frightened. Her thoughts constantly dwelled on him and what had happened that night. For weeks she could barely do anything.