David Grossman - To the End of the Land

The more he fled, the more she felt compelled to chase him. Time after time she tried to reassure him, to explain that all she wanted was for them to go back to the way they were. He pushed away, shook her off, and firmly refused to talk about that evening.

Then she discovered she was pregnant. After a month she finally managed to tell Avram. At first he froze. His face fossilized and his little remaining vitality vanished in an instant. Then he asked if she knew where to get an abortion. He would pay for it, he’d get a loan from the Ministry of Defense, no one would have to know. She refused even to hear about it. “It’s too late for that anyway,” she murmured, hurt and heartbroken, and he said that in that case he wanted nothing to do with her. She argued, tried to remind him of everything they meant to each other. He stood with a face of stone and stared somewhere above her head, so as not to risk looking at her stomach. Her head spun. She could barely stand up. She felt that if he kept this up a moment longer her body would simply spit out the fetus. She tried to grab his hand and put it on her stomach, but he let out a horrible shout. His eyes were mad with fury and raw hatred. Then he opened the door and practically kicked her out and left her standing there — so she felt — for thirteen years. And then, just before Ofer’s bar mitzvah, but ostensibly unrelated to that date, he called her one evening without any explanations or apologies and suggested in his gruff voice that they meet in Tel Aviv.

When they met, he adamantly refused to hear about Ofer, or about Adam and Ilan. The photo album she’d spent weeks preparing, with carefully selected pictures of Ofer and the family, spanning thirteen years, remained in her bag. Avram told her at length about fishermen and vagrants he met on the beach in Tel Aviv, about the pub where he’d started working, about an action flick he’d seen four times, and the sleeping-pill habit he was trying to kick. He lectured her about the social ramifications and Catholic allusions in various computer games. She sat staring at his mouth, which did not stop gushing with words that seemed to have lost their content long ago. At times she thought he was making a great effort to prove that she could no longer expect anything of him. They sat for almost two hours on either side of a table in a noisy, ugly café. She kept drifting outside of herself to observe the two of them. They looked like Winston and Julia in Nineteen-Eighty-Four , when they met after being brainwashed and forced to betray each other. At a certain moment, for no apparent reason, Avram got up, said a formal goodbye, and walked away. She assumed she would not see him for another thirteen years, but roughly every six months he would invite her for another insipid, depressing meeting, until Ofer was drafted. That was when he informed her that he could not be in touch with her until Ofer’s discharge.

But the day after she told him she was pregnant, the day after he threw her out of his home and his life, Ora put on a flowing white linen dress and went onto the porch outside the house in Tzur Hadassah. She stood there displaying her full glory, of which no one else was aware yet — even her mother hadn’t noticed. She didn’t know if Ilan was in the shed, but she had the feeling she was being watched from there.

At nine in the evening, after putting Adam to bed, she knocked on the shed door and Ilan opened straightaway. He was wearing the green T-shirt she liked and a pair of faded jeans she had once bought him. His bare, sinewy feet sent sparks through her. Behind his back she saw a remarkably monastic room. A cot, a desk, a chair, and a lamp. Bookshelves lined the walls. Ilan looked into her eyes and down to her still innocent-looking stomach, and the skin on his scalp stretched taut.

“It’s from Avram,” she said. She thought she sounded as if she were handing him a gift and declaring who had sent it. Then she realized perhaps that was the case. He stood there amazed and confused, and she, by the force of her new power, pushed him aside and walked in.

“When did this happen?” He flopped onto the bed.

“This is how you live?” She ran a finger over the books on a shelf. “Tort Law and General Tort Theory, Collateral Law,” she accentuated, stealing a look at the large spiral-bound notebooks on his table: property law, family law. “Ilan the student,” she said, slightly pained, because she had always dreamed they would be students together — well, the three of them — and had hoped to spend hours and days with them on the Givat Ram campus, in lecture halls, in the library, on the lawn, in the cafeteria. But she had quit her studies as soon as Avram came home, and she wondered if she’d ever go back — what would she study now? Not back to social work, she didn’t have the strength to spend months or years battling state authorities and officials. She could not tolerate any contact with rigidity, arbitrariness, and cruelty — not now, after the war, after Avram — and she knew from her one-year project how all these would echo through every meeting with the deputy coordinator of welfare in the Katamonim neighborhood. On the other hand, she wasn’t drawn to anything academic or abstract. Something with her hands. That’s what she wanted to do. Or with her body. Something simple and touching and unequivocal, and without a lot of words — most important, without words. Perhaps she could revive her childhood athletic career, this time as a teacher. Or maybe she could treat people, ease their pain — yes, why not, just as she had done for Avram during his years of hospitalization. But all that would probably be postponed for a while now. “To answer your question,” she finally told Ilan with strange cheer, “it’s been almost three months.”

“Are you sure it’s from him?”

“Ilan!”

Ilan buried his face in his hands, digesting. She suddenly felt important. Critical. She could even relax. She studied him, and for the first time she almost thanked him for what he had done to her by leaving. Amused, she observed the deliberations darting around beneath the smooth skin on his forehead. Ilan always had considerations and counter-considerations, she thought. Mainly counter-considerations.

“What does he say?”

“He doesn’t want to see me.” She pulled over the only chair in the room and sat down, her mind settled, her body settling. Her legs knew just how far apart to spread for a woman in her state. “And he wants me to have an abortion.”

“No!” Ilan yelled and jumped off the bed. He held her hand in both of his.

“Hey, Ilan,” she said softly, looking into his eyes, alarmed by the cyclone she saw in them: there were no considerations or reasonings, only naked, tortured darkness.

“Keep this child,” he whispered urgently. “Please, Ora, don’t do anything, don’t hurt him.”

“I’ll have him in April.” The simple sentence filled her with unimaginable strength, the seal of a secret partnership forged through those words between her body and the baby and time itself. But maybe it will be a girl, she thinks, daring to entertain the idea for the first time. Of course it will be a girl, she realizes with amazement. She feels a sudden clarity, the pressing intuition of a tiny girl splashing around inside her.

“Ora,” Ilan said to his feet, “how would you feel about—”

“What?”

“I was thinking, don’t jump up now, hear me out.”

“I’m listening.”

Ilan says nothing.

“What did you want to say?”

“I want to come home.”

“Come home? Now?” She is utterly confused.

“I want us to get back together,” he said, though his hardened expression seemed to contradict his words.

“But now?”

“I know it’s—”