David Grossman - To the End of the Land

“With his child—”

“Would you be willing?”

And everything she had somehow held in and held back all those years burst out. She cried and bellowed, and Ilan held her and steadied her with his strong hands, his supple, rapacious body, and she pulled him to her, and they made love on the sagging cot, careful as they writhed not to hurt the little fingerling inside her. And Ilan, with his sweet smell, his large hands, and his unequivocal body: wanting, wanting, wanting her, how she had missed that protruding desire, and she answered him with torrents she did not know a pregnant woman was capable of.

At dawn, they walked arm in arm down the path to the house, and Ora saw the fig tree and the bougainvillea bow to them, and together they walked up the crooked concrete steps, and Ilan went inside. He let go of her arm and walked quietly through the rooms with his quick feline movements, and he peeked into Adam’s room and came out, too quickly, and Ora knew there was still a long way to go. Together they made an early breakfast and went out onto the porch wrapped in a blanket to watch the sunrise. The sun lit up the garden and the wadi, shadows and all, and Ora thought that no one in the world could understand what had happened to them, only the two of them could understand, and that in itself was proof that they were right.

In the morning Adam got up and saw Ilan there and asked Ora, “Is that the man from the shed?”

Ilan said, “Yes, and you’re Adam,” and he held out his hand.

Adam clung to Ora, hid his face in her dressing gown, and from behind her leg he said, “I’m mad at you.”

“Why?”

“ ’Cause you didn’t come.”

“I was very silly, but now I’m here.”

“Will you leave again?”

“No, I’ll stay here forever.”

Adam thought for a long while and looked at Ora for help. She smiled encouragingly, and he said, “And you’ll be my daddy?”

“Yes.”

Adam thought some more, his face turning red with the effort to understand, and finally he let out a sigh that tugged at Ora’s heart, the sigh of a hopeless old man, and said, “Well, make me some cocoa, then.”

That afternoon Ilan went to see Avram in Tel Aviv and came back a whole year later — that’s how it felt to Ora — dejected and gray. He hugged her with all his body and mumbled that everything would be all right, maybe, or maybe not. She asked what happened, and he said, “Never mind, everything happened, we went through all possible situations. Bottom line, he doesn’t want us in his life. You or me. Our story with him is over.”

She asked if there was any chance Avram might be willing to meet with her, even for a few minutes, at least to say goodbye properly. “No chance,” Ilan said, with an impatience that she did not like. “He doesn’t want anything to do with life, that’s what he said.”

“What?” Ora whispered. “Is he talking about suicide?”

“I don’t think so, he just doesn’t want anything to do with life.”

“But how can that be?” she shouted. “How can he turn his back like that and erase everything?”

“Do you really not understand him? Because I do. I so understand him.” He grunted at Ora as though she were to blame for something or as though he envied Avram for now having an unshakable excuse to cut off his ties with human beings.

“Then why did you come back? Why do you even want to come back?”

He shrugged his shoulders and looked at her belly, and she exploded inside but said nothing, because what could she say?

That night they got into bed, he on his side and she on hers, as though years had not gone by without this routine and their familiar gestures, the shower, the brushing of teeth together, his sounds in the bathroom, the way he sat on the bed with his back to her, naked and glorious, and quickly put on his sweatpants, then lay down and stretched his body out with a pleasure she found jarring. Ora waited for him to quiet down and asked in the calmest voice she could produce whether he was only coming back to her for Avram — she motioned with her chin at her stomach — or because he loved her, too.

“I never stopped loving you even for one day. How is it possible not to love you?” he replied.

“Well, obviously it’s possible. Avram doesn’t love me anymore, and I don’t really love myself.”

Ilan wanted to ask, what about him — how did she feel about him? But he said nothing, and she understood, and said she didn’t know. She didn’t know what she felt. He nodded to himself, as though he enjoyed hurting himself with her words. She saw the color drain from his bronzed temple and from the cheek that faced her, and again, as always, she was amazed to discover how precious and important she was to him, yet how he constantly withheld the simple security of that knowledge from her.

“It’s one hell of a job, this life,” he said.

As if from within a dark mine, she said, “That’s how I’ve felt for years. Since the war, since Avram, I’ve felt like I was crawling through the dark, digging. But tell me more, what happened with him, what did you talk about?”

“Listen, he literally begged us to leave him alone. To forget that he even existed.”

Ora laughed. “Forget Avram. Yeah, sure. Did you talk about this?” She hinted at her belly.

“He almost hit me when I tried to say something. He just goes berserk, physically, it drives him mad to think that he will have a child in the world.”

And Ora thought: That he’ll have something to hold him here.

Ilan murmured, “It’s like he was on his way out, and his sleeve caught on a nail in the door.”

Ora briefly felt as though there really was a nail in her womb.

She turned the light off and they lay there quietly, feeling the vapors of the previous night’s untamed happiness dissipate. Their mouths filled with the metallic taste of what was and always would be irredeemable.

“I actually thought it would make things easier for him,” Ora said, “rescue him even, you know, connect him with life again.”

“He doesn’t want to hear about it.” He was quoting Avram and the hardness in his voice again. “He doesn’t want to hear or see or know anything about this kid. Nothing.”

“But what do you want?”

“You.”

She had many more questions that she did not dare ask, and she did not know if he understood what he was getting himself into, and whether he might not regret it the next day. But there was something unfamiliar in his determination, a molten thread that suddenly glowed in him, and it occurred to her that perhaps Ilan could tolerate it better this way, with the complications. Perhaps he could only tolerate it this way.

“And I promised him,” Ilan said, hinting. “He really begged me—”

“What?” Ora lifted up on one elbow and examined his face in the dark.

“Never to say anything.”

“To who?”

“Anyone.”

“You mean, not even—”

“No one.”

A secret? The thought of raising a child with a secret weighed on her. She lay back, feeling as though someone were trying to erect a transparent, cold partition between her and the little creature in her stomach. She wanted to cry, and she had no tears. She saw images of those close to her, the people she would have to hide the secret from, the people she would lie to for the rest of her life. With each of them, the lie and the concealment had a different painful taste. She felt the mine branching out into more and more tunnels and caves, and she was suffocating.

“I won’t be able to keep a secret like that for even one day, you know what I’m like.”

Ilan shut his eyes tight and saw Avram, the pleading in his face, and said, “We owe him this.” And Ora heard: Take a hat, put two identical slips of paper in it .