David Grossman - To the End of the Land

Ilan reached out and put his arm around her shoulders, but they did not move closer to each other. They lay on their backs and looked at the ceiling. His arm was under the back of her neck, lifeless, and they both knew that what had happened the night before in the shed would not happen again until after the baby was born. Perhaps not then, either. Adam, in his room, delivered a tempestuous monologue in his sleep, and they listened. Ora felt how much coldness had built up behind her eyes. She could feel that the secret and the hiding were already starting to distort her.

Then Ilan fell asleep and breathed very quietly, leaving not a scratch in the air. She felt some relief. She got up quietly and went into Adam’s room and sat down on the floor, leaning against the chest of drawers opposite his bed. As she listened to his restless sleep, she thought about the three years of raising him on her own and about what they had meant to each other in those years. She hugged her body and felt the blood coursing through her veins again. She would have time to figure out everything that was happening, she thought. She didn’t have to solve it all tonight. She got up and fixed Adam’s blanket and stroked his forehead until he calmed down and slept peacefully. Then she went back to bed, lay there, and thought about the little creature and how she would change everyone’s life, would maybe even manage to change Avram’s life, just by existing. She felt sleepy. Her last thought was that now Adam and Ilan would have to learn to be father and son again. A moment before she fell asleep, she smiled: Ilan’s toes were poking out from the bottom of the blanket.

She comes back from the dark bushes in a hurry, pebbles flying under her feet. Avram looks at her, and she goes straight for the notebook, signaling to him that she’s remembered something.

She writes.

A minute after he came out of me, even before they cut the umbilical cord, I closed my eyes and told you in my heart that you had a son. I said, “Mazel tov, Avram, you and I have a son.”

I’ve often wondered where you were at that moment. What exactly were you doing? Did you feel something? Because how could you not feel anything, or not even know, with some seventh or eighth sense, that this was happening to you?

She bites the pen. Hesitates, then spurts out onto the page: I want to know if it’s possible to feel nothing, or know nothing, when your son is, say, getting hurt somewhere?

A cold wave hits the bottom of her gut.

Stop, stop, what am I even doing here? What is this writing? It’s better not to think about it .

Automatic writing they call it, I think. Like automatic fire. In all directions. T-t-t-t-t-t-t .

I feel that I haven’t told you enough about what happened after the birth .

About two hours after the delivery, when the whole team was gone and everyone had really finally left us alone, and Ilan had gone to tell Adam, I talked with Ofer. I just said everything. I told him who Avram was, and what he meant to me and to Ilan .

The pen flies over the page now as though she’s chopping a salad. Her teeth bite her lower lip.

It surprised me how simple the story was when I told it to him. That was the first time (and probably the last) that I was able to think about us that way. The whole complication that was us, Avram and Ilan and me, all of a sudden became one little unequivocal child, and the story was simple .

Avram pours coffee into the mugs and hands her one. She stops writing and smiles a thank-you. He nods, You’re welcome. They briefly emit the calm, kettlish hum of a couple. She looks up with distracted confusion, then back to the notebook.

I was alone with him in the room, and I talked into his ear. I didn’t want a single word to escape into the open air. I gave him an infusion of his history. He lay in total silence and listened. He already had huge eyes. He listened to me with his eyes open and I spoke into his ear .

She feels the warmth of that virginal touch with her lips. Her mouth on the delicate oyster.

If you had been there, if you had only seen us there, everything would have been different. I’m certain. For you, too. It’s silly to think that way, I know, but there was something in that room—

I don’t even know how to put it. There was such health there. Within all the complication there was health, and I felt that if you would only come and stand with us for a moment, or sit next to us on the edge of the bed and touch Ofer, even just his toes, you would instantly be healed and finally come back to us .

They flow and flow, the words flow out of her. The sensation is sharp, sturdy, focused: when she writes, Ofer is safe.

If you had come and sat on the edge of my bed in the hospital, you could have told Ofer exactly what Ilan said to him: “I’m your dad and that’s that. No arguments.” It wouldn’t have confused him. He would simply have been born into it like a child is born into two different languages and doesn’t even know he’s supposed to adapt to something .

She tastes the coffee, and it’s lukewarm. Gone cold. She smiles at Avram with encouragement, with thanks, but he notices the tiny quiver of her mouth, and he takes the mug away and empties it and pours her a new one from the boiling finjan . She drinks. It’s good, now it’s very good. Her eyes, above the lip of the mug, run over the lines she has written.

And I told him all the things it was important for him to know, everything he had to hear once in his lifetime — even when he dozed I talked to him. I told him how I met Ilan and Avram, and that I was more or less a girlfriend to both of them since we met, Ilan’s girlfriend and Avram’s friend (although I occasionally got confused with that division). And I told him how I finished my army service while they stayed on for one more year in regular service and another year in the standing army, and I was already living in Jerusalem, on Tiberias Street in Nachlaot, and I was in my first year studying social work, and I really loved my studies and my life. He lay on me and listened with his eyes open .

I also told him about the lots they asked me to draw, forced me to, and what happened afterward in the war, and how Avram came back from there, and about the treatments and the hospitalizations and the interrogations, because for some reason the Shabak was convinced he’d given the Egyptians the most vital state secrets. Of all the people, they picked him to harass, and maybe they really did know something, you could never tell with Avram, after all, with his parallel-dimension games and plot twists, and the way he had to be loved by everyone, everywhere, and everyone had to know that he was special, that he was the best. So maybe they did know something .

I told him how we took care of Avram, we were the only ones there to take care of him, because his mother had died when he was in basic training and he had no one in the world except the two of us. And I told him how Ilan and I made Adam when Avram was still in the hospital, almost by accident we made him, almost unconsciously, I swear, we were so I-don’t-know-what that we clung to each other and made him, we were just two frightened children, and Ilan left me right after the birth, he said it was because of Avram, but I think he was also afraid to be with me and Adam, he was simply afraid of what we could give him, it had nothing to do with Avram .

And I talked a bit about his brother, Adam, so he’d get to know him, so he’d know how to behave with him, because you needed an instruction manual for Adam. And in the end I told him that about two and a half years after Adam, I had made him with Avram, and I even told him it was “the negative of a fuck,” just like Avram had whispered in my ear while we were doing it. So he’d know his father-language right from the start .