David Grossman - To the End of the Land

She’s warming up now. Really, who knew it was so good to write! Tiring, even more exhausting than walking, but when she writes she doesn’t have to keep walking and moving. Her whole body knows it: When she writes, when she writes about Ofer, she and Avram don’t need to run away from anything.

When I finished telling him everything, I gave him a little tap with my fingertip under the nose, in the indentation of his lip, so he’d forget everything he’d heard and start over fresh and innocent .

And then he burst out crying, for the first time since he was born .

She lets go of the notebook, which falls between her legs, propped open like a little tent on the ground. Ora has the feeling that the words will hurry away from the lines and slip into the cracks of the earth. She turns the notebook up. She cannot believe that all those words came out of her. Almost four pages! And Ilan says she needs a few drafts just to write a grocery list.

“Avram?”

“Hmmmm …”

“Let’s sleep a bit.”

“Now? Isn’t it early?”

“I’m beat.”

“Okay. Whatever you want.”

They cover the embers with dirt and stones. Avram rinses the utensils in the stream. Ora gathers up the leftovers and packs them in her backpack. Her motions are slow, contemplative. She thinks she detected some forgotten breeze in his voice, but when she replays his last few lines, she assumes she was wrong. The night is warm and there’s no need to set up the tents. They spread their sleeping bags out on either side of the extinguished fire. Ora is so tired that she falls asleep immediately. Avram stays awake for a long time. He lies on his side looking at the notebook with Ora’s hand resting on it. Her beautiful hand, he thinks, her long-fingered hand.

Shortly after midnight she awakes, and her fear for Ofer leaps up inside her like an evil jack-in-the-box. It is a frantic, noisy fear that rattles its limbs, flashes a crazy look, and cackles loudly: Ofer will die! Ofer is already dead! She sits up, stung, and looks with wild eyes at Avram snoring heavily beyond the ashes.

How can he not feel what’s happening?

The same way he didn’t feel it when Ofer was born.

She can’t trust him. She’s alone with this.

Their gloom as a pair falls upon her again, and the sadness of their lonely presence here, at the end of the world. What was she really thinking when she dragged him here? What is this foolishness? These sorts of sweeping, dramatic gestures are unlike her. They were right for the old Avram, not for her. She’s only an imposter, pretending to be tempestuous and daring. Just go sit at home, bake your pies, wait for the news about your son, and start getting used to life without him.

She jumps up out of the sleeping bag, grabs the notebook, and in the dark writes Ofer Ofer Ofer , line after line, dozens of times, in large, crooked letters, and mumbles his name half out loud and aims and transmits his name in the darkness straight to Avram. So what if he’s asleep? This is what needs to be done now, this is the most effective antidote she has to the poison that might be consuming Ofer at this very minute. She shuts her eyes and imagines him, note for note, and wraps him in protective layers of light. She swaddles him in the warmth of her love and plants him, plants him over and over again in the sleeping consciousness beside her. Then, in the dark, guessing her way, without seeing the lines, she writes:

I think, for example, about how he discovered his feet when he was a baby. How he enjoyed chewing and sucking them. I just think of the way he must have felt — that he was chewing something that existed in the world, that he could see it right in front of his eyes, but that it was also somehow arousing sensations within him. And maybe while he was sucking his toes, he started to grasp the very very edge of what is “me” and what is “mine.”

And that sensation started flowing around the circle he’d drawn between his mouth and his feet .

Me-mine-me-mine-me-mine-me

It’s such a huge moment, and I hadn’t thought about it until now. How? Where was I? I’m trying to imagine where in his body he felt most “me” at that moment, and I think it’s exactly in his center, his pee-pee .

I can feel it too now, when I write. Only with me it’s also very painful .

So much of mine is no longer me .

I wish I knew how to write more about that moment. There should be a whole story about that moment, when Ofer sucked his toes .

Once, when he was about eighteen months old, he had a fever, maybe after a vaccination (What did they vaccinate against? Was it the triple one? Who can remember? I only remember that the nurse couldn’t find a fleshy enough spot on his bottom, and Ilan laughed and said Ofer needed an anti-triple vaccine). Anyway, he woke up in the middle of the night and was burning up, and he was talking to himself and singing in a high-pitched voice. Ilan and I stood there, two o’clock in the morning, dead tired, and we started to laugh. Because all of a sudden we didn’t recognize him. He was like a drunk, and we just cracked up, I think because now we saw him from a certain distance, and we both felt (together, I think) that he was still a bit foreign, like every baby that arrives from somewhere out there, from the unknown .

But he really was a little foreign. He was Avram’s. He was at greater risk of foreignness than any other baby .

She stops and tries to read what she’s written. She can barely see her writing on the page.

I was so relieved when Ilan picked him up and said, “It’s not nice to laugh at you, you poor sick thing, and you’re a little inebriated, too.” I was so grateful to him for saying “It’s not nice to laugh at you,” rather than “at him.” All at once he cut through that foreignness, which had almost reared its head between us. And it was Ilan who did that .

And just so you know — she looks at the sleeping Avram — so you don’t have any doubts, he was a wonderful father, to both boys. I really think fatherhood is the best thing about him.

Then she turns to a new page and writes over its entire width, pressing hard so the pen almost tears through the page: Fatherhood? Not couplehood?

She stares at the three words. She turns to the next page.

But Ofer didn’t calm down. On the contrary — he started singing at the top of his lungs, really yodeling, and we got the giggles again, but now it was something completely different between us and there was a feeling that we were allowing ourselves to let loose a little, perhaps for the first time since the pregnancy, and also because it was suddenly clear to both of us that this time Ilan was staying. This was it, we were finally starting our life, and from now on we were a regular family .

She breathes deeply, stilling her mind.

You’re sleeping, snoring .

What would you do if I came over and lay down next to you?

I’ve been gone from home for almost a week .

How did I do such a thing? How did I run away at a time like this? I’m insane .

Maybe Adam’s right. Unnatural .

No, you know what? I really don’t feel that way .

Listen: so many feelings and nuances came to me with the children. I don’t know how much of it I understood at the time. If I even had a minute to stop and think. All those years now seem like one big tempest .

That evening, with the fever and the yodeling, we gave Ofer a cold bath to bring his fever down. Ilan didn’t have the heart to do it. I put him in the bath. A diabolical invention, but an effective one. You just have to overcome the fear of stopping his breath in the first second. And I was convinced that he was turning blue in front of my eyes. His lips were shaking, and he screamed, and I told him it was for his own good. His fingers were around his tiny chest, and his heart beat almost without any gaps, and he shivered from the shock and probably also from my betrayal .