David Grossman - To the End of the Land

Another time when I did that, Adam saw it and screamed at me that I was torturing Ofer. “You get into that water yourself!” he shouted. I said, “You know what? You’re right!” And I really did get in with him, and then the whole thing instantly turned into a funny game. Adam was the wisest of children .

She holds her head in her hands. Cut by the pain of the wheel that cannot turn back. She sits and rocks herself. A uniform, persistent rustle comes from the bushes behind her, and a few seconds later two hedgehogs, perhaps a couple, march past in single file. The smaller one sniffs at Ora’s bare feet as she sits motionless. The hedgehogs pad away and disappear down the channel, and Ora whispers thank you.

Look, Avram, about Ofer. I don’t know if I was a good mother to him. But he grew up pretty okay, I think. He is without a doubt the most stable and solid of my children .

I lacked self-confidence when they were little. I made mistakes left and right. What did I know?

Earlier you shouted at me, “You?” when I said I may not have been the best mother in the world. When I dared to destroy your — your what? Your illusion of the ideal family? Of the perfect mother? Is that how you thought about us?

When it comes to the most important things, you’re such an illiterate .

She looks up. Avram sleeps peacefully. Curled up in himself, maybe smiling in his sleep.

The bottom line is that I think we were actually a pretty good family. Most of the time we were even, excuse the expression, pretty happy together. Of course we had our problems, the usual miserable troubles, the unavoidable ones. (What did you write to me once when you were in the army? “All happy families are miserable in their own way.” How did you know?) But still, I can say without reservation that since Ofer was born and up until the whole episode in the army, in Hebron, about a year ago, we were very happy together .

And in a very uncharacteristic way for us, Ilan and I knew that even at the time. Not just in retrospect .

She looks over at him. A lost and irrelevant leaf of joy hovers in her eyes.

We had twenty good years. In our country, that’s almost chutzpah, isn’t it? “Something the ancient Greeks would be punished for.” (You said that once, but I don’t remember the context.)

Twenty years we had. A long time. And don’t forget that six of those years covered the two boys’ army service (there was a five-day gap between Adam’s discharge and Ofer’s enlistment). And they both served in the Territories, in the lousiest places. The fact that we somehow managed to walk between the raindrops without really getting splattered even once, from any war or terrorist attack, from any rocket, grenade, bullet, shell, explosive device, sniper, suicide bomber, metal marbles, slingstone, knife, nails. The fact that we just lived out a quiet, private life .

Do you get it? A small, unheroic life, one that deals as little as possible with the situation, God damn it, because as you know, we already paid our price .

Sometimes, once every few weeks—

Once a week or so, I would wake up with a panic attack and say quietly into Ilan’s ear: “Look at us. Aren’t we like a little underground cell in the heart of the ‘situation’?”

And that really is what we were .

For twenty years .

Twenty good years .

Until we got trapped .

AT THE TOPof Keren Naphtali mountain, on a bed of poppies and cyclamens, they lie sweaty and breathless from the steep incline. They agree that this was the hardest climb so far, and gobble down some wafers and biscuits. “We have to get some food soon,” they remind each other, and Avram gets up to show her how much weight he’s lost over the past few days. He’s impressed at having slept through the night for the first time, four hours straight without a sleeping pill—“Do you know what that means?” “This trip is good for you,” she says, “dieting and walking and fresh air.” Avram agrees, although he sounds surprised: “I really do feel pretty good.” Then he says it again, like someone taunting a sleepy predator from a place of safety.

Chiseled stone ruins sprawl behind them, remnants of an Arab village or perhaps an ancient temple. Avram — who happened to flip through an article not long ago — believes the stone is from the Roman era, and Ora welcomes his theory. “I can’t deal with Arab village ruins now,” she says. But a momentary illusion in her mind, composed instantaneously from the ruins, projects a tank roaring down a narrow alleyway, and before it can trample a parked car or ram the wall of a house, she moves her hands in front of her face and moans, “Enough, enough, my hard drive is overloaded with this stuff.”

Broad Atlantic terebinths spread their branches and sway meditatively in the breeze. Not far away, antennas protrude from a small fenced-in military post, and a handsomely chiseled Ethiopian-born soldier stands motionless at the top of an observation tower, surveying the Hula Valley below, perhaps stealing a glance at them to spice up his guard duty. Ora stretches her whole body out and lets the breeze cool her skin. Avram sprawls in front of her, leans on one arm, and sifts dirt through his fingers.

“It happened just before he turned four,” Ora tells him now. “Two or three months before, while I was making him lunch one day. I was already studying physiotherapy at the time, it was my last year, and Ilan had just opened his law firm, so it was a really crazy period. But at least I had two days a week when I finished school early and I could pick him up from day care and make him lunch. Is this really interesting to you, all this—”

Avram chuckles and his eyelids blush. “I’m … it lets me—”

“What? Tell me.”

“I’m peeking into your lives.”

“Yeah? Well, don’t peek: look. It’s all open. Ofer asked me what was for lunch. So I told him this and that, rice, let’s say, and meatballs.”

Avram’s mouth moves distractedly, as though chewing the words. Ora remembers how he loved to eat, and to talk about food, man’s best friend , and how she had longed to cook for him all these years. At big family meals, at dinner parties, on holidays, every year at Seder night, she would set aside a big, full plate for him in her heart. Now she has the urge to tempt him with a dish of eggplant in tomato sauce, or lamb with couscous, or maybe one of her rich, comforting soups — he doesn’t even know what a good cook she is! Probably all he remembers are burned pots in her student apartment in Nachlaot.

“Ofer asked me what meatballs are made of, and I mumbled something. I told him they were round balls, made of meat, and he thought about it and asked, ‘Then what’s meat?’ ”

Avram pulls himself up into a seated position and hugs his legs.

“To tell you the truth, Ilan always said he was just waiting for Ofer to ask that question, from the minute he started talking. From the minute we saw what kind of boy he was, really.”

“What do you mean, ‘what kind of boy he was’?”

“Wait, I’ll get there.”

Something has been gnawing at her for several minutes, trying to get her attention. Something that was left on — a faucet in the house? A light? Her computer? Or maybe it’s Ofer? Is something happening to Ofer now? She listens in, clearing a path through her whispers and conjectures, but no, it’s not Ofer.

“Ora?”

“Where was I?”

“You saw what kind of boy he was.”

“So I said to Ofer that it was nothing, you know, just meat. I said it in the most casual voice: It’s nothing special, it’s just meat. You know, like we eat almost every day. Meat.”