David Grossman - To the End of the Land

She sees it: thin little Ofer, her lovely child, starts padding from one foot to the other, like he always did when he was troubled or frightened — she gets up and demonstrates for Avram. “And he used to tug his left earlobe over and over again. Like this. Or he’d walk sideways, back and forth, quickly.”

Avram doesn’t take his eyes off her. She comes back and sits down with a sigh. Her soul longs for that Ofer.

“I stuck my head in the fridge and tried to avoid him, that look on his face, but he wouldn’t let it go. He asked who they took that meat from. And you should know that he really loved meat back then, beef and chicken. He hardly ate anything else, but he loved meatballs and schnitzel and hamburgers. He was a real carnivore, which made Ilan very happy. And me, for some reason.”

“What?”

“That he loved meat. I don’t know, some kind of primal satisfaction. You can understand that, can’t you?”

“But I’m a vegetarian now.”

“So that’s it!” she cries out. “I noticed the other day, on the moshav, that you didn’t touch—”

“Three years already.”

“But why?”

“I just felt like cleansing myself.” He stares intently at his fingertips. “Well, you remember, there was a time when I didn’t eat meat for a few years.”

When he came back from the POW prison. Of course she remembers: he used to gag every time he walked by a steak house or a shawarma stand. Even a fly burning in an electric bug trap nauseated him. And she suddenly remembers how her own stomach turned, many years later, when Adam and Ofer jokingly explained — it was a Shabbat dinner on a white tablecloth, with braided challah and chicken soup — what they thought “MBT” really stood for. Adam drove an MBT in the army, and then Ofer was a gunner, and later a commander, in the same tank. They rolled around laughing: “No, it’s not main battle tank! Where did you come up with that? It’s mutilated body transporter.”

Avram continues. “But after a few years, five or six, I got my appetite back, and then I ate everything, and you know how much I love meat.”

She smiles. “I know.”

“But about three years ago, I gave it up again.”

Now she gets it. “Three years ago exactly?”

“Plus a few days, yes.”

“A sort of vow?”

He throws her a sly sideways glance. “Let’s say, a bargain.” And after a minute — her neck is flushed now — he adds, “You think you’re the only one who can make them?”

“Make those bargains with fate, you mean?”

Silence. She draws short lines in the dirt with a twig and puts a triangle over them — a roof. Three years of abstinence from meat, she thinks, and every evening he crossed off one line on the wall. What does that say? What is he saying to me?

She went on. “Ofer thought about it some more, and asked if the cow that you take the meat from grows out new meat.”

“Grows out,” Avram repeats with a smile.

“I squirmed, and I said, ‘Not really, that’s not exactly how it works.’ Ofer paced around the kitchen again, faster and faster, and I could see that something was starting up inside him, and then he faced me and asked if the cow got a boo-boo when you took its meat. I had no choice, so I said yes.”

Avram listens, every cord of his soul suddenly fascinated by the picture. By Ora talking with her child in the kitchen, and the little boy, thin and serious and troubled, darting around the narrow room, tugging on his earlobe, looking helplessly at his mother. Avram unwittingly holds his hand up in front of his face to ward off the domestic particles being hurled at him with intolerable abundance. The kitchen, the open fridge, a table set for two, steaming pots on the stove, the mother, the little boy, his distress.

“Then he asked if they take the meat from a cow that’s already dead so it doesn’t hurt her. He was really trying to find some dignified way out of the mess, you see, for me, but somehow also for all of humanity. I knew I had to make up a white lie, and that later, with time, once he grew stronger and bigger and had enough animal protein, the time would come to tell him what you once called ‘the facts of life and death.’ Ilan was so furious with me afterward for not being able to come up with something, and he was right, he really was!” Her eyes grow fiery. “Because with kids you have to cut corners here and there, you have to hide things, soften the facts for them, there’s just no other way, and I wasn’t … I was never able to, I couldn’t lie.”

Then she hears what she is saying.

“Well, apart from … you know.”

Avram does not dare to ask with words, but his eyes practically spell out the question.

“Because we promised you,” she says simply. “Ofer doesn’t know anything.”

There is a hush. She wants to add something, but finds that after years of silence, of contracting the large muscle of consciousness, she cannot talk about it even with Avram.

“But how can you?” he asks with a wonderment that confuses her. She thinks she hears a tone of condemnation.

“You just can,” she whispers. “Ilan and I together. You can.”

She is flooded by the warmth of the covenant they made together, which had only deepened around the large open pit of secretive silence, through the tenderness that emanated from the two of them on its brink, the cautious way they held on to each other so as not to fall in but not get too far away either, and the bitter knowledge, which also held a hint of special sweetness, that their life story was always being written in inverted letters too, and that no one else in the world — not even Avram — could read it. Even now, she thinks, even apart, we have that, that definitive thing of ours.

She clenches her jaw and pushes deep back inside her what had dared to peer out into the light for a moment, and then, through the force of almost twenty-two years of practice, she transposes herself back onto the straight track, the simple one, from which she was displaced a moment ago, and she wipes the last few minutes off her slate — the memory of the vast and ungraspable anomaly of her life.

“Where was I?”

“In the kitchen. With Ofer.”

“Yes, and Ofer of course got even more stressed out by my silence, and he was flying around the kitchen like a spinning top, back and forth, talking to himself, and I could see that he wasn’t even capable of putting into words what he suspected. Finally, I’ll never forget it, he bowed his head and stood there all tense and crooked”—with the subtlest of gestures, she becomes him in her body, in her face, in his torn look that peers out of her eyes, and Avram sees it, he sees Ofer: Look, you’re seeing him, you’ll never forget now, you won’t be able to live without him—“and then he asked me if there are people who kill the cow so they can take her meat. What could I say? I said yes.

“So then he started running around the whole house in a frenzy, and he yelled”—she remembers a thin wail, not his voice, not a human voice at all, but it came from him—“and he touched things, the furniture, pairs of shoes on the floor, he ran and screamed and touched, the keys on the table, door handles. It was scary, to be honest, it looked like some kind of ritual, I don’t know, like he was saying goodbye to everything that …”

She looks at Avram softly, saddened by what she is telling him, and by what he has yet to hear from her. She feels that she is infecting him with the sorrows of raising children.

“Ofer ran to the edge of the hallway, by the bathroom door, you know, where the coatrack was? And he stood there and yelled: ‘You kill her? You kill a cow to take her meat? Tell me! Yes? Yes? You do that to her on purpose?’ And at that moment I got it. Maybe for the first time in my life I got what it means that we eat living creatures, that we kill them to eat them, and how we train ourselves not to realize that the severed leg of a chicken is sitting on our plate. And Ofer couldn’t cheat himself that way, do you see?” Her voice lowers to a whisper. “He was totally exposed. Do you know what it is to be that kind of child, like that, in this shitty world?”