David Grossman - To the End of the Land

Avram pulls back. Deep in his gut he senses a flutter of the terror that had gripped him once, when Ora told him she was pregnant.

She drinks water from a bottle and washes her face. She holds the bottle out to him, and without thinking, he empties it over his head.

“And all at once his face sealed up, locked, like this”—she shows him, tightly clenching her fist—“and then he ran all the way down the hallway, from the bathroom to the kitchen, and kicked me. Just imagine, he’d never done that before! He kicked my leg as hard as he could and screamed: ‘You’re like wolves! People like wolves! I don’t want to be with you!’ ”

“What?”

“He screamed, and he ran—”

“That’s what he said? Like wolves?”

And this is a kid who one year earlier was hardly talking, she thinks, he couldn’t string three words together.

“But where did that come from? How did he get that—”

“He ran to the door, he wanted to run away, but it was locked, and he threw himself against it, kicking and pounding, he was totally crazed. You know, I’ve always felt that that’s when something started in him that was irredeemable, something lifelong, a first scratch, you know, the first sorrow.”

“No. I don’t get it, explain to me,” Avram murmurs and thrusts his suddenly sweaty palms into his lap.

How can she explain? Maybe she can tell him about himself. About him and his father, who got up one day when Avram was five and disappeared, and was never seen again. His father, who once grabbed little Avram’s face in his hands and held it up for Avram’s mother to study, and asked with a grin if she thought the child looked anything like him, and whether it was really possible that a creature like that had come from a man like him, and if she was sure she’d given birth to him or if maybe she’d just crapped him out.

She speaks quietly. “I always have the feeling that there, in the kitchen, he found out something about us.”

“About who?”

“About us, about humans. About this thing we have in us.”

“Yes.”

Avram looks at the earth, at the dust. You’re like wolves . He rolls the words around in his mind. I don’t want to be with you . He is profoundly unsettled by these simple words, which he has sought for almost thirty years and were yelled out by his son.

Ora asks herself, for the first time, what really happened in the kitchen that day. Exactly what melody did she use, and which tone, to teach Ofer the facts of life and death? Was it really as she had described it to Avram? Not exactly a lie, but an attempt to soften for Ofer, as much as she could, the matter of the slaughter itself, to save him from the true horror? For some reason she remembers how her own mother had told her, when she was six, in great detail and with a trace of defiance and even a peculiar reproach, about the abominations committed by inmates in the concentration camp where she spent the war.

“I don’t really know whether, by telling him those kinds of things … I don’t know when it was really an essential part of his education, preparing him for life and all that, and when, at what moment, there was a tiny bit of, how to put it, cruelty?”

“But why? Why would you say cruelty?”

“Or even a bit of gloating.”

“I don’t understand, Ora, what are you …”

“I mean, wasn’t I really hinting, in an oblique sort of way, that what I was telling him was also, somehow, his punishment for having joined my screwed-up team in the first place? Or the whole game itself, you know, the game of the human race.”

“Oh, that.”

“Yes, that.”

They sit quietly.

Avram nods, his eyes very heavy.

“And when I tried to hug him, to calm him, he writhed in my arms and scratched me so hard it drew blood. He kept crying at night too, in his sleep, it was burning so hard in him. The next morning he woke up with a high fever, and he wouldn’t let us comfort him, wouldn’t let us touch him, touch him with our meat hands, you see, and from that day, for twelve years, he didn’t touch meat or anything that had been near meat. Until he was sixteen or so, until he started growing up, maturing, that kid did not touch meat.”

“So why did he start at sixteen?”

“Wait, I’m not there yet.” We still have a long way to go, she thinks; we’ll understand it slowly, together. “At first, during meals, he wouldn’t talk to me if I happened to point at him with a fork that had touched chicken. Do you understand how far it … Just like Ilan said at the time: Ofer belonged to the Shiite wing of vegetarianism.” She laughs.

That’s it, she has to write it down, that whole period. Ilan’s struggles with Ofer, the unbelievable stubbornness and determination that came out of Ofer, and the slightly confusing weakness that beset her and Ilan in the face of this four-year-old child who had such solid principles. And the feeling they both had that he was drawing strength from some hidden source that was both beyond his age and beyond them, his parents. “Where’s my notebook?” She stands up. The unresolved distress from moments ago grows denser inside her and finally erupts: “Where’s the notebook, Avram? Did you see where I put the notebook?” She storms the backpack and digs through it, but the notebook isn’t there. Not there! She looks in a panic at the other backpack, Avram’s, and Avram tenses up. She asks cautiously: “Could it be with your stuff?”

“No, I didn’t put it there. I didn’t even open it.”

“Do you mind if I look?”

He shrugs his shoulders indifferently: It’s not mine and it’s not my business, his shoulders say. He gets up and walks away from the backpack.

She opens hooks, zippers, knots. Scans the contents from above. Everything still looks more or less as it did when she packed the bag with Ofer at home. Avram had somehow managed not to unsettle anything, through all these days of carrying the thing on his back.

It sits wide open between them. At the top of the pile of clothes is the red “Milano” T-shirt, just the way Ofer packed it, and she can tell immediately that the notebook isn’t there, but she cannot close it up again.

“There are lots of clean clothes here,” she says drily, delivering useful information. “Socks, shirts, toiletries.”

“I don’t smell so good, do I?”

“Let’s just say I always know where you are.”

“Oh.” He lifts up an arm and takes a sniff. “Don’t worry, we’ll find a spring or a faucet, it’ll be okay.” His voice is unconvincing. He has the craftiness of a boy fibbing to his camp counselor about why, to his regret, he cannot shower with the other kids.

“Well, whatever you say.” She breathes deeply. Her fingers hover over Ofer’s backpack with a life of their own.

“Anyway, his clothes probably won’t fit me.”

“Some may. The pants definitely will. He’s pretty broad. And by the way, it’s not just his clothes in here.” She scans the backpack, eyebrow raised, still not touching. “There are some of Adam’s and Ilan’s shirts, too. And there’s a pair of sharwals he always wears when he goes to Sinai. You could definitely wear those, they’re so baggy.” And silently she adds: They won’t infect you with Ofer.

“But why Adam’s and Ilan’s clothes?”

“That’s what he wanted. To be enveloped in the two of them while he hiked.”

She resists telling him that they share underwear too, her three men.

She finally reaches in, hesitant at first, afraid to disturb Ofer’s order, but then she plunges deep down, penetrating, and now both hands are tunneling in, grabbing handfuls of sun-warmed clothes that have been baking for a week now, and her hands encounter paired socks, and they thrust into crevices with pickpocket speed, and here a towel, and there a flashlight, and sandals and underwear and T-shirts. Her fingers dig wildly in the depths, beyond her field of vision, looting whatever they can. A strange feeling spreads through her: his clothes, his shells, and somehow his insides, warm and damp.