David Grossman - To the End of the Land

She leans down and buries her face in the backpack. The smell of clean clothes, crammed in and unaired. They had packed together the night before, recalling the solemn preparations on the eve of the great battle in The Wind in the Willows , which Ora had read to him three consecutive times in his childhood: a shirt for Mole, and a pair of socks for Toad . And it turns out that through the whole cheerful ceremony, while Ora could not stop rolling around with laughter, Ofer was planning and scheming, perhaps even already knew with complete confidence that he wasn’t going on the trip with her, that it was all a big charade. How could he trick her? And why, in fact, did he do it? Maybe he was afraid he’d be bored spending a whole week with her. That they wouldn’t have anything to talk about, or that she’d interrogate him about Talia and the breakup again, or whine about Adam, or try to recruit him to her side — which would never have occurred to her! — against Ilan, or ask him about Hebron again. Yes, it might have been mainly that.

The entire state of particulars revolts her. A sour taste crawls up her throat. Her face is buried in the backpack and her hands clutch it on either side. She looks like someone drinking thirstily from a well, but Avram notices that the lovely, slender vertebrae on the back of her neck are twitching beneath her skin.

Inside, she sobs uncontrollably, flooded with self-pity over the ruination of her life, her family, her love, Ilan, Adam, and now Ofer out there, and God forbid, and what is left of her, and who is she now that all these have vanished or simply ripped themselves away from her, and what was all her brilliant motherhood worth? Nothing but cowardice — that’s what her motherhood was. A skilled sponge. Most of what she’d done for twenty-five years was mop up everything that poured out of the three of them, each in his own way, everything they spat out constantly over the years into the family space, namely into her, because she herself, more than any of them, and more than the three of them together, was the family space. She’d mopped up all the good and all the bad that came out of them — mainly the bad, she thinks bitterly, prolonging her self-castigation, though she knows in the depths of her heart that she’s distorting things, wronging them and herself, yet still she refuses to give up the bitter spew that flies out of her in all directions: so many toxins and acids she’s absorbed, all the excrements of body and soul, all the excess baggage of their childhood and their adolescence and adulthood. But someone had to absorb all that, didn’t they? she sobs into the shirts and socks that cling to her face like little consolation puppies — soft, how soft the touch, soft the scent of laundry, despite its gently mocking derision: two-bit feminist, an insult to women’s lib, a stain on the neon glow that emanates from the books her friend Ariela insists on buying her, books she’s never managed to read more than a few pages of, written by decisive, witty, opinionated women who use expressions like “the duality of the clitoris as signifier and signified,” or “the vagina as male-encoded deterministic space,” which immediately activate in her feeble, characterless mind an interfering hum of machines and home appliances, blenders and vacuum cleaners and dishwashers — women who perceive her limp existence itself as a crude insult to them and their just struggle. Fuck feminism, Ora thinks and laughs a little through her tears. But it’s so obvious, she argues into a T-shirt that insists on cramming itself into her face, that without the mechanisms of drainage and irrigation and purification and desalination that she has created and constantly refined, and without her never-ending concessions and her continuous swallowing of self-respect and her occasional kowtowing — without all these, her family would have crumbled long ago, years ago, for sure, though maybe not, who knows? Yet still, always, through all the years, the question had hovered in her mind: What really would have happened had she not volunteered to be their cesspit, or rather — this sounded slightly less humiliating, slightly more sophisticated and polished — their lightning rod? And which of them would have volunteered to replace her in that exhausting, thankless job? The satisfactions of which, incidentally, are incredibly deep and well hidden, right down to the depths of her innards, down to the top of her womb, which arches at the very thought, and the three of them know nothing about that — how could they know, really? What do they know about the sweetness that flows through the clefts of her soul after she manages to quell and ground another lightning storm of anger or frustration or vengefulness or insult, or just the momentary misery of each and every one of the three of them, at each and every age? She weeps a little more into the laundered fabrics, but the sorrow has subsided in her tears, and she wipes her face on the T-shirt that Ofer’s battalion gave all the soldiers when they finished serving on the base near Jericho, which read Nebi Musa — Because Hell Is Under Construction . She feels comforted now, even refreshed, as she always does after a short, sharp cry, just like after sex, ten or twenty strokes and then the explosion, always, without any delay or complication, and now that the cloud has passed she has the urge to dive down into the backpack again and grab his clothes by the handful, spread them out here in front of Avram, on the bushes and on the rocks, and conjure him from the clothes — his height, his breadth, his size. Excitement flutters down her body: if she really tries hard — and for a moment she almost believes that anything is possible on this journey strung along on a thin web of oaths and wishes — she can pull him out, deliver Ofer himself from the depths of the backpack, tiny and delightful and twitching his arms and legs. She settles for an army hat, a pair of sweatpants, and the sharwals , and these make her happy, with her arms entirely immersed, kneading her child out of the fabric like a village baker shoulder deep in a basin full of dough. But it’s also like picking through his estate — the thought pecks at her and intercepts her pleasure, and only then, with her chin over the edge of the backpack and her face buried in pairs of warm walking socks, she remembers, and stares at Avram with frightened eyes: “Listen, I’m such an idiot, I left the notebook there.”

“Where?”

“Down there. Where we slept.”

“How?”

“I was writing a bit this morning, before you woke up, and I somehow forgot it.”

“So we’ll go back.”

“What do you mean go back?”

“We’ll go back,” Avram says and straightens up.

“It’s a serious hike.”

“So what?”

She snivels. “I’m such an idiot.”

“It doesn’t matter, Ora, it really doesn’t matter.” He smiles. “We’ve been going around in circles most of the time for a week anyway.”

He’s right, and a warm ripple gurgles in her at the realization that only she and he can understand how little it matters, to go on or go back, turn around, lose their way. The point is to be in motion, the point is to talk about Ofer. They zip up and buckle up and tie down. They stop at the small military base to fill their water bottles, and the soldier from the lookout tower gives them two slightly stale loaves of sliced bread, three cans of tuna and corn, and two handfuls of apples. They walk back down the steep incline, holding on to pine trees, and Ora thinks feverishly about the man they met on the trail that morning, about his long, dark, wise face. Who knows what he thought about her and Avram? What story did he tell himself in his mind? She stops abruptly, horrified, and Avram almost walks into her: “What if that guy finds the notebook and reads it?”