David Grossman - To the End of the Land

And without even noticing it, they’re having a conversation. Two people conversing as they walk on one path.

“On the army base in Sinai, there was an Ofer,” Avram muses. “Ofer Havkin. He was a special guy. Used to wander around the desert on his own, playing the violin for the birds, sleeping in caves. He wasn’t afraid of anything. A free spirit. And so all these years I thought Ilan had that Ofer in mind when you chose the name.”

Ora delights in the words that came out of his lips—“free spirit”—then says, “No, I was the one who chose it, because of the verse in Song of Songs: ‘My love is like a young hart’—Domeh dodi le’Ofer ayalim . And I liked the way it sounds, too: o-fer . It’s soft.”

Avram silently repeats the name in Ora’s music, and then says quietly, reverently, “I could never give someone a name.”

“When it’s your own child, you’ll be able to,” she says — it just slips out, and they both fall silent.

The path is wide and comfortable. So many colors, she thinks, when all I saw at first was black and white and gray.

“I’m just curious, did you think of any names other than Ofer?”

“We thought of girls’ names too, because we didn’t know what we were having. I was convinced halfway through the pregnancy that it was a girl.”

A flock of birds alights inside Avram, noisily beating their wings: He had never thought of that possibility — a daughter!

“And what … Which names did you think of for a girl?”

“We thought of Dafna, and Ya’ara, or Ruti.”

“Just imagine …” He turns to face her. The bags under his eyes glow, and now he is entirely here, shining with life, and the pillar of fire he used to be is visible through his skin. Ofer is protected now, she senses, protected in the palms of two hands.

“A girl,” she says softly. “That would have made everything simpler, wouldn’t it?”

Avram expands his chest and takes a deep breath. “A girl” rocks him even more than “a daughter.”

They walk, each lost in thought, the path crunching beneath their feet. She thinks: Even the path suddenly has voices. How did I not hear anything all those days? Where was I?

“Didn’t you want to try again?” he asks bravely.

Ora replies simply that Ilan didn’t want to, because as it was, he said, with all the complications, we already had an excess of kids.

And parents, Avram thinks. “And you? Did you want to?”

Ora lets out a little bray of pain. “Me? Are you asking seriously? My whole life I’ve felt that I missed out terribly by not having a daughter.” After a moment’s hesitation she adds, “Because I always think a girl would have made us into a family.”

“But you … I mean, you already are …”

“Yes,” she says, “we were, absolutely, but still, that’s how I felt all these years. That if I had a daughter, if Adam and Ofer had a sister, it would give them so much, it would change them”—she outlines a circle with both hands—“and also, if I’d had a daughter, I think it would have strengthened me against them, the three of them, and maybe it would also have softened them a little toward me.”

Avram hears the words and does not understand their meaning. What is she giving him here?

“Because I’m alone,” she explains. “I wasn’t enough to soften them, and they turned so hard over time, especially toward me, and even more so recently. Hard and tough, the three of them. Ofer, too,” she adds with some effort. “Listen, it’s really difficult to explain.”

“Difficult to explain to me , or in general?”

“In general, but especially to you.”

“Try.”

The insult in his voice is good, it’s a sign of life, but she can’t explain it, not yet. She’ll bring him in slowly. It’s painful to admit to him that even Ofer wasn’t tender with her. Instead of answering, she says, “I always thought that if I’d had a daughter, maybe I would have remembered what it was like to be me. The me from before everything that happened.”

Avram turns to face her. “I remember how you were.”

Every time he touches the thought of a daughter, he feels a caress of light on his face. “Listen,” he probes, “if it had been a girl, I mean—”

“I know.”

“What do you know?”

“I know.”

“Go on, say it.”

“If it had been a girl, you would have come to see her, right?”

“I don’t know.”

“But I do.” Ora sighs. “You think I never thought about that? You think I didn’t pray for a girl the whole pregnancy? That I didn’t go to a seer — like Saul, who came to the woman by night —in the Bukharian neighborhood, so she could give me a blessing for a girl?”

“You did?”

“Of course I did.”

“But you were already pregnant! What could she have—”

“So what? You can always barter. And by the way, Ilan also wanted a girl.”

“Ilan, too?”

“Yes, I’m sure of it.”

“But he didn’t tell you?”

“You wouldn’t believe how quiet we kept around that pregnancy. We only talked when Adam asked us something. Through Adam we talked about what was in my belly, and what would happen when the new baby was born.”

Avram swallows and recalls how that whole time he lay in bed, paralyzed by the terror of the growing pregnancy.

And praying it would fail.

And planning in great detail how he would nullify his life as soon as he heard the baby was born.

And counting the days he had left.

And in the end he did nothing.

Because even when he was a POW, and increasingly after he came home, he always latched on, at the last minute, to Thales, the Greek philosopher he had admired as a youth, who said there was no difference between life and death. When asked why, in that case, he did not choose death, Thales replied, Precisely because there is no difference.

Ora laughs. “We called him Zoot. Adam made up the name.”

“You called who Zoot?”

“Ofer.”

“I don’t understand.”

“When he was still in my belly. A sort of pregnancy name, you know.”

“No,” Avram murmurs, defeated, “I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I know nothing.”

She puts a hand on his arm. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what,” he grumbles.

“Don’t torture yourself more than you have to.”

“Still, Ofer is a good name,” he says after a while.

“A very Israeli name. And I like that it has ‘o’ and ‘e’ in it. Like khoref , winter, and boker , morning.”

Avram sees her lovely forehead enveloped in brightness now. Like osher , happiness, he thinks, but does not say it.

“It’s good for nicknames, too,” she adds.

“You thought about that?”

“And also it’s like the English word ‘offer,’ which is soft and open, sort of giving.”

He laughs. “You’re amazing.”

She resists telling him that she also thought about how the name would sound in bed, coming from the lips of the women who would love him. She had even tried it out, whispering breathlessly to herself, Ofer, Ofer , which had made her giggle at the confusion that flooded her.

“Nicknames, of course,” he murmurs. “I never thought of that. And insults, too. You wouldn’t want it to rhyme with any curses.”

“Like ‘Ora Gomorrah.’ ”

“No-Fair Ofer,” he laughs.

Is he still smiling, like we do , Ora sadly hums to herself, Our hero, our lost soldier, Dudu .

The green, sedate pasture, dotted with black-and-white cows, curves abruptly into a steep mountain. They groan and sigh as they walk and grab at tree trunks that lean into the incline. If I’d had a daughter, she thinks, if I’d had a daughter there are a few things I could have repaired in myself. She tries to explain this to Avram, but he doesn’t really understand, not the way she needs him to understand her, not the way he once knew her instantly, with a hint and a wrinkle . There were things she’d once hoped to change in herself through the boys, and it had never happened. “What things?” Avram asks. She has trouble explaining it and thinks again about Ofer’s Talia, and the way all the men in the household responded to her, happily and simply giving her what they’d held back from Ora. She tells Avram that it was only recently, once Adam and Ofer were grown up, that she realized it would probably never happen to her through them, this change, this repair. It became clear to her, late in the day, that it would not be through them that she would solve anything—“Perhaps because they’re boys, perhaps because they’re them, I don’t know.” She stops talking and breathlessly climbs up the mountain, and thinks, They weren’t really attentive to me, and they weren’t really generous, not in the way I needed.