David Grossman - To the End of the Land

“I didn’t write it properly,” she says now, as they go back down the mountain to find the lost notebook. “I just don’t feel that I’m getting the main point across. Not when I write, and not when I’m talking to you. I want to tell all the minutiae about him, the fullness of his life, his life story, and I know I can’t, it’s impossible, but still, that’s what I need to do for him now.” Her speech ebbs and turns to mumbles as she pictures the man with his long, sinewy hands, and those thumbs. They were the hands of a worker, not a doctor, and she sees them opening her notebook and leafing through the pages as he tries to understand what he’s reading, what story it contains. Her heart leaps: Maybe at this minute he’s sitting on a rock, maybe even the same rock she herself sat on the night before, the only comfortable rock around, with her notebook on his lap, and he knows without a doubt that the person who wrote these pages was the woman he met coming up from the riverbed, the one with the wild hair and the slightly paralyzed lip.

“At first it was hard”—she resumes what was interrupted long ago on the way up the mountain—“his vegetarianism, and the way Ilan fought to get him to taste some meat, or at least fish, and the fighting and yelling at mealtimes, and Ilan’s personal insult at Ofer’s decision to stop being a carnivore.”

“Why was it an insult? Why personal?”

“I don’t know, that’s how he took it, Ilan.”

“You mean, like it was something against him?”

“Like it was, you know, against masculinity. That it was somehow feminine to be disgusted by meat. Can’t you understand that?”

“Yes,” Avram says, surprised at her rebuke, “but I wouldn’t take it as a personal affront. I don’t know, maybe I would. What do I know, Ora?” He spreads both hands out in a slightly flamboyant gesture of acquiescence, and an image-fragment of the old Avram flashes. “I don’t understand anything about families.”

“Come on, you?”

“What do you mean, me?”

“Well, I mean, really!” Ora blinks and the tip of her nose turns red. “Weren’t you ever born? Didn’t you have parents? A father?”

Avram says nothing.

“Let’s sit down for a minute, all my muscles are spasming.” She rubs her thighs. “Look, they’re actually shaking. It really is harder to go downhill than up!

“I’ll never forget the expression on his face the day after he found out that we kill cows, and the way he looked at me for having made him eat meat since he was born. For four years. And his astonishment at the fact that I ate meat, too. Ilan was one thing — that’s maybe how he felt, I’m trying to get into his head at the time — you could believe it about Ilan, but me? To think I was capable of murdering for food? I don’t know, maybe he was afraid that under certain circumstances I might be capable of eating him , too?”

Avram’s thumbs run back and forth over his fingertips. His lips move soundlessly.

“Maybe he felt like everything he’d thought about us was completely wrong, or worse — that it was all our conspiracy against him.”

“To wolferize him,” Avram murmurs.

She looks at him with tense pleading. “Explain to me how I never asked myself what a four-year-old boy feels when he finds out that he belongs to a carnivorous breed?”

Avram can see that she is torn apart and does not know how to comfort her.

“I have to think about it some more,” she whispers. “I mustn’t stop here. I always stop here, because there was something there, you see, in that whole vegetarianism thing. It’s not for nothing that I’m so … Look, for example, the way he was depressed afterward, for weeks, really depressed, a four-year-old boy who doesn’t want to get up in the morning for preschool because he doesn’t want some kid to touch him with ‘meat hands,’ or he’s just afraid of the children and the teacher and recoils from everyone and suspects everyone, do you understand?”

“Do I understand?” Avram snorts.

“Of course you understand. I think you could have understood him perfectly,” she says quietly.

“Really?”

“You could understand children in general. Understand them from inside.”

“Me? What do I—”

“Who better than you, Avram?”

He lets out a snicker and turns red. The skin of his face glows suddenly. Ora thinks she can see all the pores of his soul opening up.

“When he finally agreed to go back to preschool, he started inciting all the children not to eat meat. He kicked up an intifada at every snack break, dug through their sandwiches, mothers called me to complain, and when he found out that the girl who gave them music lessons was also vegetarian, he simply fell head over heels in love with her. You should have seen it, he was like some alien living among humans who suddenly finds a female alien. He used to draw pictures for her and bring her gifts and all day long all he talked about was Nina, Nina, Nina. He used to call me Nina by mistake. Or maybe it wasn’t such a mistake.”

They stand up and linger. Avram thinks about the story he wrote when he was serving in Sinai and up until he was taken hostage. It had a subplot whose power he discovered only when he was a POW, and he used to dive into it over and over again to revive himself a little. It was about two seven-year-old orphans who find an abandoned baby in a junkyard. Lots of people were getting rid of their children and babies at the time, and the two kids, a boy and a girl, find the baby, crying and hungry, and decide that he is a God-baby, the afterthought child born to an elderly God, who also apparently wanted to get rid of his child and so he threw the baby into this world. The two children vow to raise the baby themselves and bring him up to be completely different from his cruel, bitter father, so that he will fundamentally change what Avram called simply, long before he was taken hostage, the ill fate . And so in between tortures and interrogations, every time he found a drop of energy within himself, Avram delved into the lives of the two children and the baby. Sometimes, mostly at night, he would manage for several minutes to merge completely with the little baby. His broken, tortured body would melt into the innocent, whole creature, and he would remember, or imagine, how he himself was once a baby, and then a little boy, and how the world was one clear circle, until his father got up one evening from the dinner table, overturned the pot of soup on the stove top, and started beating Avram’s mother and Avram himself with an outpouring of fury, almost tearing them to shreds, and then walked out and vanished as though he’d never existed.

Avram touches her arm gently. “Come on, Ora. Let’s keep going, so we’ll find it before—”

“Find what?”

“The notebook, no?”

“Before what?”

“I don’t know, before people get there, you don’t want anyone—”

She follows him, weak and parched. That whole era pushes its way up inside her. The nightmarish mornings, the decontaminated, censored sandwiches she made — only after, of course, dressing him meticulously as an armed cowboy — the vegetarianism on the one hand, and that murderousness on the other, she now realizes in astonishment. And the suspicious way he checked his sandwich several times, the sour expression of a customs official that came over his little face, the haggling over what time she would pick him up from the preschool of carnivores, and his desperate clinging to her back — she rode him there on a bike — as they got closer to the preschool and heard the children shouting happily. And his wild delusions — that’s how she had preferred to think of them at the time — that the children kept touching him on purpose, spitting hot-dog spit on him.