David Grossman - To the End of the Land

Day after day she abandoned him, left him stuck to the chain-link fence with iron diamonds imprinted on his cheeks, his face smeared with tears and snot as he sobbed loudly. She would turn her back on him, slip away and keep hearing him bawl for many more hours, and as she got farther away from the preschool, she heard him shout louder and louder. And if when he was four she did not know how to help him — powerless against what she felt raging inside him — what good can she do for him now, on this silly, pathetic journey? What good are her chattering with Avram and her baseless bargain with fate? She walks on, and her heavy feet barely obey her. It’s good to get away from the news, that man said, especially after yesterday. What happened yesterday. How many. Who. Have they informed the families yet. Run home, run, they’re on their way.

She walks almost without looking. Falls through the expanses of an infinite space. She is one human crumb. Ofer is also one human crumb. She can’t slow his fall by even one second. And though she gave birth to him, though she is his mother and he came out of her body, now, at this moment, they are merely two specks floating, falling, through infinite, massive, empty space. What it all comes down to, Ora senses, is randomness in everything.

Something makes her zigzag, a slight arrhythmia of the feet, and then comes a painful spasm where her thigh meets her groin.

“Wait, don’t run.”

Avram seems to be enjoying the quick descent down the hill, the wind slapping his face, cooling it down, but she stops to lean against a pine tree and holds on to the trunk.

“What’s up, Ora’leh?”

Ora’leh, he called her. It just slipped out. They both glance quickly at each other.

“I don’t know, maybe we should slow down.”

She takes small, cautious steps, avoiding as best she can the tormented iliacus muscle. Avram walks beside her, as Ora’leh skips between them like a cheerful kid goat.

“Sometimes I used to fantasize that you came in disguise, or sat in a cab by the playground when I was there with him, and watched us. Did you ever do anything like that?”

“No.”

“Not even once?”

“No.”

“No temptation to know what he looked like, what he was?”

“No.”

“You just cut him out of your life.”

“Stop, Ora. We’ve run our course with this.”

She swallows a double dose of bile over the “run our course” that somehow rolled from Ilan to him. “Sometimes I would get this feeling in my back, something between a tickle and a prick, here”—she points—“and I wouldn’t turn around, I would force myself not to turn around. I would just say to myself quietly, with an insane sort of calmness, that you were there, around me, looking at us, watching us. Come on, let’s stop for a minute.”

“Again?”

“I don’t know. Look, it’s not right. To go back down, to go back, it’s not good for me.”

“The downhill is hard for you?”

“Going back is hard for me, retracing our steps — in my body. I feel all crooked, I don’t know.”

His arms hang by his sides. He stands waiting for her instructions. At such moments, she feels, he annuls his own volition. In the blink of an eye he steps out of his own being and covers himself with an impenetrable coating: nothing to do with life .

“Listen, I think — I can’t go back.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Me neither.”

“But the notebook—”

“Avram, going back is not good for me.”

As soon as she says it, the knowledge is as strong and clear as a compulsion. She reverses direction and starts going up the mountain, and it’s the right thing, she has no doubt. Avram stands there for a moment, sighs, then uproots himself and follows her, grumbling to himself, “What difference does it make?”

She walks, suddenly light-footed against the incline and against the weight of the man who is probably sitting on her rock right now, at the bottom of the valley, reading her notebook. The man she will probably never see again, who begged her with his eyes to let him help her — his lips like a ripe, cleaved plum — and from whom she now parts with a slight twinge of sorrow. She could do with his cup of coffee, but she has felt the bite of home, and she cannot go backward.

“Even before Ofer was born, ever since the war, since you came back, I’ve lived with the feeling that I’m always being watched by you.”

There. She’d told him what for years had embittered and sweetened her life at the same time.

“Watched how?”

“In your thoughts, in your eyes, I don’t know. Watched.”

There were days — but of course she will not tell him this, not now — when she felt that at each and every moment, from the second she opened her eyes in the morning, through every motion she made, every laugh she laughed, when she walked and when she lay in bed with Ilan, she was acting a part in his play, in some mad sketch he was writing. And that she was acting for him perhaps more than for herself.

“What is there to understand here?” She stops and suddenly turns around and unwillingly hurls at him: “It’s something Ilan and I felt all the time, all those years — that we were acting out a play on your stage.”

“I never asked you to be my play,” Avram mutters angrily.

“But how could we feel otherwise?”

They both get sucked back, absorbed into one moment, two boys and a girl, almost children: Take a hat, put two pieces of paper in it. But what am I drawing for? You’ll find out only afterward.

“And don’t get me wrong. Our lives were completely real and full, with the kids and our work, and the hiking and nights out and trips abroad and our friends”—the fullness of life, she thinks again in Ilan’s voice—“and there were long periods of time, years, when that look of yours in our back, we hardly felt it. Well, maybe not years. Weeks. Okay, maybe a day here and there. Overseas, for example, when we went on vacation, it was easier to be free of you. Although that’s not accurate either, because in the most beautiful places, the most tranquil spots, I would suddenly feel the jab in my back — no, in my stomach, here, and Ilan would feel it too, at the same second, always. Well, it wasn’t that hard to feel, because the minute we said anything that sounded like you, or one of your jokes, or just a sentence that begged to be said in your voice, you know. Or when Ofer folded his shirt collar with your exact movement, or when he made the spaghetti sauce you taught me how to make, or a thousand and one other things. And then we’d look each other in the eye and wonder where you were at that moment, how you were doing.”

“Ora, don’t run,” Avram groans behind her, but she doesn’t hear.

And that was part of life too, she thinks with some surprise. Part of the fullness of our lives: the void of you, which filled us.

For one moment her entire being is the look she used to give Ofer sometimes, when she gazed deep inside him as if through a one-way mirror, into the place where she saw in him what he himself did not know.

And maybe that’s exactly why he stopped looking you in the eye? Maybe that’s why he didn’t come to the Galilee with you?

She can no longer contain what wells up inside her. She has reached some sort of peak, and something inside her crumbles and melts and relaxes and loosens with an internal surprise mingled with warm sweetness. Tall, strong, and Amazonian she stands on a rock above Avram, hands on her hips, and scans him with a penetrating look. Then she laughs. “Isn’t this nuts? Isn’t it crazy?”

“What?” he asks breathlessly. “What, out of all that?”

“That first I run away to the edge of the world, and now I suddenly can’t take half a step farther from home?”