David Grossman - To the End of the Land

“So that’s what this is? You’re running home?”

“I was aching before, my whole body, when I started getting farther away.”

“Oh.” He massages his hip, which hurts from the last few minutes’ sprint.

“You must be thinking, This madwoman has kidnapped me.”

He looks up at her with a large, sweaty face and smiles. “I’m still waiting to hear what to offer as ransom.”

“That’s easy.” She leans down to him with her hands on her knees, and her breasts round into the opening of her shirt. “The ransom is Ofer.”

They set off — she likes feeling the words pulse: setting off, two friends set off on their way, off we go — and the path is effortless, and they are too, and for the first time since starting the walk, their heads seem less bowed and their eyes are not simply staring at the path and the tips of their shoes. They go uphill and downhill with the path, which becomes a broad gravel road, then they climb over a security fence and lose the markers in a thicket of growth. A field of tall green thistles covers everything, so they decide to trust their nascent travelers’ intuition and walk bravely and quietly for another few hundred meters through the thistles, without a clue which way to go, without a grasp — like a baby’s first steps, Ora thinks — and her anxiety for Ofer rouses in her, and she feels that she is not helping him now, that the thread she is tying around him is suddenly loosening. Still there is no sign of the path, and their steps grow heavy, and they stop every so often to look around while other pairs of eyes watch them: a lizard pauses to scan them suspiciously, another darts by with a grasshopper in its mouth, and a swallowtail hesitates briefly before laying a pale yellow egg on a fennel stalk. All these creatures seem to sense that something in the general rhythm has gone awry, someone has lost his way. But then they spot an orange-blue-and-white marker glimmering on a rock, and they both point at it, delighting in the sweetness of their small victory. Avram runs over and scuffs his sole on the rock, a male marking his territory, and they both confess to their worry and praise themselves for having managed to keep it to themselves and not burden each other. The markers become frequent again now, as though the path is seeking to compensate its walkers for having tested them.

“I remembered something,” Ora says. “When Ofer was born, when we brought him home from the hospital, I stood over his crib and looked at him. He was sleeping, tiny, but with that big head, and the scrunched-up red face with capillaries visible on his cheeks, from the effort of being born, and his fist was clenched next to his face. He looked like a little boxer, tiny and furious, as if he was focused on an anger he had somehow dragged into this world. But mainly, he looked lonely. As though he had fallen from a planet and the only thing he knew was that he had to defend himself.

“And then Ilan came and stood next to me and hugged my shoulders and looked at him with me, and it was so different from when we brought Adam home.”

Avram watches the three of them, then quickly looks away and quotes the sign Ilan had stuck on the door to Adam’s room: “The hotel management expects guests to leave when they reach the age of 18!”

“And Ilan said that when he was in the army and they used to send him to a new base where he didn’t know anyone and didn’t want to, the first thing he would do was find himself a bed in the farthest corner, and spend his first few hours napping, just to allow himself to adjust to the place unconsciously, in his sleep.”

Avram smiles distractedly. “That’s right. Once they spent half a day looking for him on the base at Tassa. They thought he’d flipped out on the way.”

Ora remembers how she’d elbowed Ilan next to Ofer’s crib as he slept with his fist clenched and said emphatically, “Here you are, my darling, I’ve made another solider for the IDF.” Ilan had quickly given the requisite reply that by the time Ofer grew up there would be peace.

So, she thinks, which one of us was right?

They walk side by side, each within himself, yet woven together. Capillary channels burst through Avram constantly as Ora speaks. Where was I when they stood over Ofer’s crib? What was I doing at that moment? Sometimes, when he tries out a new medication, he wakes up with an unfamiliar pain and lies awake, his face flushed with cold sweat, listening inside as a stream of infected blood makes its way into an internal organ whose existence he has never been aware of. That’s how he feels now, except the fear is completely different, both concealed and alarming, and the channels seem to be drawing a new map as they emerge.

Ora’s backpack suddenly feels almost weightless, as though someone has quietly come up to support her from behind. She feels like singing, shouting in joy, dancing through the field. The things she is telling him! The things they’re saying to each other!

“Ora, you’re running.”

She’s not sure if he’s referring only to how fast she’s walking.

She starts to squeak out a laugh. “And do you know what Ofer always says he wants to do when he grows up?”

Avram molds his face into a question mark, holds his breath, amazed at her reckless incursion into the future.

“He wants”—she doubles over, snorting, unable to speak—“he wants a job where they’ll do experiments on him while he sleeps.”

There you go again smiling, she thinks at Avram. Be careful, otherwise it might stick. Incidentally, I do appreciate your smiles, don’t hold back. At home I didn’t see much of them from my three wiseacres. Because mostly what those three are good at is making jokes. They’re not nearly as good at laughing, especially not at my jokes. They have some sort of screwed-up team spirit, which makes them refuse to laugh at my cracks. “But how do you expect anyone to laugh at your jokes when you hog all the laughter from the get-go?” Ilan had once wondered.

She wants to tell him: You know, Ofer has a laugh exactly like yours. Like a kookaburra in rewind. She hesitates. Your laugh? That one you used to have? She doesn’t even know how to phrase it. She almost asks: Do you still laugh that way sometimes, until tears run from your eyes? Until you lie down on your back and twitch your hands and legs? Do you laugh at all? Is there anything that can make you laugh?

The girl, the one he used to mention, the young one. Does she make him laugh?

They come across a tiny lake, and after some hesitation they take a dip, Ora in her underwear — a compromise between several convoluted, conflicting wishes and fears — and Avram fully clothed, then after a few minutes, wearing only his pants. And there is his body, glisteningly pale, dotted with scars and wounds, fleshier than she remembered, but also more solid than she imagined, and it is when he is nude that he emits a surprisingly brawny power. And he of course, as always, chooses to see only the “fleshy” that passes before her eyes, and apologetically pinches a fold of flesh, presenting it for her to study, and shrugs his shoulders with a this-is-all-I’ve-got sort of grief. But what she remembers is how he used to whisper when he saw her naked body, “Oh God, Ora’leh, such resplendence.” Apart from Ada, no one she knew had ever used that word, which had existed only in poetry. Or he would swing his heavy head over her and neigh like a horse, or roar like a lion, or, like old Captain Cat in Under Milk Wood , bellow: “Let me shipwreck in your thighs!”

She goes under the shallow water and can dimly sees his froggish body faltering nearby, and an old pain resurfaces, the memory of the moments when that thick, creased, careless body would light up and stretch into a blazing thread, and she would hold his face with both hands and force him to look in her eyes, to stay as open as he could, and she would study his eyes and see a gaze with a distant edge that was entirely open, endless, and she would know that there was one place where she was entirely, unconditionally loved, where all of her was gratefully, happily accepted.