David Grossman - To the End of the Land

Ora was the center, the focal point, and this too was something new he gave her. Ora — not Avram, and not Ora-Avram — was the place where their lovemaking occurred. Her body, far more than his, was the intersection of their passion, and her pleasure was always more desired by him than his own. This astonished her and sometimes troubled her—“Let me do it to you now,” she would urge, “I want you to enjoy it, too.” And he’d laugh: “But when you enjoy it, that’s when I enjoy it most, can’t you feel that? Can’t you see that?” And she did feel it, and she did see it, but could not truly understand it. “What’s with the altruism?” she would ask angrily. “What altruism?” he’d say with a sly grin. “It’s pure egoism.” And she would smile, as if at an incomprehensible joke, and would once again respond to his caresses and licks and feel that she was picking up on something complicated and warped about him, something she might have to work harder to understand if she really wanted to know Avram. But the kisses were sweet, and the licking shook the earth, and she gave in every time, and the moment was never right, and eventually that thing remained unspoken.

But if it had been the other way around, she knew — she hears Avram step out of the water with a splash, which is a pity, she wanted to play around with him a little (but he didn’t seem interested), and now she’ll have to walk out naked in front of him — if it had been the other way around he would not have given in, he would have investigated and wondered at every answer she gave, and remembered and treasured it and turned it over again and again. She hurries out of the water, hopping from one foot to the other and covering her cold breasts, which are even more shriveled now of course — where’s the towel, damn it, why didn’t she lay it out before?

Avram throws her a towel, almost without looking, and her teeth chatter a thanks. She turns her back to him and dries herself and remembers what he told her when she was nineteen: that they were perfect because they fit right in his palms. He insisted on referring to her breasts in the feminine, even though the Hebrew word was puzzlingly masculine. “How could it be any other way?” he claimed, and she gladly adopted his view. And how he marveled at them, and never had his fill of them. “Your resplendencies,” he called them, and “Your res-plenties,” which confirmed to her again that he honestly did not see her as she was, that he was blind to her shortcomings, that he apparently loved her. And she loved him so much for giving her breasts a place in the world, even before anyone had noticed them, and for believing so passionately that she was a woman, when she herself still doubted it. In the years that followed, when she breast-fed the boys, she often wished Avram could enjoy her too, wished he could know her when she was large and milky and abundant. “Your cup runneth over,” he used to delight in telling her when they were together.

She dries herself vigorously, as she always does, scrubbing her skin until it turns pink and steamy, amusing herself with her thoughts, and she stares at Avram with a strange, eager look. He gives her a sideways glance and says, “What?” She pulls herself together and straightens up and flutters her eyelids as if to clean up quickly after the unruly, damp gaze that had slipped out.

When Avram stands up to put his shirt on, Ora announces that enough is enough. “This shirt has to be washed right here, and we’ll dry it on the backpack while you walk. And please, open up your backpack right now and find something clean to wear.”

They walk past a string of natural springs: Ein Garger, Ein Pu’ah, and Ein Khalav. Pale orange lichen upholsters the branches of almond trees alongside the path. Tadpoles dart away when the shadow of Avram’s head falls on the springs. Ora talks. At times she glances at Avram and sees his lips moving, as though he is trying to engrave her words inside him. She talks about long nights sitting with Ofer in the rocking chair when he was burning with fever, sweaty, occasionally shaking and whimpering. She used to fall in and out of sleep with him, talk to him softly, and wipe the sweat off his tortured face. “I never knew you could feel someone else’s pain like that,” she says, and throws Avram a quick glance, because who more than he had once had the capacity to overflow with another person’s pain?

She talks about breast-feeding. How for months Ofer consumed nothing but her milk, and how he held entire conversations with her just by gurgling and looking. “A whole language, so rich that no words can describe it.”

She wants him to see her there too, not just Ofer. With her stained nursing bra and her wild hair. With her potbelly that refused for months to deflate, and her desperate helplessness when faced with Ofer’s mysterious pains, as he cried and screamed. With her mother’s stinging advice, and the far more experienced neighbors’, and the nurses’ at the lactation clinic. With the joy of knowing that she herself, with her own body, was sustaining a living creature.

And the moments — the chasms — between Ofer’s cries of hunger and the second her nipple disappeared into his lips. When he screamed, his body seemed to utterly collapse, like a body that knows it will die. The fear of death flowed into him quickly, and she filled the spaces that were void of food. He screamed and wailed until the rhythmic stream of her life stuff slowly filled him up, and a glow of relief illuminated his little face: he was saved, she had saved him, she had the power to.

She, who every single time she shifted from fourth to third gear had a morbid fear that she was shifting into reverse — she was giving life to a person!

Sometimes, when he was in her arms, she would run her hand quickly over his face and body, and when she did so, she always thought of the transparent threads, a web that tied Ofer to Avram, wherever he was. She knew it made no sense, but she could not stop her hand from making that motion.

Nighttime. The two of them alone in the world, darkness all around, and warm milk gurgles secretly from her innards to his. His tiny hand on her breast, the pinky finger extended like an antenna, the others moving rhythmically with his sucking, and his other hand crushing the fabric of her robe, or a tuft of his hair, or his ear. He opens his eyes and looks at her, and she dives in, imprinted in his gaze. That is how she feels: her face is now being imprinted on his tender, still foggy brain. She experiences a thrilling moment of eternity. In his eyes she sees her own image, and she is more beautiful than she has ever been. She vows to make him a good person, at least better than she is. She will repair everything her own mother ruined in her. Her zeal gushes into a milky spurt that spills on Ofer’s mouth and nose: surprised, he chokes and bursts into tears.

As she walks now, she hugs her body while a storm washes over it in waves. Forgotten sensations: fullness and hardness, dribbles that leaked through her shirt in the middle of the street, at work, or in a café, at the mere thought of Ofer—“Just thinking of him made me drip,” she laughs, and Avram, his face bathed in her light, wonders if she let Ilan taste her milk.

• • •

A shadow falls on them at midday. They are walking through the Tsivon streambed, a deep, strange channel that silences them. The path meanders among large, broken rocks, and they must climb and take calculated steps. The oak trees around them are forced to grow tall, stretch higher and higher to reach the sunlight. Pale ivy and long ferns cascade down from the treetops. They walk over a bed of crumbling dry leaves among bloodless cyclamens and albino fungi. It’s almost dark here. Touch, she says, and puts his hand on a rock covered with green moss. It feels soft and furry. They are surrounded by silence. Not a single bird chirps. “Like a fairy-tale forest,” Ora whispers. Avram looks around him. His shoulders are slightly hunched. His fingers dart, counting each other constantly. “Don’t worry,” she says, “I’ll find the way out.” Avram points: “Look over there.” A single ray of light has penetrated the foliage and shines on a rock.