David Grossman - To the End of the Land

When we get back, he thinks, I’m going to read a book about the Galilee, or even just look at a map. I want to see where I’ve been. What would it be like for her to be hiking here with Ofer instead of me? he wonders. What would she talk about with him? What is it like to be completely alone with your child in a place like this? Must be terribly awkward. Then again, Ora wouldn’t let him keep quiet. He smiles. They wouldn’t stop talking and laughing at the people they met on the way. Maybe they’d laugh at me if they happened to run into me.

They climb up a narrow path where thick tree roots crawl all over the earth. The backpacks weigh them down. She thinks: What would it be like if Avram and Ofer were walking here in the forest, alone? A journey of men.

Suddenly, as if a hand has passed in front of their faces, they walk out of the shade into the sunlight. Another few moments and a meadow is revealed, and a hillside, and orchards blossoming in white. “So beautiful,” she whispers so as not to shock the silence.

The path flows softly. A broad, well-trodden walking path, with an avenue of weeds down the center. Like a horse’s mane, Avram thinks.

She tells him about Ofer’s journeys of discovery through the house, his insistent examinations of every single book on the bottom shelves, the plant leaves, the pots and lids in the lower kitchen drawers. She gives him every memory chip of his babyhood that pops into her mind. When he fell off a chair and had to get seven stitches in his chin at Magen David; when a cat scratched his face at the playground—“there’s no scar,” she says reassuringly, and Avram snatches a fluttering touch of some of his own scars, on his arms, shoulder, chest, and back, and a surprising ripple of joy runs through him because Ofer is whole; his body is whole.

Avram seems to be growing more and more awake: he wants to know when Ofer started talking and what his first word was. “Abba,” Ora says. Daddy. But Avram mishears and responds incredulously: “Avram?” Then he realizes his error, and they both laugh. And of course he asks immediately what Adam’s first word was. (“Or,” she replies. Light. She feels him swallow back the obvious question: Not ima ? But instead Avram says, “Or is almost ‘Ora,’ ” and she hadn’t even thought of that; she remembers that Ofer always claimed his first words were: “Take me to your leader.”) She reminds Avram of his mother’s heavy bureau, which became a changing table for the boys, and the black bookshelf, which held all their childhood books. She manages to remember quite a lot from the books she used to read to them and recites by heart: “Pluto was a dog from Kibbutz Megiddo …” Then she explains to the ignorant Avram about the charms of every child’s favorite rabbit, Mitz Petel, and his animal friends. She smiles to herself: the two of us are a bit like the giraffe and the lion in the book.

She tries to imagine little Ofer, bathed and clean and ready for bed, resting his head on Avram’s shoulder while he tells a story. Ofer is wearing his green pajamas with the half-moons, but she can’t see what Avram is wearing. She can’t even see Avram himself, but she feels his broad physical presence and the way Ofer leans on it. She thinks Avram would have probably made up a new story for Ofer every night and put on plays and shows for him. She has no doubt he would have been bored reading the same story every evening for weeks, as Ofer used to insist. She can hear the special, mysterious, soft, stomach-trembling voice that Ilan used when he read bedtime stories to the boys. She does not tell Avram, but remembers for herself and for Ofer how much Ilan loved bedtime. Even when the office was terribly busy, he would come home to help put the boys to bed, and she loved to cuddle with them in bed, and listen to him read.

The path is easy and fluid. Avram spreads his arms out, surprised at how comfortable the sharwals feel on his body — Ora had folded the cuffs up three times until they fit his “peanut stature,” as he’d joked. She tells him about Ofer’s day care and his first friend, Yoel, who moved to the States with his parents and broke Ofer’s heart. “Such little stories,” she apologizes, but from one story to the next, from one word to the next, baby Ofer becomes clearer in her own mind, slowly sculpted into a boy: the tiny baby draws out into the toddler, his clothes change, his toys, his haircut, his eyes. She shows him Ofer playing alone, concentrating, absorbed in a game. She tells him about Ofer’s affection for minuscule toys with lots of detailed accessories. She was amazed at his ability to collect them with infinite patience, match them up, put them together, and take them apart again.

“That’s not something he got from me .” Avram laughs, and Ora is moved: In what he negates, she hears what he is affirming.

When he was eighteen months old, they went on vacation to Dor Beach. Early in the morning he woke up while Ora, Ilan, and Adam were still asleep, climbed down from his bed, and walked out of the cabin alone. Barefoot, wearing a T-shirt and a diaper, he padded onto the big lawn adjacent to the beach and saw, probably for the first time in his life, a huge sprinkler spraying water. He stood watching in amazement, giggling and murmuring to himself, and then he started playing with the sprinkler. He crept up to the giant spurts of water and ran away before they could lick his feet. Ora, now awake and watching from behind the cabin wall, could see his happiness right before her eyes: she could see happiness itself, sunny and golden, refracted in the sprays of water.

Then the sprinkler caught Ofer and doused his body and head. Shocked, he stood paralyzed in the stream, trembling all over, his face scrunched up and turned to the sky, shaking his tight fists. She shows him to Avram, standing with her eyes closed and her lips in a trembling pout. A tiny, lonely human among the lashes of water that spun all around him, accepting a sentence he did not understand. She hurried over to rescue him, but something stopped her and sent her back to her hiding place. Perhaps, she tells Avram, it was a desire to see Ofer all alone like that just once. To see him as a person out in the world.

Ofer finally uprooted his feet and went to stand at a safe distance from the sprinkler, which he now watched with wounded pride, soundlessly whimpering and trembling through all his limbs. But he quickly forgot his insult when he spotted a wonderful new creature: a limping old horse with a straw hat on its head and its ears sticking through holes torn out of the hat. The horse was drawing a cart on which sat a man, also elderly, also wearing a straw hat. The old man came every day at dawn to pick up the garbage from the beach, and now he was taking it to the dump. Ofer stood in a state of excitement, still dripping with water, and a circular sense of wonder lit up his eyes. As the horse and cart drove by, the man noticed the baby, gave him a toothless smile, and charmingly removed his fraying straw hat with a flourish that stretched from his old age to Ofer’s childhood.

Ora was afraid Ofer would be scared of the man, but he only patted his little stomach, laughed a rolling laugh, and slapped his head a few times with both hands, perhaps mimicking the doff of the hat.

Then he followed the horse.

He walked without looking back, and Ora followed him. “He was full of power and without a hint of fear. Just a little thing of eighteen months.”

A tiny leaf ripples inside Avram’s soul and floats on ahead of him. Behind his tightly shut eyelids, a small boy walks on an empty beach, his body leaning forward, wearing nothing but a diaper and a T-shirt, all of him moving toward and onward and ahead.

The cart bore piles of garbage, cardboard boxes, torn fishing nets, and large trash bags. Flies hovered above it, and a trail of stench lingered behind it. Every so often the old man wearily yelled at the horse and waved a long whip. Ofer walked behind them, along the water’s edge, and Ora behind him, seeing through his eyes the wonder of the large, emaciated beast, and perhaps — she is guessing now, as she recounts the story for Avram — perhaps he even thought that everything moving up there in front of him was one single wonderfully complex creature, with two heads and four legs, large wheels, leather harnesses and straw hats, and a buzzing cloud above. As she talks, she distractedly quickens her pace, pulled along by the living memory — Ofer on the beach, a bold puppy bristling with the future, she behind him, hiding at times, although there was no need because he never turned to look back. She wondered how far he would go, and he answered her with his steps: forever. She saw — and this she does not have to say, even Avram understands — how the day would come when he would leave her, just get up and go, as they always do, and she guessed a little of what she would feel on that day, a little of what now, without any warning, digs its predatory teeth into her.