David Grossman - To the End of the Land

When he could no longer keep up with the horse and the old man, Ofer stopped, waved at them for a moment longer, his fist opening and closing, then turned around with a sweet, mischievous smile, and spread his arms out to her happily, as if he’d known all along that she was there, as if anything else were not possible. He ran to her arms shouting: “Nommy, Nommy, bunny!”

“You see, in his books, in the pictures, a creature with a long head and long ears was a bunny.”

“That’s a horse,” she told him and hugged him tightly to her chest. “Say ‘horse.’ ”

“That was one of Ilan’s things,” she tells him on their next coffee break, in a purple field of clover dotted with the occasional unruly stalk of yellow asphodel humming with honeybees. “Every time he taught Ofer or Adam a new word, he would ask them to repeat it out loud. To tell you the truth, it got on my nerves sometimes, because I thought, Why does he have to do it that way — he’s not their trainer. But now I think he was right, and I even envy him, retroactively, because that way he was always the first one to hear every new word they said.”

“That is from me,” Avram says with awkward hesitation. “You know that, right? That’s me.”

“What is?”

He stammers, blushing. “I was the one who told Ilan in the army that if I ever had a kid, I would hand him every new word, present it to him, and it would be like, you know, like a covenant between us.”

“So it’s from you?”

“He … he didn’t tell you?”

“Not that I remember.”

“He probably forgot.”

“Yeah, maybe. Or maybe he didn’t want to tell me, not to pour salt on your wound with me. I don’t know. We both had all sorts of rituals about you, and moments to be with you, but it was mainly the words, and the way they spoke, the boys.” She sighs, and her droopy upper lip seems to droop a little more. “Well, you know, I mean he had that whole thing with you—”

“With me?” Avram sounds alarmed.

“Come on, it’s obvious. The two of you were so verbal , such chatterboxes, I swear, and with Ilan … Hey, what’s that sound?”

Something disturbs the thistles nearby. They hear short, rapid thrashings coming from several directions, and then the rustle of a living creature, something that runs and stops, with panting breaths. Avram jumps up and pokes around, and then comes the barking, in different voices, and Avram shouts at her to get up, and she spills her coffee and tries to stand up and trips on something and falls, and Avram stands over her, frozen, his eyes and mouth gaping in a transparent shout, and dogs — dogs come from all around them.

When Ora finally manages to get up, she counts three, four, five. He jerks his head to the left, and there are at least four more there, of different breeds, large and small, dirty and wild, standing there barking furiously at them. Avram pulls Ora to him, grabs her wrist, but she still doesn’t get it. How painfully slowly her brain processes the joints and connectors of every new situation, always. And on top of that, instead of kicking into self-defense mode, she has a foolish tendency — a completely un-survivor-like tendency, as Ilan once pointed out — to linger on the minor details (beads of sweat are spreading quickly under Avram’s armpits; one of the dog’s legs is broken and folded beneath its body; Ilan’s eyelid had jerked wildly when he told her, nine months ago, that he was leaving her; the man they met at the Kedesh River had been wearing, on top of everything else, two identical wedding rings on two fingers).

The dogs crowd into a sort of triangle, with a large, black, broad-chested hound at its vertex, and slightly behind him, a strapping golden mutt. The black one barks wildly, almost without stopping for breath, and the golden one makes a deep, prolonged, ominous rumble.

Avram spins around and breathes asthmatically. “You here, me there!” he says quickly. “Kick, and yell!”

She tries to shout but finds she cannot. Some kind of shame in front of Avram, idiotic embarrassment, and perhaps in front of the dogs, too. And herself? When has she really shouted? When has she yelled throat-rending howls? And when will she?

The dogs bark madly, their bodies rocking, their snarls and wailing charged with stubborn, raw fury. She stares at them. She is fascinated by the gaping mouths, the strands of saliva between the teeth. The dogs slowly approach, closing in on them. Avram hisses at her to find a stick, a branch, something, and Ora tries to remember things she’s picked up here and there from Adam, or in chance conversations with his friends. There was one sweet boy, Idan, a gifted musician, who had joined the army’s K-9 special forces unit. Once, when she drove him and Adam to a concert in Caesarea, he told them how they train dogs to attack the “dominant part” of a wanted suspect, a hand or a foot, which the suspect might use to try to protect himself from the dog. He explained to Ora that a regular dog will “click” its teeth when it bites someone’s arm, but a dog in their unit — Idan himself had a Belgian shepherd, which he said had the strongest instincts: you could condition them any way you wanted — could lock in on an arm or a leg or a face. Amazing how she can pull out this useful information. But Idan was the one who sicced dogs on people, and now she was on the receiving end.

“The black one,” Avram exhorts, “keep looking for him.” The large male, undoubtedly the leader, stands nearby, watching her with bloodshot eyes. A huge, dense lump that seems to be shedding its canine shell and reincarnating itself as a primeval beast. And right then another dog, a smaller, bolder one, cuts through the bushes in Avram’s direction, and Ora jumps up and grabs hold of Avram, almost pulling him down with her. He turns to her furiously and his own face is like an animal’s for a second — a peace-loving, vegetarian, and generally fearful animal. A gnu or a llama or a camel that has suddenly found itself in the midst of a massacre. Then he hurls one sharp kick at the dog, who sails through the air with terrifying silence, spread out like a rag, with its head bent backward unnaturally, and he is closely followed by one of Avram’s sneakers.

“I killed him,” Avram whispers in astonishment.

Silence hangs in the air. The dogs sniff nervously. It occurs to Ora that if she and Avram don’t attack, the dogs will settle down. She thinks about her own dog, Nicotine, and tries to draw his softness to this place, coaxing his domestic scent to waft out of her toward them. She looks around. The whole field is dotted with dogs. Almost all of them look like pets gone feral. Here and there a colorful collar peeks out, submerged in thick, filthy fur. A few glorious tails still wag, hinting at pampering and devotion. All their eyes are infected, covered with layers of yellow crud, and flies hover around them. Nicotine, who was her gift to Ilan when he stopped smoking, was as plain to her as a sister soul, but what is happening here is almost outside the realm of nature. It is rebellion. Betrayal. The big black one stands quietly, examining the situation, and the others — including Ora and Avram — tensely await his expressions. Slightly behind him stands the golden dog. When Ora looks at it closely, it turns away in embarrassment and runs its tongue over its upper lip, and Ora knows it’s a bitch.

“Stones, pick up stones,” Avram whispers out of the corner of his mouth. “We’ll throw them.”

“No, wait.” She touches his arm.

“Just don’t show them we’re afraid—”

“Wait, don’t do anything, they’ll leave.”

The dogs cock their heads as though following the conversation.

“And don’t look them in the eye, not in the eye.”