David Grossman - To the End of the Land

Avram looks down.

He and Ora face each other silently. A pair of falcons hovers above in a mating dance, cackling with laughter.

A shudder runs through the big black dog’s chest. He takes a few steps and circles them broadly. The other dogs stand tense, their fur on end.

“Fuckit,” Avram whispers, “we’ve lost our chance.”

The black one keeps pacing slowly, drawing an invisible line around them, without taking his eyes off them. The dogs follow along, completing a circle. Ora seeks out the golden bitch, who looks wild and bold as she stands beside the black dog. A handsome couple, Ora thinks with a strange twinge of jealousy — the forgotten longing, to be a handsome couple.

Suddenly it all sparks up again, as though the circular motion has fanned a primordial urge in the dogs. At once their faces and bodies sharpen. Wolves and hyenas and jackals now encircle Ora and Avram, and they too turn around in a circle. Avram’s back touches hers. He is wet. They move together, forward, backward, to either side. They are one body. She can dimly hear a deep, hoarse growl. But perhaps it’s hers.

The dogs break into a slow trot around them. Ora feverishly searches for the golden one. She must find her. She scans dog after dog like beads on a necklace. There she is, running with them. Ora’s spirits fall: the bitch’s face is also sharp and gaping now, and her cheeks are drawn up in a grimace that exposes her canines.

Gray lightning flashes, something seizes Ora’s pants from behind, at her calf, and she jumps in horror and kicks out without seeing. She hits something, her foot almost dismantled by the powerful pain, and a dirty, bedraggled mutt screeches, runs away, and sits licking its wound at some distance. Avram emits twisted, high-pitched sounds, not words but crushed syllables. She can almost feel the shaky scaffolding of his soul, which he has worked so hard to erect, collapsing because of this foolishness. Right at that moment he thrashes a stick, very close to her thigh, and a gaping hole opens up in the circle. Then comes another whistling blow, followed by a nauseating sound: something broken escapes with a whimper, pulling its rear body with its two front legs, and again she sees Nicotine, old and sick, dragging himself to his basket with a befuddled look in his eyes.

She starts to whistle. Not a tune. Something meaningless and monotonous and mechanical that sounds like the hum of a broken appliance. Her lips are pursed and she whistles. The dogs prick up their ears. Avram throws her a suspicious glance. His beard is wild, his face alarmingly sharp.

She keeps on. Sensitive ears vibrate as they decipher a signal broadcast from another world. Her eyes dart in every direction. She tries to produce a low, soft whistle, as full and rich as her lungs can muster, then sticks with the loose whistle, guarding it like an ancient fire.

An emaciated brown mutt stops moving, sits on its hind legs, and scratches behind its ears. In so doing, it breaks the circle. The other dogs spread out a little. The golden bitch walks hesitantly to one side, panting heavily. A large Canaan with an ugly open wound on its thigh limps away, then stops in the middle of the field and looks up at the sky as though he’s forgotten what he meant to do. Ora thinks she sees him yawn.

The black dog shakes his head a few times and tediously scans the other dogs. Now Ora whistles her Nicotine whistle, the first few notes of “My Beloved with Her Pure White Neck,” a song she and Ilan used to whistle to each other, too. The black dog barks vacantly at the sky and walks away. The others straggle behind him. He pricks up his tail and starts to run, and they follow. The golden bitch trails behind them. The pack looks smaller to Ora now. She gives Avram a sideways glance. His stick — now she sees it’s a branch, from a eucalyptus or a pine tree — is still held high in his hand. His chest rises and falls like a bellows.

She whistles. Ilan always distractedly whistled their song in the shower, and she, lying in bed, would put down her book to listen. Once he whistled it in a low key, standing at one end of the bustling lobby of the Jerusalem Theater. She, at the other end, picked it up and started walking toward him, whistling softly until they met and embraced.

Avram looks at her questioningly. She whistles after the pack of dogs as they recede into the distance. She rounds her lips and whistles to the golden bitch, who grudgingly turns her head and slows down. Ora leans forward with her hands on her knees. “Come,” she whispers.

The other dogs sprint away, barking, chasing one another, engaging in momentary fights, galloping across the field with floppy or perked-up ears, re-forming themselves into a pack. The golden one looks at them and back at Ora. Then, hesitantly, with a trembling paw, she starts to walk in Ora’s direction. Without moving, Ora whistles softly, almost imperceptibly, guiding the bitch. Avram lets the branch drop. The bitch walks through a patch of stubbly growth that clings to her broad chest.

Ora slowly crouches down on one knee. The bitch stops abruptly, one paw suspended, her black nostrils open wide. Ora finds a slice of bread on their cloth, and carefully tosses it near the dog. She pulls back and growls.

“Eat it, it’s good.”

The bitch cocks her head. Her eyes are large and dirty. Ora talks to her: “You lived in a house once, you had a home, people took care of you and loved you. You had a bowl for food and a bowl for water.”

With cautious, hunched steps, the bitch walks over to the bread. Growling, her brows arched, she does not take her eyes off Avram and Ora.

“Don’t look at her,” Ora whispers.

“I was looking at you,” Avram says awkwardly, and turns away.

The bitch grabs the bread and devours it. Ora throws her a piece of cheese. She sniffs it and eats. Then a few pieces of salami. Some biscuits. “Come here, you’re a good dog, good, good dog.” The dog sits down and licks her chops. Ora pours water from a bottle into a plastic dish and sets it down on the ground between her and the dog, then goes back to her place. The dog sniffs at it from a distance. Reluctant to approach, attracted yet repelled. A slight whimper escapes her lips. “Drink, you’re thirsty.” The bitch approaches the dish without taking her eyes off Ora and Avram. Her leg muscles shake and she looks as though she might collapse. She laps up the water quickly and retreats. Ora moves closer and the bitch bares her teeth and her fur stands on end. Ora talks to her and pours some more water. She does this two more times, until the bottle is empty. The bitch sits next to the dish. Then she sprawls out and starts gnawing at a ball of fur and thistles stuck to her paw.

And now they can no longer avoid looking at each other.

Ora and Avram stand there, spent, their sweat heavy with the stench of fear, ashamed. A flicker of embarrassment crosses their faces. They have not yet had time to robe themselves in their former skins. Avram stares at her and shakes his head slowly, wonderingly, gratefully, and his blue eyes fill with an undulating stir, and her body suddenly remembers his embrace, and for a moment she wonders stupidly if she should whistle for him to come. But he comes anyway, a mere three steps, and hugs her, grasps her tightly, as he used to, and whispers, “Ora, Ora’leh.” The bitch looks up at them.

A moment later Ora pulls away and stands staring at him as though she has not seen him for years. Then she falls on him again and starts to pound him with both hands and hit his face and scratch it, without saying anything, panting drily. Taken aback, he shields his face, then tries to hold her, to encircle her in his arms so that she cannot hurt him or harm herself, because she has started to scratch herself too and hit her own face with her hands. “Ora, stop, stop,” he shouts, he begs, until he is able to trap her in his arms and hold her tightly to his body to stop her wildness. She struggles and grunts and kicks him, and every time she feels a space of nothing between them she tries to fill it with a punch or a kick or an angry breath, and the wilder she gets, the closer he has to hold her, until they are practically molded into one, intertwined, and she grits her teeth and yells, “You piece of shit, all these years … punishing us … who is to blame here …” Her voice grows weaker and weaker until she flops against his chest, her head in the round of his shoulder, amazed at herself, at what came out of her — why now, why, this was not at all what she wanted to say to him. He does not move, only holds her to him and runs his hand up and down her back, over her sweat-soaked shirt, and she breathes deeply and whispers into his body just as she spoke a few days earlier into the pit she dug in the earth. Avram somehow senses that she is praying, but not to him, rather to someone inside him, asking him to open up and let her in. His hands and body constantly knead her body, and she kneads his, fingers tightening over limbs, wondering, remembering. For one moment — no more — there is a sudden abandonment, like a fleeting moment of disorderly conduct, and Ora’s legs almost fail her, but she remains standing with the last of her strength. What is this? she wonders. What’s happening here? She holds her head back, wanting to look in his eyes and ask, but he pulls her to him with new-old fervor, imprinting himself on her again. That’s exactly how he used to be, and she suddenly remembers how the whole time they were screwing— nut-and-bolting , he called it — it was as though he were hallucinating inside her, growing intermittently harder and softer, moving in a slow somnambulism, a sort of continuous sleepwalking in which his mind and body were unshackled, so different from his usual rhythm when he was outside of her, different from his huntsman-like alertness. He once told her that from the moment he entered her, it was though a circle closed inside him and he immediately sank into a dream. “It’s like an underwater maze,” he said, when she asked him to try to describe it. “No, no, forget that. It’s like a dream that you can’t tell anyone or re-create when you wake up. That’s what’s fun about it: that I can’t find the words. That I can’t find the words.”