David Grossman - To the End of the Land

Of course she felt, in those distant years, the other women and girls he saw through the canopy of his closed eyelids. She felt the rhythmic, salacious alternating of his passions and fantasies as he made love to her. And every time she felt a twinge of jealousy, she told herself that you could not love Avram without loving his imagination, his parallel dimensions, his thousands of hallucinatory women. But she would quickly search for his mouth so that she could give it her kiss — deep, demanding, vigorous — or even just touch the tip of his tongue with hers, to bring him back to the source that gave rise to all that in him, and he would instantly realize what she was doing and smile with his swollen eyelids and make a movement with his body that said: Here, I’m back.

All that time, in all those years, with all the talk and the chatter, intrigues lodged between his foot and her ankle, between his eyelashes and her navel. And she was so young, she didn’t even know you were allowed to laugh like that in the midst of lovemaking. She hadn’t realized that her body was so lighthearted and mischievous and cheerful. And it all somehow comes back to her now, barely able to stand, almost falling into his body. It’s been years since she’s allowed herself to remember how interwoven they used to be, and how all of his limbs climbed over all of her limbs—“Is that why they call it clim axing?” he joked once. “We mustn’t waste even one-thousandth of a touch,” he would murmur, “not a finger or a hip or an eyelid, certainly not two thighs or an earlobe.” And when she was with him she was inexhaustible, climaxing and laughing, laughing and climaxing in short, quick spurts, while he held back like a Tibetan yogi, gathering it in from all the corners of himself, as he explained with a conspiratorial smile. From the farthest regions, from the tips of his toes, his elbows, eyelashes, neck, starting from a distance , until she felt his signals, and she would smile in her heart, here it is, here, the sharpening of all his flesh, the filling up, the high tide, and the quick departure of humor from his body — suddenly serious, determined, fateful, with his muscles weaving around her, and the grasping, like a giant clamp, and then his essence, the beat of his imprint deep inside her. She remembers.

Then, with his head heavy on her chest, she would feel him resurface to his senses. Slow, suspended, with fetal movements, he would moan, “Ora’leh, did I hurt you?”

Here too, in the open field, he hugs her, steadies her, then gently holds her away. A pity. She was ready, if he’d only wanted to. They may have struggled that way for a minute, no longer, yet she crossed an ocean of time. And where is he? What does he want? What does she know? Only that he is grasping her, holding her in his arms, softly caressing her hair, asking, “Did I hurt you?”

Then he lets go, pushes himself away from her as though he has realized what almost happened, the ghost that was almost conjured up. Ora rocks dizzily and takes hold of his arm again. “Wait, don’t run away, why are you running away from me?” She looks at him weakly, touches a long bloody scratch on his nose, which she has given him, and says quietly, “Avram, do you remember us?”

“ILAN CAME HOME. After he ran away from me and Adam and tried out houses all over Jerusalem, he came back to us, to the house in Tzur Hadassah. As soon as he did, he was shocked at Adam, I mean at me, at the way I’d neglected Adam and his education and his speech, and any order and discipline, and he started improving him.” Ora laughs. “Do you understand? For almost three years, Adam and I were more or less on our own, two wild beasts in the jungle, no laws, no commandments, and then the missionary landed. And we suddenly discovered that nothing we did was right, that we didn’t have an agenda or a routine, we ate when we were hungry and slept when we were tired, and the house was pretty much a dump.

“Wait,” she says, holding up a finger, “there’s more. That Adam walked around the neighborhood naked and scarfed down massive amounts of chocolate and watched TV indiscriminately and got to day care at eleven a.m. And at his advanced age he still didn’t know how to go potty properly. And he called me Ora, not Mom!

“Ilan, being Ilan, took matters into his own hands right then and there. He did everything very nicely of course, with lots of smiles — he knew he was on probation with me — but all of a sudden, for example, clocks turned up around the house. One in the kitchen, a little one in the living room, and a Mickey Mouse clock in Adam’s room. And there were cleaning days, and we had to clear out the mess and get rid of the junk. The fun was over! ‘This Saturday we’re sorting through Adam’s toys, next Saturday your paperwork, and what about that pharmacy spilling out of the bathroom cabinet?’ ”

She laughs joylessly.

“I liked it, don’t get me wrong. It was nice to have a man in the house and to feel that someone was starting to eliminate the chaos. A sort of purification. The rescue forces had arrived. And don’t forget that I was pregnant with Ofer, so I didn’t have a lot of strength to resist, and all his enthusiasm signaled that he was pretty serious about his nesting and that maybe this time he would stay.”

Avram walks beside her, wriggling his toes in Ofer’s shoes. When he first stepped into the shoes, he immediately announced that he was swimming in them, and that it wouldn’t work. “It will, it will,” Ora mumbled and took out a pair of thick walking socks from his backpack. “Put these on.” He did, and still the shoes were a little big, but they were more comfortable than his old pair, whose soles were so worn out that he could feel the ground through them. “Just let your feet sail, and think about what a nice feeling that is,” Ora advised.

He spreads out in Ofer’s space, measuring his toes. The soles of his feet study his son’s footprints. Tiny dips and mounds, secret messages. Things even Ora doesn’t know about Ofer.

“But most of all, he fixed up Adam. Cleanliness and neatness and discipline, like I said, and then came the reeducation. How can I explain it? Adam was a fairly quiet boy. I wasn’t much of a chatterbox either, back then. I didn’t really have that many people to talk to. Adam and I were alone at home most of the time, and we had our little life, and it was pretty good, considering, and talking really wasn’t the most important part of it. We got along just fine without a lot of words. We understood each other perfectly. And I also think — although maybe not—”

“What?”

“Maybe I’d had a little too many words out of the two of you, all those years, you and Ilan together. Maybe I wanted a bit of quiet.”

He sighs.

“All that talk of yours, the brilliant, witty yada yada yada that never stopped for a second, that constant effort the two of you made.”

Ilan and me, Avram thinks. Two arrogant peacocks.

“And I always felt a bit left out.”

“You? Really?” Troubled, he does not know how to tell her that he always felt she was the center, their focal point. That she, in her own way, created them.

“Well, I never really got into that thing of yours.”

“But it was all because of you, for you.”

“Too much, too much.”

They walk silently. The dog trails them at a fixed distance, her ears cocked in their direction.

“And Ilan”—she returns from her contemplations—“was really amazed at Adam, at his underdeveloped speech, as he put it, and he started teaching him how to talk. Do you get it? At the age of two and three-quarters he put him through talking boot camp.”

“How?”

“He just talked to him all the time. He would take him to day care in the morning and talk about everything they saw on the way. Bring him home from day care and talk to him about what happened at day care. He asked questions and demanded answers. He wouldn’t let him off the hook. It was like a one-man protest movement: Fathers Against Silence.”