David Grossman - To the End of the Land

Avram groaned in his sleep and his lips moved. Ora held her breath. He mumbled something incoherent, squirmed with pain, and sighed. She wet his lips with a washcloth and wiped the sweat from his face. He relaxed.

He had started writing to her the morning after their last night together in isolation. “I feel as though we’ve been surgically separated,” he wrote. “I am wounded, bruised, and desolate, now that you’re uprooted from me.” Another wave of wounded soldiers had arrived, and Ora, Ilan, and Avram had been moved to different hospitals. He wrote to her daily for three weeks, even before he got hold of her address, and then he sent the first twenty-one letters in a decorated shoe box. After that, for six years, he never ceased producing missives of five, ten, or twenty pages, covered with limericks and poems and quotations and excerpts from radio plays. He sent telegrams too — he called them yellegrams — and sketches of stories he would one day write and swirling footnotes and erasures that intentionally revealed more than they concealed. He gave her his whole heart, and she always read his letters with a voyeuristic lust, slight suspense, raw nerves, an almost physical longing for Ada, and a vague sense of guilt at betraying her. In the first months of their correspondence, she had a half-formed snicker ready and waiting at the corner of her mouth each time she opened a letter — a snicker that sometimes, as she read, turned into a sort of pre-crying spasm.

And in each letter he interjected something about Ilan. To pique her curiosity or to torture himself — she wasn’t sure.

“Today, Ora,” she read to him in a whisper and leaned in closer to his face, which was cut to the bone, “I am mired in lonesome sorrow, and I walk by myself, like Rudyard Kipling’s cat (do you know him?). The only character I commune with is Ilan, he that is maimed in his privy parts. As you know, we habitually discuss the female species, or rather, I discuss it, particularly you, of course, and Ilan does not respond. But it is his silence that makes me think he is not completely indifferent to you, although it’s obvious to me that he has yet to make what I have termed, in consultation with my friend Søren Kierkegaard, ‘the leap of love.’ On the other hand, he does insist on maintaining total indifference to the herds of fair girls — and some unfair ones too — who inundate him and seek his favors (!?). For the most part, I am the one who advises him, due to his lack of experience and utter numskullery in his relations with women. I do this, of course, with complete neutrality, as a person now observing exclusively from the margins, without any personal stake in the subject — a.k.a., you . You wouldn’t believe the enthusiasm with which I attempt to convince him that you are his intended one. You must be asking yourself why I do this. It is because integrity dictates that I do so, and because I can plainly see that even though I am intended for you, you are, unfortunately, not intended for me . That is the bitter truth, Ora, and that is the law of my love for you: I shall bring you only heartache and complications, and so, precisely because I care so deeply about you, and precisely because of my total and un-egotistical love, I must fan the flames of Ilan in your direction, open his bedaubed eyes, and remove the foreskin of his heart — isn’t it nuts of me?

“Get cracking and write quick, lest I sprain my heart with longings!”

But in the P.S. of that same letter he cheerfully reported his intricate and unfortunate affairs with other girls, who were, as always, only a cheap and available substitute, and only because she, in the depths of her heart, insisted — he was convinced — on loving the forlorn Ilan, he of the Kafkaesque joie de vivre, who was utterly unwilling to acknowledge her existence, and because she refused to wed Avram and move into a chamber (preferably one with maid service) with him.

During the first few weeks she replied with short, cautious letters whose timidity embarrassed her. He did not complain. He never kept score with her over the number of pages or the meagerness of their content. On the contrary: he was always enthusiastic and grateful for every sign she sent. Then she grew bolder. She told him, for example, about her older brother, the rebellious Marxist who was making her parents’ lives miserable, doing only what he felt like, which made her angry but also jealous. She wrote about her loneliness among her friends, and her anxiety before competitions — she had almost abandoned other athletics and was focusing on swimming; the transition from dry to wet made her feel instantly better; there were days when she felt like a burning torch hitting the water. And she wrote to him about Ada, missing her in writing as only he could understand. Every so often — actually, in every letter — she could not resist asking him, in a P.S., to send Ilan her warm regards. Although she knew it pained him, she could not help it, and in the next letter she would be unable to hold back from asking if he’d given the regards.

Of this correspondence, of this new friendship, and of the maddening heartache caused by thinking about Ilan, she told none of her friends. Since coming home from her hospitalization in Jerusalem, Ora knew that what had happened to her there all those nights was too precious and rare to be handed over to strangers, and this was all the more true of what was happening to her with them now, with both of them; the duality presented a mystery she did not even try to decipher. It had snuck up on her secretly and struck her, like lightning or an accident, and all she could do was adapt to the consequences of the strike. But from day to day it grew more obvious, until she knew with unimpeachable certainty: they were both necessary to her. They were essential, like two angels who ultimately fulfill the same mission: Avram, whose presence was inescapable down to the very last thread, and Ilan, who was entirely absent.

Almost without her noticing it, writing to Avram became a sort of diary she kept. But since she could not write to him about how much she missed Ilan, day and night, and about the physical longing that burned in her, she wrote about other things. More and more she wrote about her parents, mainly her mother. She filled pages upon pages about her and had never imagined she could have so much to say. At first, when she read her own words, she would be shocked at the treachery, yet unable to keep from saying these things, and in any case she had the peculiar feeling that Avram knew everything about her, even what she might try to hide. She told him about the constant, exhausting efforts to guess the reasons for her mother’s anger and for the implied accusations that were concealed in the space of the house like dense, inescapable netting. She revealed the well-kept family secret of her mother’s attacks: every few days she would shut herself up in her room and beat herself cruelly. Ora found out by accident, when she was ten and hiding, as she often did, in the linen chest in her parents’ closet. She saw her mother come into the room quickly and lock the door, and then she started to hit herself silently, scratch her own stomach and chest, then scream in a whispered voice: “Garbage, garbage, even Hitler didn’t want you.” At that moment Ora made up her mind that she would have a wonderful family of her own. It was a determined, crystalline decision, not the kind of fantasies little girls often entertain. For Ora, it was a life decision. She would have her own family, with a husband and children — two, no more — and their house would always be full of light, even in its farthest corners. She could see it vividly in her mind’s eye: a house flooded with light and free of shadows, in which she and her husband and her two small children sailed happily, transparent and open, so that there would never be any surprises in it like this one . She still pictured it when she was fifteen, and twenty. She would have at least one person, or two, or three, of all the people in the world, of all the mysterious and unexpected strangers, whom she could really know.