David Grossman - To the End of the Land

“Is that what she said?” he asked Avram with slightly alarmed amazement. “That’s what she wrote about me?” He promised Avram he would never have a relationship with her.

“Not on my initiative, at least,” he mumbled afterward in an obligatory sort of tone.

The next day, during morning recess, Avram climbed the giant pine tree in the school yard, cupped his hands over his mouth, and announced to the dozens of onlooking students and teachers that he’d decided to divorce his body, and that he would henceforth create a total separation between body and soul. To prove his indifference to his newly divorced fate, he jumped off the tree and plummeted to the asphalt.

“I love you even more now,” he wrote the next day from his hospital bed with his left hand. “The second I jumped, I understood that my love for you is a law of nature for me. It is an axiom, a truism, or as our Arabian cousins would say, min albadhiyat . It doesn’t matter what your objective state is. It doesn’t even matter if you hate me or if you live on the moon or if, God forbid, you have a sex-change operation. I will always love you. It will always be irredeemable and I can do nothing to stop it, unless I am killed/hanged/burned/drowned, or any other thing that brings about the conclusion of the curious episode known as ‘the life of Avram.’ ”

She wrote to him that it was awful that they were both suffering so much from unrequited love and promised again that even if she didn’t love him the way he wanted, she still felt that she would always be his soul mate and that she could not imagine life without him. As in all of her recent letters, she could not resist asking about Ilan: How had Ilan responded to his jumping off the tree? Had Ilan come to visit him in the hospital? She then, completely against her will, in contrast to her character and her basic decency, in contrast to everything she wanted to think about herself, launched into long pages of conjectures regarding Ilan’s secret desires, his inhibitions and hesitations, and repeatedly asked Avram why he thought this had happened, why she had fallen in love with Ilan. Because, after all, she didn’t even know Ilan, and everything she had experienced with him for the past year (minus one month and twenty-one days) was as if a stranger had taken control of her soul and was dictating to her what to feel. “It’s actually very simple,” Avram replied venomously. “It’s like an equation with three factors: fire, survivor, and fireman. Which one do you think the survivor will choose?”

Avram now gave Ilan a detailed account of each of her letters, as he listened and shrugged his shoulders. “Write something to her,” Avram begged. “I can’t take her torturing me with this anymore.” Ilan said for the thousandth time that he had no interest in Ora and any girl who pursued him like that made him sick. The problem was that Ilan had no interest in any girl. Girls buzzed and hummed around him, but he didn’t really get excited about any of them. From date to date, from experience to experience, he became more and more sad and subdued. “Maybe I should just be a homosexual,” he said to Avram one evening as they sprawled on the big soft cushions in Jan’s Tea House, in Ein Karem. They both froze at the explicit word, which had somehow hovered between them for a long time. “Don’t worry,” Ilan added forlornly, “you’re not my type.” In Avram’s pocket was Ora’s latest letter, which he had not dared tell Ilan about: “Sometimes I think that he is now in the state I was in up until about a year ago, until I met you (and him) in the hospital. Because I was really sleepwalking, afraid to open my eyes. And now, with all the terrible pain of his ignoring me, I still feel that I’ve come back to life, and that’s also in large part thanks to you (really it’s mainly thanks to you). I can also reveal to you that sometimes I deeply wish he would fall in love with some (other) girl already, even though I know it will cause me great pain. Or even with some other guy (don’t laugh, sometimes I really do think that might be what he needs and that he doesn’t dare to even comprehend it, and sometimes I even think you are the one he’s a little bit in love with, yes, yes …), and even that is something I could accept from him, as long as he found some happiness and woke up from his slumber, which scares me to death. Oh, Avram, what would I do without you?

“Yours, the corner-store lady …”

She woke up with a start. The room was dark (perhaps the nurse had come in and found her sleeping and turned off the light), except for the glowing red coils of the space heater. The last letter she’d read to him was still in her lap. Ilan was probably right. Not a single expression passed Avram’s face when she read to him. All she was doing was breaking her own heart. She put the letter back in the shoe box, stretched out, and stopped: his eyes were open. He was awake. She thought he was looking at her.

“Avram?”

He blinked.

“Should I turn on the light?”

“No.”

Her heart began to pound. “Should I fix your covers?” She stood up. “Do you want me to call the nurse to change your IV? Is the heater okay for you?”

“Ora—”

“What? What?”

He breathed heavily. “What happened to me?”

She blinked. “You’re going to be fine.”

“What happened?”

“Wait a minute,” she mumbled and retreated to the door, her body strangely tilting. “I’m going to get—”

“Ora,” he whispered with such profound distress that she stopped herself, walked back, and quickly wiped her eyes.

“Avram, Avram,” she said, taking pleasure in the way her mouth pronounced the name.

“Why am I like this?”

She sat down by his side and moved her hand through the air above his bandaged arm. “Do you remember that there was a war?”

His chest dropped and a drenched, heavy sigh escaped his lips. “Was I injured?”

“Yes, you could say so. You should rest now. Don’t speak.”

“A land mine?”

“No, it wasn’t—”

“I was with them,” he said slowly. Then his head drooped and he dived into sleep.

She thought of running for a doctor to report that Avram had regained his speech, or calling Ilan to let him know, but she was afraid to leave him even for a minute. Something in his face told her not to move but to sit by his side and wait, to protect him from what he would understand when he awoke.

His voice cracked. “Is there anyone else here?”

“Just you. And me.” She crushed out a smile. “You have a private room.”

He digested the information.

“Should I get the doctor? Or a nurse? There’s a bell above the—”

“Ora.”

“Yes.”

“How long have I …?”

“Here? About two weeks. A little longer.”

He shut his eyes and tried to move his right arm but could not. He craned his neck to look at the mess of tubes and wires growing out of his body.

“They gave you a few … treatments,” she murmured, “some small operations, you’ll be fine. Another few weeks and you’ll run—”

“Ora.” He stopped her with a heavy voice, exempting them both from her pretenses.

“Should I get you something to drink?”

“I … There are things I don’t remember.” His voice was frightening, throaty and clumsy, as though being squeezed out of a bent tube.

“You’ll remember gradually. The doctors say you’ll remember everything.” She spoke quickly, in a high-pitched voice that was too cheerful. He slowly ran one hand over his face, then touched his broken teeth with a surprised finger. “They’ll fix that for you, don’t worry.” She heard herself sounding like a rental agent eager to convince a hesitant tenant to keep on renting the dump. “They’ll take care of your elbow too, and the fractures here, in your fingers, and your ankles.”