David Grossman - To the End of the Land

“Ofer’s always prepared, but you know he didn’t get that from me or from you,” Ora says, laughing.

On a bed of poterium they spread out a large, plastic-covered 1:50,000-scale map and pore over it, heads almost touching.

“Where are we?”

“Maybe here?”

“No, that’s not even the right direction.”

They strain their eyes. Two fingers dart around, run into and cross over each other.

“Here’s our path.”

“Yes, it’s marked.”

“That’s what that guy said, the Israel Trail.”

“Which guy?” she asks.

“The one we met.”

“Oh, him.”

“Yes, him.”

Her finger runs back along the path until it hits the border. “Oops.” She stops and folds in her finger. “Lebanon.”

“If you ask me, that’s more or less where we started.”

“Maybe it was here? Because that’s right where we waded into the stream, remember?”

“Could I forget?”

“And we followed it along here in a zigzag, like this.” She leads her finger down the winding path. Avram’s finger is next to hers, just behind. “This is where we climbed up, and here there was a wooden bridge, and here we saw the flour mill, and maybe this is where we slept the first night? No? Maybe here, next to Kfar Yuval? How can anyone remember? What did we even see those first few days? Who could see anything at all?”

He laughs. “I was a total zombie.”

“Here’s the Kfar Giladi quarry, and here’s the Tel Chai Forest, and the sculpture path, and here’s where we ate, at Ein Ro’im.”

“I wasn’t seeing anything back then.”

“No, you weren’t. You just walked and cursed me for dragging you along.”

“And ’round about here, I think, we met Akiva, and then we went down into the wadi.”

“This whole stretch was a real hike, see?”

“Yes, and that must be the Arab village.”

“What’s left of it.”

“I wanted to see it, but you ran on.”

“I’ve had enough ruins in my life.”

“And that’s the Kedesh River.”

“So here’s where we slept.”

“And then we walked up the riverbed and met that guy of yours.”

“Since when is he mine?” Her fingers press into the map, leaving a brief indentation in the plastic. “And here’s Yesha Fortress, and that’s the Sheik’s tomb, Nebi Yusha.”

“And here, you see, here’s where we walked up all the way to Keren Naphtali, and then down again because you left the notebook at the Kedesh River.”

“And here was another stream, Dishon.”

“It looks so innocent on the map. And look here, it’s those turbines we couldn’t figure out. Apparently that was the Ein Aviv Regional Pumping Station. So we’ve learned something.”

“And I think this is the pool where we bathed.”

“And here we walked along that big pipe to cross the water.”

“I was shaking.”

“Seriously? I didn’t know, you didn’t say anything.”

“That’s me.”

“And here, look, it’s your fairy-tale forest, Tsivon Stream.”

“And here’s the meadow we walked through earlier. Definitely.”

“And here’s the road we crossed.”

“Yes, it said ‘Highway 89.’ ”

“So if we crossed here,” Avram says musically, “then now we must be—”

“On Meron,” she determines.

“Mount Meron?”

“See for yourself.”

Their fingers point reverently.

“Avram,” she whispers, “look how far we’ve walked.”

He gets up, hugs his chest, and paces among the trees.

They fold up the map, hoist their backpacks, and start making their way up the steep incline again through the thistles. Avram leads now, and Ora has a hard time keeping up. These shoes are really good for me, he decides. Excellent socks, too. He finds a long, supple branch of an arbutus tree, breaks it into the right size with one stomp, and uses it to help with the climb. He suggests that Ora use one, too. He comments on the excellent path markings in this section. “Frequent and consecutive, just like they should be,” he pronounces. She thinks she can hear him humming a tune to himself.

It’s a good thing the path is so long, she thinks, watching him from behind. This way, there’s time to get accustomed to all the changes.

“Black-Maned Horse. That was one of Ilan’s nicknames for Adam, when he was maybe three and a half. There was also Giant-Trunked Elephant. Get it?”

Avram mumbles the words, hearing them in Ilan’s voice.

“Or Lovely-Braying Donkey. Or Angry-Browed Cat. That kind of thing.”

“Angry-Browed Cat?”

“I’m telling you, it was like he was conducting human experiments.”

She saw Adam changing in front of her very eyes, twisting and turning himself to adapt to Ilan’s desires. He painted an orange cat: “I oranged it,” he told her, “and now I’m trickling some yellow with my paintbrush.” She smiled crookedly. Of course she was proud of him, but with every accomplishment she felt him grow farther away from her. She looked at him as he wagged his tail for Ilan and was alarmed at what she felt toward him. She could not understand how all that time he had hidden from her the eagerness that now overflowed, bursting from every pore in his skin. The exposed — and so masculine — fervor with which he turned his back on the years he had spent with her, in their little paradise for two. Bambi and his mother, RIP.

“My stomach is butterflying!” he’d shout joyously after Ilan spun him over his head. “Yes,” she’d say, straining to smile, “lucky you.”

It seems to her that shortly after he mastered speech, speech mastered him. He started to voice his thoughts out loud. She didn’t notice it immediately, but at some point she realized that another channel had been added to the already bustling soundtrack of their domestic life. He vocalized all his thoughts, wishes, and fears. And since he still talked about himself in the third person, it made for entertainment sometimes: “Adam is hungry, hungry, hungry! Just wait a bit! No, he’s sick of waiting for Mom to come out of the bathroom. Adam is going into the kitchen now, and he’s going to make himself a snack. What should he put in his sandwich? And which should he put in his sand-what?”

He would lie in his bed after the bedtime rituals and mumble his thoughts. Ora and Ilan would stand behind the door eavesdropping halfheartedly. “Adam has to go to sleep. Maybe a dream will come? Teddy, here’s what we have to do now. You have to go to sleep, and if a dream comes, shout ‘Adam!’ Dreams aren’t real, it’s just a drawing in your brain, Teddy.”

“It was strange,” Ora says now, “and a little embarrassing, as though his subconscious was completely exposed to us.” She looks away from Avram so as not to remind him of his own narcotic-induced ramblings the night she kidnapped him. She wonders if she should tell him what he said about her that night: “She’s totally nuts, she’s gone off her rocker.”

Adam knew all the letters and vowel marks by the time he was four. He picked them up with incredible ease, and you just couldn’t stop him. He read, he wrote. He saw characters in the cracks of a soap bar, in a crust of bread, in the whitewash on the walls. He insisted on reading words in the folds in his sheet and the lines of his palm.

“Remind me what kind of pie you are?” Ilan said, tickling Adam while he bathed him.

“I’m a pi rate,” Adam answered, laughing.

“And what else?”

“A pied piper!”

“And?”

“A grieving magpie!”

“Thieving,” Ilan corrected him with a smile. “And what else?”

“A pile of cow pie!”

Bubbles of rolling laughter foamed up in the bathroom and burst in front of her as she lay in bed.