To the End of the Land (11 page)

His eyes dart between the Jeep in front of him and the one tailgating him. He reaches up and uses two fingers to pull his shirt collar away from his neck. He is the only Arab in this whole convoy, she thinks, and she too starts to feel a prickle of sweat: he’s simply scared, he’s dying of fear, how could I have done this to him? One large drop hangs from the edge of his chin and refuses to fall. A thick, teary drop. How can it not fall? Why doesn’t he wipe it off? Is he leaving it like that on purpose? Ora’s face is hot and red and her breathing is heavy, and Ofer opens a window and grumbles, “It’s hot,” and Sami says, “The A/C is weak.”

She leans back and takes off her glasses. Waves of yellow blossoms sway in front of her. Wild mustard, probably, which her deficient eyes crumble and crush into bright smudges. She shuts her eyes and at once feels the pulse of the convoy burst through and rise, as if from her own body, in a tense, menacing growl. She opens her eyes: the dark pounding stops at once and the waves of light return. She covers her eyes again and the growl picks up, with a heavy drumbeat within, a stubborn, dulled, abysmal sound, a medley of engines and pistons, and beneath them the beating of hearts, pulsating arteries, quiet splutters of fear. She turns back to look at the snake of vehicles, and the scene is almost celebratory, excitable, a huge, colorful parade full of life: parents and brothers and girlfriends, even grandparents, bringing their loved ones to the campaign, the
event of the season. In every car sits a young boy, the first fruits, a spring festival that ends with a human sacrifice. And you? she asks herself sharply. Look at you, how neatly and calmly you bring your son here, your almost-only-son, the boy you love dearly, with Ishmael as your private driver.

When they get to the meeting point, Sami pulls into the first parking spot he finds, yanks up the emergency brake, folds his arms over his chest, and announces that he will wait for Ora there. And he asks her to be quick, which he has never done before. Ofer gets out of the cab and Sami does not move. He hisses something, but she can’t tell what. She hopes he was saying goodbye to Ofer, but who knows what he was muttering. She marches after Ofer, blinking at the dazzling lights: rifle barrels, sunglasses, car mirrors. She doesn’t know where he is leading her and is afraid he will get swallowed up among the hundreds of young men and she will never see him again. Meaning—she immediately corrects herself, revising the grim minutes she has been keeping all day—she won’t see him again until he comes home. The sun beats down, and the horde becomes a heap of colorful, bustling dots. She focuses on Ofer’s long khaki back. His walk is rigid and slightly arrogant. She can see him broaden his shoulders and widen his stance. When he was twelve, she remembers, he used to change his voice when he answered the phone and project a strained “Hello” that was supposed to sound deep, and a minute later he would forget and go back to his thin squeak. The air around her buzzes with shouts and whistles and megaphone calls and laughter. “Honey, answer me, it’s me, Honey, answer me, it’s me,” sings a ringtone on a nearby cell phone that seems to follow her wherever she goes. Within the commotion Ora swiftly picks up the distant chatter of a baby somewhere in the large gathering ground, and the voice of his mother answers sweetly. She stands for a moment looking for them but cannot find them, and she imagines the mother changing the baby’s diaper, maybe on the hood of a car, bending over and tickling his tummy, and she stands slightly stooped,
hugging her suede bag to her body, and laps up the soft double trickle of sounds until it vanishes.

It is all a huge, irredeemable mistake. It seems to her that as the moment of separation approaches, the families and the soldiers fill with arid merriment, as if they have all inhaled a drug meant to dull their comprehension. The air bustles with the hum of a school trip or a big family excursion. Men her age, exempt from reserve duty, meet their friends from the army, the fathers of the young soldiers, and exchange laughter and backslaps. “We’ve done our part,” two stout men tell each other, “now it’s their turn.” Television crews descend on families saying goodbye to their loved ones. Ora is thirsty, parched. Half running, she trails behind Ofer. Every time her gaze falls on the face of a soldier she unwittingly pulls back, afraid she will remember him: Ofer once told her that when they had their pictures taken sometimes, before they set off on a military campaign, the guys made sure to keep their heads a certain distance from each other, so there’d be room for the red circle that would mark them later, in the newspaper. Screeching loudspeakers direct the soldiers to their battalions’ meeting points—a
meetery
, they call this, and she thinks in her mother’s voice: barbarians, language-rapists—and suddenly Ofer stops and she almost walks into him. He turns to her and she feels a deluge. “What’s the matter with you?” he whispers into her face. “What if they find an Arab here and think he’s come to commit suicide? And didn’t you think about how he feels having to drive me here? Do you even get what this means for him?”

She doesn’t have the energy to argue or explain. He’s right, but she really wasn’t in a state to think about anything. How can he not understand her? She just wasn’t thinking. A white fog had filled her mind from the moment he told her that instead of going on the trip to the Galilee with her he was going off to some kasbah or
mukataa
. That was at six a.m. She had woken to hear his voice whispering into the phone in the other room, and hurried in there. Seeing his guilty look she had tensed and asked, “Did they call?”

“They say I have to go.”

“But when?”

“ASAP.”

She asked if it couldn’t wait a little while, so they could at least do the trip for two or three days, because she realized immediately that a whole week with him was a dream now. She added with a pathetic smile, “Didn’t we say we’d have a few puffs of family-together time?”

He laughed and said, “Mom, it’s not a game, it’s war,” and because of his arrogance—his, and his father’s, and his brother’s, their patronizing dance around her most sensitive trigger points—she spat back at him that she still wasn’t convinced that the male brain could tell the difference between war and games. For a moment she allowed herself some modest satisfaction with the debating skills she’d displayed even before her morning coffee, but Ofer shrugged and went to his room to pack, and precisely because he did not respond with a witty answer, as he usually did, she grew suspicious.

She followed him and asked, “But did they call to let you know?” Because she remembered that she hadn’t heard the phone ring.

Ofer took his military shirts from the closet, and pairs of gray socks, and shoved them into his backpack. From behind the door he grumbled, “What difference does it make who called? There’s an operation, and there’s an emergency call-up, and half the country’s reporting for duty.”

Ora wouldn’t give in—Me? Pass up getting pricked with such a perfect thorn? she asked herself later—and she leaned weakly against the doorway, crossed her arms over her chest, and demanded that he tell her exactly how things had progressed to that phone call. She would not let up until he admitted that he had called
them
that morning, even before six he had called the battalion and begged them to take him, even though today, at nine-zero-zero, he was supposed to be at the induction center for his discharge, and from there to drive to the Galilee with her. As he lowered his gaze and mumbled on, she discovered, to her horror, that the army hadn’t even considered asking him to prolong his service. As far as they were concerned he was a
civilian, deep into his discharge leave. It was he, Ofer admitted defiantly, his forehead turning red, who wasn’t willing to give up. “No way! After eating shit for three years so I’d be ready for exactly this kind of operation?” Three years of checkpoints and patrols, little kids in Palestinian villages and settlements throwing stones at him, not to mention the fact that he hadn’t even been within spitting distance of a tank for six months, and now, at last, with his lousy luck, this kind of kick-ass operation, three armored units together—there were tears in his eyes, and for a moment you might have thought he was haggling with her to be allowed to come back late from a class Purim party—how could he sit at home or go hiking in the Galilee when all his guys would be there? In short, she discovered that he, on his own initiative, had convinced them to enlist him on a voluntary basis for another twenty-eight days.

“Oh,” she said, when he finished his speech, and it was a hollow, muffled Oh.
And I dragged my corpse into the kitchen
, she thought to herself. It was an expression of Ilan’s, her ex, the man who had shared her life and, in their good years, enriched the goodness.
The fullness of life
, the old Ilan used to say and blush with gratitude, with reserved, awkward enthusiasm, which propelled Ora toward him on a wave of love. She always thought that deep in his heart he was amazed at having been granted this fullness of life at all. She remembers when the kids were little and they lived in Tzur Hadassah, in the house they bought from Avram, how they liked to hang the laundry out to dry at night, together, one last domestic chore at the end of a long, exhausting day. Together they would carry the large tub out to the garden facing the dark fields and the valley, and the Arab village of Hussan. The great fig tree and the grevillea rustled softly with their own mysterious, rich lives, and the laundry lines filled up with dozens of tiny articles of clothing like miniature hieroglyphics: little socks and undershirts and cloth shoes and pants with suspenders and colorful OshKosh overalls. Was there someone from Hussan who had gone out in the last light of day and was watching them now? Aiming a gun at them? Ora wondered sometimes, and a chill would flutter down her spine.
Or was there a general, human immunity for people hanging laundry—especially this kind of laundry?

Her thoughts flit as she remembers how Ofer presented her and Ilan with his new “tankist” overalls. They had already sold the Tzur Hadassah house by then and moved north to Ein Karem, closer to the city. Ofer came out of his room wrapped in the big, fireproof overalls, approached them with little hops and skips, swayed this way and that, flapped his arms, and shouted sweetly: “Mommy! Daddy! Teletubbies!” Two decades earlier, in the garden at night, in the middle of hanging up the boys’ clothes, Ilan had walked through the crowded lines and hugged her, and they had both rocked together, entangled in the damp laundry, laughing softly, sighing lovingly, and Ilan had whispered in her ear, “Isn’t it, Orinkah? Isn’t it the fullness of life?” She had hugged him as hard as she could, with a salty happiness pulsing in her throat, and had felt that for one fleeting moment she had caught it as it rushed through her, the secret of the fruitful years, their tidal motion, and their blessing in her body and his, and in their two little children and in the house they had built for themselves, and in their love, which finally, after years of wandering and hesitating, and after the blow of Avram’s tragedy, was now, it seemed, standing up on its own two feet.

Ofer finished packing in his room, and she stood motionless, dropsical, in the kitchen, and thought that Ilan had won again without any effort: she would not go on the trip with Ofer, she would not have even one week with him. Ofer must have sensed what she was going through, as he always did, even if he sometimes denied it, and he came and stood behind her and said, “Come on, Mom, it’s okay …” He said it tenderly, in a voice that only he knew how to use. But she hardened her heart and did not turn to him. They had planned the Galilee trip for a whole month. It was her gift to him for finishing the army, and it was a gift for herself too, of course, for
her
release from his army. Together they’d gone out and bought two little tents that folded up into small squares and elaborate backpacks and sleeping bags and hiking boots, but only for her: Ofer wouldn’t give up his dingy pair. In her spare time she’d bought thermal
underwear and hats and fanny packs and Band-Aids for blisters and canteens and waterproof matches and a camping stove and dried fruit and crackers and canned food. Every so often, Ofer would pick up the swelling backpacks in her bedroom, gauge their weight in astonishment, and comment, “They’re coming along well, really growing nicely.” He joked that she’d have to find a Galilean Sherpa to carry all the gear she was packing. She laughed heartily, responding to his good spirits, to the light in his face. In the last few weeks, as his discharge date approached, she could feel the tastes and smells slowly returning from exile. Even the sounds sharpened, as they do when you get your ears flushed. Little surprises awaited her, wild crossbreeds of sensations: she would open a water bill and feel as if she had unwrapped a package of fresh parsley. Sometimes she would say to herself out loud, so she could believe it: “One week alone, the two of us, in the Galilee.” And mostly she proclaimed to no one: “Ofer is being released from the army. Ofer is getting out. He’s getting out of it in one piece.”

During the last week she played the words over and over again to the walls of the house, growing bolder and bolder. “The nightmare is over,” she would say. “No more nights of sleeping pills,” she whispered defiantly, and knew she was tempting fate. But Ofer had been on his discharge leave for two weeks by then, and there was no immediate threat. The general, almost eternal conflict from which she had disconnected herself years ago kept on making its dark circles, here a terrorist attack, there a targeted assassination, hurdles that the soul leaped over with an expressionless face and without ever looking back. And perhaps she was emboldened to hope because she felt that Ofer himself was starting to believe that this was it, that it was over. A few days earlier, when he stopped sleeping for eighteen hours straight every day, she noticed the change in him, the slight civilianness that diluted his military speak, and his expressions, which softened day by day, and even the way he moved around the house once he allowed himself to grasp that he had apparently escaped his three years of lousy military service unharmed. “My boy is coming back,” she reported cautiously
to the fridge and the dishwasher, to the computer mouse and the flower arrangement she put out in a vase. She knew full well from her experience with Adam, who had been out of the army for three years, that they don’t really come back. Not like they were before. And that the boy he used to be had been lost to her forever the moment he was nationalized—lost to himself, too. But who said that what happened to Adam would happen to Ofer? They were so different, and what mattered now was that Ofer was coming out of the Armored Corps—
and out of his armor
, she thought, waxing poetic. These were the sweet drops she had been pouring into herself just the night before, when she took the remote control out of his hand and covered him with a thin blanket, and sat watching him sleep. His full, wide lips were slightly parted in a hint of an ironic smile, as if he knew she was watching him. His rounded forehead gave him, even in his sleep, a slightly severe expression, and his open face, with the bronzed crown shaved down to a stubble, looked, more than ever before, strong and ready for life. A man, she thought in amazement. A total man. Everything in him looked possible and open and propelled. The future itself lit up his face, from inside and out. And now this operation suddenly comes along, and I could really do without it, Ora sighed the next morning as she stood in the kitchen and made herself a particularly noxious cup of coffee. Had she been able to, she would have turned around and gone back to bed and slept until the whole thing was over. How many days could a campaign like this last? A week? Two? A lifetime? But she didn’t even have the strength to go back to bed, incapable of taking a single step, and from one moment to the next everything became decided, inevitable. Her body already knew, and her stomach, and her gut, which was melting away.