To the End of the Land (18 page)

She remembers the way Ilan’s face lit up—it was in the army, in Sinai, when they were nineteen and a half and Ilan still dreamed of making movies and music, and Avram was still Avram—when he told her how moved he was every time he read in the book of Kings of how the great woman of Shunem told her husband they should prepare a resting place for the Prophet
Elisha.
Let us make, I pray thee, a little chamber on the roof
, Ilan read to her from the little army-issue Bible.
And let us set for him there a bed, and a table, and a stool, and a candlestick; and it shall be, when he cometh to us, that he shall turn in thither
.

They were lying on a narrow cot in his room on the base. Avram must have been at home on leave. His empty cot faced them, and on the wall above it was a line handwritten in charcoal:
It is not good that man should be …
The quote trailed off without bothering to include the last word,
alone
. Her head rested in the depression of Ilan’s shoulder. He read to her until the end of the chapter, slowly running his long musician’s fingers through her hair.

As it turns out, they are not going to South Tel Aviv but to Jaffa, and not to a hospital but to an elementary school that Sami locates only after driving around for a long time. Yazdi, who has recovered slightly, sits with his face pressed to the window and laps up the streets and scenes. Every so often he turns to Ora with a look of disbelief that such things can truly exist. Behind Sami’s back the two of them make up a game: he looks at her, she smiles, he looks back at the window and then peeks at her again over his shoulder. When they drive along the waterfront promenade, Sami says to Yazdi,
“Shuf el bahr”
—look at the sea. The boy puts his head and shoulders out of the window, but beyond the streetlamps the sea is just a dark mass with a few frothy mounds. He murmurs,
“Bahr, bahr,”
and spreads his fingers out. Ora asks, “Haven’t you ever seen the sea?” He does not answer, and Sami laughs: “This one, where’s he gonna see the sea? At the promenade of the refugee camp?” A breeze carries a whiff of saltwater, and Yazdi’s nostrils widen as he sniffs and tastes. His face has a strange, almost tortured expression, as if its features cannot tolerate the happiness.

Then the illness bears down on him again. His arms and head begin to jerk, and he looks like someone trying to avoid things being thrown at him. Ora keeps mopping his sweat with tissues, and when they run out she uses a rag she finds under the front
seat. There is a plastic bag there too, with his underwear, a pair of socks, a Ninja Turtles T-shirt that used to belong to Ofer and was passed on to Sami’s kids, a screwdriver with spare blades, and a clear globe with a tiny dinosaur inside. Yazdi is thirsty and his tongue flicks around in his mouth. The water bottle is empty, but Sami is afraid to stop for water at a kiosk. “On a day like this, an Arab at one of these kiosks, it’s not a good idea,” he explains drily. Soon, perhaps because of Sami’s nervous driving and the circuitous ambling around the maze of Jaffa’s alleyways, Yazdi starts to vomit.

Ora feels his body seize up, his ribs spasmodically rise and fall, and tells Sami to stop the car. Sami gripes that he can’t pull over here: a police van is parked on the opposite sidewalk. But when he hears another fitful gargle from the back, he speeds up as if he’s lost his mind. He runs red lights, looking for a dark corner or an empty lot, and yells at Yazdi in Arabic to hold it in. He threatens the boy, and curses him and his father and his father’s father. A projectile of vomit erupts from the boy’s mouth. Sami yells at Ora to aim Yazdi’s head at the floor, away from the upholstery, but the boy’s head jerks in all directions like a balloon with its air let out, and Ora is sprayed all over her feet, pants, shoes, and hair.

Sami’s right hand reaches back like lightning, feels around, touches something, and pulls back in disgust. “Gimme his hand!” he screeches in a thin, feminine voice. “Put his hand here!” Ora mechanically obeys the urgency in his voice, dimly hoping he might know some instant cure or Palestinian-Shamanic trick, and she holds Yazdi’s limp hand on the fake-wood space between the two front seats. Sami, without even looking, slams down on the hand with his heavy sledgehammer of a fist. Ora screams as though she is the one who’s been hit, and reaches to pull back Yazdi’s hand, but Sami, who doesn’t see what is happening, lands another blow on her arm.

A few minutes later they reach the school. They stop outside a locked gate and a young bearded man, who was waiting in the shadows inside, emerges and looks in all directions, then motions to Sami to follow him along the fence. They walk with
the fence between them. At a dark corner the young man holds open a broken part of the fence and comes out to Sami, and the two men whisper quickly, glancing around. Ora gets out of the taxi and inhales the damp night air. Her left arm is burning, and she knows the pain will get worse. In the light of the streetlamp she sees that she is covered with vomit stains. She tries to shake herself off. The bearded man holds Sami’s arm and walks him back to the taxi. They look at Yazdi lying inside, and Sami examines the upholstery with grieving eyes. They both ignore Ora. The young man gives some sort of signal over a cell phone, and three boys come running out of the dark school. Not a single word is uttered. The three pull Yazdi out of the taxi and carry him inside quickly, through a side gate. One of them holds Yazdi’s shoulders, and the other two hold his legs. Ora looks at them and thinks, This is not the first time they’ve carried someone inside like that. Yazdi’s head and arms droop, and his eyes are closed, and it is somehow clear to her that this is not his first time, either.

When she starts walking after them, the bearded man turns to her and then looks at Sami. Sami goes up to her: “Maybe it’s better if you stay here.”

Ora gives him a piercing look. He gives in, walks back to the bearded man, and whispers something to him. Ora assumes he is telling him it’s all right; perhaps he even said, “She’s one of us.”

Inside, the school is completely silent and dark, illuminated only by the moon and the streetlamp. Sami and the bearded man disappear, swallowed up into one of the rooms. Ora stops and waits. When her eyes grow accustomed to the dark, she sees that she is in a fairly large auditorium, with a few corridors leading out of it. Empty window boxes are placed here and there, and posters promoting quiet, neatness, and cleanliness hang crookedly on the walls. She can smell children’s sweat and a distant odor of locker rooms and above all the stench of vomit from her own clothes. She wonders how she will find Sami and Yazdi but is afraid to call out to them. She walks carefully through the darkness, taking small steps, with her arms out in front of
her, until she reaches a round supporting column in the middle of the auditorium. Her gaze orbits the walls. She sees pictures of faces she cannot make out, possibly Herzl and Ben-Gurion, or perhaps the prime minister and the chief of staff. A small memorial made out of a heap of rocks sits in the corner opposite her, beneath a large picture that seems to be of Rabin, with black metal letters affixed to the wall above. Ora slowly walks around the column, touching it with one hand. The rotation awakens in her the sweet dizziness she used to summon as a child, with a slight sensation of burning in her fingertips.

As though gathering images while she circles, she begins to see shadowy figures of men, women, and children dressed in rags, silent, submissive, dusted with refugee ash. They are standing some distance away, along the walls, watching her. Ora freezes in terror. They’re coming back, she thinks. For a brief deceptive moment she is convinced that her motion has made real the nightmare that always flickers in the distance. A young woman walks up to Ora and whispers in broken Hebrew that Sami said she could wash her clothes in the bathroom.

Ora follows the woman. The hallways rustle with shadows and the sounds of quick steps. Dim shapes hurry past. She hears almost no voices. The woman silently points to the girls’ bathroom and Ora goes in. She understands that she must not turn on the light, that the entire place must remain dark. In one of the doorless stalls she sits down and pees into the small toilet. Then she washes her face and hair in the sink, scrubs the vomit off her clothes as best she can, and runs cold water over her aching left arm. When she is done, she stands with both hands on the stainless-steel counter, shuts her eyes, and succumbs to an overwhelming weariness. But with weakness comes a sharp pang of fright, again, as though she has left her post.

What have I done.

I took Ofer to war.

I brought him to the war myself.

And if something happens to him.

And if that was the last time I touched him.

At the end, when I kissed him, I touched his cheek on the soft spot where there’s no stubble.

I took him there.

I didn’t stop him. I didn’t even try.

I called a cab and we went.

Two and a half hours on the road, and I did not try.

I left him there.

I left him for them.

With my own hands, I did.

Her breath stops. She is afraid to move. Paralyzed. It’s a feeling she has, a sharp, real knowledge.

Be careful, she thinks at him without moving her lips, and look behind you.

Then, of its own accord, her body begins to move very gently, almost imperceptibly. Shoulders, hips, a slight shift of the waist. She has no control over her limbs. She only feels that her body is communicating to Ofer how he should move to get out of some danger or trap over there. The peculiar involuntary motion continues for a long minute, and then her body quiets and returns to her, and Ora breathes and knows everything is all right, for now.
“Ahh,”
she sighs to her little abdomen reflected in the low mirror.

Sometimes I think I can remember almost every moment I had with him, from the second he was born. Yet at other times I find that entire phases are lost to me. “My friend Ariela gave birth prematurely, in her second trimester,” she tells a heavyset older woman in a floral scarf who has come into the bathroom and stands quietly to the side. She watches Ora with kind eyes and seems to be waiting for her to recover from whatever is paining her.

“They gave her an injection,” Ora says softly. “An injection that was supposed to kill the fetus in her womb. He wasn’t right, he had Down syndrome, and she and her husband decided they couldn’t raise a child like that. But the child was born alive, do you see? Do you understand me?” The woman nods and Ora continues. “There must have been a mistake in the amount of stuff they injected, and my friend asked them to let her hold the child for as long as he was alive. She sat up in bed, her husband walked out, he couldn’t take it”—Ora flashes her eyes at the woman and thinks she sees a spark of understanding and
comradeship—“and for fifteen minutes he was alive in her arms, and she kept talking to him, she hugged him and kissed him all over, it was a boy, and she kissed each of his fingers and fingernails. She always says he looked like a perfectly healthy child, except tiny, and translucent, and he moved around a little and had facial expressions, just like a baby. He moved his hands and his mouth, but he didn’t make any sound.” The woman listens with her arms folded over her chest. “And very slowly, he simply ended. He just went out like a candle, in total silence and without making any trouble about it, he twisted a little and folded in, and that was that. And my friend remembers those moments even more than the other three childbirths, before and after, and she always says that in the short time she had with him, she tried to give him as much life as she possibly could, and all her love, even though she was actually the one who killed him, or shared the decision to kill him.” Ora murmurs and runs her hands stiffly over her head and temples and crushes her cheeks between her hands, and her mouth opens briefly in a silent scream.

The woman bows her head slightly and says nothing. Now Ora notices that she is very old, and that her face is furrowed with deep wrinkles and covered with tattoos.

“And what do I have to complain about?” Ora continues in a cracked voice. “I held my child for twenty-one years—
wakhad wa-ashrin sana
,” she says in the tentative Arabic she remembers from high school. “But they went by so quickly, and I barely had time for anything with him, but now that his army is finished we could have really started.” Her voice breaks but she pulls herself together. “Come on, ma’am, let’s get out of here, please take me to Sami.”

It isn’t easy to find him. The old woman does not know Sami and seems not to understand what Ora wants. Still, she willingly leads her from room to room, pointing inside each one, and Ora peers into the dark classrooms. In some of them she sees people, not many, three here, five there, children and adults, huddled around a cluster of desks whispering, or sitting on the floor and warming up dinners on little gas cookers, or asleep in their
clothes on desks and chairs joined together. In one room she sees someone lying on a long bench, with several people bustling around him quickly but silently. In another a man kneels down to bandage the foot of a man sitting on a chair. A young woman cleans the wound of a man with a bare chest and a grimace on his face. From other rooms she hears stifled moans of pain and murmurs of comfort. There is a sharp smell of iodine in the air.

“And in the morning, what happens?” Ora asks in the hallway.

“Morning,” the old woman repeats in Hebrew and smiles broadly, “in the morning
kulhum mafish
—they’re all gone!” She mimes a bubble bursting.

Ora finally finds Sami and Yazdi. There is no light but the moonlight and the room is utterly silent. She stands in the doorway and looks at the little chairs turned upside down on the desks. A huge cardboard cutout of a seal hangs on the wall, with the caption
Recon-seal-iation
. Each of its parts is a conflict that has to be reconciled: Ashkenazim and Sephardim, left wing and right wing, religious and secular. Sami and the bearded man stand a few steps away, next to the blackboard, talking quietly with an older man who is short, solid, and silver-haired. Sami nods slightly at Ora, but his face is impervious. Something in his posture and the way he cuts through the air as he makes hand gestures is new to her and very foreign. Three little children, two or three years old, discover Ora and start running around her, excitedly pulling her by the pants without any embarrassment. They also make almost no sound, to Ora’s surprise: they too are well-trained partridge chicks. She follows them to the corner of the classroom, near the window. A little circle of women tightens around someone in the center. Ora glimpses between the women’s heads and sees a large woman sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall with her bare feet stretched out in front of her. She is breast-feeding Yazdi. His mouth is attached to her nipple and his feet hang over her lap. He is wearing different clothes: a brown-and-white-checkered shirt with black pants. For the first time since Ora met him,
his face looks serene. The breast-feeding woman watches him with deep concentration. She has a strong, wild face and bony, slightly masculine cheeks, and a full white breast. The women look hypnotized, all strung on one thread. Ora stands on her tiptoes, drawn inside the circle—after all, she has some part in Yazdi too, or perhaps she just wants to touch his hand one last time, to say goodbye. But when she tries to squeeze her way through, the women tighten up against her as one, and she withdraws and stands behind them.