To the End of the Land (21 page)

She stops and waits for him, and he comes over and stands one or two steps behind her. She waves her hand over the broad
plain glowing in bright green, glistening with beads of dew, and over the distant, mauve mountains. There is a hum, and not just of insects: Ora thinks she can hear the air itself teeming with a vitality it can barely contain.

“Mount Hermon,” she says, pointing to a pure white glow in the north. “And look here, did you see the water?”

“Do me a favor,” Avram spits out, and walks on with his head hanging.

But there’s a stream here, Ora thinks to herself. We’re walking alongside a stream. She laughs quietly at his back as he recedes. “You and me by a stream, could you have imagined?”

For years she had tried to get him out of the house, to take him to places that would light up his soul and bathe him in beauty, but at most she’d managed to drag him to dull meetings in cafés he chose, a couple of times a year. It had to be one he chose, and she never argued, even though the places he picked were always noisy, crowded, mass-produced (his word, the old Avram’s), as if he enjoyed seeing her aversion, and as if through these places he was confronting her, for the thousandth time, with his distance from her and from who he used to be. And now, in a completely unexpected way, it’s just the two of them and the stream and trees and daylight.

On his body the backpack looks shrunken and smaller than hers, like a child clinging to his father’s back. She stands looking at him for a moment longer, with Ofer’s pack over his shoulders. Her eyes widen and brighten. She feels the first rays of sun slowly smoothing over her bruised wings.

Mist rises from the fragrant earth as it warms, and from the large, juicy rolls of excrement left by the cows that preceded them. Elongated puddles from the recent rains reply to the dawn sky, emitting modest signals, and frogs leap into the stream as they walk by, and there is not a human being in sight.

A moment later they come up against a barbed-wire fence blocking the path, and Avram waits for her. “I guess that’s it, then?”

Ora can hear how relieved he is that the hike is over relatively quickly and painlessly. Her spirits fall—what is a fence doing in the middle of the path? Who would put a fence in a place like
this? Her Moirae gather to determine her fate, to circle her in a dance of mockery and rebuke—for her
ungainliness
, her
appliance dyslexia
, and her
user-manual illiteracy
—but as she wallows in their juices, she notices some thin metal cylinders on the ground. She takes her glasses out and puts them on, ignoring Avram’s look of amazement, and realizes that part of the fence is in fact a narrow gate. She looks for the tether that secures it and finds a twisted, rusty wire.

Avram stands next to her without lifting a finger, either because he hopes she will not be able to open it or because he is once again too weak to understand what is going on. But when she asks for his help he pitches in immediately, and after she explains what needs to be done—namely, to pick up two large stones and pound the wire on either side until it gradually gives way and breaks—he studies the tether for a long time, hoists the loop over the fence post in one swift motion, the barbed wire falls to the ground at their feet, and they walk through.

“We have to shut it behind us,” she says, and Avram nods. “Will you do it?” He locks the gate, and she notes to herself that he needs to be constantly activated and have his engine started; he seems to have given up his volition and handed the keys to her.
Nu
, she thinks in her mother’s voice, it’s the blind leading the blind. After they go a little farther, something else occurs to her, and she asks if he knows why there was even a fence there. He shakes his head, and she explains about the cows and their pasture areas. Since she knows very little, she talks a lot, and is unable to determine how much of it he is taking in, or why he is listening with such stern concentration—whether he hears what she was saying or is simply lapping up the sounds of her voice.

She notices that he is becoming irritable again, throwing nervous glances behind him and jumping every time a crow caws. After losing focus on him for a moment, she turns to find that he has stopped walking and is standing a ways back, staring at the earth. She walks over and finds the rotting corpse of a little songbird at his feet. She cannot identify it, but it has black feathers, a white stomach, and brown glassy eyes. Ants, white maggots, and flies are swarming all over it. She calls Avram’s
name twice before he snaps awake and follows her. How much farther am I going to be able to drag him, she wonders, before he erupts or falls apart? What am I doing to him? What did I do to Sami? What’s happening to me? All I do is cause trouble.

The path curves sharply and plunges into the stream. Ora stands close to the water and spots the path emerging on the opposite bank in a charming, innocent-looking zigzag. When she was planning the trip with Ofer, she had read something about how, in spring, “you’ll need to wet your feet in the streams once in a while.” But this is a torrent, and there is no other visible path. She cannot turn back—this is another new rule, a trick against her persecutors:
she must not reverse her tracks
. Avram stands next to her and stares at the glistening green water as though it were a huge mystery bustling with clues. His thick arms hang by his sides. His helplessness suddenly angers her, and she is angry at herself too, for not looking into what to do in such a situation before the hike. But before the hike she’d had Ofer. Ofer was supposed to navigate and lead, he would build bridges over the water for her, and now she is here alone with Avram. Alone.

She edges closer to the stream, careful not to slip. A large leafless tree is growing out of the water, and she leans in as far as she can and tries to break off a branch. Avram does not move. He stares hypnotically at the current, horrified when the dry branch snaps and Ora almost falls into the water. She angrily sticks the branch into the streambed, then pulls it out and measures it against her body. The ring of water reaches up to her waist. “Sit down and take off your shoes and socks,” she says. She sits down on the path and takes off her own shoes, sticks her socks in a side pocket on the backpack, ties the shoelaces together after threading them through a loop on top of the pack, and rolls her pants up to her knees. When she looks up, Avram is standing over her, looking at her feet the way he stared at the stream.

“Hey,” she says softly, a little surprised, and wiggles her pink toes at him. “Yoo-hoo!”

He sits down quickly to take off his shoes and socks. He
rolls his pants up to the knees, exposing thick, pale legs that are slightly bent but look surprisingly powerful. She remembers those legs well—the legs of a horseman, and also, as he himself once said, the legs of a stretched-out dwarf. “Hey,” he growls.

“Yoo-hoo.”

Ora looks away and laughs, excited by the flicker of old Avram from within his flatness, and perhaps also by his suddenly bared flesh.

They sit and watch the water. A translucent purple dragonfly flits by like an optical illusion. There was a time, Ora thinks, when I was at home in his body. And then there were years when I was in charge of it: I washed and cleaned and dried and clipped and shaved and bandaged and fed and drained and whatever else.

She shows him how to tie his shoes to the backpack, next to Ofer’s pair, and suggests that he empty out his pockets so his money and other stuff won’t get wet.

He shrugs.

“Not even an ID?”

Avram mumbles: “What do I need it for?”

She walks down to the water first, holding the branch, and lets out a yelp when she touches the cold torrent. She wonders what she will do if Avram gets swept away and thinks perhaps he shouldn’t even walk into a current like this in his condition. But she decides, of her own accord, by unanimous proclamation, that it will be all right, because there is simply no choice. She puts one foot in front of the other, fighting the flow of water that reaches up to her stomach now and is so powerful that she is afraid to lift her feet off the bottom. But Avram will be fine, she determines again, frightened. He will walk into this water and nothing will happen. Are you sure? Yes. Why? Because. Because for the last hour, really the last day and night, she’s had a continuous resolve, desperate yet determined, and she has used it countless times to force people and events to proceed exactly as she wished, because she needs them to, because she has no leeway for bargains or compromises, because she demands blind obedience to the new rules that her mind is constantly legislating—the regulations of this emergency state that
has befallen her. And one of the rules, quite possibly the most important one, is that she has to keep moving, has to be constantly in motion. Besides, she must keep moving because the water is freezing her entire lower half.

Her feet grope pebbles and silt, and slippery weeds float around her ankles. Every so often her toes grasp a little stone or rock. They examine it, hypothesize, draw conclusions, and a primeval fishlike sensation flutters in her spine. A long thin branch floats by near the surface and suddenly whips into a twist and slithers away. Droplets of water spray her glasses, and she gives up wiping them off. Every so often she dips her swollen left arm into the water and delights in the cold relief. Avram wades in behind her, and she hears his gasp of pained surprise when the water envelops him with its coolness. She keeps going, already halfway across. Torrents of water flow and part around her body and lap against her thighs and waist. The sun warms her face, and a field of blue and green rays dances in her eyes and in the drops on her glasses, and it feels good to stand in this transparent bubble of the moment.

She climbs up the opposite bank through deep, doughy mud that enfolds her feet and sucks at them with its quivering lips, and clouds of gnats rise from the indentations left by her soles. Another few steps and she is on dry land, where she collapses against a rock with her backpack. She feels a new lightness; in the water, in the current that surged through her, she’d felt as though a stone had been rolled from the mouth of a well she thought was dry. And then she remembers: Avram. Stuck in the middle of the stream with half-closed eyes and a face distorted with fear.

She quickly walks back through the dark, rich mud, stepping in the dimples of her own footprints, and holds the branch out to him. He presses his head down between his shoulders and refuses to move. Over the rush of the water she shouts that he can’t keep standing there—who knows what might be swimming in that water—and he instantly obeys her commanding tone, inches forward, and reaches for the branch. He moves slowly, and she takes tiny steps backward, then sits down on one rock
and plants her feet against another, and pulls him out with all her strength. “Come on, sit down and dry off,” she says, laughing. But he stands frozen in the mud, lost, his body reenacting his Tel Hashomer Hospital days, with the catatonic stares and the fossilized rigidity. With a panicked realization that he might fall back in, she rushes over to him. She fears that what she is doing to him might destabilize him. But he seems to be finding things easier now: after all, he did follow her for half an hour without collapsing. Perhaps over the years he has managed to acquire a certain strength, even a modicum of existential solidity (that was one of his idioms, the old Avram’s), and she no longer needs to bend each joint to activate it—ankles, knees, and thighs—the way she did back in those days, like a sculptor of one body. She used to go to his physiotherapy sessions, in exercise rooms or in the pool, and sit watching and memorizing, jotting down notes on what she observed. She forced him to work with her, secretly, in between the professional sessions, during sleepless nights. Nine months passed before his body learned to mimic the positions she molded it into. He once introduced her to a doctor on the ward as his choreographer, a disclosure that let her know that there was still just a little bit of Avram inside the shell.

He lets out a long exhalation and begins to defrost his limbs. He stretches his arms, back, shoulders, elbows, wrists. Everything is working, Ora thinks as she watches surreptitiously: broad, diagonal movements, the large muscle groups. He looks at the stream without believing he really crossed it, and when he smiles awkwardly at Ora, a fraction of the old charm flashes through. She feels a pang as she looks at him: Oh, my old, suspended lover. She returns a measured smile, very careful not to flood him. This is another piece of wisdom she’s learned in her long life among the tribe of men: the wisdom of not flooding them.

She shows him where to sit and how to put his feet on the rock so they’ll dry faster, and from a side pocket in the backpack she takes some crackers, processed cheese, and two apples. She holds them out to him and he munches heavily and methodically,
glancing around with his suspicious, studious look. He gets stuck again on her long, narrow feet, which have turned very pink from the cold water, and he quickly looks away. Then he slowly straightens his neck and spreads his arms out from his body, with cautious movements, like a huge dinosaur chick erupting from its egg. As he looks contemplatively at the opposite bank, Ora realizes that now, having crossed the stream, he is beginning to grasp that he has left behind what used to be, and that from here on there will be a new reality.

She starts talking, to distract him before he can get scared. She shows him how to peel off the large cakes of mud drying on his legs and slaps her own legs lightly to get the blood flowing. Then she puts her socks and shoes back on, ties her shoelaces the way Ofer taught her—she likes to feel that even from afar he is zipping and fastening her up with his embrace—and wonders whether she should try to tell Avram that Ofer, when he showed her the double knot, had said he was positive that no future invention could ever replace man’s ingenuity when it came to the simple act of tying shoelaces. “No matter what they invent,” he’d said, “we’ll always have that, and that’s how we’ll remember every morning that we’re human.” Her heart had filled with pride, perhaps because he’d said “human” so naturally, with such humanness. She had quoted Nahum Gutman, who wrote in his
Path of the Orange Peels
that every morning when he put on his shoes, he whistled excitedly, “because I am glad of the new day breaking.” And of course they both brought up Grandpa Moshe, her father, who had worn the same pair of shoes for seventeen years, explaining that he simply “walked lightly.” Ora had not been able to resist telling Ofer—she thought he’d probably heard the story before, but she risked it anyway—that when he was about eighteen months old and she’d put his first pair of shoes on, she’d accidentally put the left shoe on the right foot and vice versa. “And to think that for half a day you walked around with your shoes on the wrong feet, just because I decided that was the right way. It’s terrible how parents can determine their—Wait, have I already told you this story?” “Let’s see,” Ofer had said, laughing, and punched in a calculation
on his phone. They had endless such conversations, full of laughter and mutual potshots. An awkward warmth flowed between them, with soul-penetrating glances. In recent years this was diminishing, much as everything between them was diminishing. It seemed that ever since the two of them started to mature, he and Adam, they’d moved more into Ilan’s domain, and sometimes she thought they’d been transferred into a different magnetic field, with its own laws and sensibilities, and mainly its own impermeabilities, where she flailed in a tapestry of wires that tripped her up and made her falter ridiculously with each step. But it was still there, she convinced herself repeatedly. What existed between them must still exist somewhere, it’s just that it was slightly subterranean now, especially while he was serving in the army, and it would come back after he finished, and it might even be richer and fuller. She sighs loudly and wonders how it happened that her expertise in recent years was to look for signs of life in people.