To the End of the Land (23 page)

“Come on, let’s go.”

After no more than a hundred steps, beyond a small hill, the path led them into the stream once again.

Avram stood defeated. This turn was too much for him. For
me too, Ora thought and sat down angrily. She took off her shoes and socks, tied them and fastened them, rolled up her pants, and walked firmly into the freezing, snow-fed water, unable to stifle a tiny shriek. Avram was still stuck on the bank behind her, confused by the forces that both pulled and pushed him. Desperate as he was, he knew that the bank Ora was moving toward now was the side on which they had begun their trek, and there, it seemed, was some stability, perhaps because that was the side of home. He sat down and went through the motions, tied his shoes to the backpack almost without seeing Ofer’s pair, and waded into the cold water with his lips pursed. This time he took resolute strides, kicking up a big commotion, and then came to sit down beside Ora on the bank. He slapped his feet dry and put his socks and shoes back on. Ora felt that he was at ease, not only because he was back on the familiar side but because he had seen that it was possible to cross over and back. And that is exactly what they did, three or four more times—they lost count—on that first morning of their Upper Galilee journey, which she was still calling a hike, if she was even calling it anything, if they even spoke more than a few words the whole day: “Come on,” “Give me your hand,” “Watch out here,” “Damn cows.” The path and the stream weaved and converged, and by the third crossing they no longer removed their shoes but simply walked through the mud and the water and climbed back up, sloshing around in their shoes until the water seeped out. Finally the path broke away from the Hatzbani River and became easier and earthier, an ordinary trail through the fields, dotted with big puddles of mud, pale cyclamens hovering on either side. Avram stopped glancing behind him every few minutes and did not ask whether Ora would know how to find the way back. He seemed to have realized that she had no intention of going back anywhere and that he was her hostage. He grew introverted, resigned to reducing his vitality to that of a plant, a lichen, or a spore. It must hurt less that way, Ora imagined. Why am I torturing him? she wondered as she watched him walk, frail and downtrodden, serving out a sentence he did not understand at all. He’s no longer part of me or of my
life and really hasn’t been for years. She did not feel pained by this thought, merely baffled: How could it be that the person I thought was my own flesh and blood, the root of my soul, would not tug at my heartstrings when he is severed from me in this way? What am I doing with him now? Why did this fixation grab hold of me now, when I need all my strength to rescue one child—why burden myself with another?

“Ofer,” she murmured, “I’m forgetting to think about him.”

Avram turned around suddenly and walked back down the path, aiming himself at her with his faltering steps. “Tell me what you want, I don’t have the strength for these games.”

“I told you.”

“I don’t get it.”

“I’m running away.”

“From what?”

She looked into his eyes and said nothing.

He swallowed. “Where’s Ilan?”

“Ilan and I separated a year ago. A bit less. Nine months.”

He swayed a little, as though she had hit him.

“That’s that,” she said.

“What do you mean separated? From who?”

“From who? From us. From each other. That’s it.”

“Why?”

“People separate. It happens. Come on, let’s go.”

He raised a heavy hand and kept standing there like a dim-witted student. Under his stubble she saw his tortured expression. There were years when she and Ilan used to joke that if they ever split up, they’d have to keep pretending they were a couple, for his sake.

“What reason do you have to separate?” he growled. “I want to know what came over you all of a sudden. All these years you keep going and then you just get sick of it?”

He’s scolding me, Ora realized with some surprise. He’s complaining.

“Who wanted this?” Avram straightened up, suddenly full of power. “It was him, wasn’t it? Did he have another woman?”

Ora almost choked. “Calm down. The two of us decided
together. And maybe it’s better this way.” But then she seethed: “Anyway, why are you poking your nose into our lives? What do you even know about us? Where were you for three years? Where were you for thirty years?”

“I’m sorry.” He huddled over, alarmed. “I … Where was I?” He furrowed his brow as though he truly did not know.

“Anyway, that’s the situation.” Ora spoke smoothly now, to compensate for her outburst.

“And you?”

“What about me?”

“You’re alone?”

“I … I’m without him, yes. But I’m not alone.” She looked straight into his eyes. “I really don’t feel alone.” Her attempt at a smile did not work.

Avram wrung his hands nervously. She could feel his body rallying to take in the news. Ora and Ilan are separated. Ilan alone. Ora alone. Ora without Ilan.

“But why? Why?!” He was riled up again, shouting into her face, all but stomping his feet.

“You’re shouting. Don’t shout at me.”

“But how … you were always …” He let his backpack drop and looked up at her like a miserable puppy. “No, explain this to me from the beginning. What happened?”

“What happened?” She put down her backpack, too. “Lots of things happened since Ofer enlisted. Since you decided that you had to, I don’t know, disappear on me.”

His hands crushed each other. His eyes darted around.

“Our lives changed,” Ora said softly, “and I changed. And Ilan, too. And the family. I don’t know where to start telling you.”

“Where is he now?”

“On a trip in South America. Took a vacation from the office and everything. I don’t know how long he’ll be gone. We haven’t really had any contact recently.” She hesitated. She did not tell him that Adam had gone along, too. That in fact she was separated from her older son as well. That from him, from Adam, she might even be divorced. “Give me some time, Avram. My life is a mess right now, it’s not easy for me to talk about this.”

“Okay, okay, we don’t have to talk.”

He stood up looking frightened and stricken, like an ant nest kicked by a crude foot. Once, Ora thought, these sorts of plot twists, new permutations, frenetic changes, used to excite him, stimulate his mind and body,
fermentize
him—his word. Oh, she sighed silently, all the endlessly possible. Remember? Remember? You invented that, you made those rules for us. Playing blindman’s buff in lower Manhattan and opening our eyes in Harlem. And the way you said the lion
should
lie down with the lamb—let’s see what happens, you said. Maybe for once in the history of the universe there’ll be a surprise. Maybe this one particular lion and this one particular lamb will make a go of it together, this one time, and maybe they’ll reach—she could not remember the word he’d used—“elevation”? “Salvation”? His words, an entire lexicon, a dictionary and a phrasebook and a glossary, at the age of sixteen and nineteen and twenty-two, but since then: silence, lights out.

They started walking again. Slowly, side by side, bowed under their weights. She could practically feel the news sinking into him, like a solution trickling into a substance and changing its composition. He was slowly grasping that for the first time in thirty-five years he was really with her alone, without Ilan, without even the shadow of Ilan.

Whether or not that was true, she had trouble deciding. For months now she hadn’t been able to make up her mind. One minute she thought this way, and the next she thought the other.

“And the kids?” Avram blurted.

Ora slowed her steps. He wasn’t even willing to say their names.
“The kids,”
she annunciated, “are grown now, the kids are independent. They can make up their own minds whom to be with and where.”

He shot her a quick sideways glance, and for a moment a screen lifted and his eyes plunged into hers. He looked at her and knew her to the depths of her aggrievedness. Then the screen covered him over again. Within the sorrow and the pain, Ora felt a thrill: there was still someone inside there.

• • •

They kept on this way till the evening, walking a little then stopping to rest, avoiding roads and people, eating food from Ora’s backpack, picking the odd grapefruit or orange and finding pecans and walnuts on the ground. They filled and refilled their water bottles from brooks and springs. Avram drank constantly, Ora hardly at all. They walked this way and that like a pendulum, and she wondered if he understood that they were intentionally disorienting themselves so they could not find their way back.

And they barely spoke. She tried to say something a few times about the separation, about Ilan, about herself, but he would put his hand up in supplication, almost pleading—he did not have the strength for it. Maybe later. Tonight or tomorrow. Preferably tomorrow.

He was growing weaker, and she too was unaccustomed to such exertion. Calluses developed on his heels, and jock itch set in. She offered him Band-Aids and talc, and he refused. In the afternoon they napped under the shade of a leafy carob tree, then meandered a little more and stopped to doze again. Her thoughts grew unfocused. She thought it might be because of him: just as he had once awakened her and turned her inside out, his presence was now extinguishing and uninspiring. At dusk, when they sprawled on the edge of a pecan grove on a bed of dry leaves and nutshells, she looked up at the sky—empty apart from two noisy, stationary helicopters that had been hovering for hours, probably watching the border—and thought that she really wouldn’t mind meandering like this for the rest of the twenty-eight days, even a whole month. Just to stupefy herself. But what about Avram?

Perhaps he wouldn’t care, either. Perhaps he also felt like roaming now. What do I know about what he’s going through and what his life is like and who he’s with? she thought. As for me, it’s really not bad this way, it’s less painful. She noted with surprise that even Ofer had somewhat quieted in her over the last few hours. Maybe Avram was right and you didn’t have to talk about everything, or about anything. What was there to say, anyway? At most, if the right moment came along, she
would tell him a bit about Ofer, carefully—maybe out here he wouldn’t be so resistant—just a few little things, maybe the easy things, the funny things. So at least he’d know who Ofer was in general outlines, in chapter headings. So at least he would know this person he had brought into the world.

They pitched their tents in a small wooded area, among terebinth and oak trees. Ofer had drilled her at home on setting up the tent, and to her amazement she did it with almost no difficulty. First she set up her own, then she helped Avram, and the tents did not stealthily attack her or slyly wrap themselves around her and did not pull her inside them like a carnivorous plant, as Ofer had predicted they might. When she had finished there were two round little tents, hers orange and his blue, about three or four yards apart, two bubbles that looked like little spaceships, impervious to water and to each other, and both had tiny windows covered with long nylon foreskins.

Avram still avoided opening Ofer’s backpack. Even the outside pockets. He said he didn’t need to change his clothes, which had been washed several times on his body in the stream that day, and he could lie down just as he was, on the ground, he didn’t need a pad, and anyway he wouldn’t rest for long because Ora hadn’t brought the sleeping pills he usually used, which were kept in a drawer next to his bed. The ones she’d brought, the homeopathic ones she’d found in the bathroom, were not his. “Whose are they, then?” Ora asked without moving her lips. “Um …” Avram dismissed the question. “They don’t have any effect on me.” Ora thought about the woman who used the vanilla-scented deodorant, who had purple hair, and who for a month, apparently, or so she thought he’d told her on the phone, had not lived with him.

At seven, when they could no longer bear the silence, they went to their tents and lay awake for hours, dozing off occasionally. Avram was exhausted from the day’s efforts and almost managed to fall asleep with the help of the ludicrous pills, but eventually he overcame them.

They tossed and turned, sighed and coughed. Too much reality was bustling inside them: the fact that they were out in
the open, lying on earth that felt uncomfortably knobby with stones and dimples, and frighteningly new, and the unseen but tense quivering of a large animal, and a nervousness instilled in them by the twinkling stars, and breezes—first warm, then cool, then damp—that kept moving in different directions like soft breaths from an invisible mouth. And the calls of nocturnal birds and the rustling all around and the buzz of mosquitoes. At every moment it seemed as if something was crawling on their cheeks or down their legs, and the sound of light steps came from the nearby thicket, and the jackals called, and once there was the yelp of a creature being preyed upon. Ora must have fallen asleep despite all this, because she was awoken early in the morning by three people in military uniform standing on the stoop outside her front door. They squeezed against the wall to allow the senior member to pass by and knock. The doctor felt in his bag for a tranquilizer, and the young officer readied her arms to catch Ora if she passed out.

Ora saw the three of them straighten up and clear their throats, and the senior one raised his hand and hesitated for an instant. She watched his fist, transfixed, and it occurred to her that this was a moment that would last a lifetime, but then he knocked on the door, knocked firmly three times, and looked at the tips of his shoes, and as he waited for the door to open he silently rehearsed the notification:
at such-and-such time in such-and-such place, your son Ofer, who was on an operational mission—

Across the street a series of windows slammed shut and drapes were drawn closed, with only their corners pulled aside for someone to peek out. But her door would remain shut. Ora finally managed to move her feet and tried to pull herself into a seated position in the sleeping bag. She was bathed in cold sweat. Her eyes were closed and her hands felt rigid, unmovable. The senior officer knocked three times again and was so averse to doing it that he knocked too hard, and for a moment he seemed to want to break down the door and burst in with the news. But the door was closed and no one was opening it to receive his notification, and he looked awkwardly at the document in
his hand, which stated explicitly that at such-and-such time in such-and-such place, your son Ofer, who was on an operational mission. The female officer walked backward on the stoop to check the house number, and it was the right house, and the doctor tried to peer through the window to see if there was a light on inside, but no light was on. Two more weaker knocks, and the door remained shut, and the senior officer leaned on it with his whole weight as if seriously considering breaking the door down and hurling his notification inside at any cost. He looked at his colleagues with a confused expression, because it was becoming clear to them that something had gone wrong with the rules of this ritual, that their businesslike and professional desire, their essentially logical desire, to deliver the notification, to rid themselves of it, to vomit it out, and above all to embed it quickly into the person it belonged to by law and by destiny, namely, that at such-and-such time in such-and-such place, your son Ofer, who was on an operational mission—this desire of theirs was now encountering a wholly unexpected yet equally powerful force, which was Ora’s absolute unwillingness to receive the notification or accommodate it in any way, or even to acknowledge that it belonged to her at all.