To the End of the Land (31 page)

“Look,” she says a moment later in surprise, “I haven’t thought about that for years.”

Avram says nothing.

“Should I go on?”

I’ll take that as a yes, she tells herself, that jerk of the head.

The closer they got to home, to Tzur Hadassah, the more tense and nervous Ilan grew. She noticed that from a certain angle his chin looked weak, evasive. She saw the damp marks his fingers were leaving on the wheel—Ilan, who almost never sweated. He parked the car opposite the rusty gate, took Adam out, and handed him to her without looking in her eyes. Ora asked if he wanted to carry Adam into the house himself, for the first time, but he said, “You, you,” and pushed the baby into her arms. She remembers the short walk down the paving stones
through the garden, the lopsided little house with its sharp textured walls dotted with cement spots. It was a “Jewish Agency house” that Avram’s mother had inherited from a childless uncle and lived in with Avram since he was ten. She remembers the neglected garden, which became overgrown with weeds and tall thistles during the years when Ora and Ilan could only tend to Avram. She even remembers thinking that as soon as she recovered she would go into the garden and introduce Adam to her beloved fig and grevillea trees. And she remembers the feel of her crooked steps as she duck-walked painfully around her stitches. She talks softly. Avram listens. She sees that he’s listening, but for some reason she feels as though it is mostly herself she is talking to now.

Ilan walked quickly ahead of her up the three uneven steps, opened the door, and stood aside to let her go in with Adam. There was something chilling and hurtful in his courtesy. She made a point of taking the first step in on her right foot, and said out loud, “Welcome home, Adam”—she felt, as she did every time she said or thought his name, a secret caress of Ada inside her—and carried him to his room, where his crib was already set up. Although he was sleeping, she turned him around in all directions to show his translucent eyelids the bureau, the chest of drawers with a changing pad, the box of toys, and the bookshelves.

Then she discovered a piece of paper taped to the door:
Hello Baby-o
, it said.
Welcome. Here are a few instructions from the hotel management
.

She placed the baby in his crib. He looked tiny and lost. She covered him with a thin blanket and stood gazing at him. Something prickled at her back, causing unease. The paper taped to the door seemed full of words, too many words. She leaned over and stroked Adam’s warm head, sighed, and walked back to the door to read it:

The hotel management asks that you respect the peace and quiet of the other lodgers
.

Remember: the proprietress belongs solely to the hotel owner, and your use of her is limited to her upper portion only!

The hotel management expects guests to leave when they reach the age of 18!

And so on and so forth.

She crossed her arms over her chest. She suddenly felt tired of Ilan and his wisecracks. She reached out and ripped the paper off and crumpled it tightly.

“You didn’t like that?” Ilan piped up, sounding annoyed. “I just thought … Never mind. It didn’t work. Want to drink something?”

“I want to sleep.”

“And him?”

“Adam? What about him?”

“Should we leave him here?”

“I don’t know … Should we take him into our room?”

“I don’t know. Because if we’re asleep and he wakes up here, alone …”

They looked at each other awkwardly.

She tried to listen to her instincts and couldn’t hear anything. She had no desire, no knowledge or opinion. She was confused. Deep in her heart she had hoped that when the baby was born she would immediately know everything she needed to know. That the baby would infuse her with a primal, natural, and unimpeachable knowledge. Now she realized how much she had looked forward to that throughout the pregnancy, almost as much as to the baby itself—to the acuteness of knowing the right thing to do, which she had lost completely in recent years, since Avram’s tragedy.

“Come on,” she said to Ilan, “we’ll leave him here.”

She felt the pain of unraveling again, as she had whenever she’d had to part with Adam in the hospital. “Yes, he doesn’t need to sleep with us.”

“But what if he cries?” Ilan asked hesitantly.

“If he cries we’ll hear him. Don’t worry, I’ll hear him.”

They went to their room and slept for two whole hours, and Ora woke a minute or two before Adam made a sound and immediately felt the fullness in her breasts. She woke Ilan to go and bring the baby to her. She arranged the pillows on the bed
and leaned back heavily, and Ilan came in from the other room holding Adam, his face glowing.

She breast-fed him and was once again amazed at how small his head looked against her breast. He sucked strongly, firmly, almost without looking at her, and she felt blades of unfamiliar pleasure and pain turn over clods of body and soul. Ilan stood looking at them the whole time, mesmerized, all corporeality stripped from his face. Every so often he asked if she was comfortable, if she was thirsty, if she felt the milk coming out. She pulled the child away from one nipple and moved him to the other breast and wiped her nipple with a cloth. Ilan stared at her breast, which she thought looked huge, moonlike, and webbed with bluish veins, and there was a new awe in his expression. He suddenly looked like a little boy, and she asked, “Don’t you want to take pictures of him?”

He blinked as though awakening from a dream. “No, I don’t feel like taking pictures now. The light in here isn’t good.”

“What were you thinking about?”

“Nothing, no one.”

She could see what looked like a dark spider settle down over his face. “Maybe you’ll take some later,” she said weakly.

“Yes, of course, later.”

But he hardly took any pictures later, either. Sometimes he would bring the camera, take off the lens cover, aim and focus, but somehow he didn’t like the lighting, or didn’t think the angle would work. “Maybe later,” he’d say, “when Adam is more alert.”

Avram clears his throat to remind her of his existence. She smiles at him in surprise: “I got carried away. I suddenly remembered all sorts of … Do you want to keep walking?”

“No, it’s okay here.” He leans back on his elbows, even though his entire body is bubbling with a desire to leave this place.

They sit looking down at the verdant valley. Behind Avram, in his shadow, is a silent commotion. Ants bustle along a dry stem of fennel plant, gnawing at the wood and the crumbs of congealed honey left by last year’s bees. A tiny scepter of orchid stands tall, purple and light as a butterfly, its pair of tuberous roots in the earth—one slowly emptying out, the other filling
up. A little farther away, in the shade of Avram’s right upper back, a small white deadnettle, engaged in its complicated affairs, sends out olfactory signals to insects that constantly flit between it and other plants, and it grows fertile sepals, for self-pollination, in case the insects fail it.

“And one night, when Adam was about a month old, he woke up hungry. Ilan got up to bring him to me, but when I fed him Ilan didn’t stay with us in the room. It was strange. I called him, he was in the living room, and he said he would be right with us. I couldn’t understand what he was doing there, in the dark. I didn’t hear any noise or movement. I had the feeling he was standing by the window looking out, and I got nervous.”

Scenes she hasn’t thought of for many years rise up before her eyes, and they are sharp and alive, more lucid than ever. She realizes that perhaps she is no less afraid to tell these things than he is to hear them.

“When I finished feeding, I took Adam back to his crib, and then I saw Ilan standing in the middle of the living room. He was just standing there, as if he’d forgotten where he was going. I saw him from behind, and I knew straightaway that something was wrong. His face was awful. He looked at me as if he was afraid of me, or wanted to hit me. Or both. He said he couldn’t do it anymore, he couldn’t take it. That you—” She swallows. “Look, are you sure you want to hear this?”

Avram grunts something, pulls himself up into a seated position, and rests his head on his arms. She waits. His back heaves. He does not get up and walk away.

“Ilan said his thoughts about you were destroying him. That he felt like a murderer—
‘I have killed and also taken possession,’
he said—and that he couldn’t look at Adam without seeing you and thinking about you at the stronghold, or in prison camp, or in the hospital.”

The back of Avram’s neck contracts.

She asked him, “What do you want us to do?” Ilan did not answer. The house was heated, but she was still cold. She stood barefoot in her robe and shivered and leaked milk. She asked again what he proposed doing, and Ilan said he didn’t know, but
he couldn’t go on this way. He was starting to scare himself. “Before, when I brought him to you—” He stopped.

“It’s not our fault,” she mumbled—that was their mantra during those years. “We didn’t want it to happen, and we didn’t invite it. It just happened, Ilan, it’s just a terrible thing that happened to us.”

“I know.”

“And if it hadn’t been him there, in the stronghold, it would have been you.”

He snorted. “That’s just it, isn’t it?”

“It was you or him, there was no other option.” She walked over to hug him.

“Stop it, Ora.” He raised a hand to keep her away. “We’ve heard it, we’ve said it, we’ve talked about it. I’m not to blame and you’re not to blame, and Avram is certainly not to blame, and we didn’t want it to happen, but it did happen, and if I wasn’t such a nothing I would kill myself right this minute.”

She stood silently. Everything he said she had thought of countless times before, in his voice and hers. She couldn’t gather up the strength to tell him not to talk such nonsense.

As she tells these things to Avram now, she feels cold in the day’s intensifying heat, and her voice trembles a little from the tension. She cannot see his face. His face is hidden in his arms, and his arms embrace his knees. She has the feeling that he’s listening to her from within the depths of his flesh, like an animal in its lair.

“And the fact that we’re living here,” Ilan said.

“It’s just until he gets back,” she murmured. “We’re just looking after his house.”

“I keep telling him that when I’m with him,” Ilan whispered, “and I don’t know if he even understands that we’re actually living here.”

“But as soon as he gets back, we’ll leave.”

Ilan sneered. “And now our kid is going to grow up here.”

Ora thought that if Ilan didn’t come over and hold her immediately, her body would fall to the ground and shatter.

“And I can’t see any way out of it, or any chance that anything
will ever work out for us”—he was shouting now—“and just think about it, we’ll live out our lives here, and we’ll have another child and maybe another, we once talked about four, including one we’d adopt, right? To repay a kindness to humanity, didn’t we say? And every time we look into each other’s eyes we’ll see
him
. And all that time, through all our lives, and his; twenty, thirty, fifty years, he’ll sit there in his darkness, do you understand?” Ilan seized his head with both hands and hammered with his voice, and Ora was suddenly afraid of him. He bellowed: “There will be a child here who’ll grow up and be an entire world, and over there he’ll be a living dead, and this child could have been his, and you could have been his too, if only—”

“And then maybe you would have been a living dead somewhere.”

“You know what?”

And she did.

“Is this hard for you?” Ora asks Avram in a muffled voice.

“I’m listening,” he answers, his jaws breaking the words up into tight syllables.

“Because if it’s too difficult—”

He lifts his head and his face looks as though a firm hand is crushing it. “Ora, it’s my finally hearing from the outside something I’ve been hearing inside my head for years.”

She wants to touch his hand, to absorb some of what’s overflowing from him, but she doesn’t dare. “You know, it’s strange, but it’s the same way for me.”

She had no strength left. She collapsed on the couch. Ilan came and stood facing her and said he had to leave.

“Where to?”

“I don’t know, I can’t stay here.”

“Now?”

He was suddenly very tall. It was as though he stretched out more and more from above and looked all stiff and his eyes glistened.

“You mean you’re going to walk out and leave me alone with him?”

“I’m no good here, I’m poisoning the air, I hate myself here. I even hate you. When I see you like that, so full, I just can’t stand you.” Then he added, “And I can’t love Adam. I can’t manage to love him. There’s a glass wall between him and me. I don’t feel him, I don’t smell him. Let me go.”

She said nothing.

“Maybe if I think quietly a bit, for a few days, maybe I’ll be able to come back. Right now I have to be alone, Ora, give me one week alone.”

“And how am I supposed to manage here?”

“I’ll help you, you won’t have to worry about anything. We’ll talk on the phone every day, I’ll find help for you, a nanny, a babysitter, you can be totally free, you can go back to school, find a job, do anything you want, just let me go now, it’s not good for me to stay here even for ten minutes.”

“But when did you think about all this?” Ora murmured dully. “We were together the whole time.”

Ilan spoke rapidly, organizing her bright future in a blink. “I could actually see,” she tells Avram, “how in a second that mechanism of his was turned on, you know? The cogwheels in his eyes?”

She looked at Ilan and thought that as smart as he was, he didn’t understand anything, and that she had made a terrible mistake with him. She tried to imagine what her parents would say and how devastated they would be.

“And I thought about how they always warned me about you,” she tells Avram, “and how they admired
him
, mainly my mother, who in my opinion always wondered what a guy like him saw in me.”