To the End of the Land (38 page)

Ofer took another step, then another. He walked without falling, and perhaps thanks to his brother’s chirps, to which he had tied his willpower, he managed to maintain some stability. Like a tiny airplane in a storm, homing in on a beam of light from a control tower, he walked over and collapsed into his brother’s arms, and the two of them rolled on the rug, embraced and squirmed and shrieked with laughter. She suddenly feels like writing down this little memory so it won’t slip away for another twenty years. She just wants to describe the seriousness of Ofer as he walked, and Adam’s screeching excitement, and his huge relief, and above all, their puppy-like embrace of
each other. That was the moment they truly became brothers, the moment Ofer chose Adam, the moment Adam, perhaps for the first time in his life, truly believed he had been chosen. Ora smiles, bewitched by the heap of her children on the rug, and thinks how clever Ofer was, because he knew how to give himself to Adam, and because he carefully avoided getting trapped in the thicket of secrets and silences that lurked between her and Ilan’s open arms.

“So that was how he walked for the first time,” she sums up hastily, exhausted, and gives Avram a strained smile.

“The second time.”

“What do you mean?”

“You said so.”

“What?”

“That you didn’t see the first time, the real first steps.”

She shrugs. “Oh, yes, that’s true. But really what does it—”

“No, nothing.”

She wonders whether this is some strange insistence on historical accuracy, or perhaps a hint of haggling with her and with Ilan, a sort of “I didn’t and you didn’t, either.”

“Yes,” she says, “you’re absolutely right.”

They look at each other for a moment, and she knows: it’s haggling. And perhaps even more than that, it’s the settling of accounts. The discovery is frightening, but also exciting, like the first sign of an uprising, the rousing of someone who has been depressed and silenced and dormant for too long. Then it occurs to her that when Ofer rolled over onto his back for the first time, no one was there, either. Is that true? She checks quickly with herself. True. I swear: Ilan went over to his crib one afternoon and found him lying quietly on his back, looking at his blue elephant mobile—she even remembers the mobile, in its every detail, with utter clarity now. It’s as though someone has come along and removed a cataract that had covered her eye for years. And when he sat up for the first time he was alone too, she thinks with increasing bewilderment. And when he stood up for the first time.

For one moment, no longer, she hesitates, and then she gives
Avram a simple reportage of facts, the facts that now belong to him too, because he has finally come to demand them. His eyes narrow: she can almost see the wheels in his mind straining.

“Somehow the first time he did all these things—turning over, sitting up, standing, walking—he really was alone.”

“So,” Avram murmurs, staring at his fingertips, “is that something, you know, unusual?”

“Honestly, I’ve never thought about it before. I never made a list of all the first things he did. But for instance, when Adam sat up for the first time, or stood up or walked, I was with him. Well, I told you that for the first three years of his life we were never apart. And I remember how he glowed every time he accomplished something like that, and Ofer, yes, Ofer is—”

“Alone,” Avram quietly finishes, his features suddenly softening.

Ora gets up and hurries to her backpack, digs through it urgently, and pulls out a thick notebook with dark blue binding. From a side pocket she takes out a pen. Without introductions, still standing with her head slightly tilted, she writes on the first page:
Ofer walked funny. I mean, his walk, at first, was strange. Almost from the moment he started walking he used to veer around all sorts of obstacles that no one else could see, and it was really funny to watch. He would avoid something nonexistent, or draw back from some monster that must have been lurking for him in the middle of the room, and you could absolutely not convince him to step on that tile! It’s a bit like watching a drunk walk (but a drunk with a method!). Ilan and I agree that he has a private map in his head, and he always follows it
.

She cautiously walks back to her spot, puts the open notebook on the ground, and sits down next to it, very straight, then looks at Avram.

“I wrote about him.”

“About who?”

“Him.”

“What for?”

“I don’t know. I just—”

“But the notebook—”

“What about it?”

“Why did you bring it?”

She stares at the lines she wrote. The words seem to scurry about on the page, wagging their fingers at her, calling her to go on, not to stop now. “What did you ask?”

“What did you drag a notebook along for?”

She stretches, tired suddenly, as though she’d written whole pages. “I don’t know, I was just thinking I’d write down all sorts of things we saw on the way, Ofer and I. A kind of travel diary. When we used to go on vacations abroad with the boys, we always wrote our experiences together.”

She was the one who used to write. Every evening in the hotel, or on rest stops, or during long drives. They refused to cooperate—Ora hesitates, and decides not to tell Avram this—and the three of them affectionately mocked her endeavor, which they thought was unnecessary and childish. She insisted: “If we don’t write things down, we’ll forget them.” They said, “But what is there to remember? That the old man in the boat threw up on Dad’s foot? That they brought Adam eel, instead of the schnitzel he ordered?” She wouldn’t answer, thinking, You’ll see how one day you’ll want to remember how we had fun, how we laughed—how we were a family, she thinks now. She always tried to be as detailed as possible in those diaries. Whenever she didn’t feel like writing, when her hand was lazy, or her eyelids drooped with exhaustion, she would imagine the years to come when she might sit with Ilan, preferably on long winter evenings, with a mug of mulled wine, the two of them wrapped in plaid blankets, reading each other passages from the scrapbooks, which were decorated with postcards and menus and tickets from tourist sites, plays, trains, and museums. Ilan guessed it all, of course, including the plaid. She was always so transparent to him. “Just promise you’ll shoot me before that happens to me,” he told her. But he said that about so many things …

How did it happen, she wonders, that while I only softened with the years, the three of them grew tougher? Maybe Ilan’s right, maybe it’s because of me that they hardened. They hardened
against me. A good cry would do me some good now, she notes to herself.

When she opens her eyes, Avram is sitting across from her, leaning with his backpack against a rock, delving into her.

Once, when he used to look at her like that, she would immediately open herself to him, allowing him to see into her inner depths unhindered. She did not let anyone else see inside her like that. Not even Ilan. But she was easy with Avram—such a horrible word, “easy”; she was always easy with Avram, letting him see all of her, almost from the first moment she met him, because she had a feeling, a conviction that there was something inside her, or someone, perhaps an Ora more loyal to her own essence, more precise and less vague, and Avram seemed to have a way to reach her. He was the only one who could truly know her and could pollinate her with his look, with his very existence, and without him she simply did not exist, she had no life, and so she was his, she was his prerogative.

That’s how it was when she was sixteen, and nineteen, and twenty-two, but now she pulls her gaze sharply away from him, fearing he might hurt her there, punish her for something, take his revenge on her there. Or perhaps he will discover that there’s nothing inside her anymore, that his old Ora has dried up and died along with what dried up and died inside him.

They sit quietly, digesting. Ora hugs her knees, rationalizing that she isn’t all that accessible and permeable even to herself anymore, and that even she herself doesn’t go near that place inside her. It must be that she’s growing old, she decides—for some time now she’s had a strange eagerness to pronounce her aging, impatient for the relief that comes with a declaration of total bankruptcy. That’s how it goes. You say goodbye to yourself even before other people start to, softening the blow of what will inevitably come.

Later, much later, Avram gets up, stretches, gathers some firewood in a pile, and surrounds it with a circle of stones. Ora senses new purpose in his movement, but she knows herself and
remains cautious: she might simply be convincing herself that she’s seeing things—seeing Avram in Avram’s shadow.

She takes out an old towel and spreads it on the ground. She lays out plastic plates and cutlery and hands Avram two overripe tomatoes and a cucumber to chop. She has crackers too, and canned corn and tuna fish and a small bottle of olive oil that Ofer loves, from the Dir Rafat monastery, which she was planning to surprise him with. She had other little surprises that were supposed to make him happy on their trip. Where is Ofer now? She isn’t sure whether she should think about him or let him be. What does he need from her now? Her eyes are drawn to the open notebook. Maybe the answer is there. She wants to close it, but cannot. It’s all exposed there, yet to close it would be to stifle it, even to stamp it out. She gets down on one knee, straightens the corner of the towel, and weighs it down with a stone. As she does so she pulls the notebook to her and reads what she has written. She is surprised to find that in just a few lines she skipped from past to present:
Ofer walked funny … It’s a bit like watching a drunk … Ilan and I agree that …

Ilan would have something to say about that.

Avram lights a piece of newspaper and coaxes the fire to the twigs. Ora stares at the paper, wondering what day it’s from, and looks away from the headlines. Who knows how far things have gone there? She quickly shuts the notebook and waits for the paper to be consumed. Avram sits down opposite her and they eat silently. Actually, Avram eats. He boils water for a Cup-a-Soup and gobbles down two of them, one after the other, claiming he’s addicted to MSG. She asks casually about his nutritional habits. Does he cook? Does someone cook for him?

“Sometimes. Depends,” he says.

She watches his appetite in astonishment. She herself can’t put a bite in her mouth. In fact, she realizes that her stomach has locked up since she left home. Even at the feast in the house of the laughing woman, the baby’s mother, she could hardly swallow the food. Maybe one good thing has come of this trip after all. Then, as quick as she can, like someone pickpocketing herself, she reaches out to the notebook and opens it.

I’m afraid to forget him. His childhood, I mean. I often get confused between the two boys. Before they were born I thought a mother remembers every child separately. Well that’s not exactly how it is. Or maybe with me it’s especially not that way. And stupidly, I didn’t keep a notebook for each boy, with their development and all the clever things they did since they were born. When Adam was born I didn’t have the mind for that with everything that was going on, when Ilan left us. And when Ofer was born I didn’t either (again because of all the complications back then—apparently every time I give birth there’s something going on). And I thought that maybe now, on this hike, I would write down a few things I still remember. Just so they’ll finally be written down somewhere
.

The stream runs in the distance. Evening gnats hum, and crickets chirp madly. A branch cracks in the fire, flicking charred specks over the notebook. Avram gets up and moves the backpacks away from the fire. She is surprised: his movements really are more confident, lighter.

“Coffee, Ofra?”

“What did you call me?”

He laughs, very embarrassed.

She laughs too, her heart pounding.

“So, coffee?”

“Can you wait? I’ll just be a minute.”

He shrugs his shoulders, finishes eating, and arranges Ofer’s sleeping bag like a pillow. He sprawls out, crosses his arms behind his neck, and looks up at the sheltering branches and hints of dark sky. He thinks about the woman with the crimson thread walking all the way down the country. He sees the procession of exiles. Long lines of people with bowed heads come out from every populated area, from the cities and the kibbutzim, to join the main line, the long one, which moves slowly down the spine of the land. When he was in solitary confinement in Abbasiya Prison and thought Israel no longer existed, he saw the picture in detail—the babies on shoulders, the heavy suitcases, the empty, extinguished eyes. But the woman walking with the crimson thread gives some comfort. You could imagine, for example, he thinks, sucking on a piece of straw, that in
every town and village and kibbutz there was someone stealthily tying his own thread to hers. And that way, secretly, a tapestry was being woven all over the country.

Ora bites the tip of her pen and clicks it against her teeth. His slip of the tongue a moment ago confused her, and she has to make an effort to get back to where she was.

Ofer was born in a routine delivery, nothing difficult, and very quick. Maybe twenty minutes from when Ilan got me to the hospital. It was Hadassah Mount Scopus. We got there at around seven a.m., after my water had broken at six or so, in my sleep
.

Not exactly sleep
, she writes, and gives Avram a sideways glance, but he’s still pondering the sky, lost in a thought that jerks the length of straw in his mouth this way and that.
There was something going on and my water broke in bed. And when I realized that’s what it was, I mean, that nothing else made sense under the circumstances, we got organized quickly. Ilan had already prepared bags for me and for him, it was all arranged, written instructions, phone numbers, phone tokens, etc., Ilan being Ilan. We phoned Ariela to come and stay with Adam and take him to day care later. He slept all night and never knew a thing
.

Ofer was born at seven twenty-five a.m. It was a very easy, quick delivery. I got there and gave birth. They hardly had time to prepare me. Gave me an enema and sent me to the bathroom. I felt strong pressure in my stomach, and as soon as I sat down on the toilet, I could feel him coming out! I yelled for Ilan, and he came in and just picked me up the way I was, and put me down on a bed in the corridor, and shouted for a nurse. Together they pushed me, running, to the large delivery room, which by the way was where I had Adam (in the same room!), and three more pushes, he was out!