To the End of the Land (43 page)

Do you get it? A small, unheroic life, one that deals as little as possible with the situation, God damn it, because as you know, we already paid our price
.

Sometimes, once every few weeks—

Once a week or so, I would wake up with a panic attack and say quietly into Ilan’s ear: “Look at us. Aren’t we like a little underground cell in the heart of the ‘situation’?”

And that really is what we were
.

For twenty years
.

Twenty good years
.

Until we got trapped
.

AT THE TOP
of Keren Naphtali mountain, on a bed of poppies and cyclamens, they lie sweaty and breathless from the steep incline. They agree that this was the hardest climb so far, and gobble down some wafers and biscuits. “We have to get some food soon,” they remind each other, and Avram gets up to show her how much weight he’s lost over the past few days. He’s impressed at having slept through the night for the first time, four hours straight without a sleeping pill—“Do you know what that means?” “This trip is good for you,” she says, “dieting and walking and fresh air.” Avram agrees, although he sounds surprised: “I really do feel pretty good.” Then he says it again, like someone taunting a sleepy predator from a place of safety.

Chiseled stone ruins sprawl behind them, remnants of an Arab village or perhaps an ancient temple. Avram—who happened to flip through an article not long ago—believes the stone is from the Roman era, and Ora welcomes his theory. “I can’t deal with Arab village ruins now,” she says. But a momentary illusion in her mind, composed instantaneously from the ruins,
projects a tank roaring down a narrow alleyway, and before it can trample a parked car or ram the wall of a house, she moves her hands in front of her face and moans, “Enough, enough, my hard drive is overloaded with this stuff.”

Broad Atlantic terebinths spread their branches and sway meditatively in the breeze. Not far away, antennas protrude from a small fenced-in military post, and a handsomely chiseled Ethiopian-born soldier stands motionless at the top of an observation tower, surveying the Hula Valley below, perhaps stealing a glance at them to spice up his guard duty. Ora stretches her whole body out and lets the breeze cool her skin. Avram sprawls in front of her, leans on one arm, and sifts dirt through his fingers.

“It happened just before he turned four,” Ora tells him now. “Two or three months before, while I was making him lunch one day. I was already studying physiotherapy at the time, it was my last year, and Ilan had just opened his law firm, so it was a really crazy period. But at least I had two days a week when I finished school early and I could pick him up from day care and make him lunch. Is this really interesting to you, all this—”

Avram chuckles and his eyelids blush. “I’m … it lets me—”

“What? Tell me.”

“I’m peeking into your lives.”

“Yeah? Well, don’t peek: look. It’s all open. Ofer asked me what was for lunch. So I told him this and that, rice, let’s say, and meatballs.”

Avram’s mouth moves distractedly, as though chewing the words. Ora remembers how he loved to eat, and to talk about food,
man’s best friend
, and how she had longed to cook for him all these years. At big family meals, at dinner parties, on holidays, every year at Seder night, she would set aside a big, full plate for him in her heart. Now she has the urge to tempt him with a dish of eggplant in tomato sauce, or lamb with couscous, or maybe one of her rich, comforting soups—he doesn’t even know what a good cook she is! Probably all he remembers are burned pots in her student apartment in Nachlaot.

“Ofer asked me what meatballs are made of, and I mumbled
something. I told him they were round balls, made of meat, and he thought about it and asked, ‘Then what’s meat?’ ”

Avram pulls himself up into a seated position and hugs his legs.

“To tell you the truth, Ilan always said he was just waiting for Ofer to ask that question, from the minute he started talking. From the minute we saw what kind of boy he was, really.”

“What do you mean, ‘what kind of boy he was’?”

“Wait, I’ll get there.”

Something has been gnawing at her for several minutes, trying to get her attention. Something that was left on—a faucet in the house? A light? Her computer? Or maybe it’s Ofer?
Is something happening to Ofer now?
She listens in, clearing a path through her whispers and conjectures, but no, it’s not Ofer.

“Ora?”

“Where was I?”

“You saw what kind of boy he was.”

“So I said to Ofer that it was nothing, you know, just meat. I said it in the most casual voice: It’s nothing special, it’s just meat. You know, like we eat almost every day. Meat.”

She sees it: thin little Ofer, her lovely child, starts padding from one foot to the other, like he always did when he was troubled or frightened—she gets up and demonstrates for Avram. “And he used to tug his left earlobe over and over again. Like this. Or he’d walk sideways, back and forth, quickly.”

Avram doesn’t take his eyes off her. She comes back and sits down with a sigh. Her soul longs for that Ofer.

“I stuck my head in the fridge and tried to avoid him, that look on his face, but he wouldn’t let it go. He asked who they took that meat from. And you should know that he really loved meat back then, beef and chicken. He hardly ate anything else, but he loved meatballs and schnitzel and hamburgers. He was a real carnivore, which made Ilan very happy. And me, for some reason.”

“What?”

“That he loved meat. I don’t know, some kind of primal satisfaction. You can understand that, can’t you?”

“But I’m a vegetarian now.”

“So that’s it!” she cries out. “I noticed the other day, on the moshav, that you didn’t touch—”

“Three years already.”

“But why?”

“I just felt like cleansing myself.” He stares intently at his fingertips. “Well, you remember, there was a time when I didn’t eat meat for a few years.”

When he came back from the POW prison. Of course she remembers: he used to gag every time he walked by a steak house or a
shawarma
stand. Even a fly burning in an electric bug trap nauseated him. And she suddenly remembers how her own stomach turned, many years later, when Adam and Ofer jokingly explained—it was a Shabbat dinner on a white tablecloth, with braided challah and chicken soup—what they thought “MBT” really stood for. Adam drove an MBT in the army, and then Ofer was a gunner, and later a commander, in the same tank. They rolled around laughing: “No, it’s not main battle tank! Where did you come up with that? It’s mutilated body transporter.”

Avram continues. “But after a few years, five or six, I got my appetite back, and then I ate everything, and you know how much I love meat.”

She smiles. “I know.”

“But about three years ago, I gave it up again.”

Now she gets it. “Three years ago exactly?”

“Plus a few days, yes.”

“A sort of vow?”

He throws her a sly sideways glance. “Let’s say, a bargain.” And after a minute—her neck is flushed now—he adds, “You think you’re the only one who can make them?”

“Make those bargains with fate, you mean?”

Silence. She draws short lines in the dirt with a twig and puts a triangle over them—a roof. Three years of abstinence from meat, she thinks, and every evening he crossed off one line on the wall. What does that say? What is he saying to me?

She went on. “Ofer thought about it some more, and asked if the cow that you take the meat from grows out new meat.”

“Grows out,” Avram repeats with a smile.

“I squirmed, and I said, ‘Not really, that’s not exactly how it works.’ Ofer paced around the kitchen again, faster and faster, and I could see that something was starting up inside him, and then he faced me and asked if the cow got a boo-boo when you took its meat. I had no choice, so I said yes.”

Avram listens, every cord of his soul suddenly fascinated by the picture. By Ora talking with her child in the kitchen, and the little boy, thin and serious and troubled, darting around the narrow room, tugging on his earlobe, looking helplessly at his mother. Avram unwittingly holds his hand up in front of his face to ward off the domestic particles being hurled at him with intolerable abundance. The kitchen, the open fridge, a table set for two, steaming pots on the stove, the mother, the little boy, his distress.

“Then he asked if they take the meat from a cow that’s already dead so it doesn’t hurt her. He was really trying to find some dignified way out of the mess, you see, for me, but somehow also for all of humanity. I knew I had to make up a white lie, and that later, with time, once he grew stronger and bigger and had enough animal protein, the time would come to tell him what you once called ‘the facts of life and death.’ Ilan was so furious with me afterward for not being able to come up with something, and he was right, he really was!” Her eyes grow fiery. “Because with kids you have to cut corners here and there, you have to hide things, soften the facts for them, there’s just no other way, and I wasn’t … I was never able to, I couldn’t lie.”

Then she hears what she is saying.

“Well, apart from … you know.”

Avram does not dare to ask with words, but his eyes practically spell out the question.

“Because we promised you,” she says simply. “Ofer doesn’t know anything.”

There is a hush. She wants to add something, but finds that after years of silence, of contracting the large muscle of consciousness, she cannot talk about it even with Avram.

“But how can you?” he asks with a wonderment that confuses her. She thinks she hears a tone of condemnation.

“You just can,” she whispers. “Ilan and I together. You can.”

She is flooded by the warmth of the covenant they made together, which had only deepened around the large open pit of secretive silence, through the tenderness that emanated from the two of them on its brink, the cautious way they held on to each other so as not to fall in but not get too far away either, and the bitter knowledge, which also held a hint of special sweetness, that their life story was always being written in inverted letters too, and that no one else in the world—not even Avram—could read it. Even now, she thinks, even apart, we have that, that definitive thing of ours.

She clenches her jaw and pushes deep back inside her what had dared to peer out into the light for a moment, and then, through the force of almost twenty-two years of practice, she transposes herself back onto the straight track, the simple one, from which she was displaced a moment ago, and she wipes the last few minutes off her slate—the memory of the vast and ungraspable anomaly of her life.

“Where was I?”

“In the kitchen. With Ofer.”

“Yes, and Ofer of course got even more stressed out by my silence, and he was flying around the kitchen like a spinning top, back and forth, talking to himself, and I could see that he wasn’t even capable of putting into words what he suspected. Finally, I’ll never forget it, he bowed his head and stood there all tense and crooked”—with the subtlest of gestures, she becomes him in her body, in her face, in his torn look that peers out of her eyes, and Avram sees it, he sees Ofer: Look, you’re seeing him, you’ll never forget now, you won’t be able to live without him—“and then he asked me if there are people who kill the cow so they can take her meat. What could I say? I said yes.

“So then he started running around the whole house in a frenzy, and he yelled”—she remembers a thin wail, not his voice, not a human voice at all, but it came from him—“and he touched things, the furniture, pairs of shoes on the floor, he ran and screamed and touched, the keys on the table, door handles. It was scary, to be honest, it looked like some kind of ritual, I don’t know, like he was saying goodbye to everything that …”

She looks at Avram softly, saddened by what she is telling him, and by what he has yet to hear from her. She feels that she is infecting him with the sorrows of raising children.

“Ofer ran to the edge of the hallway, by the bathroom door, you know, where the coatrack was? And he stood there and yelled: ‘You kill her? You kill a cow to take her meat? Tell me! Yes? Yes? You do that to her on purpose?’ And at that moment I got it. Maybe for the first time in my life I got what it means that we eat living creatures, that we kill them to eat them, and how we train ourselves not to realize that the severed leg of a chicken is sitting on our plate. And Ofer couldn’t cheat himself that way, do you see?” Her voice lowers to a whisper. “He was totally exposed. Do you know what it is to be that kind of child, like that, in this shitty world?”

Avram pulls back. Deep in his gut he senses a flutter of the terror that had gripped him once, when Ora told him she was pregnant.

She drinks water from a bottle and washes her face. She holds the bottle out to him, and without thinking, he empties it over his head.

“And all at once his face sealed up, locked, like this”—she shows him, tightly clenching her fist—“and then he ran all the way down the hallway, from the bathroom to the kitchen, and kicked me. Just imagine, he’d never done that before! He kicked my leg as hard as he could and screamed: ‘You’re like wolves! People like wolves! I don’t want to be with you!’ ”