To the End of the Land (47 page)

Every time he touches the thought of a daughter, he feels a caress of light on his face. “Listen,” he probes, “if it had been a girl, I mean—”

“I know.”

“What do you know?”

“I know.”

“Go on, say it.”

“If it had been a girl, you would have come to see her, right?”

“I don’t know.”

“But I do.” Ora sighs. “You think I never thought about that? You think I didn’t pray for a girl the whole pregnancy? That I didn’t go to a seer—like Saul, who
came to the woman by night
—in the Bukharian neighborhood, so she could give me a blessing for a girl?”

“You did?”

“Of course I did.”

“But you were already pregnant! What could she have—”

“So what? You can always barter. And by the way, Ilan also wanted a girl.”

“Ilan, too?”

“Yes, I’m sure of it.”

“But he didn’t tell you?”

“You wouldn’t believe how quiet we kept around that
pregnancy. We only talked when Adam asked us something. Through Adam we talked about what was in my belly, and what would happen when the new baby was born.”

Avram swallows and recalls how that whole time he lay in bed, paralyzed by the terror of the growing pregnancy.

And praying it would fail.

And planning in great detail how he would nullify his life as soon as he heard the baby was born.

And counting the days he had left. And in the end he did nothing.

Because even when he was a POW, and increasingly after he came home, he always latched on, at the last minute, to Thales, the Greek philosopher he had admired as a youth, who said there was no difference between life and death. When asked why, in that case, he did not choose death, Thales replied, Precisely because there is no difference.

Ora laughs. “We called him Zoot. Adam made up the name.”

“You called who Zoot?”

“Ofer.”

“I don’t understand.”

“When he was still in my belly. A sort of pregnancy name, you know.”

“No,” Avram murmurs, defeated, “I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I know nothing.”

She puts a hand on his arm. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what,” he grumbles.

“Don’t torture yourself more than you have to.”

“Still, Ofer is a good name,” he says after a while.

“A very Israeli name. And I like that it has ‘o’ and ‘e’ in it. Like
khoref
, winter, and
boker
, morning.”

Avram sees her lovely forehead enveloped in brightness now. Like
osher
, happiness, he thinks, but does not say it.

“It’s good for nicknames, too,” she adds.

“You thought about that?”

“And also it’s like the English word ‘offer,’ which is soft and open, sort of giving.”

He laughs. “You’re amazing.”

She resists telling him that she also thought about how the name would sound in bed, coming from the lips of the women who would love him. She had even tried it out, whispering breathlessly to herself,
Ofer, Ofer
, which had made her giggle at the confusion that flooded her.

“Nicknames, of course,” he murmurs. “I never thought of that. And insults, too. You wouldn’t want it to rhyme with any curses.”

“Like ‘Ora Gomorrah.’ ”

“No-Fair Ofer,” he laughs.

Is he still smiling, like we do
, Ora sadly hums to herself,
Our hero, our lost soldier, Dudu
.

The green, sedate pasture, dotted with black-and-white cows, curves abruptly into a steep mountain. They groan and sigh as they walk and grab at tree trunks that lean into the incline. If I’d had a daughter, she thinks, if I’d had a daughter there are a few things I could have repaired in myself. She tries to explain this to Avram, but he doesn’t really understand, not the way she needs him to understand her, not the way he once knew her instantly,
with a hint and a wrinkle
. There were things she’d once hoped to change in herself through the boys, and it had never happened. “What things?” Avram asks. She has trouble explaining it and thinks again about Ofer’s Talia, and the way all the men in the household responded to her, happily and simply giving her what they’d held back from Ora. She tells Avram that it was only recently, once Adam and Ofer were grown up, that she realized it would probably never happen to her through them, this change, this repair. It became clear to her, late in the day, that it would not be through them that she would solve anything—“Perhaps because they’re boys, perhaps because they’re them, I don’t know.” She stops talking and breathlessly climbs up the mountain, and thinks, They weren’t really attentive to me, and they weren’t really generous, not in the way I needed.

“I didn’t write it properly,” she says now, as they go back down the mountain to find the lost notebook. “I just don’t feel that I’m
getting the main point across. Not when I write, and not when I’m talking to you. I want to tell all the minutiae about him, the fullness of his life, his life story, and I know I can’t, it’s impossible, but still, that’s what I need to do for him now.” Her speech ebbs and turns to mumbles as she pictures the man with his long, sinewy hands, and those thumbs. They were the hands of a worker, not a doctor, and she sees them opening her notebook and leafing through the pages as he tries to understand what he’s reading, what story it contains. Her heart leaps: Maybe at this minute he’s sitting on a rock, maybe even the same rock she herself sat on the night before, the only comfortable rock around, with her notebook on his lap, and he knows without a doubt that the person who wrote these pages was the woman he met coming up from the riverbed, the one with the wild hair and the slightly paralyzed lip.

“At first it was hard”—she resumes what was interrupted long ago on the way up the mountain—“his vegetarianism, and the way Ilan fought to get him to taste some meat, or at least fish, and the fighting and yelling at mealtimes, and Ilan’s personal insult at Ofer’s decision to stop being a carnivore.”

“Why was it an insult? Why personal?”

“I don’t know, that’s how he took it, Ilan.”

“You mean, like it was something against him?”

“Like it was, you know, against masculinity. That it was somehow feminine to be disgusted by meat. Can’t you understand that?”

“Yes,” Avram says, surprised at her rebuke, “but I wouldn’t take it as a personal affront. I don’t know, maybe I would. What do I know, Ora?” He spreads both hands out in a slightly flamboyant gesture of acquiescence, and an image-fragment of the old Avram flashes. “I don’t understand anything about families.”

“Come on, you?”

“What do you mean, me?”

“Well, I mean, really!” Ora blinks and the tip of her nose turns red. “Weren’t you ever born? Didn’t you have parents? A father?”

Avram says nothing.

“Let’s sit down for a minute, all my muscles are spasming.” She rubs her thighs. “Look, they’re actually shaking. It really is harder to go downhill than up!

“I’ll never forget the expression on his face the day after he found out that we kill cows, and the way he looked at me for having made him eat meat since he was born. For four years. And his astonishment at the fact that I ate meat, too. Ilan was one thing—that’s maybe how he felt, I’m trying to get into his head at the time—you could believe it about Ilan, but me? To think I was capable of murdering for food? I don’t know, maybe he was afraid that under certain circumstances I might be capable of eating
him
, too?”

Avram’s thumbs run back and forth over his fingertips. His lips move soundlessly.

“Maybe he felt like everything he’d thought about us was completely wrong, or worse—that it was all our conspiracy against him.”

“To wolferize him,” Avram murmurs.

She looks at him with tense pleading. “Explain to me how I never asked myself what a four-year-old boy feels when he finds out that he belongs to a carnivorous breed?”

Avram can see that she is torn apart and does not know how to comfort her.

“I have to think about it some more,” she whispers. “I mustn’t stop here. I always stop here, because there was something there, you see, in that whole vegetarianism thing. It’s not for nothing that I’m so … Look, for example, the way he was depressed afterward, for weeks, really depressed, a four-year-old boy who doesn’t want to get up in the morning for preschool because he doesn’t want some kid to touch him with ‘meat hands,’ or he’s just afraid of the children and the teacher and recoils from everyone and suspects everyone, do you understand?”

“Do I understand?” Avram snorts.

“Of course you understand. I think you could have understood him perfectly,” she says quietly.

“Really?”

“You could understand children in general. Understand them from inside.”

“Me? What do I—”

“Who better than you, Avram?”

He lets out a snicker and turns red. The skin of his face glows suddenly. Ora thinks she can see all the pores of his soul opening up.

“When he finally agreed to go back to preschool, he started inciting all the children not to eat meat. He kicked up an intifada at every snack break, dug through their sandwiches, mothers called me to complain, and when he found out that the girl who gave them music lessons was also vegetarian, he simply fell head over heels in love with her. You should have seen it, he was like some alien living among humans who suddenly finds a female alien. He used to draw pictures for her and bring her gifts and all day long all he talked about was Nina, Nina, Nina. He used to call me Nina by mistake. Or maybe it wasn’t such a mistake.”

They stand up and linger. Avram thinks about the story he wrote when he was serving in Sinai and up until he was taken hostage. It had a subplot whose power he discovered only when he was a POW, and he used to dive into it over and over again to revive himself a little. It was about two seven-year-old orphans who find an abandoned baby in a junkyard. Lots of people were getting rid of their children and babies at the time, and the two kids, a boy and a girl, find the baby, crying and hungry, and decide that he is a God-baby, the afterthought child born to an elderly God, who also apparently wanted to get rid of his child and so he threw the baby into this world. The two children vow to raise the baby themselves and bring him up to be completely different from his cruel, bitter father, so that he will fundamentally change what Avram called simply, long before he was taken hostage,
the ill fate
. And so in between tortures and interrogations, every time he found a drop of energy within himself, Avram delved into the lives of the two children and the baby. Sometimes, mostly at night, he would manage for several minutes to merge completely with the little baby. His broken, tortured body would melt into the innocent, whole creature, and he would remember, or imagine, how he himself was once a baby, and then a little boy, and how the world was one clear
circle, until his father got up one evening from the dinner table, overturned the pot of soup on the stove top, and started beating Avram’s mother and Avram himself with an outpouring of fury, almost tearing them to shreds, and then walked out and vanished as though he’d never existed.

Avram touches her arm gently. “Come on, Ora. Let’s keep going, so we’ll find it before—”

“Find what?”

“The notebook, no?”

“Before what?”

“I don’t know, before people get there, you don’t want anyone—”

She follows him, weak and parched. That whole era pushes its way up inside her. The nightmarish mornings, the decontaminated, censored sandwiches she made—only after, of course, dressing him meticulously as an armed cowboy—the vegetarianism on the one hand, and that murderousness on the other, she now realizes in astonishment. And the suspicious way he checked his sandwich several times, the sour expression of a customs official that came over his little face, the haggling over what time she would pick him up from the preschool of carnivores, and his desperate clinging to her back—she rode him there on a bike—as they got closer to the preschool and heard the children shouting happily. And his wild delusions—that’s how she had preferred to think of them at the time—that the children kept touching him on purpose, spitting hot-dog spit on him.

Day after day she abandoned him, left him stuck to the chain-link fence with iron diamonds imprinted on his cheeks, his face smeared with tears and snot as he sobbed loudly. She would turn her back on him, slip away and keep hearing him bawl for many more hours, and as she got farther away from the preschool, she heard him shout louder and louder. And if when he was four she did not know how to help him—powerless against what she felt raging inside him—what good can she do for him now, on this silly, pathetic journey? What good are her chattering with Avram and her baseless bargain with fate? She walks on, and
her heavy feet barely obey her. It’s good to get away from the news, that man said, especially after yesterday. What happened yesterday. How many. Who. Have they informed the families yet. Run home, run, they’re on their way.

She walks almost without looking. Falls through the expanses of an infinite space. She is one human crumb. Ofer is also one human crumb. She can’t slow his fall by even one second. And though she gave birth to him, though she is his mother and he came out of her body, now, at this moment, they are merely two specks floating, falling, through infinite, massive, empty space. What it all comes down to, Ora senses, is randomness in everything.

Something makes her zigzag, a slight arrhythmia of the feet, and then comes a painful spasm where her thigh meets her groin.

“Wait, don’t run.”

Avram seems to be enjoying the quick descent down the hill, the wind slapping his face, cooling it down, but she stops to lean against a pine tree and holds on to the trunk.

“What’s up, Ora’leh?”

Ora’leh, he called her. It just slipped out. They both glance quickly at each other.

“I don’t know, maybe we should slow down.”

She takes small, cautious steps, avoiding as best she can the tormented iliacus muscle. Avram walks beside her, as
Ora’leh
skips between them like a cheerful kid goat.