To the End of the Land (50 page)

A tiny leaf ripples inside Avram’s soul and floats on ahead of him. Behind his tightly shut eyelids, a small boy walks on an empty beach, his body leaning forward, wearing nothing but a diaper and a T-shirt, all of him moving toward and onward and ahead.

The cart bore piles of garbage, cardboard boxes, torn fishing nets, and large trash bags. Flies hovered above it, and a trail of stench lingered behind it. Every so often the old man wearily yelled at the horse and waved a long whip. Ofer walked
behind them, along the water’s edge, and Ora behind him, seeing through his eyes the wonder of the large, emaciated beast, and perhaps—she is guessing now, as she recounts the story for Avram—perhaps he even thought that everything moving up there in front of him was one single wonderfully complex creature, with two heads and four legs, large wheels, leather harnesses and straw hats, and a buzzing cloud above. As she talks, she distractedly quickens her pace, pulled along by the living memory—Ofer on the beach, a bold puppy bristling with the future, she behind him, hiding at times, although there was no need because he never turned to look back. She wondered how far he would go, and he answered her with his steps: forever. She saw—and this she does not have to say, even Avram understands—how the day would come when he would leave her, just get up and go, as they always do, and she guessed a little of what she would feel on that day, a little of what now, without any warning, digs its predatory teeth into her.

When he could no longer keep up with the horse and the old man, Ofer stopped, waved at them for a moment longer, his fist opening and closing, then turned around with a sweet, mischievous smile, and spread his arms out to her happily, as if he’d known all along that she was there, as if anything else were not possible. He ran to her arms shouting: “Nommy, Nommy, bunny!”

“You see, in his books, in the pictures, a creature with a long head and long ears was a bunny.”

“That’s a horse,” she told him and hugged him tightly to her chest. “Say ‘horse.’ ”

“That was one of Ilan’s things,” she tells him on their next coffee break, in a purple field of clover dotted with the occasional unruly stalk of yellow asphodel humming with honeybees. “Every time he taught Ofer or Adam a new word, he would ask them to repeat it out loud. To tell you the truth, it got on my nerves sometimes, because I thought, Why does he have to do it that way—he’s not their trainer. But now I think he was right,
and I even envy him, retroactively, because that way he was always the first one to hear every new word they said.”

“That
is
from me,” Avram says with awkward hesitation. “You know that, right? That’s me.”

“What is?”

He stammers, blushing. “I was the one who told Ilan in the army that if I ever had a kid, I would hand him every new word, present it to him, and it would be like, you know, like a covenant between us.”

“So it’s from you?”

“He … he didn’t tell you?”

“Not that I remember.”

“He probably forgot.”

“Yeah, maybe. Or maybe he didn’t want to tell me, not to pour salt on your wound with me. I don’t know. We both had all sorts of rituals about you, and moments to be with you, but it was mainly the words, and the way they spoke, the boys.” She sighs, and her droopy upper lip seems to droop a little more. “Well, you know, I mean he had that whole thing with you—”

“With me?” Avram sounds alarmed.

“Come on, it’s obvious. The two of you were so
verbal
, such chatterboxes, I swear, and with Ilan … Hey, what’s that sound?”

Something disturbs the thistles nearby. They hear short, rapid thrashings coming from several directions, and then the rustle of a living creature, something that runs and stops, with panting breaths. Avram jumps up and pokes around, and then comes the barking, in different voices, and Avram shouts at her to get up, and she spills her coffee and tries to stand up and trips on something and falls, and Avram stands over her, frozen, his eyes and mouth gaping in a transparent shout, and dogs—dogs come from all around them.

When Ora finally manages to get up, she counts three, four, five. He jerks his head to the left, and there are at least four more there, of different breeds, large and small, dirty and wild, standing there barking furiously at them. Avram pulls Ora to him, grabs her wrist, but she still doesn’t get it. How painfully slowly her brain processes the joints and connectors of every
new situation, always. And on top of that, instead of kicking into self-defense mode, she has a foolish tendency—a completely unsurvivor-like tendency, as Ilan once pointed out—to linger on the minor details (beads of sweat are spreading quickly under Avram’s armpits; one of the dog’s legs is broken and folded beneath its body; Ilan’s eyelid had jerked wildly when he told her, nine months ago, that he was leaving her; the man they met at the Kedesh River had been wearing, on top of everything else, two identical wedding rings on two fingers).

The dogs crowd into a sort of triangle, with a large, black, broad-chested hound at its vertex, and slightly behind him, a strapping golden mutt. The black one barks wildly, almost without stopping for breath, and the golden one makes a deep, prolonged, ominous rumble.

Avram spins around and breathes asthmatically. “You here, me there!” he says quickly. “Kick, and yell!”

She tries to shout but finds she cannot. Some kind of shame in front of Avram, idiotic embarrassment, and perhaps in front of the dogs, too. And herself? When has she really shouted? When has she yelled throat-rending howls? And when will she?

The dogs bark madly, their bodies rocking, their snarls and wailing charged with stubborn, raw fury. She stares at them. She is fascinated by the gaping mouths, the strands of saliva between the teeth. The dogs slowly approach, closing in on them. Avram hisses at her to find a stick, a branch, something, and Ora tries to remember things she’s picked up here and there from Adam, or in chance conversations with his friends. There was one sweet boy, Idan, a gifted musician, who had joined the army’s K-9 special forces unit. Once, when she drove him and Adam to a concert in Caesarea, he told them how they train dogs to attack the “dominant part” of a wanted suspect, a hand or a foot, which the suspect might use to try to protect himself from the dog. He explained to Ora that a regular dog will “click” its teeth when it bites someone’s arm, but a dog in their unit—Idan himself had a Belgian shepherd, which he said had the strongest instincts: you could condition them any way you wanted—could lock in on an arm or a leg or a face. Amazing how she can pull
out this useful information. But Idan was the one who sicced dogs on people, and now she was on the receiving end.

“The black one,” Avram exhorts, “keep looking for him.” The large male, undoubtedly the leader, stands nearby, watching her with bloodshot eyes. A huge, dense lump that seems to be shedding its canine shell and reincarnating itself as a primeval beast. And right then another dog, a smaller, bolder one, cuts through the bushes in Avram’s direction, and Ora jumps up and grabs hold of Avram, almost pulling him down with her. He turns to her furiously and his own face is like an animal’s for a second—a peace-loving, vegetarian, and generally fearful animal. A gnu or a llama or a camel that has suddenly found itself in the midst of a massacre. Then he hurls one sharp kick at the dog, who sails through the air with terrifying silence, spread out like a rag, with its head bent backward unnaturally, and he is closely followed by one of Avram’s sneakers.

“I killed him,” Avram whispers in astonishment.

Silence hangs in the air. The dogs sniff nervously. It occurs to Ora that if she and Avram don’t attack, the dogs will settle down. She thinks about her own dog, Nicotine, and tries to draw his softness to this place, coaxing his domestic scent to waft out of her toward them. She looks around. The whole field is dotted with dogs. Almost all of them look like pets gone feral. Here and there a colorful collar peeks out, submerged in thick, filthy fur. A few glorious tails still wag, hinting at pampering and devotion. All their eyes are infected, covered with layers of yellow crud, and flies hover around them. Nicotine, who was her gift to Ilan when he stopped smoking, was as plain to her as a sister soul, but what is happening here is almost outside the realm of nature. It is rebellion. Betrayal. The big black one stands quietly, examining the situation, and the others—including Ora and Avram—tensely await his expressions. Slightly behind him stands the golden dog. When Ora looks at it closely, it turns away in embarrassment and runs its tongue over its upper lip, and Ora knows it’s a bitch.

“Stones, pick up stones,” Avram whispers out of the corner of his mouth. “We’ll throw them.”

“No, wait.” She touches his arm.

“Just don’t show them we’re afraid—”

“Wait, don’t do anything, they’ll leave.”

The dogs cock their heads as though following the conversation.

“And don’t look them in the eye, not in the eye.”

Avram looks down.

He and Ora face each other silently. A pair of falcons hovers above in a mating dance, cackling with laughter.

A shudder runs through the big black dog’s chest. He takes a few steps and circles them broadly. The other dogs stand tense, their fur on end.

“Fuckit,” Avram whispers, “we’ve lost our chance.”

The black one keeps pacing slowly, drawing an invisible line around them, without taking his eyes off them. The dogs follow along, completing a circle. Ora seeks out the golden bitch, who looks wild and bold as she stands beside the black dog. A handsome couple, Ora thinks with a strange twinge of jealousy—the forgotten longing, to be a handsome couple.

Suddenly it all sparks up again, as though the circular motion has fanned a primordial urge in the dogs. At once their faces and bodies sharpen. Wolves and hyenas and jackals now encircle Ora and Avram, and they too turn around in a circle. Avram’s back touches hers. He is wet. They move together, forward, backward, to either side. They are one body. She can dimly hear a deep, hoarse growl. But perhaps it’s hers.

The dogs break into a slow trot around them. Ora feverishly searches for the golden one. She must find her. She scans dog after dog like beads on a necklace. There she is, running with them. Ora’s spirits fall: the bitch’s face is also sharp and gaping now, and her cheeks are drawn up in a grimace that exposes her canines.

Gray lightning flashes, something seizes Ora’s pants from behind, at her calf, and she jumps in horror and kicks out without seeing. She hits something, her foot almost dismantled by the powerful pain, and a dirty, bedraggled mutt screeches, runs away, and sits licking its wound at some distance. Avram emits
twisted, high-pitched sounds, not words but crushed syllables. She can almost feel the shaky scaffolding of his soul, which he has worked so hard to erect, collapsing because of this foolishness. Right at that moment he thrashes a stick, very close to her thigh, and a gaping hole opens up in the circle. Then comes another whistling blow, followed by a nauseating sound: something broken escapes with a whimper, pulling its rear body with its two front legs, and again she sees Nicotine, old and sick, dragging himself to his basket with a befuddled look in his eyes.

She starts to whistle. Not a tune. Something meaningless and monotonous and mechanical that sounds like the hum of a broken appliance. Her lips are pursed and she whistles. The dogs prick up their ears. Avram throws her a suspicious glance. His beard is wild, his face alarmingly sharp.

She keeps on. Sensitive ears vibrate as they decipher a signal broadcast from another world. Her eyes dart in every direction. She tries to produce a low, soft whistle, as full and rich as her lungs can muster, then sticks with the loose whistle, guarding it like an ancient fire.

An emaciated brown mutt stops moving, sits on its hind legs, and scratches behind its ears. In so doing, it breaks the circle. The other dogs spread out a little. The golden bitch walks hesitantly to one side, panting heavily. A large Canaan with an ugly open wound on its thigh limps away, then stops in the middle of the field and looks up at the sky as though he’s forgotten what he meant to do. Ora thinks she sees him yawn.

The black dog shakes his head a few times and tediously scans the other dogs. Now Ora whistles her Nicotine whistle, the first few notes of “My Beloved with Her Pure White Neck,” a song she and Ilan used to whistle to each other, too. The black dog barks vacantly at the sky and walks away. The others straggle behind him. He pricks up his tail and starts to run, and they follow. The golden bitch trails behind them. The pack looks smaller to Ora now. She gives Avram a sideways glance. His stick—now she sees it’s a branch, from a eucalyptus or a pine tree—is still held high in his hand. His chest rises and falls like a bellows.

She whistles. Ilan always distractedly whistled their song in the shower, and she, lying in bed, would put down her book to listen. Once he whistled it in a low key, standing at one end of the bustling lobby of the Jerusalem Theater. She, at the other end, picked it up and started walking toward him, whistling softly until they met and embraced.

Avram looks at her questioningly. She whistles after the pack of dogs as they recede into the distance. She rounds her lips and whistles to the golden bitch, who grudgingly turns her head and slows down. Ora leans forward with her hands on her knees. “Come,” she whispers.

The other dogs sprint away, barking, chasing one another, engaging in momentary fights, galloping across the field with floppy or perked-up ears, re-forming themselves into a pack. The golden one looks at them and back at Ora. Then, hesitantly, with a trembling paw, she starts to walk in Ora’s direction. Without moving, Ora whistles softly, almost imperceptibly, guiding the bitch. Avram lets the branch drop. The bitch walks through a patch of stubbly growth that clings to her broad chest.

Ora slowly crouches down on one knee. The bitch stops abruptly, one paw suspended, her black nostrils open wide. Ora finds a slice of bread on their cloth, and carefully tosses it near the dog. She pulls back and growls.

“Eat it, it’s good.”