To the End of the Land (51 page)

The bitch cocks her head. Her eyes are large and dirty. Ora talks to her: “You lived in a house once, you had a home, people took care of you and loved you. You had a bowl for food and a bowl for water.”

With cautious, hunched steps, the bitch walks over to the bread. Growling, her brows arched, she does not take her eyes off Avram and Ora.

“Don’t look at her,” Ora whispers.

“I was looking at
you
,” Avram says awkwardly, and turns away.

The bitch grabs the bread and devours it. Ora throws her a piece of cheese. She sniffs it and eats. Then a few pieces of salami. Some biscuits. “Come here, you’re a good dog, good, good dog.” The dog sits down and licks her chops. Ora pours water from a
bottle into a plastic dish and sets it down on the ground between her and the dog, then goes back to her place. The dog sniffs at it from a distance. Reluctant to approach, attracted yet repelled. A slight whimper escapes her lips. “Drink, you’re thirsty.” The bitch approaches the dish without taking her eyes off Ora and Avram. Her leg muscles shake and she looks as though she might collapse. She laps up the water quickly and retreats. Ora moves closer and the bitch bares her teeth and her fur stands on end. Ora talks to her and pours some more water. She does this two more times, until the bottle is empty. The bitch sits next to the dish. Then she sprawls out and starts gnawing at a ball of fur and thistles stuck to her paw.

And now they can no longer avoid looking at each other.

Ora and Avram stand there, spent, their sweat heavy with the stench of fear, ashamed. A flicker of embarrassment crosses their faces. They have not yet had time to robe themselves in their former skins. Avram stares at her and shakes his head slowly, wonderingly, gratefully, and his blue eyes fill with an undulating stir, and her body suddenly remembers his embrace, and for a moment she wonders stupidly if she should whistle for
him
to come. But he comes anyway, a mere three steps, and hugs her, grasps her tightly, as he used to, and whispers, “Ora, Ora’leh.” The bitch looks up at them.

A moment later Ora pulls away and stands staring at him as though she has not seen him for years. Then she falls on him again and starts to pound him with both hands and hit his face and scratch it, without saying anything, panting drily. Taken aback, he shields his face, then tries to hold her, to encircle her in his arms so that she cannot hurt him or harm herself, because she has started to scratch herself too and hit her own face with her hands. “Ora, stop, stop,” he shouts, he begs, until he is able to trap her in his arms and hold her tightly to his body to stop her wildness. She struggles and grunts and kicks him, and every time she feels a space of nothing between them she tries to fill it with a punch or a kick or an angry breath, and the wilder she gets, the closer he has to hold her, until they are practically molded into one, intertwined, and she grits her teeth and yells,
“You piece of shit, all these years … punishing us … who is to blame here …” Her voice grows weaker and weaker until she flops against his chest, her head in the round of his shoulder, amazed at herself, at what came out of her—why now, why, this was not at all what she wanted to say to him. He does not move, only holds her to him and runs his hand up and down her back, over her sweat-soaked shirt, and she breathes deeply and whispers into his body just as she spoke a few days earlier into the pit she dug in the earth. Avram somehow senses that she is praying, but not to him, rather to someone inside him, asking him to open up and let her in. His hands and body constantly knead her body, and she kneads his, fingers tightening over limbs, wondering, remembering. For one moment—no more—there is a sudden abandonment, like a fleeting moment of disorderly conduct, and Ora’s legs almost fail her, but she remains standing with the last of her strength. What is this? she wonders. What’s happening here? She holds her head back, wanting to look in his eyes and ask, but he pulls her to him with new-old fervor, imprinting himself on her again. That’s exactly how he used to be, and she suddenly remembers how the whole time they were screwing—
nut-and-bolting
, he called it—it was as though he were hallucinating inside her, growing intermittently harder and softer, moving in a slow somnambulism, a sort of continuous sleepwalking in which his mind and body were unshackled, so different from his usual rhythm when he was outside of her, different from his huntsman-like alertness. He once told her that from the moment he entered her, it was as though a circle closed inside him and he immediately sank into a dream. “It’s like an underwater maze,” he said, when she asked him to try to describe it. “No, no, forget that. It’s like a dream that you can’t tell anyone or re-create when you wake up. That’s what’s fun about it: that I can’t find the words. That
I
can’t find the words.”

Of course she felt, in those distant years, the other women and girls he saw through the canopy of his closed eyelids. She felt the rhythmic, salacious alternating of his passions and fantasies as he made love to her. And every time she felt a twinge of jealousy, she told herself that you could not love Avram without
loving his imagination, his parallel dimensions, his thousands of hallucinatory women. But she would quickly search for his mouth so that she could give it
her
kiss—deep, demanding, vigorous—or even just touch the tip of his tongue with hers, to bring him back to the source that gave rise to all that in him, and he would instantly realize what she was doing and smile with his swollen eyelids and make a movement with his body that said: Here, I’m back.

All that time, in all those years, with all the talk and the chatter, intrigues lodged between his foot and her ankle, between his eyelashes and her navel. And she was so young, she didn’t even know you were allowed to laugh like that in the midst of lovemaking. She hadn’t realized that her body was so lighthearted and mischievous and cheerful. And it all somehow comes back to her now, barely able to stand, almost falling into his body. It’s been years since she’s allowed herself to remember how interwoven they used to be, and how all of his limbs climbed over all of her limbs—“Is that why they call it climaxing?” he joked once. “We mustn’t waste even one-thousandth of a touch,” he would murmur, “not a finger or a hip or an eyelid, certainly not two thighs or an earlobe.” And when she was with him she was inexhaustible, climaxing and laughing, laughing and climaxing in short, quick spurts, while he held back like a Tibetan yogi, gathering it in from all the corners of himself, as he explained with a conspiratorial smile. From the farthest regions, from the tips of his toes, his elbows, eyelashes, neck,
starting from a distance
, until she felt his signals, and she would smile in her heart, here it is, here, the sharpening of all his flesh, the filling up, the high tide, and the quick departure of humor from his body—suddenly serious, determined, fateful, with his muscles weaving around her, and the grasping, like a giant clamp, and then his essence, the beat of his imprint deep inside her. She remembers.

Then, with his head heavy on her chest, she would feel him resurface to his senses. Slow, suspended, with fetal movements, he would moan, “Ora’leh, did I hurt you?”

Here too, in the open field, he hugs her, steadies her, then gently holds her away. A pity. She was ready, if he’d only wanted
to. They may have struggled that way for a minute, no longer, yet she crossed an ocean of time. And where is he? What does he want? What does she know? Only that he is grasping her, holding her in his arms, softly caressing her hair, asking, “Did I hurt you?”

Then he lets go, pushes himself away from her as though he has realized what almost happened, the ghost that was almost conjured up. Ora rocks dizzily and takes hold of his arm again. “Wait, don’t run away, why are you running away from me?” She looks at him weakly, touches a long bloody scratch on his nose, which she has given him, and says quietly, “Avram, do you remember us?”

“ILAN CAME HOME.
After he ran away from me and Adam and tried out houses all over Jerusalem, he came back to us, to the house in Tzur Hadassah. As soon as he did, he was shocked at Adam, I mean at me, at the way I’d neglected Adam and his education and his speech, and any order and discipline, and he started improving him.” Ora laughs. “Do you understand? For almost three years, Adam and I were more or less on our own, two wild beasts in the jungle, no laws, no commandments, and then the missionary landed. And we suddenly discovered that nothing we did was right, that we didn’t have an agenda or a routine, we ate when we were hungry and slept when we were tired, and the house was pretty much a dump.

“Wait,” she says, holding up a finger, “there’s more. That Adam walked around the neighborhood naked and scarfed down massive amounts of chocolate and watched TV indiscriminately and got to day care at eleven a.m. And at his advanced age he still didn’t know how to go potty properly. And he called me Ora, not Mom!

“Ilan, being Ilan, took matters into his own hands right then and there. He did everything very nicely of course, with lots
of smiles—he knew he was on probation with me—but all of a sudden, for example, clocks turned up around the house. One in the kitchen, a little one in the living room, and a Mickey Mouse clock in Adam’s room. And there were cleaning days, and we had to clear out the mess and get rid of the junk. The fun was over! ‘This Saturday we’re sorting through Adam’s toys, next Saturday your paperwork, and what about that pharmacy spilling out of the bathroom cabinet?’ ”

She laughs joylessly.

“I liked it, don’t get me wrong. It was nice to have a man in the house and to feel that someone was starting to eliminate the chaos. A sort of purification. The rescue forces had arrived. And don’t forget that I was pregnant with Ofer, so I didn’t have a lot of strength to resist, and all his enthusiasm signaled that he was pretty serious about his nesting and that maybe this time he would stay.”

Avram walks beside her, wriggling his toes in Ofer’s shoes. When he first stepped into the shoes, he immediately announced that he was swimming in them, and that it wouldn’t work. “It will, it will,” Ora mumbled and took out a pair of thick walking socks from his backpack. “Put these on.” He did, and still the shoes were a little big, but they were more comfortable than his old pair, whose soles were so worn out that he could feel the ground through them. “Just let your feet sail, and think about what a nice feeling that is,” Ora advised.

He spreads out in Ofer’s space, measuring his toes. The soles of his feet study his son’s footprints. Tiny dips and mounds, secret messages. Things even Ora doesn’t know about Ofer.

“But most of all, he fixed up Adam. Cleanliness and neatness and discipline, like I said, and then came the reeducation. How can I explain it? Adam was a fairly quiet boy. I wasn’t much of a chatterbox either, back then. I didn’t really have that many people to talk to. Adam and I were alone at home most of the time, and we had our little life, and it was pretty good, considering, and talking really wasn’t the most important part of it. We got along just fine without a lot of words. We understood each other perfectly. And I also think—although maybe not—”

“What?”

“Maybe I’d had a little too many words out of the two of you, all those years, you and Ilan together. Maybe I wanted a bit of quiet.”

He sighs.

“All that talk of yours, the brilliant, witty yada yada yada that never stopped for a second, that constant effort the two of you made.”

Ilan and me, Avram thinks. Two arrogant peacocks.

“And I always felt a bit left out.”

“You? Really?” Troubled, he does not know how to tell her that he always felt she was the center, their focal point. That she, in her own way, created them.

“Well, I never really got into that thing of yours.”

“But it was all because of you, for you.”

“Too much, too much.”

They walk silently. The dog trails them at a fixed distance, her ears cocked in their direction.

“And Ilan”—she returns from her contemplations—“was really amazed at Adam, at his underdeveloped speech, as he put it, and he started teaching him how to talk. Do you get it? At the age of two and three-quarters he put him through talking boot camp.”

“How?”

“He just talked to him all the time. He would take him to day care in the morning and talk about everything they saw on the way. Bring him home from day care and talk to him about what happened at day care. He asked questions and demanded answers. He wouldn’t let him off the hook. It was like a one-man protest movement: Fathers Against Silence.”

Avram laughs softly and Ora turns red: her joke worked.

“He talked to Ofer while he dressed him and while he put him to bed and while he fed him. I heard him all the time. There was a constant hubbub of speech at home, and Adam and I weren’t used to that kind of noise, and it wasn’t easy for me. I’m sure it wasn’t for Adam, either.

“There was no more pointing and saying ‘that.’ Now there
was ‘doorframe,’ ‘lock,’ ‘shelves,’ ‘saltshaker.’ I heard it in the background the whole time, like a broken record. ‘Say “shelf.” ’ ‘Shelf.’ ‘Say “grasshopper.” ’ ‘Grasshopper.’ And he was right, I’m not saying he wasn’t. I felt he was doing the right thing, and I could really see Adam’s world growing richer and fuller because he suddenly had names for things. I’m just not … I don’t … You see, I don’t really know how to say it exactly.” She laughs and points sharply to the spot between her eyes: “This.”