To the End of the Land (52 page)

Her heart pounded when she saw the immense thirst coming from Adam, which she previously hadn’t detected at all. Because after the initial shock, he seemed to get what Ilan was offering him, and she suddenly had a prattling child.

Ilan—she explains to Avram—talked to Adam like you talk to a grown-up, both in vocabulary and in tone. It stung her to hear the businesslike, egalitarian way Ilan addressed the boy, using a voice that did not contain a hint of the childish, slightly playful tone that she herself used. There was almost no word he considered too sophisticated for a conversation with Adam. “Say ‘association.’ ” “Association.” “Say ‘philosophy,’ ‘Kilimanjaro,’ ‘crème brûlée.’ ”

Ilan explained to him about synonyms, drawing pictures of words as identical twins. At three, Adam learned that the moon was also a crescent, or Luna. That at night it could be dark, dim, or even dusky. That a person could jump, but also leap and hop. (As Avram listens, a strange smile curls inside him, slightly proud, slightly embarrassed.) Ilan used nursery rhymes to teach him grammar and spent hours practicing “my child,” “his rabbit,” “her fingers.”

Every so often Ora would find the courage to protest. “You’re training him to do tricks, you’re turning him into your toy.”

“For him it’s just like LEGO, but with words,” Ilan replied.

She wanted to object—You’re just marking him as your territory—but all she said was, “He’s too young for that, a boy of his age doesn’t have to know all about possessive pronouns.”

“But look how much he enjoys it!”

“Of course. He can tell you’re enjoying it and he wants you to like him. He’ll do anything to make you like him.”

“And listen to this”—she tells Avram parenthetically—“about six months after Ilan came home, Adam asked where the man in the hut had gone.”

“What did you say?”

“I just couldn’t talk, and all Ilan said was, ‘He left, he’s never coming back.’ I only just remembered that. What were we talking about?”

She was weak. Her second pregnancy, which had begun with ease and a sense of health, grew burdensome and sickly toward the end. Most of the time she felt elephantine and drained and ugly. “In the last trimester, Ofer was pressing on a nerve that gave me horrible pain every time I stood up.” For the last two months she had to spend most of the time lying in one position, in bed or in the big armchair in the living room, and her breathing was labored, cautious—it hurt to breathe sometimes. She would stare at Ilan and Adam as they buzzed around her with intellectual fervor while she grew weaker and weaker, squeezing into the old familiar niche she had carved out years ago with a dull sort of self-deprecation.

She had no way to prevent Ilan and Adam from constantly amusing themselves with synonyms, rhymes, and association games, and of course she was flattered when the day-care teacher talked about Adam’s huge leap, and how within such a short time he seemed to have matured by at least two years. His status at day care greatly improved, although his wetting problem grew worse for some reason. But at least he was able to report the little accidents, so it was hard to get angry. “ ‘My pee-pee escaped,’ ” Ora quotes with a crooked smile. “What are you smiling about?” she asks irritably.

“I was thinking,” Avram says without looking at her, “that I would have definitely done that, too.”

“With your child? What Ilan did?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t say the thought never crossed my mind,” she notes, and vows not to expand on this point, ever.

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“Come on, what?”

“That that was really what he was looking for. A partner like you. So that he’d have someone to be witty and clever with.”

Avram silently twirls a strand of his beard.

“Because I wasn’t a good enough substitute,” she continues drily. “At least not in that regard. I couldn’t do it and I didn’t try, either.”

“But why did you even have to?”

“Ilan needed it. Oh, how he needed you and what you had together. And how withered he felt without you.”

Avram’s face burns, and Ora has the sudden gnawing thought that she may not have understood what Ilan was going through at all, and that perhaps he had not been looking for a substitute for Avram, but trying to
be
Avram. Excited, she hastens her steps: Maybe he was trying as hard as he could to be a father the way he imagined Avram would be.

They are so lost in their thoughts that the sudden appearance of a road startles them. What’s more, the path markings have disappeared. Ora walks back to look but returns disappointed. We were happy with our path, she thinks, and now what? How will we get to Jerusalem?

The road is not especially wide, but vehicles zoom past frequently, and they both feel slow and dull in comparison. They would happily retreat to the quiet, light-filled meadow, or even back to the shadowy forest. But they can’t go back. Ora cannot, and Avram seems to have been infected by her onward-and-forward purposefulness. They stand there confused, looking left and right, pulling their heads back with every passing car.

“We’re like those Japanese soldiers who emerged from the forests thirty years after the war was over,” she says.

“I really am like that,” he reminds her.

She can see that the road and the violence that emanates from it are scaring Avram. His face and body have locked up. She looks for the bitch. She was walking behind them just a few
moments ago, keeping her distance, but now she’s gone. What to do? Should she go back and look for her? And how will she get her across the road? How will she get the dog and Avram across?

“Come on,” she says, swinging into action, knowing that if she doesn’t do something now, his enervation will seep into her and paralyze them. “Come on, we’re crossing.”

She holds his hand, feeling how defeated and stalked he is by the road.

“When I give the word, run.”

He nods feebly. His eyes are on the tips of his shoes.

“You can run, right?”

His face suddenly changes. “Tell me something, wait a minute—”

“Later, later.”

“No, wait. What you said before—”

“Pay attention, after the truck. Now!”

She takes some steps into the road but is pulled back—his mass, his weight. She quickly looks to both sides. A bright purple jeep roars around the bend at them, flashing its headlights. They are stuck almost in the middle of the lane—can’t swallow and can’t throw up—and Avram is frozen. She calls to him and tugs at his hands. She thinks he’s talking to her, his lips are moving. The jeep whips past them with an angry honk and Ora prays no one comes from the other side. “Tell me,” he mumbles again and again, “tell me.”

“What?” she groans in his ear. “What’s so urgent right this minute?”

“I … I … What did I want to ask … What did I want to ask …”

A truck rolls in their direction, bellowing with what sounds like a foghorn. They’re standing in its lane. Ora pulls Avram toward her and out of the truck’s path, then they freeze on the white stripe in the middle of the road. They will die here. Run over like two jackals.

“Nobody else, either?”

“Nobody else
what
? What are you talking about, Avram?”

“About what you said, the substitute, that Ilan … that Ilan didn’t have.”

Through the din of a passing horn she hears a thin whisper slip away in his voice like the sleeve of a child playing hide-and-seek behind the drapes. She stares at him: his large, round, sun-scalded head, the wild tufts of hair sprouting on both sides, his blue eyes with their gaze refracting like a teaspoon in a glass. She finally understands what he’s asking.

She slowly smoothes both hands over his face, his disheveled beard, his broken eyes, erasing the road around them with one stroke. The road will wait. Very quietly she says, “Do you really not know? Can’t you guess? Ilan never had another friend like you.”

“I didn’t, either,” he says, and bows his head.

“Me neither. Now come on, give me your hand, we’re crossing.”

“I’m in hell!” he announced in a letter from a pre-military training camp, at age seventeen. “I’m at the Be’er Ora base, which is undoubtedly named after you. You would like it here, because we get to eat sand and gun grease, and jump off twelve-foot-high platforms like hunted fowl, to land on canvas sheets. All your favorite pastimes. Me? I make do with fantasies about you, and failed attempts to deflower your stand-ins. Last night, for example, I invited a young lady named Atarah to my room. I have no love for her in my heart, as you well know, but (a) I had the impression that she was available, and (b) biology calls … The excuse (a lowly trick!) was that we’d listen to
Paul Temple
(it was the Vandyke Affair episode) on the radio together, but then they announced that the girls weren’t allowed in the boys’ rooms, and I would therefore be left on my lonesome to shrivel away in my hole. Meanwhile, Ilan disappeared with the guys—who included, if you ask me, a number of girls (FYI), and there was undoubtedly some fooling around going on there.”

“This morning, my dear,” he wrote the next day, “we got up
at five-thirty and went to work on a mountain, clearing stones, weeding, and building terraces (Can you imagine me there? Without an undershirt?). I devised a plot whereby I was the only boy working with seven members of your gender, but they turned out to be cold-buttocksed females with no fondness for the common Avram wherever he may grow. Next to me was Ruchama Levitov (I wrote to you about her, we once had a hasty and cheerless affair), so I had the opportunity to examine our relationship more profoundly. But in the end, as usual, we just engaged in small talk (I’ve made up a new word for it: ‘chatair.’ Do you approve?), and she had the audacity to tease me about how we always argue and fight and break up and then start over again, like a double diagram. I gave her a perfect Jean-Paul Belmondo look and said nothing, but afterward it occurred to me that this has always been my fate with girls, that something never quite works out, and even when I have the occasional success, there’s always a moment when she suddenly gets scared of me and runs away, or claims I’m too much for her (Did I tell you about Tova G.? About how when we finally horizontalized, she declared that I was ‘too intimate’ [??!!] and literally fled from the bed?!). Honestly, Ora, I don’t know what my problem is with girls, and I’d be happy to discuss it with you one day, candidly and uncensored.

“Yours, blister-footed Caligula, as he rushes to dinner.”

Ora rummaged through the brimming shoe box and fished out another letter from the same period. She glanced at Avram as he lay there covered in bandages and casts, and read out loud.

“My
Shaina-Shaindle
. Chemistry class yet again, with promising talk of endodermic and exothermic activation reactions. I had a huge argument with the teacher. It was fantastic! She tried to get out of it, so I had to smite her hip and thigh. She crawled out of the jubilated classroom with her tail between her legs, and I made my triumphant victory laps around the classsss!”

She glanced at him. No response. Two days earlier, the doctors had gradually started to bring him out of the induced
coma, but even when he was half awake he did not open his eyes or speak. He was snoring now. His mouth was open, his face and exposed shoulder covered with open, pussy wounds. His left arm was in a cast, as were both his legs. His right leg was raised and suspended in a Thomas splint, and tubes emerged from every part of his body. For several nights she had read to him from letters he’d sent her when they were young. Ilan did not believe in this therapeutic approach, but she hoped Avram’s own words would be able to penetrate him and rouse him to speech.

Perhaps there really was no point. She leafed through the letters and notes. Every so often she pulled one out and read from it. Usually her voice died down after a few lines, and then she read to herself and laughed again, struck by how Avram, at the age of sixteen and a half, used to describe his dates with other girls—“Don’t worry, they’re only pale imitations of you, and this is only until you decide to lift the passion embargo you’ve imposed on me and give yourself to me wholly, including the holy sites”—and his failed courtships, and the mishaps. Above all, he described the ridiculous, humiliating mishaps. Ora had never met anyone who reported with such glee on his own failures and shortcomings. One evening, after seeing a movie with Chayuta H., he had walked her to Peterson Street, where she lived. He pulled her into a yard and they started making out. When he reached into her pants, Chayuta stopped him and said, “No, I’ve got the curse,” and Avram, who didn’t realize what she meant, was overcome with compassion. He consoled her and encouraged her and tried to rescue her from this surprising, exciting self-loathing, which he would never have imagined existed in lighthearted Chayuta. Chayuta listened silently as he prattled on, and since she was so quiet, for the first time that evening, Avram felt that he was finally reaching a pure spot in her cynical, socialite soul, and when he went so far in his eager consolations as to rival Gregor Samsa and the Brothers Karamazov, Chayuta cut him off and grinningly explained to him what exactly she had meant.

He described the episode to Ora with merciless precision,
and she laughed from the bottom of her heart and wrote how much she hated that ugly euphemism for menstruation. With rare courage, she added that when she gets her period—I had a medical problem for a few years after Ada, but now it’s all right, she explained—she actually feels extremely feminine. He replied immediately that the fact that she had chosen to tell him something like that meant she had already made up her mind to be only his
friend
, and that he must be like some sort of male girlfriend to her, and in his opinion that’s what she had really decided about him right from the start, when they met in the hospital, and it killed him, but that seemed to be his permanent fate, to suffice with the leftovers of her love, or of any love.

Hundreds of notes and letters were stuffed into that shoe box, written in his crowded, frenetic handwriting, which shuddered sometimes with a tension that could not be released even in words. The pages were covered with doodles, charming illustrations, arrows, asterisks, and footnotes. He overflowed with inventions and puns and tricks and little traps, meant to test her attention to all his details and minutiae. On the backs of the envelopes she read: “Hilik and Bilik, Ltd., Accessories and Auxiliary Equipment for Dreams and Nightmares.” Or, “S. Bubari, Pharmacological Consultant for Cuckoldry Troubles.” On each envelope, next to the official stamp, he stuck his own private stamps, on which he drew himself and her, and, of course, her with Ilan, and with their three, five, seven future children. He cut out funny or rude newspaper clippings for her, and copied engravings from tombstones in Jerusalem (“This one reads, ‘Dispirited by Torments’—it’s like they were thinking of me!”). He sent detailed knitting patterns for an elf’s hat made of thick wool with red tassels, and his own recipes for hamantaschen, quiches, and cakes, which she never dared to bake because simply reading the recipes made it clear that too many conflicting flavors were doing battle.