To the End of the Land (56 page)

“But we really did love,” she said, even though he was asleep. “You and me, we were really …” It’s horrible, she thought, the way I’m already talking about it in the past tense.

He moved, entangled in the covers, and swore at the cast that pressed on his leg. She heard the large plate screw in his arm clicking against the bedrail.

“Ora—”

“What?”

“I’m not.”

“Not what?”

“You need to know.”

“What?”

“I can’t …” He moaned, searching for the words. “I don’t love anything. Nothing.”

She sat silently.

“Ora?”

“Yes.”

“That’s it.”

“Yes.”

“And no one.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t have it … Love.”

“Yes.”

“For anything.” He groaned. A remnant of his old compassionate, chivalrous self made him wish to protect her, she could sense it, but he did not have the strength. “I wanted to tell you earlier.”

“Yes.”

“Everything died in me.”

She bowed her head. How could there be an Avram without love? What was Avram without love? And who, she thought, am I without his love?

But since the war, since he was taken hostage, she’d had no love for anyone, either. Just like after Ada—her blood had dried up in her again. It was comfortable. She lived precisely within her means. But why did it seem so much more terrible in Avram?

“Tell me.”

“Yes.”

“How long were we?”

“Almost a year.”

“And you and Ilan?”

“Five years. From age seventeen or so.” She laughed joylessly. “You hooked us up, remember?” We were in a hospital then too, she thought. There was a war then, too.

“That, I remember,” he murmured. “And I remember that you were a couple. I didn’t remember us.”

She swallowed the insult heavily.

Then he mumbled in surprise, “Of course we were, how could I forget.”

“You’ll remember everything, there’s no rush.”

“I think they did things to me there.”

“It will come back to you,” she said, and her stomach felt desiccated. “It’ll take a while, but you’ll—”

A tall, strong nurse opened the door, switched the light on, and peered inside: “Are we all right?”

“We’re all right,” Ora said and jumped up with a panic that turned into a sort of feverish, habitual happiness: “I’m glad you came, I was about to call you.”

To her astonishment, Avram was snoring loudly, and this time she had trouble believing he was asleep, but she stopped herself and did not tell the nurse he had regained consciousness. The nurse changed his infusion and urine bags and spread some cream on his fingertips and above his eyes, where the brows had been pulled out. Then she turned him over and cleaned the pus oozing from the wound in his back, bandaged him up again, and gave him a massive injection of antibiotics.

“Sweetie, you need some sleep,” she told Ora while she worked.

Ora smiled with great effort. “I’ll go home in the morning.” “So tell me, what are you to him? You and the tall guy. Family?”

“Sort of. Well, yes, we’re his family.”

It occurred to Ora that Ilan had been changing from day to day since Avram’s return. It was as though a new energy had filled him and was somehow enlarging his volume, the space he occupied. His gait was more vibrant, stronger. There was something confusing and a little bothersome about it. Sometimes she
looked at him in surprise: it was like someone had traced over his pencil-drawn features with black ink.

The nurse laughed. “It’s just that I keep seeing just the two of you here. Doesn’t he have anyone else?”

“No, just the two of us.”

“But how are you related to him? You don’t look anything like him.” Having finished her business, she stood in the doorway, refusing to leave them. “You actually look more like each other, you and that other guy. Like brother and sister. So how are you related to him?”

“It’s a long story,” Ora murmured.

“Door,” Avram whispered when the nurse left. Ora got up and shut the door.

“And you were Ilan’s,” he said, probing for solid ground to put his foot down on.

“Yes, you could say. That, too. But you really shouldn’t make such an effort now.”

“And Ilan … You loved him, right?”

Ora nodded. She pondered how it was possible to use the very same word to describe such different feelings.

“So how … I mean, how did you also …”

Either he’s testing me—a strange idea flashed in her mind—or else he’s playing one of his games with me. “How what?”

“How were we also.”

She thought she could finally see a very thin strip of pale light in the window. Why are you torturing him with your stammerings? she thought. What are you afraid of? Just tell him. Give him back his past. That may be all he has left. “Listen, Avram, there was one year, up until not long ago, until the war, when I was with you and with him.”

He let out a heavy, hoarse breath of surprise. “Remember, I have to remember,” he mumbled to himself. “Why is all the time erased? She was with me and with him? Together? How did he let me …”

He sank back into himself again and melted away for several minutes. Ora thought: He cannot understand what was once the spirit of his life.

“I don’t understand anymore, Ora, help me.”

His body twitched and jerked as if a battle was raging within him. She squirmed too, suffocating in her own skin. What is this strange interrogation? He must remember. How could you forget a year like that, and everything we went through?

“But with both of us?”

“Yes.”

“Together? At the same time?”

She held her head up straight and said, “Yes.”

“And did we know?”

Ora could not do this anymore. These questions, this diminution of him, as though something was becoming irredeemably polluted in her own mind, too.

“He—Ilan—and I, we knew?”

“What?” she shouted in a whisper. “Knew what?”

“That both of us … that we were with you together?”

“What do you want from me? What do you want to hear?”

His voice climbed into an agitated whisper: “We didn’t know?”

She no longer had a choice. “But
you
knew.”

“And he didn’t?”

“Apparently not. I don’t know.”

“You didn’t tell him?”

She shook her head.

“And he didn’t ask?”

“No.”

“And he didn’t ask me, either?”

“You never told me he did.”

“But did he know?”

“Ilan’s a smart guy,” Ora spat out. She had a lot more than that to say. The word “smart” explained nothing. There was something broad and deep, wonderful in its own way, in what the three of them had been given in that silenced year. She looked at Avram’s strained face, at his narrow, haggling apprehension, and realized he was incapable of comprehending even the tip of the iceberg now.

“But we were friends,” he murmured with dim amazement.
“Ilan and I. We were friends, he’s my best … so how could I …”

Had she been able to, she would have put him to sleep again, so he wouldn’t understand so much, so he wouldn’t encounter himself so unprotected.

It was too late. With a stare suspended in infinity, his eyes glazed over. Ora felt as though a slow explosion of comprehension was detonating inside him.

Beyond the shoulder of the road they’ve just crossed lies a fertile stretch of pasture. A barbed-wire fence is partially trampled to the ground, and the clover blooms abundantly. “Hey!” Avram smiles and points happily to a round rock, where the orange-blue-and-white path marker winks at them in the sunlight. “We’ve found it!” He plants one foot on the rock and sweeps his arm out in the direction of the path. “That’s quite a mountain,” he exclaims as his eyes follow his arm all the way up the path, and he tentatively moves his foot off the rock.

“Are mountains also an issue for you?”

“Roads aren’t an issue either,” he says, “I don’t know what got into me.”

“I was really scared. We could have got run over back there.”

“So it turns out I owe you my life.”

“Let’s say another few times like that and we’ll be even?” She sees the shadow of a bitter smile pass over his lips like a sly animal caught stealing something delectable—perhaps a heart pang.

“And your dog, where is she?”

“
My
dog? Now she’s mine?”

“Ours, okay, ours.”

They walk back to the roadside and whistle to the dog. Over the rush of traffic, they shout out, “Hey! Whoa! Doggy! Dog! Come here!” They hear the interweaving sounds of their own voices. If she had the courage, Ora would yell, just once,
Ofer, Oh-Fer, come home!

But the dog is gone, and perhaps it’s for the best, Ora thinks. I don’t want to get attached to her, I can’t take another separation. Still, it’s a pity, we could have been good friends.

The mountain is steep and meandering, entangled with olive trees and terebinths and spiny hawthorn. The path strains their calf muscles painfully and wears out their lungs. “I wonder which mountain this is,” says Avram breathlessly. “I don’t even know where we are.”

Ora stops and takes gulps of air. “All of a sudden you care where we are?”

“Well, it’s just weird to walk without knowing where you are.”

“The map is in your backpack.”

“Should we look at it?”

They sit down and suck on hard lemon candy. Avram hesitates briefly, then opens the right pocket of the backpack. For the first time since they left, he reaches inside. He pulls out a Leatherman penknife, a matchbox, and candles. A ball of twine. Mosquito repellant. Flashlight. Another flashlight. Sewing kit. Deodorant, aftershave. A small pair of binoculars. He spreads his loot on the ground and looks at it. For a moment she thinks he’s trying to form a mental image of Ofer from these items.

“Ofer’s always prepared, but you know he didn’t get that from me or from you,” Ora says, laughing.

On a bed of poterium they spread out a large, plastic-covered 1:50,000-scale map and pore over it, heads almost touching.

“Where are we?”

“Maybe here?”

“No, that’s not even the right direction.”

They strain their eyes. Two fingers dart around, run into and cross over each other.

“Here’s our path.”

“Yes, it’s marked.”

“That’s what that guy said, the Israel Trail.”

“Which guy?” she asks.

“The one we met.”

“Oh, him.”

“Yes, him.”

Her finger runs back along the path until it hits the border. “Oops.” She stops and folds in her finger. “Lebanon.”

“If you ask me, that’s more or less where we started.”

“Maybe it was here? Because that’s right where we waded into the stream, remember?”

“Could I forget?”

“And we followed it along here in a zigzag, like this.” She leads her finger down the winding path. Avram’s finger is next to hers, just behind. “This is where we climbed up, and here there was a wooden bridge, and here we saw the flour mill, and maybe this is where we slept the first night? No? Maybe here, next to Kfar Yuval? How can anyone remember? What did we even see those first few days? Who could see anything at all?”

He laughs. “I was a total zombie.”

“Here’s the Kfar Giladi quarry, and here’s the Tel Chai Forest, and the sculpture path, and here’s where we ate, at Ein Ro’im.”

“I wasn’t seeing anything back then.”

“No, you weren’t. You just walked and cursed me for dragging you along.”

“And ’round about here, I think, we met Akiva, and then we went down into the wadi.”

“This whole stretch was a real hike, see?”

“Yes, and that must be the Arab village.”

“What’s left of it.”

“I wanted to see it, but you ran on.”

“I’ve had enough ruins in my life.”

“And that’s the Kedesh River.”

“So here’s where we slept.”

“And then we walked up the riverbed and met that guy of yours.”

“Since when is he mine?” Her fingers press into the map, leaving a brief indentation in the plastic. “And here’s Yesha Fortress, and that’s the Sheik’s tomb, Nebi Yusha.”

“And here, you see, here’s where we walked up all the way to Keren Naphtali, and then down again because you left the notebook at the Kedesh River.”

“And here was another stream, Dishon.”

“It looks so innocent on the map. And look here, it’s those turbines we couldn’t figure out. Apparently that was the Ein Aviv Regional Pumping Station. So we’ve learned something.”

“And I think this is the pool where we bathed.”

“And here we walked along that big pipe to cross the water.”

“I was shaking.”

“Seriously? I didn’t know, you didn’t say anything.”

“That’s me.”

“And here, look, it’s your fairy-tale forest, Tsivon Stream.”

“And here’s the meadow we walked through earlier. Definitely.”

“And here’s the road we crossed.”

“Yes, it said ‘Highway 89.’ ”

“So if we crossed here,” Avram says musically, “then now we must be—”

“On Meron,” she determines.

“
Mount
Meron?”

“See for yourself.”

Their fingers point reverently.

“Avram,” she whispers, “look how far we’ve walked.”

He gets up, hugs his chest, and paces among the trees.

They fold up the map, hoist their backpacks, and start making their way up the steep incline again through the thistles. Avram leads now, and Ora has a hard time keeping up. These shoes are really good for me, he decides. Excellent socks, too. He finds a long, supple branch of an arbutus tree, breaks it into the right size with one stomp, and uses it to help with the climb. He suggests that Ora use one, too. He comments on the excellent path markings in this section. “Frequent and consecutive, just like they should be,” he pronounces. She thinks she can hear him humming a tune to himself.

It’s a good thing the path is so long, she thinks, watching him
from behind. This way, there’s time to get accustomed to all the changes.

“Black-Maned Horse. That was one of Ilan’s nicknames for Adam, when he was maybe three and a half. There was also Giant-Trunked Elephant. Get it?”

Avram mumbles the words, hearing them in Ilan’s voice.