To the End of the Land (60 page)

The next day, Ora told him now, Ofer woke up with a conclusion and a solution: from now on he would be English, and everyone had to call him John, and he would not answer to the name Ofer. “ ’Cause no one kills
them
,” he explained simply, “and they don’t have any enemies. I asked in class, and Adam says so too, everyone’s friends with the English.” He started speaking English, or rather, what he thought was English, a gibberish version of Hebrew with an English accent. And just to be on the safe side, he buttressed his bed with protective layers of books and toys, trenches of furry stuffed animals. And every night he insisted on sleeping with a heavy monkey wrench next to his head.

“I happened to look in his notebook one day, and I saw that he kept writing ‘Arobs.’ When I told him it was spelled with an ‘a’ he was amazed: ‘I thought it was A-robs, ’cause they keep robbing us.’

“Then one day he found out that some Israelis were Arabs. Well, by that time I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, you know? He discovered that all his calculations were wrong, and he had to deduct the Israeli Arabs from the number of Israelis.”

She remembers how furious he was when he found out. He stomped his feet and shouted and turned red and hurled himself on the floor and screamed: “Make them go away! Back to their own homes! Why did they even come here? Don’t they have their own places?”

“And then he had an attack, a bit like the one he had at age four, with the vegetarianism. He ran a high fever, and for almost a week I was in total despair. And there was one night when he was convinced there was an Arab with him.”

“In his body?” Avram asks in horror, and his eyes dart to the sides. She has the feeling that he has lied to her about something.

“In his room,” she corrects him softly. “It was just feverish nonsense, hallucinations.”

The hair on her skin stands on end, telling her she has to be careful, but she’s not sure of what. Avram seems to have ossified right in front of her. His eyes harden with the look of a captive.

“Are you okay?”

There is shame and terror and guilt in his eyes. For a moment Ora thinks she knows exactly what she is seeing, and the next moment she flings herself away. An Arab in his body, she thinks. What did they do to him there? Why doesn’t he ever talk?

“I’ll never forget that night,” she says, trying to abate the horror on Avram’s face. “Ilan was on reserve duty in Lebanon, in the eastern sector. He was gone for four weeks. I put Adam to sleep in our bed so Ofer wouldn’t disturb him. Adam didn’t have a lot of patience for Ofer through that whole episode. It was like he couldn’t see that Ofer was afraid of something. And just imagine: Ofer was—I don’t know, six? And Adam was already nine and a half, and it was like he couldn’t forgive Ofer for breaking down like that.

“I sat with Ofer all night, and he was burning up and confused, and he kept seeing the Arab in the room, sitting on Adam’s bed, on the closet, under the bed, peering at him from the window. Madness.

“I tried to calm him, and I turned on the light, and I brought a flashlight to prove to him there was no one there. I also tried to explain some of the facts to him, to put things in perspective—me, the big expert, right? There I was in the middle of the night, giving him a seminar on the history of the conflict.”

“And then what?” Avram asks very quietly, his face fallen.

“Nothing. You couldn’t even talk to him. He was so miserable—you’ll laugh—that I almost thought of calling Sami, our driver, you know, the one who—”

“Yes.”

“To explain to him, or something like that. To show him that he was an Arab too, and that he wasn’t Ofer’s enemy and didn’t hate him and didn’t want his room.” She falls quiet and swallows a bitter lump: the memory of her last drive with Sami.

“At nine the next morning, Ofer had an appointment with our family doctor. At eight, after I sent Adam to school, I bundled up Ofer in a coat, sat him in the car, and drove to Latrun.”

“Latrun?”

“I’m a practical girl.”

With a stern and determined look, she had climbed up the
steps, walked down the gravel path, put Ofer down in the center of the huge courtyard at the Armored Corps site, and told him to look.

He had blinked hazily, blinded by the winter sun. Around him were dozens of tanks, both ancient and new. Tank barrels and machine guns were aimed at him. She held his hand and walked him to one of the larger ones, a Soviet T-55. Ofer stood facing the tank, excited. She asked if he was strong enough to climb on it. He replied in amazement: “Am I allowed?” She helped him climb up the turret, then clambered up after him. He stood there, swaying, looked fearfully around, and asked, “Is this ours?”

“Yes.”

“You mean, all this?”

“Yes, and there’s lots more, we have loads of these.”

Ofer waved his arm in the air over the semicircle of tanks in front of him. Some of them had been discontinued as long ago as the Second World War, metal toads and iron tortoises, antiquated booty tanks from at least three wars. He asked to climb on another tank, and another, and another. He ran his fingers in awe over tracks, firing platforms, equipment chambers, and transmissions and rode like a cavalier on the barrels. At ten-thirty they both sat down in the restaurant at the Latrun gas station, where Ofer devoured a huge Greek salad and a three-egg omelet.

“Maybe it was a little primitive, my instant treatment, but it was definitely effective.” Then she adds drily, “Besides, at the time I thought that what was good enough for a whole country was good enough for my child.”

In the heart of a pasture, at the foot of a giant lone oak tree, a man is lying on the ground. His head rests on a large rock, a backpack sits beside him, and Ora’s blue notebook peeks out of one of its pockets.

They stand awkwardly by his side, afraid to wake him, yet drawn to the notebook. Ora snatches her glasses off her face
and hides them in her fanny pack. She quickly runs her fingers through her disheveled hair to tidy it. She and Avram try to understand—exchanging looks and furrowed brows—how the man has managed to get here ahead of them. Ora, slightly envious, admires the tranquillity and confidence with which he has abandoned himself in this open, invadable space. His dark, masculine face is so exposed. Those glasses lie on his chest like a large butterfly, tied to a string around his neck.

Avram signals to her that if she has no objection, he will take the notebook. She hesitates. The notebook is nestled comfortably in his backpack pocket.

But Avram is already approaching, and with a pickpocket’s expertise he fishes the notebook out of the bag and signals to Ora that they should move away quickly if they don’t want to get embroiled in explanations, especially with someone who, at their first encounter, had made the mistake of mentioning the news.

She hugs the notebook to her heart, soaking up its warmth. The man goes on sleeping. With his mouth half open, he snores, making soft, woolly sounds. His arms and legs are clumsily splayed out. A rug of silver hair rises out of his shirt collar and awakens in Ora a vague longing to put her head there, to give herself over to a deep, infectious slumber, like his own. In a moment’s impulse, she tears out the last page of the notebook and writes, “I took back my notebook. Bye, Ora.” She hesitates, and quickly adds her phone number, in case he wants a more detailed explanation. When she leans over to put the note in his backpack, she notices them again: two identical wedding rings, one on his ring finger, the other on his pinky.

They slip away quickly, bubbling sweetly with the success of their plot, their eyes glimmering with childlike mischief. As they walk, she leafs through the notebook, amazed to see how much she had written that night by the river. She scans her lines with his eyes.

The path appears again, bending and twisting cheerfully, and the dog circles around them, sometimes runs alongside them and at other times sprints ahead quickly, then suddenly
stops for no reason. She sits on her behind, turns her head back to Ora, the black arches above her eyes slightly raised, and Ora makes a similar gesture.

“She’s a happy dog, see? She’s smiling at us.”

But as they walk down the mountain, over heaps of shattered fallen rocks, a bothersome thought nags at her. She could not have written so many pages in one night. A few steps later, next to a huge rock with a mysterious oblong shape, she has to stop. She pulls the notebook out of her backpack, puts her glasses back on, and quickly leafs through the pages. She lets out a little shriek: “Look!” She shows Avram. “Look, it’s his handwriting!”

Avram studies the pages and his face wrinkles. “Are you sure? Because it looks like—”

She holds the page close to her face. It looks like her handwriting, or a masculine version of it: straight, neat characters, all at the same angle. “It really does look like mine,” she mumbles awkwardly, feeling naked. “Even I was confused.”

She turns the pages back, looking for the place where the writers switched. Twice, then three times, she flips past the right point before recognizing her final lines:
Aren’t we like a little underground cell in the heart of the ‘situation’? And that really is what we were. For twenty years. Twenty good years. Until we got trapped
. Immediately after those words—even without turning the page: such chutzpah! Even without a separating line!—she reads:
Next to Dishon River I meet Gilead, 34, an electrician and djembe drummer, who used to be from a moshav in the north. Now lives in Haifa. What does he miss: “Dad was a farmer (pecans), and in slow years he did all kinds of jobs. There was a time when he gathered construction planks from dumps and sold them to an Arab in the village nearby.”

“What is this?” She thrusts the notebook at Avram’s chest. “What is this supposed to be?” She pulls it back and reads with a choked-up voice:

“Wood, you see—you have to know how to treat it. You can’t just throw it in the basement. You have to carefully stack big ones on big ones, and small ones on small ones, and put bricks on top of it all, otherwise it warps. But first of all you have to take out the nails. So
I would stand with Dad at night in the sheltered area where he kept the wood—

“What on earth is this? What is all this stuff?” She raises her eyebrows at Avram, but his eyes are closed, and he signals: Keep reading.

“Dad had a blue undershirt, with holes here. And we had a crowbar that we connected to an extension handle, and we would take an iron chisel and separate, say, two planks nailed together. Dad on this end, me on that end, bracing, and after we separated them, we’d work together on the plank, pulling out nails with the other end of the hammer. It went on for hours, with a little bulb hanging above from a string, and that’s something I still miss to this day, the way I worked with him like that, together
.

“There’s more. Listen, that’s not all. There’s more.

“Now about the regret. Well, that’s a harder one. I regret lots of things (laughs). I mean, do people just come out and tell you? Look, at some point I had a ticket to Australia, to work on a cotton farm. I had a visa and everything, and then I met a girl here and I canceled my trip. But she was worth it, so it’s just a partial regret.”

Ora frantically turns the page and her eyes run over the lines. She reads silently:
Tamar, my darling, someone lost a notebook with her life story. I’m almost positive I met her earlier, when I walked down to the river. She looked like she was in a bad state. In danger even (she wasn’t alone). Ever since I saw her, I’ve been asking you what to do but you haven’t answered. I’m not used to not getting answers from you, Tammi. It’s all a little confusing. But I am asking the questions you posed at the end: What do we miss most? What do we regret?

Ora slaps the notebook shut. “What is he? Who is this?”

Avram’s face is gloomy and distant.

“Maybe a journalist, interviewing people along his way? But he doesn’t look like one at all.” A doctor, she remembers. He said he was a pediatrician.

She glances at the pages again:
Near Moshav Alma I meet Edna, 39, divorced, a kindergarten teacher, Haifa: “What I miss most is my childhood days in Zichron Yaakov. Originally I’m a Zammarin, that was my maiden name, and I miss the days of innocence, the simplicity
we had then. Everything was less complicated. Less, kind of, ‘psychological.’ You wouldn’t believe it to look at me, but I have three grown sons (laughs). It doesn’t show, does it? I married early and divorced even earlier …”

Ora is sucked in. She turns the pages rapidly and sees, on every page, longings and regrets. “I don’t understand,” she murmurs, feeling deceived. “He looked like such a”—she searches for the right word—“solid man? Simple? Private? Not a man who … who would just walk around asking people these kinds of questions.”

Avram says nothing. He digs the tip of his shoe into the gravel.

“And why in
my
notebook?” Ora asks loudly. “Aren’t there any other notebooks?”

She spins around and starts to walk away, head held high, pressing the notebook close to her. Avram shrugs his shoulders, looks back for a moment—there’s no one there, the guy must still be asleep—and follows her. He does not see the thin smile of surprise on her lips.

“Ora—”

“What?”

“Didn’t Ofer want to go on a big trip somewhere, after the army?”

“Let him finish the army first,” she says curtly.

“Actually, he did talk about that,” she picks up later. “Maybe to India.”

“India?” Avram bites back a smile and buries an unruly thought: He should come see me at the restaurant. I can tell him all about India.

“He hasn’t decided yet. They were thinking of traveling together, he and Adam.”

“The two of them? Are they really that—”

“Close. Those two are each other’s best friend.” A seedling of pride grows inside her: At least in that realm she’d been successful. Her two sons were soul mates.

“And is that—is that normal?”

“What?”

“For two brothers, at that age …”

“They were always like that. Almost from the beginning.”