To the End of the Land (62 page)

At sunset, Ora and Ilan sat in deck chairs, Ofer played and dug in the sand, and Adam stood waist-high in the water, turning in circles, blowing in every direction, touching every joint and knuckle in his hands and feet. A tall, tan elderly couple walked arm in arm on the beach and stopped to look at Adam. From a distance, with the sunset’s blush on his back, he looked enmeshed in a poetic fairy dance, one movement following the other, each born from its predecessor.

“They think it’s Tai Chi,” Ilan hissed, and Ora whispered that it was starting to drive her mad. He put a hand on her arm. “Wait. He’ll get sick of it. How long can he keep this up?”

“Look at how totally indifferent he is to people watching him.”

“Yes, that’s what worries me a little.”

“A little? Adam? In front of everyone?” She thought about Ilan’s father, who during his final days in the hospital had lost all shame and would undress in front of everyone to show yet another place on his body where the growth had spread. “And look how Ofer keeps peeking at him, all the time.”

“Think about what it must do to him, to see Adam like that.”

“Has he talked to you about it?”

“Ofer? Nothing. I tried to ask him this morning, when we were alone on the beach. Nothing.” She forced a smile. “Well, he’s not going to collaborate against Adam.”

Adam kissed his fingertips and showered light touches on his waist, thighs, knees, and ankles in the water. He straightened up, spun around in a circle, and blew in all four directions.

“What’s going to happen when school starts in September, I want to know.”

“Wait. There are almost two months to go. It’ll pass by then.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“It will, it will.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“How could it not?”

Now she pulls her knees in to her chest, holds her breath, and looks at Avram for a long time. Avram feels that he can’t sit still for much longer. Ants are crawling all through his body.

Adam seemed to grow more distant day by day. Bad thoughts congregated, and Ora sensed that they had been lying in wait for some time. During the day they hovered like shadows in her head. At night, she sleepily banished them until she was exhausted, and then they descended. Ilan woke her and caressed her face and held her close to him and told her to breathe with him, slowly, until she calmed down.

“I had a nightmare,” she said. Her face was buried in his chest. She would not let him turn on the light, afraid he might read in her eyes what she had seen: Avram walked past her on the street, dressed in white and looking very pale, and when he came close he murmured that she should buy the newspaper today. She tried to stop him, to ask how he was and why he insisted on being estranged from her, but he pulled his arm away from her grip in disgust and left. The newspaper headline said that Avram was planning to go on a hunger strike outside her house until she gave in and delivered one of her sons to him.

Adam needed new gym shoes for the school year, and she kept putting off the shopping expedition. He asked her repeatedly to take him to the mall so he could choose a gift for Ofer, and while only two weeks earlier she would have been filled with excitement by such a request—“And after we finish shopping, can I take you out to a café?”—she now avoided him with such feeble excuses that he seemed to understand, and he stopped asking.

Every day brought new symptoms. He quickly pulled his arms away from his shoulders and to the sides before talking. He pulsed his fists open and closed before he said “me.” The washing and rinsing became more and more frequent. In the course of a single meal he was capable of getting up to wash his hands and mouth five or ten times.

After a Shabbat spent at home, during which Ilan saw Adam for a whole day, including three meals, he told Ora, “Let’s call someone.”

As predicted, Adam refused even to hear about it. He hurled himself on the floor and screamed that he wasn’t crazy and they should leave him alone. When they tried to persuade him, he locked himself in his room and pounded on the door for a long time.

“We’ll wait a bit,” said Ilan, as they both tossed and turned in bed. “Let him get used to the idea.”

“How long? How long can you wait with this?”

“Let’s say, a week?”

“No, that’s too long. A day. Maybe two, but no more.”

There was something paralyzing about watching Adam in the days that followed. Her child was turning into a process. During the hours she spent at home with him—when she could not find an excuse to go out for some fresh air, to absorb the smooth, harmonious movements of other people like an elixir, and to suck up some bitter jealousy at the sight of Adam’s peers having fun on their summer vacations—in those hours with him she witnessed his entire existence being chopped up into separate parts, whose connection was growing more and more tenuous. At times it seemed that the gestures—the “phenomena,”
as she and Ilan called them—were themselves the tendons and nerves that now sustained the affinity between the parts of the child he used to be.

“It all happened so close,” she says, whether to Avram or to herself. “It happened inside our home. You could reach out and touch it, but there was nothing to hold on to. Your hand closed in on emptiness.”

“Aha,” says Avram faintly.

“Tell me if you don’t feel like hearing this.”

He gives her another look that says, Stop talking nonsense.

She shrugs as if to say, How am I supposed to know? I’ve spent so many years getting used to being silent with you.

They set up their little camp at the spring of Ein Yakim in the Amud River wadi, next to a Mandate-era pumping station. Ora spreads the cloth on the ground and lays out food and dinnerware. Avram gathers wood, makes a circle of stones, and builds a fire. The dog crosses the skinny river back and forth, shaking her wet fur off in thousands of sprays, and looks at them playfully. Before sitting down to eat, they wash socks, underwear, and shirts in the spring water and lay them on bushes to dry when the sun rises. Avram digs through his backpack and finds a large, white Indian shirt and fresh
sharwal
pants. He changes his clothes behind a shrub.

The next day, when she was alone at home with Adam, he told her about something in his favorite computer game, and he seemed happy and full of excitement. She tried to focus on what he was saying and share his happiness, but it was hard: now he marked the ends of his sentences with exhalations, too. And after certain letters—she thought it was the sibilant consonants, but this rule may have had exceptions that demanded their own penalties—he sucked in his cheeks. Sentences that ended with question marks incurred a new tic: he folded back his upper lip toward his nose.

She stood in the kitchen with him and fought a malicious urge to stick her lips out at him in a crude imitation. So at least
he’d know how he looked. So he’d understand what people saw when they looked at him, and how hard it was to tolerate. She managed to stop herself only when she realized that was exactly what her mother had done to her after Ada. She’d had her own little physical quirks, though far less severe than these.

But when she saw Adam’s piercing, knowing look, she had a sudden impulse to wrap her arms around him. It had been weeks since she’d hugged him. He wouldn’t let anyone touch him, and she’d stopped trying, averse to touching his alien body. Perhaps she had the vague feeling that her touch would not find warm skin but a hardened shell. Now she kissed his cheek and forehead. She’d been so foolish to avoid it, to collaborate with his aversion, when perhaps all he needed was a simple, strong hug. And indeed, in one large wave, he suddenly emerged from captivity, leaned his whole body into her, and put his little head on her chest. She responded fervently and felt her own power again, her vivacity. How could she have agreed to give up on all that? How had she even considered letting her child be treated by a stranger before she herself had given him this simple, natural thing? She swore that from this moment on she would give him everything she had, empty her healing powers into him, her vast experience of treating bodies and giving calming massages. How had she withheld all this from him?

She shut her eyes and gritted her teeth above his head so as not to falter on the trip wire of tears gathering inside her and remembered what Ilan had once explained: he always hugged the boys a little less than he wanted to, because that was always a little more than they needed. Oh well, Ilan and his calculations. She kissed Adam’s forehead again, and he looked up at her with a sweet can-I-have-a-special face, which made her incredibly happy. The “special” was an old childhood tradition between her and the boys. It had been years since either of them had agreed to it, but now Adam puckered his lips, and she laughed with embarrassed delight—after all, he was almost thirteen, with the dark shadow of a moustache. But he seemed to need it so much that nothing embarrassed him, and he kissed her warmly, first on her right cheek, then on her left, and on the tip
of her nose, and on her forehead, and Ora rejoiced: she would show him the way home with kisses. He smiled and lowered his gaze, indicated that he wanted another round, and kissed her on her right cheek again, then her left, then the tip of her nose and her forehead. Ora said, “Now my turn,” and Adam grunted, “Just one more time.” He tightened his hands around her face and the back of her neck stiffened. He showered sharp pecks on her right cheek and left cheek, the tip of her nose and her forehead. She struggled to pull her face away and he grasped her with sharp fingers until she shouted: “Stop it, what’s the matter with you?” He grimaced, at first with a lack of comprehension, then with deep insult, and they faced each other for a moment, standing between the kitchen table and the sink, and Adam quickly touched the corners of his mouth and the spot between his eyes, then blew on his hands, first right then left, and his eyes kept filling with murky, thick liquid, and then he walked backward away from her, monitoring her suspiciously, as if fearing she would pounce on him, and she remembered: this was exactly the look Ofer had given her when he found out that she ate meat. That same flash of recognition—the possibility of rapaciousness—which had passed between them then, which had flickered across his cerebral cortex like an ancient drawing. How could she explain this to Avram? This moment between a mother and her child. Yet she does explain it, right down to the last detail, so he’ll know, so he’ll hurt, so he’ll live, so he’ll remember. Adam’s eyes widened and almost filled his entire face, and he kept backing away from her, still watching, and before leaving the kitchen he gave her one last sober, awful look, and she thought he was wordlessly saying, You had the chance to save me, and now I’m leaving.

Finally, after pressure and threats—taking away his computer privileges was the most effective method—they overcame Adam’s resistance and took him to see a psychologist.

After three meetings the man summoned Ora and Ilan. “Adam seems like an intelligent boy with a lot of potential. A
boy with strong character. Very strong.” His voice sounded weak. “The truth is, he sat here on this chair for three hours and didn’t say a word.”

Ora was amazed. “He didn’t speak? What about the gestures?”

“No gestures. He just sat here like a statue. He looked at me and barely blinked.”

Ora suddenly remembered that when Ilan was a boy, he had blackballed his whole class.

“Not an easy experience,” the man said. “Three whole sessions. I tried this, I tried that, but there’s some kind of resistance in him.” He tightened his hand into a fist. “A bunker, a sphinx.”

“So what do you suggest?” Ilan asked rancorously.

“Of course we can try another few sessions,” the man replied without looking in their eyes. “I’m certainly willing, but I have to say there’s something in the interaction—”

“Tell us what we should do,” Ilan interrupted. The vein in his temple was turning blue. “I want you tell me in simple words, what—do—we—do—now!”

Ora looked in despair at the iron layer descending over Ilan’s face.

The man blinked as he spoke. “I’m not certain there’s an immediate solution here. I’m just trying to think out loud with you. Perhaps it would be more successful with someone else? Perhaps a woman therapist?”

“Why a woman?” Ora sat back in her chair, feeling accused. “Why does it have to be a woman?”

One evening, Ora sat poring over receipts for her income-tax return—every two months she had to report her income from the physiotherapy clinic (“But patients I see at home, I don’t report on principle,” she tells Avram with a proud sense of conspiracy between two mutineers; he doesn’t even carry an identity card!)—when Adam came up to her and asked her to help him tidy his room. This was an unusual request, especially in those days, and the mess in his room was intolerable, but she
had to finish her taxes. “Does it have to be now?” she asked irritably. “Why didn’t you ask me an hour ago, when I wasn’t busy? Why is it that only my time is expendable in this household?”

Adam danced and fidgeted away in his complex of tics. Ora tried to keep sorting through her receipts, but she could not concentrate. More than anything, it depressed her to think that he had walked away without arguing. Without saying a word. As though he knew he could not waste even one drop of energy now.

As she calculated her mileage and per diem expenses, she could sense that Adam was in his room crumbling into shards of despair and loneliness. She knew his disintegration was sucking her in too, and that soon it might dissolve her and Ilan as a couple, and the entire family. We’re so weak, she thought, staring at the neat little piles of paper. How can the two of us be so paralyzed, instead of really fighting for him? It’s like—the thought punctured her—it’s like we can feel that it’s … what? Our punishment? For what?

“For
you
we fought a lot harder,” she says to Avram.

Avram tightens his hands around the hot cup of coffee. His body is tense, his eyes enthralled by the last glimmers of light on the stream.

Ora got up and almost ran to Adam’s room with a foreboding heart. But he was just standing there in the middle of the room he shared with Ofer, surrounded by incredible heaps of clothes, toy parts, notebooks, towels, and balls, leaning slightly forward, frozen.