To the End of the Land (65 page)

“Just one, what do you care?”

“But why?”

“So you’ll have to do one less.”

“What?”

“Stop it, you’re getting water on my drawing!”

“What did you say?”

“That if I do one, then you’ll have one less to do.”

“You’re crazy, you know that? Totally nuts. Anyway, this doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

“Whaddayacare? Just one. A loaner.”

“Which one?”

“Whatever you say. This one, or like that, or—”

She hears a chair flung aside and quick steps. She guesses Adam’s little steps around himself on his way to the faucet, his eyes now scurrying in panic.

“Adam—”

“I’m gonna beat the crap out of you. Shut up!”

A long silence.

“Come on, Adam, just one.”

She hears steps and a thud. Panting and bodies falling to the floor. A chair turned over. Stifled grunts. She realizes that Ofer is holding back his shouts so she won’t come in to separate them and ruin his plan. She stands up.

“Give in?”

“Just let me do it once.”

“You’re such an annoying kid!” Adam screeches. “Don’t you have any friends, you midget? Pest!”

“Just once and that’s it, I swear.”

She hears the slaps, one and two, and Ofer’s deep, stifled yelp. Without realizing it, she is biting her fists.

“Now d’you understand?”

“Whaddayacare, just once each time.”

Adam lets out a high-pitched giggle of amazement.

“I’ll do it so you won’t even know,” Ofer groans.

Adam sucks his lips, blows on the backs of his hands, and
spins around. Finally, he says quietly, “No. I think I have to do them all. The whole thing.”

“Then I’ll just do them next to you.”

The faucet is turned on. A quick rinse. Blows. Silence. Then the faucet again, a little longer this time, and different blowing, stronger and slower.

“Did you do it? Okay, now get lost.”

“Let me do one every time,” Ofer says with an assertiveness that amazes Ora. Then she sees him run out of the kitchen with a serious, focused look on his face.

Over the next few days, Ofer and Adam spend all their free time together. They seldom leave their room, and it’s hard to know what’s going on. When she listens behind the door, she hears them playing and blathering the way they used to when they were seven and four. They seem to be returning, together, to an earlier era, as if drawn instinctively to some moment in time when they were both little children.

One morning, after she wakes them up and lets them lie chattering in bed for a while, she walks by and hears Adam ask: “How many today?”

“Three for me, three for you.”

“But which three?” Adam’s voice sounds so submissive and soft that she hardly recognizes him.

“You do the water and the feet and the turning, and I’ll do all the rest.”

“Can I do the mouth, too?” Adam whispers.

“No, I’m doing the mouth.”

“But I have to …”

“I already have dibs on the mouth. That’s it.”

She places both hands on her temples. Ofer must have dropped an anchor inside Adam. She has no other words to describe it. He’s already there, working in the depths of Adam with that same calm determination with which he builds giant LEGO castles or dismantles old televisions.

“Aren’t I allowed any today?” Adam asks at the breakfast table, out in the open, in her presence.

Ofer thinks about it and decrees, “None. Today I’m doing them all.” Then he comes around: “You know what? You can do the one with the lip. When you fold it.”

“And everything else is you?” Adam asks. His voice is childish and obedient, and it horrifies her.

“Yes.”

“But d’you remember to do it?”

“All the time.”

“Are you sure, Ofer?”

“I never missed any till now. Come on, let’s go to the room.”

She practically runs to her post behind the closed door. Her body, she notes to Avram, remembers that station very well from childhood, when she used to eavesdrop on her parents from behind the closed door of her own room, trying to pick up hints, voices, giggles. Human traces. Forty years have gone by—declares the tight-lipped judge in her mind—and what has madam done in those four decades? I’ve changed sides at the door, your honor.

“The cop’s name will be Speed,” Ofer says.

“And the thief?”

“Let’s call him Typhoon.”

“Okay.”

“Speed rides a motorbike and he has a hovercraft.”

“And the thief?” Adam asks weakly.

“The thief will have long hair, and on his shirt there’s a black star, and he has a bazooka and a laser drill.”

“Okay,” Adam says.

Ora puts her hand to her neck. This is an ancient game. They used to play it—how long ago? Two years? Three? They would lie on the rug and make up pairs of cops and robbers, or orcs and halflings. Except that back then Adam was the creator and Ofer the nodding pupil.

“Don’t,” Ofer says casually. “I’m doing the fingers today.”

“Did I do the fingers?”

“You didn’t notice.”

“Then do it already.”

“Wait. You have to pay a fine, ’cause you did mine.”

“What’s the fine?”

“The fine,” Ofer answers thoughtfully, “is that I’m taking the eye thing from you too, where you blink hard and open them.”

“But I have to do that one,” Adam whispers.

“Well, I took it.”

“I don’t have anything left.”

“You have the hands and feet left, and the one where you blow.”

There is a long silence. Then Ofer picks up as if nothing has happened. “Now I’m bringing in a cop with an iron fist. He’s called Mac Boom Boom, and he can open his shirt—”

“How many days are you taking mine for?”

“Three days not counting today.”

“So today I can still do it?”

“No, today neither of us can.”

“Neither of us? Then who’s going to do it?”

“No one. It doesn’t get done today.”

“Is that allowed?” Adam whispers sadly.

“Whatever we decide,” says Ofer in a Dungeon Master’s voice.

Ora tells Avram she will probably never know what really went on behind Adam and Ofer’s closed door during that whole period. Because what, in fact, did happen? Two kids, one almost thirteen, the other just over nine, spent every day together, usually just the two of them, for three or four weeks during summer vacation. They played computer games and foosball, chattered for hours, made up characters, and every so often they cooked
shakshuka
or pasta together. “And while they did all that—don’t ask me exactly how it happened—one of them saved the other.”

“You were asking if they’re alike?” His question from the night before suddenly pops into her head.

“Yes, that’s what I asked.”

“Ofer, I think, is a little more … Actually, a little less, um …”

“What?”

“Oh, it’s complicated. Look, let me put it this way: Adam is
kind of … Kind of what? What am I trying to say?” She pouts. “It’s funny how hard it suddenly is to describe them. Almost everything I want to say about them sounds so inaccurate.” She shakes herself off and gathers her thoughts. “Adam—I’m only talking about outward appearances now, right? Well, he’s less, say, he draws less attention at first glance. You know? But on the other hand, when you really get to know him, he’s a very charismatic young man. The most charismatic. He’s the kind of guy who can—”

“What does he look like?”

“You mean, you want me to describe him?”

“You know me—I like details.”

The detaileater: a distant relative of the anteater, a virtually extinct subspecies of the order Pilosa, survives exclusively on details
. That was how Avram had defined himself in a booklet he put together in his senior year at high school, “The Class of ’69 Encyclopedia of Human Fauna.” It contained his descriptions of the students and teachers, with precise illustrations, arranged by their zoological categorizations.

“He’s a little bit short, relatively speaking. I told you that. And he has very black hair, like Ilan’s, but he parts it in the middle and it comes down in a kind of wave over his left ear.” Ora illustrates. Her face sparkles at Avram.

“What?”

“Nothing at all,” she answers and shrugs one shoulder provocatively. But the more Avram comes back to life—quiet and heavy and lacking as he is—the more he magnetizes her to an internal precision, a private nuance that spreads the kind of warm ripples through her body she hasn’t felt in years.

Two young couples pass by. The women nod hello and look at them curiously. The men are immersed in a loud conversation. “We’re mostly into biometric identification smart cards,” the taller one says. “We’re working on a card called BDA, and what it does is that a Palestinian who wants to get in just has to hold his hand and face under the biometric reader. Get it? No contact with soldiers, no talking, no nothing. Clean as a whistle. CWC—communication without contact.”

“So what’s ‘BDA’ stand for?” asks the second man.

The first one snickers. “Actually, it’s an acronym for biometric access device, but we realized that that came out BAD, so we changed it.”

“And his left ear,” Ora says when the people have gone, “is always exposed. It’s cute, like a little pearl.”

She shuts her eyes: Adam. His cheeks still look a little red beneath his shadow of stubble, a childhood souvenir. And he has long sideburns. And big, bitter eyes.

“His eyes are what stand out most. They’re big, like Ofer’s, but completely different, more sunken and black. All in all we’re a family of eyes. And his lips—” She stops suddenly.

“What about them?”

“No, I think they’re beautiful.” She concentrates on her hands. “Yes.”

“But?”

“But … but here, on the top one, he has a sort of tic, a permanent one. Not a tic, but an expression—”

“What sort of expression?”

“Well …” She takes a deep breath, girding her face. The time has come.

“You see what I have here?”

He nods without looking.

“So it’s this. Except his is turned upward.”

“Yes.”

They skip from stone to stone across a shallow creek, holding on to each other every so often.

“Tons of flies today,” Avram says.

“It must be the heat.”

“Yes. This evening it will be more—”

“Can I ask you something?”

“What?”

“Does it really stand out?”

“No, no.”

“Because you didn’t say anything about it.”

“I hardly noticed.”

“I had this thing, it was nothing, something in the nerves on
my face, about a month after Ilan left. It happened in the middle of the night. I was alone at home. I was terrified. Does it look awful?”

“I’m telling you, you can hardly see it.”

“But I can feel it.” She touches the right corner of her upper lip, pushes it slightly up. “I keep thinking my face is falling to one side.”

“But you really can’t see anything, Ora’leh.”

“It’s just a couple of millimeters that I can’t feel. The sensation in the rest of my lips is totally normal.”

“Yes.”

“It should go away at some point. It won’t always be like this.”

“Of course.”

They walk down a narrow path among orchards of strawberry and walnut trees.

“Avram, tell me something.”

“What?”

“Stop for a minute.”

He stands waiting. His shoulders hunch up.

“Would you mind giving me a little kiss?”

He comes up close to her, rigid and bearish. Without looking at her, he hugs her, and plants a decisive kiss on her lips.

And lingers, and lingers.

“Ahhh.” She breathes softly.

“A-ah.” He sighs in surprise.

“Avram.”

“What?”

“Did you feel anything?”

“No, everything’s normal.”

She laughs. “ ‘Normal’!”

“I mean, like you used to be.”

“You still remember?”

“I remember everything.”

“Remember how I get dazed from kissing?”

“I remember.”

“And that sometimes I almost pass out from kissing?”

“Yes.”

“You be careful when you kiss me.”

“Yes.”

“How you loved me, Avram.”

He kisses her again. His lips are as soft as she remembered. She smiles as they kiss, and his lips move with hers.

“One more thing—”

“Hmmmmm …”

“Do you think we’ll ever sleep together?”

He presses her against his body and she feels his force. She thinks again of how much good this journey is doing him, and her.

They walk on, at first hand in hand, then they let go. Threads of new awkwardness stretch out between them, and nature itself winks behind their backs and plays nasty tricks on them, scattering yellow clods of asters and groundsel, blanketing purple clover and pink flax, erecting stalks of huge—but smelly—purple arum flowers, sprinkling red buttercups, and hanging baby oranges and lemons on the trees around them.

“Very arousing,” Ora says. “This walk, and the air. Isn’t it? Don’t you feel it?”

He laughs, embarrassed, and Ora—even her eyebrows suddenly feel warm.

He’s known Neta for thirteen years. She claims that she sat several evenings in the pub where he worked, on HaYarkon Street, and he did not take his eyes off her. He says he didn’t even notice her until she threw up and passed out on the bar one night. She was nineteen and weighed eighty-two pounds, and he carried her in his arms, against her will, on a stormy winter night—not a single cabdriver would take them—to a doctor friend in Jaffa. She squirmed in his arms the whole way, her gaunt limbs swirled around him and hit him mercilessly, and she hurled vile curses at him. When she ran out of those, she worked her way through the insults showered upon Sholem Aleichem by his stepmother, in the alphabetical order in which he had recorded them, calling him “carbuncle,” “forefather of all impurities,” “leper,” and “purloiner.”
Avram himself mumbled the occasional choice curse to fill in what she omitted. When these ran out too, she started to pinch him painfully, and as she did so she laid out in detail the various uses one could make of his flesh, his fat, and his bones. Here Avram raised an eyebrow, and when she told him about the strips of wax she would be glad to produce from him, Avram—who never forgot a line he read—mumbled into her ear,
“It was the idea also, that this same spermaceti was that quickening humor of the Greenland Whale.”
This was a sentence he and Ilan had loved to quote in their youth, when
Moby-Dick
served as a particularly fertile ground for quotations. The tangle of vipers in his arms fell silent at once, gave a cross-eyed glance at the heavy monster exhaling condensation into the downpour, and noted, “There are some similarities between you and the book.”