To the End of the Land (66 page)

“She was nineteen?” Ora asks. And thinks: I was sixteen when we met.

Avram shrugs. “She left home at sixteen and wandered around Israel and the whole world. The gypsy from next door. About two months ago was the first time she ever rented a real apartment. It was in Jaffa. Yuppified, you know.”

Ora doesn’t feel like talking about Neta now.

Reluctantly, she learns that Neta always looks starved—“not necessarily for food, but a general, existential starvation,” Avram explains with a laugh—and that her fingers almost always shake, maybe from drugs or maybe because, Avram quotes with a smile, “life zaps her at high voltage.” For years, she spent every summer living in an ancient Simca that a friend had left her. She also had a small tent, which she pitched whenever she found a place she wasn’t asked to leave. As he talks, the name “Neta” begins to etch a circle of frost in Ora’s gut, even though the sun is shining. What is this flood of speech suddenly coming out of him? What is he doing sticking Neta between us now?

“How does she make a living?” (Be generous, she commands.)

“This and that. It’s not really clear. She needs very little. You wouldn’t believe how little she needs. And she paints.”

Ora’s heart sinks a little lower. Of course she paints.

“Maybe you saw in my apartment, on the walls? That’s her.”

The huge, stirring charcoal drawings—how had she not asked him about them before? Perhaps because she had guessed the answer—prophets breast-feeding goats and lambs, an old man bending over a girl turning into a crane, a maiden being born from a wound in the chest of a godlike deer. She thinks about the drawing of a woman with a mohawk, and asks if that’s how Neta looks.

Avram chuckles. “Once, a long time ago. I didn’t like it, and now she has long hair, all the way down to here.”

“Yes. And the empty albums I saw at your place, the ones without any photos—are those hers, too?”

“No, those are mine.”

“Do you collect them?”

“I collect, I search, I aggregate. Things people throw out.”

“Aggregate?”

“You know, I put together all sorts of
alte zachen.
”

They are walking down the side of a cliff. The river, far below, is invisible. The dog leads, Ora walks behind her, and Avram brings up the rear as he tells her about his little projects. “It’s nothing, just something to pass the time. Like photo albums that people throw away, or albums that belonged to people who died.” He takes the photos out and puts in ones of other people, other families. He copies some of the photos onto tin boxes, right on the rust, or on the sides of ancient, rusty engines. “I’m very interested in rust lately. That place, or that moment, when iron turns to rust.”

It’s a good thing you found me, then, Ora thinks.

The path descends into the channel again, and suddenly Avram is alert and bright. He excitedly describes an atlas he found in the trash, printed in England in 1943. “If you looked at it, you wouldn’t understand anything about what happened in the world back then, because all the countries are still in their old borders, there’s no annihilation of the Jews, no occupation of Europe, no war, and I can sit looking at it for hours. So on the corners of the maps, I stuck pieces of a Russian newspaper I found in the dump,
The Stalinist
, also from ’forty-three, and there the war is described in detail, with battle maps and vast
numbers of casualties. When I put those two objects together, I can really—Ora … I can feel electricity going through my body.”

She discovers that he and Neta do joint projects sometimes, too. “It’s this thing we have going together,” he says, blushing. They look for old objects and junk on the street, then they fantasize about what they could do with the things. “I’m always a little more practical,” he says with an apologetic snort, “and she’s much bolder.” He inadvertently drops himself from the story and describes some of what Neta has done in her brief life, her trials and tribulations, the skills she’s learned, her hospitalizations and adventures, and the men who have passed through her life. Ora thinks he is describing the life of a seventy-year-old. “She’s so brave,” he says admiringly, “much braver than I am. She may be the bravest person I’ve ever met.” He laughs softly when he remembers that Neta says she’s composed mainly of fears. Fears and cellulite.

Ora sees the crossed-out black lines over his bed, and a thick streak runs from them to the charcoal drawings in his living room. A spark lights up in her: “Avram, does she know?”

“About Ofer?”

Ora nods quickly. Her heart starts to pound.

“Yes, I told her.”

She walks ahead in confusion, with her hands held out. She steps into the stream, balancing on the slippery stones. This is the Amud River, she thinks. I hiked here in high school, on a sea-to-sea trip. It seems like it was yesterday. As if just yesterday I was still a young girl. She rubs her eyes. The hillside across the way is covered with thick growth, and a family of hyrax dots the rocks. The scene blurs, and she finds it’s best to look only to the next steps: pay attention, you’re going up again, walking on the rock ledge, and the river below plunges into a waterfall, and just don’t fall, hold on to this railing, and Neta knows.

The dog comes over and rubs against Ora’s leg as if to encourage her. Ora leans down and strokes her head distractedly. Neta knows. The secret bubble has been burst. The sealed, stifling bubble that Ora has taught herself to breathe in. Avram himself
has punctured it. A stream of outside air bursts in. Such relief: a new, deep breath.

“What did she say?” Ora asks as her legs almost fail her.

“What did she say? She said I should go and see him.”

“Oh.” She lets out a thin, involuntary coo. “That’s what she said?”

“And I thought, when I called you, that evening, before you came. That’s what I wanted to tell you.”

“What?”

“That.”

“What?” She is almost suffocating. Her entire body hunches over the dog, burying ten trembling fingers in her fur.

“That if he’s finished with the army,” Avram says, hewing word by word, “I would like to, but only if you and Ilan didn’t have any objection …”

“What? Say it already.”

“Maybe see him one day.”

“Ofer.”

“Just once.”

“You would like to see him.”

“Even from a distance.”

“Yeah?”

“Without him … Look, I don’t want to interfere with your—”

“And you’re telling me this now?”

He shrugs his shoulders and plants his feet firmly on the rock.

“And when you phoned”—she finally gets it—“I told you he was …”

“Going back there, yes. And then I no longer—”

“Oh.” She moans, holds her head in both hands and presses hard and curses this war from the depths of her heart—this eternal war that has once again managed to shove its way into her soul. She opens her mouth wide and her lips roll back to expose her gums, and the cord of a sharp scream leaves her throat and shocks all the birds into silence. The dog looks up and her wise eyes expand until she can bear it no longer, and she too erupts into a heart-rending howl.

• • •

The last time he’d seen her was when he went to help paint her new apartment in Jaffa. A one-bedroom fourth-floor walk-up with a kitchenette and a rooftop. She was standing on a tall painter’s ladder with a joint in one hand and a brush in the other, and he was on an aluminum stepladder. Her three cats slunk around between the ladders. One had a kidney disease, one was retarded, and one was a reincarnation of her mother, who in this form continued to make Neta’s life a misery. Before she moved in, the apartment had housed foreign workers from China, and one whole wall was still studded with little nails hammered in a pattern whose meaning she and Avram were trying to discern. She insisted on wearing a man’s gray undershirt full of holes, which she’d found in a pile of trash left behind in the apartment. “This is how I honor the memory of the one billion,” she said, and he was just happy to see her in an undershirt.

“Every so often she stocks up my fridge,” he tells Ora, “and cleans my apartment. Gives me a makeover. Does this even interest you?”

“Yes, of course, I’m listening.”

With money she didn’t have, Neta bought him a first-rate stereo system, and they listened to music together. Sometimes she read entire books to him out loud. “And she doesn’t say no to any drug. She even does coke and heroin, but somehow she doesn’t get addicted to anything.”

“Except you,” Neta laughed when he suggested she quit her Avram addiction and go into rehab.

“Nothing good will come of me for you,” he’d said.

“And what are illusions, chopped liver?”

“You’re young, you could have children, a family.”

“You’re the only person I’m willing to familiate with.”

But maybe she’s fallen in love with someone else? The thought pains him far more than he had imagined it would. Maybe she finally changed her mind?

“What?” Ora asks. “What is it?”

“I don’t know.” Avram hastens his steps. He suddenly realizes that if Neta is not in his life, or he in hers, he may not have a reason to go home after this trip. “I’m a little worried about her. She’s disappeared on me lately.”

“Is that unusual for her?”

“It’s happened before. That’s how she is, she comes and goes.”

“When we reach a phone, try calling her.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe she left you a message at home.”

He walks quickly. Tries to remember her cell-phone number, but cannot. He, who remembers everything, every bit of nonsense, every stupid sentence anyone said to him thirty years ago, every random combination of numbers his eyes fall upon. In the army he could recite all the serial numbers of all the soldiers and officers in the listening bunker; and the unlisted phone numbers of all the unit commanders; and of course the names and serial numbers of all the Egyptian units and divisions and armies, and of the commanders of all the military airfields in Egypt; and their private addresses and home phone numbers, and sometimes the names of their wives and children and mistresses; and the lists of monthly code names of all the intelligence units under the Southern Command. But now, with Neta, he can’t get the numbers straight!

“She’s very young,” he murmurs. “I’m old, and she’s so young.” He laughs glumly. “It’s a bit like raising a dog who you know will die before you do. But I’m the dog, in this case.”

Ora distractedly covers the bitch’s ears with her hands.

Through Neta he has met a whole gang of people. People like her. Kind and hardworking. “Chipped mugs,” she calls them. They roam in packs. The beaches of Sinai, Nitzanim, the Judean Desert, ashrams in India, music festivals with drugs and free love in France, Spain, and the Negev.

“Do you know what an Angel Walk is?”

“Something in sports?”

He takes Ora to a “rainbow gathering” in the Netherlands or Belgium. “Everyone shares everything,” he explains enthusiastically, as if he himself has been there. “Everyone helps out with meals and pays for food with whatever they have. The only thing that costs money is drugs.”

“I see.”

“One evening she took part in an Angel Walk.” Avram gives
Ora a smile that is not intended for her, the likes of which she has not seen on him since he was a boy. Like the flicker of a candle in an old, dusty lantern. The smile is irresistible. “Two rows of people stand opposite each other, very close”—he demonstrates with his hands—“and usually they don’t know each other. Total strangers. And one person goes in with his or her eyes shut, and walks all the way down between the rows.”

The two rows of hitters
, Ora suddenly remembers. So many times he’d talked about them, in a thousand different contexts and digressions, until sometimes it seemed that the entire world was those two rows, into which a person is thrown when he is born, and he gets pummeled around between them as they hit and kick, until finally he is spat out, bruised and crushed.

“And they lead this one person slowly, gently, between the rows, and everyone strokes him, touches him, hugs him, whispers in his ear: ‘You are so beautiful, you are perfect, you are an angel.’ It goes on that way right to the end, and then someone is waiting for him with a big, pampering hug, and then he steps back into the rows of givers.”

“Did she get hugged like that?”

“Wait. First she was in the rows, and for a few hours she stroked and hugged and whispered all those lines, which usually make her giggle. Those kinds of words really don’t work for her.” He perks up. “Listen, you have to meet her.”

“Okay, when we have a chance. And then what happened?”

“When her turn came to receive, to walk through the lines, she didn’t go in.”

Ora nods. Even before he said it, she knew.

“She ran away to the forest and sat there until morning. She couldn’t do it. She felt that it wasn’t her time to receive yet.”

Ora suddenly knows what Avram and Neta share: they have both found that those who stroke can also hit. She hugs herself tightly as she walks. This girl Neta arouses conflicting emotions in her, because suddenly, in the last few moments, she feels affection toward her, and a maternal tenderness. And Neta knows about Ofer. Avram told her about Ofer. “Does she know anything about me?”

“She knows you exist.”

Ora swallows heavily, then finally manages to cough the pit out of her throat. “And do you love her?”

“Love? What do I know? I like being with her. She knows how to be with me. She gives me space.”

Not like me. Ora thinks about the boys and their complaints.

Too much space, Avram thinks fearfully. Where are you, Nettush?

After they’d finished painting her little apartment, they took the ladders out onto the roof and she taught him how to ladder-walk. “In her wanderings, when she travels sometimes, she makes a living as a street performer. She swallows fire and swords, she juggles, and joins street circuses.” Like two drunken grasshoppers, they’d walked toward each other under the evening sky, between the water tank and the antenna. Then she leaped up off the ladder onto the roof ledge and Avram’s blood froze.