To the End of the Land (67 page)

“So what do you say?” she asked with her sweet, sad smile. “It’s not going to get any better than this. Should we get it over with now?”

He leaned over and gripped his ladder. Neta crab-walked along the edge of the roof. Behind her he could see rooftops and a bloodred sunset and a mosque dome. “You’re a tough nut, Avram,” said Neta, almost to herself. “You’ve never, for example, told me that you love me. Not that I ever asked you, as far as I can remember, but still, a girl needs to hear it from her man once in her life, or something like it, even a paraphrase. But you’re cheap. At most you’ll give me an ‘I love your body’ or ‘I love being with you’ or ‘I love your ass.’ That kind of witty sidestep. So maybe I should get the message already?”

The ladder’s legs clicked against the stone lip of the roof. Avram decided in a flash that if something happened to her, he would, without thinking, throw himself after her.

“Go into my room,” she murmured. “On the table, next to the ashtray, there’s a small brown book. Go and get it.”

Avram shook his head.

“Go, I won’t do anything until you get back. Scout’s honor.”

He got off his ladder and went into the room. He was there for a second or two, and every vein in his body yelled out that she was jumping. He grabbed the book and went back to the roof.

“Now read where I marked it.”

His fingers trembled. He opened the book and read: “ ‘… for I had
my life support
in Vienna. I use this expression to describe the one person who has meant more to me than any other since the death of my grandfather, the woman who shares my life and to whom I have owed not just a great deal but, frankly, more or less everything, since the moment when she first appeared at my side over thirty years ago.’ ” He turned over the book:
Wittgenstein’s Nephew
by Thomas Bernhard.

“Keep going, but with more feeling.”

“ ‘Without her I would not be alive at all, or at any rate I would certainly not be the person I am today, so mad and so unhappy, yet at the same time happy.’ ”

“Yes,” she said to herself, her eyes closed in deep concentration.

“ ‘The initiated will understand what I mean when I use this expression to describe the person from whom I draw all my strength—for I truly have no other source of strength—and to whom I have repeatedly owed my survival.’ ”

“Thank you,” said Neta, still swaying on the ladder as if in a dream.

Avram said nothing. He seemed loathsome and despicable in his own eyes.

“Do you understand what the problem is?”

He moved his head to indicate something between yes and no.

“It’s very simple. You are my
life support
, but I’m not your
life support.
”

“Neta, you’re—”

“Your life support is her, that woman who had a child with you, whose name you won’t even tell me.”

He buried his head between his shoulders and did not answer.

“But look.” She smiled and brushed the hair away from her eyes. “It’s not such an original tragedy, what we have here. And
not such a big problem, either. The world is just a very unfocused picture. I can live with that—how about you?”

He did not answer. She asked for so little, but he could not give her even that. “Come on, Neta.” He held out his hand.

“But think about it?” Her soft eyes lingered on him, full of hope.

“Okay. Now come on.”

A flock of starlings soared by with a flutter of wings. Avram and Neta stood there, both immersed in themselves.

“Not yet?” she murmured to herself after a while, as though responding to an unheard voice. “It’s not time yet?”

With two swift strokes she landed the ladder on the rooftop floor. “Look at you,” she said, sounding surprised. “You’re shaking all over. Are you cold inside? In your no-heart?”

Ora tells him more about Adam the next day. She would prefer to talk again about the old Adam, baby Adam, about the three years when he was hers alone. But he asks about today’s Adam, and without holding anything back, she describes her older son, whose eyes are always red and bloodshot, whose body is slender and a little stooped, hunched forward with troubling languor, his hands and fingers drooping to the ground, his lip pulled up with a slightly contemptuous expression of subtle, nihilistic scorn.

She is struck by the things she says about him and by the fact that she is capable of looking at Adam this way. Ilan’s objective view of the boys is now hers, too. She is learning to speak a foreign language.

Note by note, she depicts a young man of twenty-four who looks both weak and tough at the same time, conveying a quiet strength beyond his age. “I don’t quite understand it,” she says hesitantly, “this strength he has. It’s something elusive, even a bit”—she swallows—“dark.” There, I’ve said it.

“His face isn’t anything special, at least not at first sight—he’s pale, with cheeks darkened by stubble, sunken black eyes, and a very prominent Adam’s apple—still, to me he looks exceptional.
I find him really beautiful from certain angles. And he has this combination of features that looks as though several of his ages are all there at the same time. I find it so interesting sometimes just to look at him.”

“But what is that strength? What do you mean?”

“How can I explain it?” She knows she must be precise now. “It’s like you can’t surprise him with anything. Yes, that’s it. Not with anything happy or anything sad, and not with something really painful or really terrible, either. You’ll never surprise him.” Having said it, she realizes for the first time how accurate her perception of him is. She also understands how different he is from her—the opposite. “He has such power,” she says in a fading voice. “The power of contempt.”

She’s seen two of his shows. One he invited her to, and the other she snuck into after he’d dropped her. There were dozens of young boys and girls there, and their faces leaned toward him in the blinding lashes of light whipped from every direction, all drawn, with their eyes closed, to his indifferent, slightly sick frailty, which sucked them out of themselves. “You should have seen them. They looked like … I don’t know what. I don’t have the words to describe it.”

Avram sees a field of albino sunflowers. Albino sunflowers in a solar eclipse.

They rest at the peak of Mount Arbel, above the thirst-quenching Kinneret Valley. The area is full of hikers. A school group of screeching girls and boys arrives. They take one another’s pictures and scurry around. Buses spit out groups of tourists, and their guides compete against one another in a shouting match. But Ora and Avram are immersed in their own affairs. A soft breeze refreshes them after the exhausting ascent. On the way up they hardly spoke—it was an especially steep climb. Carved steps and iron posts in the rock helped them, but every few steps they had to stop for a breather. From the Bedouin village at the foot of the hill came roosters’ crowing, a school bell, and the commotion of children. Above them, in the cliff side, a chain of gaping mouths: the caves where the Galilean rebels hid from Herod (“I read about it somewhere,” Avram murmured).
Herod’s soldiers had cleverly propelled themselves down the mountain in cages and used rods fitted with iron hooks to hunt down the cave dwellers and hurl them into the valley.

Above the mountain, above the human tumult, a large eagle glides against the blue sky, floating on a warm, transparent air column that rises up from the valley. In broad circles, with spectacular ease, the eagle hovers above the air column until its towering warmth evaporates, then glides away in search of a new breeze. Avram and Ora take pleasure in its flight, and in the mountains of the Galilee and the Golan, glowing purple in the warm vapors, and the blue eye of Lake Kinneret, until Ora notices a plaque in memory of Sergeant Roi Dror, of blessed memory, who was killed below this cliff on June 18, 2002, during a training operation of the Duvdevan special forces unit.
“He fell as gently as a tree falls. There was not even the slightest sound, because of the sand” (The Little Prince)
. Without a word, they get up and flee to the opposite end of the mountaintop, but there is another monument in their new place of refuge, in memory of Staff Sergeant Zohar Mintz, killed in ’96 in Southern Lebanon. Ora reads with tears in her eyes:
He loved the country and died for it, he loved us and we loved him
. Avram pulls her hand but she does not move, so he forcefully tugs her away. “You started telling me about Adam,” he reminds her.

“Oh, Avram, where will this end? Tell me, where will this end? There’s no more room for all the dead.”

“Now tell me about Adam.”

“But listen, I remembered that I wanted to tell you something about Ofer.” She could feel it again. The slight push she gives Ofer to the front of the stage every time she thinks Avram is too drawn to Adam.

“What about Ofer?” he asks, but she can feel that his heart is still caught in the riddle of Adam.

They walk down the mountain heading south, toward Karnei Hittin. On either side of the path are fields of wheat ears turning golden in the sun. They find an isolated patch, like a little nest on the ground, surrounded by a meadow of purple lupines. Avram sprawls out, Ora lies down opposite him, and the dog
nuzzles under Ora’s head. Ora feels the warm, breathing body, which needs her, and thinks she might break the vow she’d made after Nicotine died and adopt this dog.

“When Talia left Ofer—I guess my boys always get deserted; so they did inherit something from me after all. But wait, I have to explain that Adam never had a serious girlfriend, I mean a true love, before Ofer had Talia. And think about that. Two boys like them, they’re not that bad, are they? They’re definitely a catch, but neither of them had a girlfriend until a pretty late age. Think about us at their age. Think about you.”

Of course he already has. She sees in his face that he is instantly there, at seventeen and nineteen and twenty-two. Buzzing around her like mad, but at the same time pursuing every other girl he laid eyes on. She could never understand his taste in girls, and he found every one of them worthy of his undying love. Each grew greater and more beautiful in his eyes, even the stupidest and ugliest ones, and especially the ones who scorned and tormented him. “Remember how …,” she starts, and he shrugs his shoulders in embarrassment. Of course he remembers. She thinks about his efforts to enchant, to seduce, and how he would hollow out his soul for them, humiliate himself, stammer, blush, and then poke fun at himself: “What am I? Nothing more than a hormonal fermentation bacterium.” And now, thirty years later, he still has the nerve to argue with her: “It was all because you didn’t want me. If you’d said yes right away, if you hadn’t tortured me for five years before giving in, I wouldn’t have needed that whole march of folly.”

She hoists herself up on her elbows. “I didn’t want you?”

“Not the way I wanted you. You wanted Ilan more; I was just the zest.”

“That’s not true. That’s really inaccurate, it’s a lot more complicated than that.”

“You didn’t want me, you were afraid.”

“What did I have to be afraid of?”

“You were afraid, Ora, because the fact is you gave up on me in the end. You gave up. Admit it.”

They both sit quietly. Her face is flushed. What can she tell
him? She couldn’t even explain it to herself back then. When she was with him for that one year, she sometimes had the feeling that he was flushing through her en masse, like a whole army. What can she tell him? After all, she wasn’t even always convinced it was
her
he loved so much, that
she
was the one creating that love storm. Perhaps it was someone he had once fantasized about, and he just kept on daydreaming her with all his creative powers. She also suspected that simply because he had fallen in love with her once, in a hasty, crazy moment, in the isolation ward, he would never admit, not even to himself, that she wasn’t right for him. With his peculiar, Quixotic chivalry, he would never go back on his resolution. (But how could she have told him that at the time? She hadn’t even had the courage to say it to herself, as she was doing now.) Sometimes she felt like a mannequin on which he constantly piled more and more colorful outfits that only underscored her dryness, her diminution, her narrowness. But every time she told him, full of sorrow and a broken heart, a little of what she felt, he was deeply insulted, amazed at how little she knew herself and him, at how she could hurt the most beautiful thing he had ever had in his life.

Why does everything have to be so exaggerated with him? Why does everything have to have such force? she used to wonder. And then she’d feel ashamed, and she’d think of the girl who jumped out of his bed because he was
too intimate
for her. She also often felt that he had so much love and passion that he was invading her, raging inside her body and soul like an oversized carnivorous puppy, without even imagining how much it pained her and ripped her apart. At times he would look into her eyes so intently. There were no words to describe what was in his eyes at those moments. And it didn’t necessarily occur in times of passion. Usually it came
after
the passion. He would look at her with such exposed, piercing, almost mad love, and she would teasingly touch his nose, or giggle, or make a funny face, but it was as if he did not sense her embarrassment. His face would take on a strange expression, imploring her for something she did not understand, and for one long moment he would sink
into her eyes without taking his look off hers, and he was like a massive, shadowy body drowning in dark liquid, and he would gradually disappear as he looked at her, and her eyes would slowly close and cover him inside them, sheltering from herself, too. She could no longer look, and yet she did, and she saw his gaze emptying to reveal something else, something skeletal and terrible, with no end. He would dive deep inside her, hold her tight against his body, clutch her until she almost choked in his grip, and every so often he shuddered powerfully as though he had absorbed something from her that he could not tolerate. She did not know what was there, what she’d given him, what she’d received.