To the End of the Land (7 page)

Shut up. You’d better just shut up!

He shut up. She touched her lips. She thought they were on fire.

Just tell me one thing.

What?

What did you say his name was?

Ilan. Why? Was there … did something happen here while I was gone?

What could happen? You left and came right back, what—

I left and came right back? Now it’s “You left and came right back”?

Stop it, get off my case.

Wait, did he talk? Did he say something in his sleep?

Look, what are you, the Shabak?

Did you turn the light on?

None of your business.

I knew it, I just knew it!

So you knew, you’re a genius. So if you knew, why did you leave just when I—

And you saw him.

Okay, I saw him, I saw him! So what?

So nothing.

• • •

Avram?

What—

Is he really very sick?

Yes.

I think he’s sicker than both of us.

Yes.

Do you think he’s … I don’t know, in danger?

What do I know?

Ahh, Ora sighed from the depths of her heart, I wish I could fall asleep now for a month, a year, ach!

Ora?

What?

He’s good-looking, isn’t he?

I don’t know, I didn’t look.

Admit that he’s good-looking.

Not exactly my taste.

He’s like an angel.

Yeah, all right, I get the point.

The girls at school are crazy about him.

Tell it to someone who cares.

Did you talk to him?

He was asleep, like I said! He can’t hear a thing.

I meant—did you talk
to
him? Did you tell him anything?

Leave me alone, won’t you just leave me alone!

Ora?

What?

Did he open his eyes? Did he see you?

I can’t hear you, I’m not hearing anything,
la-la-la-la—

But did he say anything? Did he talk to you?

“… On a wagon bound for market, there’s a calf with a mournful eye …”

Just tell me if he spoke.

“… High above him there’s a swallow, winging swiftly through the sky …”

Wait, isn’t that the song?

What?

That’s the song, I swear. From when you woke me up.

Are you sure?

Except then you were screaming it so loudly I couldn’t even make out—

That’s the song …

A calf with a mournful eye, yes, “Dona Dona.” But you were shouting it, like you were fighting with someone, arguing.

Ora could feel herself lift up out of her own body and float to a distant place that was not a place, where she and Ada walked together and sang Ada’s favorite song, and it was Ada’s mother’s favorite song too, and sometimes, when she washed the dishes, she would sing it to herself in Yiddish. The song about a calf being led to the slaughter, and a swallow that flies up in the sky and mocks him, then flutters away with lighthearted joy.

Avram, Ora said suddenly in horror, leave now, leave!

What did I do now?

Go! And take him with you! I have to sleep now, quick. I want to—

What?

I have to dream her …

Later, just before dawn, she suddenly appeared in the doorway of Room Three and called to him in a whisper. He jumped awake: What are you doing here? She said sadly, I’ve never met anyone like you, and then corrected herself: Any boy like you. He was hunched over, extinguished, and he murmured, So, did you dream about her? Ora mumbled, No, I couldn’t sleep. I wanted to so badly that I couldn’t. And he asked, But why did you want to? What was so …? She said, I have to tell her something important.

Ora, said Avram tiredly and without any pleasure, Do you want to see him again? She said, Do you have a screw loose or something? I’m talking about you, and all you keep doing is showing me
him
. Why are you, like, purposely—Honestly, I don’t know, he said. I’m always like that, it just comes out.
And she said desperately, I don’t understand anything anymore, I don’t understand anything.

They sat hunched in the dark, suddenly very ill. From one moment to the next the burden of bad tidings swelled inside him. What a mistake he had made, what a terrible, destructive complication he had caused by leaving her alone with Ilan.

There’s something else I wanted to tell you, he said hopelessly, but you’re probably not interested, are you? She asked carefully, something like what? But even before he spoke she knew what he would say, and her body locked up against him. No one knows that I write, he said. I write all the time.

But what, what do you write? Her voice sounded oddly piercing to her own ears. Essays? Limericks? Tall tales? What?

I write all kinds of things, Avram said with slight arrogance. Once, when I was little, I used to make up stories, all the time. Now I write totally different things … I don’t understand, she hissed, you just sit there and write, for yourself? A desolate revulsion enveloped him. He wanted her to leave. To come back. To be who she was before. The thing that had been woven between them the last few nights, the wonder, the delicate secret cooled and faded away at once. And perhaps it had never existed at all, perhaps it had only been in his head, along with everything else.

Just explain to me, she urged him, suddenly eager for battle, what you mean by “I write totally different things”? But Avram sank into himself, amazed at the sting of betrayal. Ora mumbled stubbornly, And limericks are fun! Let me tell you, they are the ultimate entertainment! She recalled the way he had said earlier that in these years he was interested in voices—“in these years”! From which she was apparently supposed to conclude that in previous years he had been interested in other things, that snob, as if he already knew that in “the next years”—ha!—he would have yet other interests. Smart aleck. But she, she, where had she been “in these years”? What had she wasted herself on? All she’d done was cheat everyone and sleep with her eyes open. That was her big accomplishment. A cheating pro, sleepwalking champion of the world. She slept when she ran and did high
jumps and played volleyball, and most of all when she swam, because it was a lot less painful in water than on land. She slept when she went with the team to the stadium in Ein Iron on Saturdays, and sometimes they went to the Maccabi courts in Tel Aviv, and in the back of the truck she roared cheers at the passersby along with everyone else.

She slept while she sang her heart out on hikes, and on the night trek to the beach at Atlit, and at the Machanot Olim all-nighter, and when they all took turns jumping onto a canvas held by the team, and when she did the zip line, and helped build a rope bridge and set up the fire displays. She didn’t think about anything when that was going on. Her hands moved, her legs moved, her mouth babbled constantly, she was all noise and bells, but her brain was empty and desolate, her body a desert wilderness.

And together with Miri S. and Orna and Shiffi, her new friends after Ada, she was once again brimming with funny songs and operettas for parties and trips, everything just like it was before. Life really did go on. It was almost ungraspable how it did. Her body kept making the usual moves—she ate and drank and walked, she stood and sat and slept and crapped and even laughed—it was just that for the whole first year she couldn’t feel her toes, sometimes for hours on end, and sometimes she couldn’t feel the skin on the back of her left hand, either. There were places on her thigh and her back too, and when she touched them, even scratched them softly, she couldn’t feel a thing. Once she held a burning match to the dead spot on her thigh and watched the fair skin singe and smelled the burning, but she did not feel any pain. She didn’t tell anyone about that. Who could she talk to about things like that?

There’s a hole, she thinks now, and feels cold and chilled. It’s been there for a long time. How could I not have seen it? Ever since Ada there’s an Ora-shaped hole where I used to be.

She coughed and sprang back to life. She must have fallen asleep in the middle of fighting with Avram. What were they fighting about? What was it about him that got to her? Or maybe they’d already made up? In the darkness she guessed at
Avram’s sprawled figure on the other end of the bed, leaning on the wall, snoring heavily. Was this his room or hers? And where was Ilan?

He had told her he was going to die. He knew it would happen, knew it had to happen. From the age of zero he’d known he wouldn’t live long, because he didn’t have enough life energy inside him. That’s what he said, and she tried to calm him, to erase his strange words, but he didn’t hear her, maybe didn’t even know she was there. He shamelessly cried over his life, which had been ruined since his parents divorced and his father took him to his army base to live with all the animals there. Everything had been screwed up since then, he wailed, and the illness was just a natural extension of all that shit. He was burning, and half of what he said she couldn’t understand. Fragments of mutterings and whispers. So she just stood very close to him, bathed in his warmth, and carefully stroked his shoulder. Every so often she stroked his back too, and sometimes, with a pounding heart, she quickly slid her hand over his thick hair, and as she did so she realized she didn’t even know what he looked like, and perhaps she even vaguely imagined that he looked a lot like Avram, simply because they had both come into her life together. She kept telling him the things Avram said to her when she was afraid or miserable. Thanks to Avram, that idiot, she knew what to say. Ilan suddenly grasped her hand, squeezed it hard, and glided over her arm from one end to the other. She was taken aback but did not pull her hand away, and he leaned his cheek against her, and his forehead, and held her arm to his chest, and suddenly he kissed her, showering dry, burning little kisses on her arm, her fingers, the palm of her hand, and his head burrowed into her body, and Ora stood speechless, looked into the dark over his head, and thought wondrously: He’s kissing me, he doesn’t even know he’s kissing me. Ilan laughed suddenly to himself, laughed and shivered, and said that sometimes, at night, he snuck out and wrote on the walls of the army base huts: “The Commander’s Son Is a Fag.” His father
went crazy when he saw the graffiti and walked around with a bucket of whitewash, and lay in wait to ambush whoever was doing it—but I’m warning you, bro, don’t you ever tell anyone, Ilan giggled and shivered. I’m only telling you this. He talked in a hoarse voice about the fat soldier his father was screwing in his office, and how the whole base could hear her, but even that was better than when my parents were together, he said, at least that nightmare is over. I’ll never get married, he groaned, and his forehead burned against her chest until it hurt, and she pressed him to her and thought he sounded like someone who really hadn’t spoken to anyone for a whole year. He laughed and buried his face in the crook of Ora’s arm and inhaled her scent. I’m crazy about the smell in that music shop on Allenby, he said. It’s the sweet smell of glue—they use it to stick the plastic pads that plug the saxophone holes. He told her that a year ago he found a used Selmer Paris in good condition there. In Tel Aviv I had a band, he said. We used to sit around on Fridays listening to new records all night long, learning about John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, making Tel Aviv jazz.

His body heat trickled into her. She was overcome by a paralyzing awe of the burning boy leaning on her arm. She wouldn’t mind if this went on for a while, even until morning, even a whole day. I want to help him, she thought, I want to, I want to. Her body was prickling with desire, even her feet were burning. She hadn’t felt these kinds of currents for so long, and Ilan found her other hand and placed her palms on his closed eyes, and said he knew how to always be happy.

Happy? Ora choked and pulled her hand back for a second, as if burned. How?

I have a method, he said. I just break myself up into all kinds of areas, and if I feel bad in one part of my soul, I skip to another part. His breath licked at her wrists, and she felt his eyelashes tickle her palms.

I just spread out the risks that way, said Ilan, and he put his head back and gave a dry, tortured laugh. No one can hurt me, I skip, I—

In mid-sentence his head drooped and he was swallowed
up, exhausted, in a deep slumber. His fingers loosened and slid down her arms until they dropped on his lap, and his head plunged forward.

Ora stood, struck a match, and lit up Ilan’s face for the first time. With his eyes closed, and within the circle of light, his face was a drop of beauty. She lit another match and he kept mumbling, fighting with someone in his dream, and he shook his head hard, and his face flinched with anger, perhaps because of the blinding light, perhaps because of what he saw in his mind’s eye. His dark, rich eyebrows coiled sternly toward each other, and Ora forgot herself as she stood there and lit up his clear forehead, the shape of his eyes, his gorgeous lips, warm and slightly cracked, which even now still burned on her own.

SHE SWORE HERSELF
to silence. Anything she said would be a mistake anyway, it would give Avram further proof of her stupidity and superficiality. If only she had the strength to get herself up from his bed and go back to her room and forget him forever, and
the other one
.