To the End of the Land (70 page)

“That sucks,” she heard Ofer say to Adam. “We spent the whole summer killing flies in Nebi Musa, and it turns out we killed the weak ones, so we created a generation of resistant flies, and now their genetics are much stronger.” They laughed. They both have lovely teeth, Ora thought. Adam described the rats that run freely around the kitchen at his reserve duty unit. Ofer struck back with a winning card: a fox, maybe even a rabid one, had infiltrated his crew’s room while people were dozing and stolen a whole cake out of someone’s backpack. They spoke in loud, deep voices, as they always do when they talk about the army. “But that might also be because Ofer’s ears are always full of dust and grease,” she explains to Avram. Ora and Ilan laughed and laughed, delighted, and gobbled down pieces of herb bread. Their role here was clear: they represented the sufficiently blurry background, the sounding board against which their children repeatedly declared their maturity and independence, and from which their declaration echoed back to the children themselves, at every age, so that they could finally believe in it. The boys changed the topic to accidents, big and small. There was practically a permanent order to these conversations, Ora realizes now, an organized, gradual escalation. Adam told them about how when he started his service in the Armored Corps, one of the commanders had demonstrated what could happen to a tank driver who got stuck in the gun’s side traverse. He set a wooden crate on the hull, rotated the gun sideways, and showed how the barrel shattered the crate, “which is exactly what could happen to anyone who steps out of a tank without coordinating,” Adam cautioned his younger brother, and Ora felt a chill.

“We have this soldier,” Ofer said, “poor guy, a real screwup, he’s the company’s punching bag—everyone who walks past him gives him a punch. About a month ago, in a camouflage drill, he fell off the tank and his arm swelled up. So they sent him to rest in the DT”—the “discipline tent,” he begrudgingly translated when he saw Ora’s look—“and there an antenna fell on his head and cracked it open.” Ilan and Ora exchanged quick glances of horror, but they knew they must not respond to the story with a single word. Anything they said, any concerned expression, would be met with mockery (“skirt on the left,” Adam liked to warn Ofer against Ora), but Adam and Ofer of course picked up on their glances, and everyone got what they wanted, and now, once the foundations were laid, once the parents had been duly enlightened about the many and varied dangers from which they could no longer protect their sons, Ofer told them casually that the suicide bomber who had blown himself up two weeks earlier at the central bus station in Tel Aviv, killing four civilians, had probably passed through his roadblock—meaning, the roadblock his battalion was responsible for.

Ilan asked guardedly if they knew when exactly the terrorist had gone through, and whether anyone was holding Ofer’s battalion responsible. Ofer explained that there was no way to tell who was on shift when he’d gone through, and that he could have been carrying a new kind of explosive that was impossible to detect at the roadblock. Ora was dumbstruck, unable to speak. Ilan swallowed and said, “You know what? I’m glad he blew himself up in Tel Aviv and not on you at the roadblock.” Ofer was outraged: “But, Dad, that’s my job! I stand there precisely so they’ll blow themselves up on me and not in Tel Aviv.”

And Ora—what was she doing at that moment? Her memory is hazy, she cannot reconstruct it. All she remembers is that she suddenly felt hollow, a shell of herself. There was something stuck in her mouth, probably pine nut–studded rye bread dipped in walnut pesto. Ofer and Adam were already deep in conversation about a soldier they both knew, who on parents’ day at the end of training had come up to a strange couple with his arms outstretched and shouted, “Mom, Dad, don’t you recognize
me?” Ofer and Adam, and probably Ilan too, rolled around laughing, and Ora sat with her mouth half open while nymph-like waitresses hovered around the tables and whispered: “How is everything?” And two weeks ago a terrorist packed with explosives had walked right past Ofer, and that was Ofer’s job: he stood there precisely so that terrorists would blow themselves up on him and not in Tel Aviv.

Then Ofer turned very serious, and he told Adam and Ilan about his stint in Hebron during the past week. He wasn’t allowed to talk about it, but he could give them the gist. The battalion was sent there to wage a campaign to eliminate wanted men in the kasbah—Ora was no longer really listening to him; she’d been transported—something they hadn’t done before and which had never been one of their duties. They commandeered a whole building to use as a lookout post, and locked up the residents in one apartment. “We actually treated them really well,” he said and gave her a sideways glance, but she was no longer there. Had she been listening, perhaps she could have changed something. Or perhaps not. And then—how did the conversation end up there? Only in retrospect, through a supreme effort that lasted weeks and months, was she able to piece together the fragments of that conversation into an approximate tapestry of the entire evening. Ofer asked Adam to explain something about the procedure for arresting a suspect, but here too she heard only fragments. You yell three times, in Hebrew and in Arabic, “Stop! Who’s there?” And then three times, “Stop or I’ll shoot” (Adam).
“Wakef wa’la batukhak”
(Ofer). And then you cock your weapon and aim at sixty degrees through the sight (Ofer again?). And then you shoot (Adam). The music of their voices, Ora dimly noticed, sounded exactly like it did when they used to study for Adam’s grammar exams together, when Adam was the teacher and Ofer the student. “You aim for the legs, yeah, knees-down, static, through the sight, and if he doesn’t stop, you go for the center of the body mass and you shoot to kill.” Ofer sheepishly admits that he doesn’t remember what that “mass” is, exactly. Adam scolds: “Didn’t you learn any physics at school?” Ofer says, “Yes, but where is it on a person?”
Adam scoffs: “When I was in the Territories they told us, ‘Shoot between their nipples.’ ” Ofer said, “At my last target practice, I shot the dummy in the stomach, and the P.C. goes, ‘I told you to aim for the knees!’ So I say, ‘But, sir, won’t he go down this way, too?’ ” They both laughed, and Ofer threw Ora a cautious glance. He knew she didn’t like that kind of joke. Adam, who also knew, grinned and said, “Some soldiers are convinced that the Arabs walk around with bull’s-eyes on their faces, just like in practice.”

And now here she is with them again. She’s back. The temporary fault in her brain has been fixed. She had experienced some sort of electrical short when Ofer said, “But, Dad, that’s my job! I stand there precisely so they’ll blow themselves up on me and not in Tel Aviv.” She laughs with them, laughs despite herself, laughs because the three of them are laughing and she can’t afford to stay outside their circle of laughter. But something is not right. She looks helplessly from Ilan to Ofer to Adam and back. Something smells funny, and she laughs nervously and tries to figure out whether they can detect it, too. At the moment of the electrical short, she saw something: a picture, a real one, completely tangible, of someone who came running in from outside, from the fields, jumped up on the table, pulled down his pants, crouched down between them, and dumped a huge stinking pile of shit among the dishes and glasses. And they kept on talking as if nothing had happened, her guys, and everyone at the other tables was behaving normally too, and the nymphs fluttered and chirped, “How is everything? Is everything okay?” Yet something did not make sense to her, and everyone else seemed to have passed a course on how to act in this situation, when your son tells you something like, “But, Dad, that’s my job! I stand there precisely so they’ll blow themselves up on me and not in Tel Aviv,” and it turns out that she’s missed a lot of classes, and the air in the restaurant suddenly becomes unbearably hot, and now she realizes what happened, she feels the signs coming closer, and she starts to drip with sweat. She’s had these kinds of attacks before. It’s purely physical, it’s nothing, just hot flashes, the rampages of menopause. It’s completely beyond her control,
a little intifada of the body. It happened at the ceremony after the advanced training course, in the parade courtyard at Latrun, when the formation passed by a huge wall covered with thousands of names of fallen soldiers; and at a fire demonstration in Nebi Musa to which the parents were invited; and on two or three other occasions. Once her nose bled, another time she threw up, and once she cried hysterically. And now—she laughs nervously—now she thinks she’s going to have diarrhea, and it’s entirely possible that she won’t even make it to the bathroom, it’s that bad, and she clenches and constricts her body, even her face is strained. How can they not notice what’s happening to her? She looks weakly from one to the other as they talk. It’s good for them to laugh: Go ahead, laugh, she thinks, let out the week’s tension. But inside her body the systems are collapsing. She is a shell containing only fluids. She is a coconut. Maybe they are actors? Maybe her family has been switched? Her heart pounds. How can they not hear it? How can they not hear her heart? Loneliness closes in on her. The basement loneliness of childhood. It’s so hot in here, I swear, it’s like they turned on all the ovens and shut all the windows. And it stinks. Horribly. She practically gags. She has to pull herself together, and most important, she must not show them anything, not ruin this wonderful, happy evening. They’re having such a good time, it’s so fun here, and she’s not going to ruin it for them with the stupid nonsense coming from her body, which has suddenly turned bleeding heart on her. One more minute and she’ll have everything under control, it’s just a matter of willpower. She just has to not think about the severity and the responsibility and the gravity with which he said, “But, Dad, that’s my job!” And now, right in front of Ilan and Adam and Ofer’s laughing faces, oh God, it’s coming back, he’s here again, in this soft lighting, among the dainty dragonflies—“How is everything? Is everything cool?”—there he is, jumping right up on the table with both feet and dumping a huge pile of shit, and a terrifying wave rises inside her, one second from now she’ll have no more room in her body, it will burst out of her mouth, her eyes, her nostrils, and she desperately closes everything off, scurries
among the treacherous orifices, and all she can think about is the relief of that guy, the immense, scandalous relief of the low-life who jumped onto the table with two solid legs, and just like that, among the little white dishes and the delicate wineglasses and the napkins and the dark bottles of wine and the asparagus spears, simply crouched down and shat out a huge, steaming pile of radioactive stench. And Ora struggles with all her might to uproot her gaze from the center of the table, from the huge naked fiend smiling at her with excremental seduction—he isn’t, he isn’t here, but he’s about to split her open—wait for me! she chirps with charming sweetness and pursed lips, and flits away.

A long time ago, at the beginning of Ofer’s service in the Territories (“This is parenthetical,” she tells Avram. “It has nothing to do with that evening in the restaurant”), they were living in Ein Karem, and she heard a strange sound from the steps that led from the back garden down to the path. She followed the sound to the edge of the garden and saw Ofer sitting there, wearing shorts and an army shirt—he was on leave—carving a beautiful stick with his penknife. She asked what it was, and he looked up at her with his ironic, arched eyebrows and said, “What does it look like?”

“Like a rounded stick.”

He smiled. “It’s a club. Club, meet Mom. Mom, meet club.”

“What do you need a club for?”

Ofer laughed and said, “To beat up little foxes.” Ora asked if the army didn’t give him weapons to protect himself with, and he said, “Not clubs, and clubs are what we need most, they’re the most efficient weapon in our situation.” She said that scared her, and he said, “But what’s wrong with a club, Mom? It’s minimal use of force.”

Ora, with uncharacteristic cynicism, asked if they had an acronym for that, “MUF, or something.”

“But clubs prevent violence, Mom! They don’t create it.”

“Even so, allow me to feel bad when I see my son sitting here making himself a club.”

Ofer said nothing. “He usually avoids getting into these arguments with me,” she tells Avram. “He could never be bothered with that kind of talk, always said politics just didn’t interest him.” He was doing his job and that’s that, and when he got out, when everything was done, he promised her he would think over exactly what had happened.

He kept on smoothing the stick until it was completely round. Ora stood over him, at the top of the steps, and hypnotically watched his skilled hands at work. “He had wonderful hands. You should see some of the things he’s made. A round dining table. And the bed he made for us.”

Ofer wrapped elastic webbing around the head of the stick. Ora went down and asked to touch it. For some reason it was important to her to touch it, to feel what it’s like when it strikes you—“a black, rigid, unpleasant sort of fabric,” she reports to Avram, and he swallows and looks out into the distance—and Ofer added more brown binding around the stick itself, and then the club was ready, and that’s when he made the
move
. She shows Avram how Ofer hit his open palm with the club three times to assess its strength, to appraise its hidden force. And he played around with it, like someone would with a dangerous animal whose training has only just begun. “That was a bad moment, when I saw Ofer sitting there whittling a club. And it was important to me that you know about that.”

Avram nods to confirm that he has accepted this too from her.

“Where was I?”

“Hugs,” he reminds her, “and that restaurant.” He likes the way she asks “Where was I?” every so often. A sloppy, dreamy, distracted young girl peers out of her face when she does.

Ora sighs. “Yes. We were celebrating Adam’s birthday, and the truth is we didn’t even think they’d both be home that Shabbat until the last minute. Adam was on reserve duty in the Bik’ah, and Ofer was in Hebron and wasn’t supposed to get out for the weekend, but they let him go at the last minute, there
was a vehicle leaving for Jerusalem, and he got home late and was exhausted. He even nodded off during dinner a couple of times. He’d had a hard week, we later learned, and he was so tired he barely knew where he was.”