To the End of the Land (71 page)

Avram looks at her expectantly.

“It was a lovely evening,” she says, skipping tactfully over the sudden indigestion that meant she ate almost nothing the whole meal. “And then I wanted us all to toast Adam,” she continues in the same tense voice, hoping she has managed to establish for Avram the fact of Ofer’s abysmal exhaustion, his main line of defense in the inquiries and questionings held afterward, and in his endless arguments with her. “We always have a little toasting ritual when we’re celebrating something …”

She hesitates again: All these family affairs of ours, all our little rituals, do they pain you? His eyes signal back to her: Go on, go on already.

“Normally, Adam never let us toast him. We weren’t allowed to do that in public, where strangers could hear. He’s so much like Ilan that way.”

Avram smiles. “God forbid you might be overheard by all those people who booked tables months in advance so they could eavesdrop on you?”

“Exactly. But that evening Adam said yes, though only if Ofer would do it. Ilan and I quickly said, ‘Fine,’ we were so surprised he’d agreed at all. And I thought I’d give him my toast later, when I was alone with him, or I’d write it for him. I always used to write birthday wishes for him, to all of them actually, because I think, I thought, that these occasions were an opportunity to sum things up, or to summarize a period, and I knew he kept my cards—Hey, have you noticed we’re really talking now?”

“So I hear.”

“We’ll have to hike the whole country three times to fit everything in.”

“That’s not a bad idea.”

She says nothing.

“Where was I?” Avram says a while later instead of her, and replies, “The restaurant. Ofer’s toast.”

“Oh, the birthday.”

She sinks back into her thoughts. That weekend, those final moments of the careful, fragile happiness. And she realizes what she’s been doing here all these days: reciting a eulogy for the family that once was, that will never be again.

“So Ofer leaned his head between his hands and thought quietly for a few minutes. He wasn’t in any hurry. He’s always a little slower than Adam. In general, there’s something heavier, more solid about him, his movements, his speech, even his appearance. Usually strangers who see them both think he’s older than Adam. And it was so nice, the way he treated Adam’s request so seriously.

“Then he said that first of all he wanted to say how happy he was to be Adam’s little brother, and how in the last few years, since he’d started going to Adam’s high school, and even more once he joined the battalion where Adam had served, he was getting to know Adam through all the other people who knew him—teachers, soldiers, officers. At first it got on his nerves the way everyone kept calling him Adam by mistake, and treating him as just Adam’s little brother, but now …”

“Seriously,” Ofer said in his slow, raspy, deep voice, “people are always coming up to me and talking about you—what a great guy you are, what a good friend, and how you always took the initiative. Everyone knows your jokes, and everyone in the battalion has a story about how you helped him, how you cheered him up when he was bummed out—”

“This is Adam?” Avram asks carefully. “You’re talking about Adam, right?”

“Yes, we were also intrigued by this new side of him. Ilan even joked that Ofer was recklessly destroying the reputation Adam had spent years building up at home.”

“Or like the bingo you invented,” Ofer told Adam with a giggle, “which is still named after you at school.”

“What’s that?” Ilan interrupted.

“You pick seven words that are totally unlikely for a teacher
to say in class. Like ‘pizza,’ or ‘belly dancer,’ or ‘Eskimo.’ And when class starts, everyone has the words written down in front of them, and they have to ask the teacher questions that sound all innocent, like they have something to do with the material, so that the teacher himself, without knowing it, says all the words.”

Ilan leaned forward with a glimmer in his eye and slowly interlaced his fingers. “And the teacher doesn’t know anything about it, of course.”

“Not a thing.” Adam smiled. “He’s just happy to see the students suddenly so interested in his boring class.”

“Ha!” Ilan said and looked admiringly at Adam. “I’ve raised a real snake.”

Adam bowed his head modestly, and Ofer said, smiling at Ilan, “An ‘inventional spark,’ don’t you think?” Ilan confirmed this, and bumped his shoulder against Ofer’s. Ora still didn’t get the rules of the game, and she didn’t like what she did understand. She was impatient to get back to what Ofer had started saying to Adam.

“And who wins?” asked Ilan.

“Whoever makes the teacher say the most words from the list.”

Ilan nodded. “Okay. Give me an example of how you get him to say a word.”

“But Ofer was in the middle of telling Adam something,” Ora reminded them.

“Hang on, Mom,” Ofer said cheerfully, “this is super cool. Go on, gimme a word.”

“You pick one,” said Adam.

“But don’t let me hear it, I’m the teacher!” Ilan laughed.

The boys leaned in, whispered, laughed, and nodded.

“But it’s a history lesson,” Adam said, adding a twist.

“Then we’ll do the Dreyfus affair,” Ilan decided. “I still remember that one a bit.”

Ilan launched into an account of the French Jewish officer accused of treason, and Ofer and Adam bombarded him with questions. He talked about the trial, about the silencing of Dreyfus’s
defenders, about the conviction. They were more interested in Dreyfus’s family, its customs, its dress and food. Ilan stuck to his lecture and avoided all the traps. Theodor Herzl showed up in the audience at Dreyfus’s public humiliation. The boys’ questions grew more frequent. Ora leaned back and watched, and the three of them felt her watching them and picked up the speed. Dreyfus was imprisoned and exiled to Devil’s Island, Emile Zola wrote his
J’accuse!
, Esterhazy was captured and convicted, Dreyfus was released, but the boys were more interested in Herzl.
Der Judenstaat
was published, and then came Herzl’s meetings with the Turkish Sultan and the German Kaiser. Ilan leaned forward and licked his lips. His eyes sparkled. The boys salivated on either side of him like two young wolves closing in on a buffalo. Ora found herself swept up in the excitement, though she was entirely unsure whom she wanted to win. Her heart was with the boys, but something about the wild enthusiasm on their faces made her crumple, and she felt compassion for the new, scant grayness gradually emerging on Ilan’s temples. The First Zionist Congress convened in Basel,
Altneuland
was published, Britain offered the Zionists a state on a large piece of land in Uganda—“ ‘a land that will be beneficial for the health of whites,’ ” Ilan quoted, recalling his high school days—and Adam wondered what things would have been like had the offer been accepted: all of Africa would have been stricken with frenetic zeal had the Jews gone there and started stirring things up with their hyperactive nervousness. Ilan added, “And you can be sure that within sixty seconds there would already be deep-seated anti-Semitism.”

Ofer laughed. “And then we’d have had to occupy Tanzania.”

“And Kenya and Zambia!”

“Of course, just to protect ourselves from their hatred.”

“And teach them to love Israel and give them a little
Yiddishkeit
with chicken soup!” Adam rolled around laughing.

“Not to mention gefilte fish,” Ilan snickered, and the boys jumped up and cheered: “Bingo!”

• • •

The main courses arrived. Ora remembers every dish. Adam had steak tenderloin, Ilan ordered the goose leg, and Ofer got steak tartare. She remembers her gaze being drawn to Ofer’s raw meat; she missed the vegetarian Ofer. In the weeks and months that followed, during the sleepless nights and nightmarish days when she replayed the events of that evening, minute by minute, she often wondered what really went through Ofer’s mind when he ate the steak, or during that game of bingo, and whether he honestly did not remember anything—after all, they had talked about occupation and hatred and had even mentioned locking up people and releasing them, and there was even something about silencing. How could it be that not a single alarm bell had sounded in him? How had he not picked up even the vaguest association between all of that and, say, an old man with his mouth gagged, trapped in a meat locker in the cellar of a house in Hebron?

“He was just really tired,” she states apropos of nothing. “His eyes were half closed and he could barely hold his head up. He hadn’t slept for two whole days, and he’d had three beers, too. But somehow the game and the joking around kept him up.”

There was a moment, she thinks, when it seemed as if he remembered. He suddenly asked for Adam’s phone and wanted to call the army. She can see it: he held the phone in his hand. His eyebrows moved. His forehead was strained. He was trying to gather something in through the tiredness. But then he saw the screen and got excited about some new function he’d never seen before, and Adam demonstrated it for him.

“Ofer, you didn’t finish toasting Adam,” Ora said.

“You’re off the hook,” said Adam and started to devour his steak.

“No fair!” Ora pleaded. “He hasn’t said anything yet!”

“Only if he wants to,” Adam said. “And no violins!”

Ofer turned serious again. His face softened and hardened intermittently. His chiseled, generous lips, Avram’s lips, moved unconsciously. He put down his fork. Ora noticed the exchange of amused glances between Adam and Ilan: Watch out, their eyes said, get your handkerchiefs ready.

Then Ofer spoke. “The truth is, I don’t even know how I would get along in life without your help, and without the way you took care of me in all kinds of bad situations that Mom and Dad don’t even know about.”

That was surprising. Ora perked up, and so did Ilan. “Because we only knew the opposite situation, where Ofer took care of Adam. And he suddenly opened up a whole world we’d never known, but which I’d always somehow hoped did exist, you know? Do you understand?”

Avram nods vigorously. His lower lip surrounds his whole mouth.

“And I saw Adam lower his gaze, and he got this kind of flush on his neck, and I knew that it was true.”

“And I think,” Ofer continued, “that there’s no one else in the world who knows me like you do, knows all my most private stuff, and who always, from the minute I was born, did only good things for me.”

Adam did not comment or crack a joke. Ora felt that he really wanted her and Ilan to hear these things.

“And there’s no one in the world I trust like you, and value and love like you. No one.”

Ora and Ilan bowed their heads so the boys wouldn’t see their eyes.

“Even though I always used to get mad at you, especially when you got preachy, or made fun of my taste in music.”

“Guns N’ Roses is not music,” Adam put in, “and Axl Rose is not a singer.”

“But I didn’t know that back then, and I was so mad at you for ruining my enjoyment of them, and in the end I realized you were right. See, you improved me in every way. And you protected me from all kinds of crap, and even though you weren’t exactly a bruiser, and I couldn’t threaten the kids who hit me and tell them my brother would come and beat the crap out of them, I still felt that you always had my back, and you wouldn’t let anyone do anything to me.” Then he blushed, as though only now comprehending the candor he’d permitted himself.

There was a long silence. Everyone’s heads were bowed. They
had touched on the root of the matter. Ora held her breath and prayed that Ilan wouldn’t try to make them laugh. That none of them would give in to their stand-up-comic reflex.

“Lechayim,”
Ilan said softly. “Here’s to our family.” There were tears in his eyes, and he looked at her gratefully and held his glass up to her.

“Lechayim,”
Adam and Ofer repeated, and to her surprise they also looked straight at her and raised their glasses. “To our family,” Ofer added quietly, and his eyes met hers on a new frequency, and for one brief moment she thought—he knows.

“After that he seemed a bit stiff, stunned by his own speech, and then he leaned his head on his hands again, like this, and Adam turned to him and hugged him. He really hugged him, with both arms”—Avram sees, he sees them—“and small as Adam is compared to him, he still enveloped him, and Ofer’s head leaned in, like this.”

She remembers his handsome, shapely head. Back then he wasn’t shaving it yet, and it was very fair after his haircut. For a minute it looked like Adam was smelling Ofer’s hair, the way he used to do when Ofer was a baby and he’d just had it washed.

Her head unconsciously reconstructs the gesture and nestles into her own shoulder.

“Ilan and I watched them, and I had a feeling, maybe Ilan did too, I never asked him—”

“What feeling?”

“When they hugged, I suddenly knew, body and soul, that even when Ilan and I were gone they would stay together, they wouldn’t grow apart, they wouldn’t be cut off, they wouldn’t be alienated, and they’d help each other out if there was a need. They would be
family
, you see?”

Avram’s mouth stretches out in a tortured grimace.

“What’s going to happen, Avram?” She looks up at him with tear-filled eyes. “What will happen if he—”

Avram almost shouts: “Tell me, tell me about him!”

• • •

On the drive home from the restaurant, everyone was full and soft and pliable. The boys sang a silly Monty Python song about a sexed-up lumberjack who likes to wear women’s clothing, and Ora noted the heartwarming deviation from their usual puritanism, as though they were confirming that they now viewed their parents as grown-ups. In the backseat they slapped their knees, stomachs, and chests while they sang—Ofer’s broad chest produced a dense, drum-like echo that excited her—and then they discussed which pub to go to. Ora and Ilan were amazed that they still had the energy to go out drinking so late, when Ofer had barely been able to keep his eyes open. Ilan asked only that they not go together into the same place and reminded them that a month ago a terrorist strapped with explosives had been caught trying to enter a Jerusalem bar. The boys put their hands to their hearts and promised gravely that they would split up: Ofer would go to the “
Shahid
Hope” pub, and Adam to the “Hezbollah Martyrs” nightclub. “Then we’ll meet up in “Seventy Virgins” square and hang around downtown for a while, mostly in crowded places, and we’ll get right up close to people with Middle Eastern features and piercing looks.”