To the End of the Land (75 page)

He suddenly remembers Ilan the teenager, scanning the old radio in Avram’s house for Willis Conover’s jazz program on the Voice of America. His green eyes narrow, his long fingers gently turn the dial. Avram gets up and starts to pull on his clothes. He cannot hear this news with nothing on.

“Why are you getting up?”

“I have to know, Ora. Did he hear something on the network?”

“Wait, I’m getting there, let me—”

“Did he hear me?” His eyes gape.

“I can’t do it like this.” She gets up and also dresses quickly. “With—you—pressuring—me—like—this!”

“But what could he have done there?” Avram yells, one leg hanging out of his pants. They fumble around, each hopping on one foot, battling rebellious pants and shouting, and the dog barks fearfully. “What was he looking for?!”

“
You!
He was looking for you!”

“Is he an idiot? What is he, Rambo?”

They sit down breathlessly, facing each other.

“I need some coffee.” Avram gets up and gathers wood and twigs in the dark. They light a fire. The night is cold and seething. Birds screech as in a dream, toads croak with thick voices,
mongooses churr. Dogs bark in the distance, and the bitch scurries around, restlessly watching the dark valley. Ora wonders if she can hear her pack barking. Perhaps she regrets leaving them.

“Listen, they wanted to court-martial him after the war,” she says quietly. “But in the end they let it go. The circumstances. The chaos. They dropped it.”

“But he barely knew how to shoot! What was he thinking? Didn’t you ask him?”

“I did.”

“And what did he say?”

“Well, what could he say? He said he was mostly looking for someone to shoot him.”

“What?”

“ ‘Someone to do him a favor,’ ” she quotes. “What are you looking at? That’s what he said.”

At ten a.m., Ilan and the tankist reached the Hamama stronghold on the banks of the Suez Canal, opposite the city of Ismailia. For the first time, they saw the Egyptians crossing the Canal en masse, not far away, streaming into the Sinai Peninsula. They stood staring. It was hard to believe the scene. Ilan told her, “Somehow it wasn’t frightening. We felt like we were watching a movie.”

They called out to the soldier watching them from the tower near the gate, waved a white undershirt, and asked him to let them in. A short burst of fire came from the stronghold, and they ran and fell to the ground, spread their arms out in front of them and kept shouting. The gate opened a crack and a frightened-looking officer with an Uzi aimed at them peered out. “Who are you?” he yelled. Ilan and the guy replied that they were Israelis. The officer screamed at them not to move. “Let us in!” they begged, but he wasn’t in any hurry. “Where are you from?” They gave him their unit numbers. “No, where in Israel?” “Jerusalem,” they both replied, and glanced at each other. The officer considered this, signaled for them not to
move, and disappeared. The earth below their feet trembled. Behind their backs they could hear the hum of Egyptian tanks. “Where d’you go to school?” Ilan hissed without moving his lips. “Boyer,” the guy said, “a year below you.” “You mean you know me?” Ilan exclaimed. The soldier smiled. “Who didn’t? You were always with that other one, the fat guy with long hair who jumped off the tree.” The gate swung open and the officer motioned for them to approach slowly, on their knees, with their hands up.

Ghosts with bloodshot eyes gathered around them. Filthy ghosts covered with white dust. From all ends of the stronghold they closed in around the two new guys. They silently listened to their report on what they’d seen on the way. The stronghold commander, a tired, worn-out man twice Ilan’s age, asked what he was doing in this area. Ilan looked him in the eye and said he’d been sent from Bavel to remove classified information and secret equipment from Magma, and asked when he could go there. The soldiers gave one another sideway looks. The commander just grimaced and left, taking the tankist with him. A fat reservist with a blunt look turned to Ilan and said in a drawl, “Forget about Magma. Those guys are done for. And even if by some miracle anyone’s still alive there, the Egyptians are throttling them from all directions.” Ilan was astonished. “Then why doesn’t someone go help them? Why doesn’t the Air Force take out the Egyptians?” The soldiers snickered. “The Air Force? Forget it,” said the fat reservist. “Forget everything you know about the IDF.” The others mumbled in concurrence. “You should have heard the guys from Hizayon crying over the radio,” said a blond soldier with a soot-blackened face. “Depressed the hell out of us.” Ilan whispered: “Crying? They really cried?” The fat guy said, “They cried, and they cursed us for not coming to help. Don’t worry, we’ll be crying soon, too.” Another soldier, with a bandaged arm hanging in a filthy fabric sling, said, “We know how it goes now, all the stages.” A short, dark-skinned sergeant piped up: “You hear everything here. You
hear it right up to the last minute, right up to when they shit themselves. Live broadcast.” A squat reservist added, “We’ve gone through it with a few strongholds by now.” They all talked at Ilan together, interrupting each other. Their voices had no colors. Ilan sensed they were taking advantage of his presence to talk to one another through him.

He turned away and staggered over to a corner and sat down on the floor. He looked around and did not move. His brain was empty. Every so often someone came up to him and tried to engage him, asked what he knew about the war and about the situation in Israel. The medic forced him to drink some water and ordered him to lie down on a stretcher. He lay down obediently and must have fallen asleep for a while. He soon awoke when an earthquake shook the ground and a cloud of dust thickened the air. A faint alarm rang out somewhere in the distance, and then came hurried footsteps from all directions, and panicked shouts. Someone tossed him a helmet. He stood up and walked around the bunker, confused, from wall to wall, amid the commotion of a disturbed ants’ nest. He felt as if he were walking very slowly through a fast-forwarded movie and that if he reached out to the soldiers dashing around him, his hand would go right through their bodies.

“Ora.”

“What?”

“When did he tell you all this?”

“The morning Ofer was born.”

“What, in the delivery room?”

“No. We were still at home. Before we left for the hospital. Very early in the morning.”

“He just woke you up and started telling you?”

She blinks, trying to understand why the details are so important to him, amazed at how, just like in the old days, his soothsaying instincts have awakened. “Look, it was the first and last time I heard the story.”

“Then how do you remember everything?”

“I can’t forget that morning. Every single word.” She looks away, but he spies, he scans, sharp and keen, and she knows: he can feel something. He just doesn’t understand what.

The bombardment stopped. People calmed down, took off their steel helmets and flak jackets. Someone made Turkish coffee and handed Ilan a cup. He stood up, walked mechanically to the commander, and asked if he could go back to his base at Um Hashiba now. People poked their heads up over maps and transceivers and looked at him as if he were crazy. They repeated his question to one another. “You’re a real space cadet,” they scoffed. “The only way you leave this place is with broken dog tags in your mouth.”

“And that’s when he finally grasped what he’d gotten himself into,” Ora said.

“I didn’t know,” Avram whispers, pained.

Ora thinks: Wait till you hear how much you didn’t know.

“They stuck an Uzi in his hand and asked if he knew how to shoot it. He said he’d done target practice six months ago. They smiled disdainfully and sat him down by some device. I think it was something for night vision—”

“SLS,” Avram murmured. “Starlight scope, we had one at Magma, too.”

“—and they told him to snap out of it because the Egyptians were coming and it would be rude to greet them in that state. ’Cause at that point they were still joking around.”

He couldn’t see anything through the telescope and probably didn’t know how to use it, but all night he heard shouting in Arabic, very close, and large objects splashing in the water, and he realized the Egyptians were still crossing. Shells fell constantly and shook the stronghold. Every so often he told himself: Avram is dead. My friend Avram is dead, his body is close by. But even though he kept repeating the words, he still couldn’t feel their meaning. He couldn’t feel simple pain or even bewilderment at not feeling pain.

They sit quietly, both their hearts suddenly speeding up,
beating down the questions that will not be asked. What did you think, Ora? What did you think when we called you and told you to take a hat and two pieces of paper? Did you really have no clue what you were drawing? And what did you secretly hope? Which name did you want to pick out of the hat? And had you known then what would happen—no, don’t ask that question. Still, he has to, he has to know for once: Had you known what would happen, which name would you have wanted to pick?

At four in the morning someone took over his position. Ilan ran out to the bunker and a shell flew past his head. Horrified, he shrank into one of the foxholes in the side of the trench. “Where’s the latrine?” he yelled at a bearded soldier hunched nearby in the moat, his whole body shaking. “Wherever you take a shit, that’s the latrine,” the guy groaned. Ilan felt as if his pants were about to fill up any second. He tore them down, and for a few blessed moments forgot about everything—the war, the shelling, Avram whom he’d lost—and focused entirely on emptying his bowels.

When he got to the war room afterward, the silence terrified him. Someone signaled for him to climb up the lookout point and look west. And there he saw a massive carpet of white and pale yellow moving toward the stronghold like a tidal wave floating through the desert.

“Theirs,” a soldier spat out. “Probably twenty tanks. All the guns are at us.”

And the bombardment began. Tanks fired, a battery of mortars that appeared on a distant hilltop fired, and an Egyptian Sukhoi flew over and dropped bombs. The air and the earth shook. Everything in front of Ilan’s eyes shook. People and concrete walls and tables and transceivers and weapons. Every object diverged from its natural shape and hummed wildly. A new discharge of diarrhea surged in Ilan’s bowels. He turned and ran to his pigeonhole.

“The world’s dead,” muttered a young redhead in military long johns as he ran past, and Ilan dimly realized it might be time to write letters—or something like that—to his parents, and to
Ora and Avram, and then he realized he’d never write anything to Avram again. Not notes in class, not lewd limericks, not ideas for recordings or Ephraim Kishon quotes or quasi-Talmudic interpretations of
Fanny Hill
. There would be no more songs in Rashi script describing the charms of their female classmates, nor long conversations in sign language during class, right in front of the teachers. No sweet dreams about the ultimate Israeli movie—a
neon-realist
film—which Ilan would direct based on Avram’s screenplay. No rhymed letters full of horny cogitations, like the ones that flew among the various bases to which they were each sent, already stamped with circles of ink for the censor’s drool spots. No messages—transmitted in code that was unbreakable because it was based on their own secrets and trivia—which they sent each other over the military teleprinter. Gone were their joint voyages of discovery to the new continents of Bakunin and Kropotkin, Kerouac and Burroughs, and Fielding’s
Tom Jones
and
Joseph Andrews
, or Druyanov’s
Book of Jewish Jokes and Wit
. Finished were the jokes, Ilan finally realized, the witticisms, the repartee, the rude puns, the comprehension with one glance, the deep, dark, mutual identification between two spies in enemy land, two only children and what always linked them together, beyond the hysterical laughter to the point of tears.

That was it. He would no longer have anyone to marvel with at
On Aggression
and
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
, which they read to each other out loud in the valley of Yafeh Nof, perched on a rock known as “the elephant tusk.” And whom would he argue with, while running through a hole in the fence of the Bahad 15 base in the middle of the night, about Moshe Kroy’s concepts or the blues chords encoded in Beatles songs? Who would dramatize and sketch and record with him on the clumsy Akai tape recorder the stomachachingly exhausting arguments between Naphta and Settembrini from
Magic Mountain
? There would be no more quotes from the sacred poetry of David Avidan and Yonah Wallach or from
Catch-22
or
Under Milk Wood
—a song of praise for the human voice, from which Avram could recite entire pages by heart. And who else in the world would manage
to drag him to the offices of
Yedioth Aharonot
in Tel Aviv for a meeting with the editor in chief, who was surprised to discover that they were only boys, and that the idea to which they had alluded in their letter—“which, if permitted, we may unfurl in your honor’s ears solely in a face-to-face meeting”—namely that once a month the entire newspaper should be written by poets (“all the sections,” Avram explained gravely to the astounded editor, “from the main headline down to the sports and ads. Even the weather”)? Only with Avram would he live a whole life, parallel to their own and hidden to all, in the smoky rooms of
DownBeat
magazine, which they stole every month from the Music Academy’s library, and with which they carefully planned their nightly entertainment at Carnegie Hall, Preservation Hall, and the jazz dens of New Orleans, and fantasized about new jazz albums, and books they could not get in Israel, though they could entertain wild conjectures about their content—Duke Ellington’s
Music Is My Mistress
drove them crazy for weeks, based solely on the reviews and the ads and the title. And who would dig through Ginsburg on Allenby Street with him, looking for secondhand instruments? Who would buy for him, with money he did not have, Stan Getz and John Coltrane albums, and open his ears to the political protest of jazz and blues, which he had never detected or imagined before Avram? No one in the world would cheerfully call him “progeny of languid seed,” or “misbegotten Adullamite,” or “gout-ridden vesicle.” And who else would thrash out with him the finer points of the Hebrew language and its Greek borrowings? Who would compliment him after a brilliant move in backgammon by yelling, “Mighty is your roar, O lion!”?