To the End of the Land (76 page)

There would be no rowdy competitions to recite the Ayalon-Shen’ar Arabic-Hebrew dictionary by heart, and therefore, no one would hit him with
tadahlaz:
“to dally in the corridors, of parliament etc.” (of course Ilan had to remember the “etc.”), or slip him, in a crowded elevator,
nahedah
—“a maiden with rounded, full breasts.” Gone were their Arabized Hebrew and Hebraized Arabic: he could not call bottles
bakabik
instead of
bakbukim
, or birds
tzapafir
instead of
tziporim
, or condoms
kanadem
for
kondomim
, or buttocks
aka’ez
for
akuzim
. And who would there be to immerse him in a bubbling cauldron, pass him with the call of the wild, carry him through a storm in his talons, and shuffle him off this mortal coil?

He went back to the war room just as the Israeli tanks flanked the Egyptian tanks and set two of them on fire. The soldiers throughout the stronghold cheered and hugged. They waved excitedly at the Israeli tanks and began to prepare for their rescue. When the forces disappeared over the sand dunes in pursuit of the unharmed Egyptian tanks, a heavy, toxic silence spread through the stronghold. The soldiers stood with their arms suspended awkwardly, mid-wave.

A few moments later, a wounded Egyptian soldier climbed out of his tank with flames shooting up from his shoulders. He jumped off the tank and started running around with his hands held high, until he finally collapsed facedown, convulsed, and eventually stopped moving. He lay there in strange surrender as the flames engulfed his body. Four Egyptian APCs showed up and discharged a few soldiers in camouflage fatigues, who looked at the stronghold and consulted. The stronghold commander gave an order, and everyone who had a weapon started shooting. Ilan, too. The first shot, his only one in the war, punctured his eardrum and scarred him with a constant ringing sound. The Egyptian soldiers jumped back into the APCs and retreated. Ilan pulled a water canteen out of an abandoned gear belt and gulped down almost the entire contents. His knees were shaking. The thought that he could have killed a person, and that he really wanted to, ripped off a layer of film that had been covering him since he began this journey.

The commander called him over, said he didn’t care where he’d come from, but from now on he was under his command. He told him to circle through the lookout positions and take care of anything the men asked for. Over the next several hours, Ilan hauled crates of ammunition, jerry cans of water and generator fuel, and sandwiches churned out by the medic. Together with
a thick-bearded, reticent soldier, he dismantled a MAG from an APC in the yard and helped erect it on the northern post. He gathered more and more “administrative material,” papers and forms and activity logs, and burned them in the yard.

When he stopped to pee, a thought came to him. He went up to the APC, untied and rolled back the camouflage net, and peered in at the pile of instruments. He stood looking at them for a long time. Suddenly he jumped up as though someone had slapped him and ran as fast as he could to look for the Intelligence NCO. He dragged him back to the APC and explained what he wanted to do.

The NCO stared at him, then laughed loudly, cursed him, and yelled that HQ would kick his ass if anything happened to any of the instruments. In the same breath he added that in an hour or two they’d have to douse the whole thing with gasoline and burn it anyway. Ilan said, “Just gimme one instrument for an hour, that’s all.” The NCO shook his head and crossed his arms over his chest. He was a big guy, taller and broader than Ilan. Ilan said quietly, “We’re all going to die. Why would you cheap out on me for one lousy VRC?” The NCO tied the camouflage net back on the APC and whistled to himself. When he finished, he turned and saw Ilan still standing there. “Get lost,” he hissed, “there’s nothing for you to do here.” Ilan said, “Half an hour, you can time me.” The NCO turned red. He snarled that Ilan was getting on his nerves, and besides, the transceiver at Magma had been destroyed ages ago, so there weren’t any transmissions coming out of there anyway. Ilan smiled and asked pleasantly, almost sweetly (“Well, when Ilan wants something …,” Ora says, and Avram nods), “Just tell me one thing. What other instruments do they use in the strongholds?” The NCO, thrown by Ilan’s friendliness, muttered that Magma probably had a few PRC-6s, but there was no chance anything was left there. Ilan asked if
this
scanner could pick up a PRC-6 frequency. The NCO shoved Ilan’s hand off the instrument, fastened the net again, and growled that if Ilan didn’t get lost, he was done for. Ilan, with his usual coolheadedness, smiled again and said that if the NCO gave him an instrument now, just for
an hour, he promised, he swore, not to tell the Egyptians when they came that he was the Intelligence NCO.

“What did you say?”
the NCO blurted. Ilan pinned him to the APC with his arms, and repeated his offer face-to-face. The NCO’s eyes darted around in search of help, but Ilan could already see the wheels in his mind moving like a very simple abacus. “You’re fucked up,” the NCO panted in his ear, “you’re an asshole, a spy, this is treason.” But he spoke in a whisper that disclosed the results of his calculations. Ilan let go. They stood facing each other. “Where did you come from?” the NCO whispered hoarsely. “Who are you, anyway?” Ilan flooded him with his green eyes and shamelessly mimed fingernails being torn out and electrodes being hooked up to his balls. The guy moaned. His lips moved silently. All this lasted maybe ten seconds. The NCO could no longer deal with such a terrifying scenario and voluntarily gave in. Without a word, he undid the camouflage net and extracted a VRC device. He placed it on a small wooden table outside the war-room bunker and turned to leave. Ilan grabbed his arm and asked: “Are you sure this can pick up a PRC-6?”

“No,” the NCO mumbled, avoiding Ilan’s eyes like a hypnotist’s. “It’s not even in the right range.”

“Then make it in the right range.”

The NCO swallowed and hooked up the instrument with a wire to the only antenna that hadn’t yet collapsed. Then he pulled out a screwdriver, removed the instrument lid, dug through its innards, and expanded the frequency range. When he finished, he got up and walked away without looking at Ilan, his arms hanging by the sides of his body and the back of his shirt soaked with sweat.

As Ora talks, Avram slowly pulls his sleeping bag around his body like a cocoon. Only his white face peers out.

“Ora?”

“What?”

“He told you all that?”

“Yes.”

“The morning Ofer was born?”

“I told you—”

“What was it, some kind of urge he suddenly had, before the birth? To tell you all this?”

“I guess. Ask him.”

“Just like that, out of the blue, you were sitting there, chatting over your morning coffee, and he started telling you about—”

“Avram, I don’t remember all the details.”

“You said you couldn’t forget anything about that morning.”

“But what difference does it make now?”

“It’s just interesting, don’t you think?”

“What?”

“That right before Ofer’s birth, he decided. It’s a bit strange, after all.”

“What’s so strange?”

“That he chose that time—”

“Yes, that time. Don’t you understand?”

His eyes scan hers. She looks straight at him without hiding anything. She gives it to him: herself and Ilan, and Ofer in her stomach. He looks and sees.

“Hello hello hello hello,” came a ghostly voice, exhausted and despondent, and Ilan jumped up in his chair, losing the signal when he did so. He carefully moved the dial again. His finger suddenly trembled uncontrollably, and he had to fold it in and use his wrist to turn the dial. He’d been sitting there for two hours, almost without moving, only his index finger rolling the dial with paper-thin moves as his eyes scanned the lawn of signals: thin green blades that sprouted and withered intermittently on the little screen. “Hello hello hello,” a distant voice whispered weakly again. “Hello, hello …” The voice faded, disturbed by the breezes of radio noise, someone from Ismailia shouting in Arabic at a squad commander of Sagger missiles. Ilan tried to calm down and convince himself he’d been wrong—there was no way to identify a single voice in this hellish commotion. He
carefully turned the dial through Egyptian and Israeli radio networks, a concoction of hysterical yells, engine hums, falling shells, orders and screams and curses in Hebrew and Arabic, until suddenly, from the depths, the weak and desperate voice emerged again: “Hello hello, answer already, you fuckers.” Ilan’s hair stood on end.

With both hands he held the earphones to his head and heard it, word for word: “Where is everyone? You scurvy-ridden eunuchs, may my spirit haunt you at night!” He tore the headphones off and ran to the war-room bunker, burst into a debriefing, and yelled, “There’s a soldier in Magma! I heard him, I got him on the radio, he’s alive!”

The commander gave him one look and hurried after him, without even asking who gave Ilan permission to deploy secret interception equipment. Trembling, Ilan put the headphones over the commander’s ears: “Listen, he’s alive, he’s alive.” The commander leaned on the desk with two fists, listened, and his forehead wrinkled as his face changed expressions. Ilan thought quickly: Maybe I should explain that this is how Avram always talks; he even considered adding that they had to rescue him
despite
his talk.

Years later—Ilan told Ora that dawn, the day Ofer was born—he still tormented himself for being so embarrassed about Avram in front of the commander. When he told her, Ora suddenly realized that Avram, in the way he spoke, the way he acted, and his entire being, was always exposing a vaguely embarrassing, private secret that everyone kept. She remembered how he used to joke, “I always say out loud what everyone isn’t thinking.” The commander let out a pent-up breath, straightened up, and said, “Okay, it’s that kid, we know about him, but we thought he was gone.” He took the headphones off and asked, “Who gave you permission to open up a position?”

Ilan seemed not to have heard and asked in a choked-up voice: “You know about him? Why didn’t you tell me?”

The commander furrowed his brow. “Who are you, anyway? What makes you think I have to report anything to you?”

Ilan turned very pale and seemed unable to breathe, and the
commander sensed his distress and changed his tone. “Listen, calm down, sit down, we can’t do anything for him for now.” Ilan sat down obediently. His limbs were weak, and sweat poured down his face. “On the first and second days he drove the whole network crazy,” said the commander as he glanced at his watch.

“What did he do?” Ilan whispered.

“Oh, he just wouldn’t stop blathering and shouting for us to come and get him out. And he’s wounded, too. Lost a hand or a foot or something, I can’t remember. Truth is, he kept giving so many vivid descriptions, we just stopped hearing it, and then he disappeared off the airwaves just like everyone else over there, and we thought that was it. So it’s commendable that he’s lasted this long, but forget about reaching him. Get that out of your head.”

“Get what?” Ilan whispered.

“Him,” the commander said, raising his eyebrows in the direction of the scanner, which once again emitted Avram’s voice, now sounding strangely joyous as he trumpeted Duke Ellington’s “Take the ‘A’ Train” through his lips.

The commander started to head back to the bunker, but Ilan grabbed his arm. “I don’t understand. What do you mean, we can’t? He’s a soldier in the IDF, isn’t he? So what do you mean ‘we can’t’?”

The commander gave Ilan a cautionary look and slowly released his arm from his grip. They faced each other as Avram’s voice wafted between them, announcing, in English, a competition between Russian and American big bands, and asking his listeners to send in postcards and vote for their favorite.

The commander was a short and doleful-looking man. His face was covered with floury dust. “Forget it,” he said gently. “I’m telling you, forget it. We can’t do anything for him right now. He’s surrounded by the entire Egyptian army, and we have zero forces out there. Besides, listen to him,” he added in a whisper, as though he feared Avram could hear him. “He’s beyond caring where he is, believe me.” As if to confirm this, Avram burst into a long, screeching yodel that sounded horrifyingly alien, and the commander quickly flipped the dial and
replaced Avram’s screech with the sounds of orders and gunshot and Artillery Corps tracking points that briefly sounded, even to Ilan, logical in their own way, legal tender under these circumstances.

“Wait!” Ilan ran after the commander as he left the room. “Has anyone been able to talk to him?”

The commander shook his head and kept walking. “At first, yes. On the first day he had one good transmitter, but it stopped working, and he doesn’t seem to know how to put the PRC in receiving mode.”

“He doesn’t know?” Ilan asked in horror. “How could he not know? All he has to do is listen, doesn’t he?”

The commander shrugged his shoulders as he walked. “I guess the instrument’s screwed up. Or else the guy’s screwed up.” Then he stopped abruptly, turned to Ilan, studied him closely, and asked, “What’s your deal with this guy? You know him?”

“He’s from Bavel. Intelligence.”

The commander turned grave. “That I didn’t know. Not good. We’ll have to send word on.”

Ilan brightened at this spark of interest. “Listen, we can’t let him get caught, he knows lots of stuff, he knows everything, he has a phenomenal memory, we have to get to him before they do—”

He fell silent at once. He wanted to bite his tongue. Something foreign and tortuous flashed in the commander’s eyes, and Ilan realized that he himself might have handed down a death sentence for Avram at that very moment. He stood there, stunned by what he had done. In his mind’s eye he saw an Israeli Phantom diving down over the stronghold to destroy the security risk hidden among the ruins of Magma. He ran after the major and danced around him, behind him, in front of him. “Try to save him!” he begged. “Do something!”