To the End of the Land (79 page)

Ilan feverishly tried to remember something he’d once invented as a boy: the happiness method. How did it go? He used to divide himself up into different parts, separate regions, and whenever he was unhappy in one part, he’d skip to another. It never really worked, but at least he’d had that inner skipping sensation, and something like the momentum of his own private ejection seat, which could propel him for a few moments over his parents’ divorce, the parade of new men who started visiting his mother, his father’s abominations with his female soldiers in front of the whole world, the forced move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the hated school, the horrible boredom—three days and nights every week at the transport base his father commanded. Once, on guard duty with Avram under the antennas on the northern cliff of Bavel, he’d half jokingly told him about his
method, making fun of the child he used to be, but he’d sensed Avram’s converging revulsion and attraction.

Avram had looked at him then as though he’d discovered something new, something very dark. He’d questioned Ilan in great detail about the method and demanded to know all the nuances of the mechanism, how he had come up with the idea and the different sensations at each stage. After luring him on mercilessly, he’d arched his eyebrows and grinned. “You know what the next stage is, right?”

Ilan had smiled wearily. “What? What’s the next stage?”

“After you divide yourself up into lots of little squares, you can’t fit into any of them anymore!” Avram conveyed an excitement that may or may not have contained slight mockery. “I’m telling you, I’ve never heard of a more elegant way to commit suicide! And without anyone noticing!”

The landline phone connected to the division HQ rang, and a familiar voice came through. The speaker did not identify himself, but he didn’t have to. He told the soldiers he was planning to reach their area with an entire division and rescue everyone trapped in the strongholds. They looked at one another, then slowly stood up and stretched out. Feet stomped, blood started flowing through dulled limbs again. “Arik is coming!” the soldiers told one another, savoring the words. They gradually sped up their movements and went back to their positions throughout the stronghold. Even Ilan repeated the line to himself and to others: “Arik is coming. Arik’s gonna screw the Egyptians. Arik will save Avram and me. One day we’ll laugh about all this.”

“Because you won’t ever be mine anyway, you’re Ilan’s,” Avram’s voice said as soon as Ilan put the headphones back on. “And me, I’ve got this imprint of you, from the first minute I saw you, and every other girl will always be just a substitute. That was clear from the start, so what do I have to look forward to? People make such a big deal out of their lives. What I’m worried about now is just the thermal discomfort, you know,
those goddamn flamethrowers. Truth is, I’ve never liked
shawarma
. I don’t want to die, Ora.”

He laughed, he cried, and he talked to Ora, describing her body and the two of them making love. As usual, he was bolder in his imagination than he’d ever really been with her.

Ilan listened, and that morning, the day Ofer was born, he told Ora what he’d heard, for the first and last time. They never spoke of it again. She lay with her back to him and did not move. He lay close to her and quoted Avram. She heard Avram through his lips. “He was so delirious,” Ilan said. She didn’t say a word. He waited. He said nothing and asked her nothing. She lay silently. Ilan reached out and pulled down her underwear. She did not move, did not resist. At most she said his name with slight hesitation. Then he was inside her with all his force. Had he asked her whether the lovemaking was just Avram’s fantasy, she would have told him the truth. He didn’t ask. He entered her. She did not respond. She took him inside her. Her senses perked up, warning her against what she was doing, but she found that her body was eager to take him. She thought of how she had to protect the fetus inside her, but her body responded wildly, hungry for him. His arms and thighs closed in on her. His mouth burned, he bit the back of her neck, he almost went right through her. Even many years later she found it hard to believe that she’d done it. Her belly swayed, and the boy Avram had planted in her body rocked around inside her, waiting to be born, but for a few moments Ilan and she were only a man and a woman going about their business.

This is so the boy can be born, she sensed at the time, through her fog of self-sedation. And so that Ilan can be his father, and so that Ilan and I can once again be man and woman to each other.

“Hello, hello, this is the Voice of Free Magma. It’s the third night. Or fourth? I’ve lost my sense of time. I got out of the alcove before. There was total silence here for a few minutes, so I crawled out. First time since this started. I could barely move.
I thought maybe the battle was over and they’d gone back to the other side of the Canal. I guess that’s not exactly the case. I think it’s still going on, at least in my area, ’cause I peeked out and saw them still crossing the Canal, masses of them, hard to believe, and I didn’t see a single one of our forces.”

He sounded completely lucid again.

“I searched the stronghold, and apart from the radio operator I saw three other bodies, all our men, in Bunker 2, totally scorched. At first I thought they were tree trunks, I swear, but then I got it—why would there be trees here? It’s the reservists from the Jerusalem brigade. When I got here on the eve of Yom Kippur, I went right down to the edge of the Canal with my notebook. It was completely quiet, and I thought everything they’d scared us with at Bavel was bullshit. I found a barrel to lean on, and I sat with my back to the water and wrote a bit, just to acclimate myself faster. And these three guys were on the look-out post above me, and they made a whole production over my writing, and I fought with them, we almost came to blows. Now I feel bad. The way they looked, I think they were executed together. Maybe they tied them to each other and then shot. What was I going to—

“Everything’s falling apart here. Iron rods, rocks, nets, bent and melted Uzis. I think I saw an Egyptian flag above the stronghold. I found three cans of meat loaf, one hummus, and one sweet corn. And most important, two bottles of water. I can’t eat the meat. I’m done with meat for the rest of my life.

“I also filled two helmets with dirt, to cover my latrine. Now that I have food, I’ll probably go back to running my bowels on full speed, ha-ha.

“Bottom line, I’m back in my cage. I crawled in here, lay down again in the dervish-sucking-himself position. If I only knew how to operate this lousy machine, damn it! Anyone there? Hello …

“I just hope it doesn’t hurt. I wish I could lose consciousness. Before, after I saw the guys in there, I tried to strangle myself with my own hands, but I started coughing and I was afraid someone would hear.

“I just hope they don’t torture me first. A guy like me is their bread and butter. I keep seeing pictures flash by. And it’s a shitty movie.

“Good thing they don’t have a lot of time to waste on me.

“But how much? A minute? Three? How long could it take?

“Just do it quickly. A bullet to the head.

“No, not the head.

“Then where?

“Okay, come on already. Come on, you sons of bitches! Fucking Egyptians—sideways-walkers!”

He yelled as loudly as he could. Then Ilan heard two ringing blows and figured Avram had slapped himself.

“Ilan,” Avram said suddenly in a voice so close and tender that it sounded like a casual phone call, “you’ll probably marry Ora in the end. Way to go, you stud. Just promise me you’ll name your son Avram, d’you hear me? But with the ‘h’—Avra
ha
m! Father of many nations! And tell him about me. I’m warning you, Ilan, if you don’t, my ghost will haunt you at night in your bed and bruise your reed.”

Then he laughed. “Listen to this! Once, before the army, I went to Ora’s house in Haifa, and her mom made me take my shoes off, you know her, but my socks were so stinky, I hadn’t changed them for maybe a week, you know me, and she sat me down in the living room, on the fauteuil, to find out who I was and what I was plotting to do with her daughter, and I was so nervous about my socks that I started telling her that when I was seventeen I’d decided to be a Stoic, and then I was an Epicurean for a while, and now I’d been a Skeptic for a few months. I gave her a whole speech so she wouldn’t notice the stench. Just a silly story. But tell it to Ora, and to the boy, to Avraham, and you can all laugh about it, why not.

“Enough,” he pleaded. “Come on, come on, whoever you are.”

“Seven notebooks, Ora—d’you get that? It was a fantastic idea. Listen, I was thinking of a series, not just one play. Three at
least. One hour each. And no compromises. For once, I was going to do something huge, something like our old friend Orson’s
War of the Worlds
. The end of the world, I was thinking. That’s the idea, see? But not because of an alien invasion or an atom bomb. I was thinking about a meteor strike, and everyone knows exactly when it’s going to happen. ’Cause the whole idea is that the end date is known, see? Every person in the world knows exactly when—

“It kills me that I can’t tell you this. How am I going to write something without getting your confirmation, without your enthusiasm? Listen, listen, listen to me,” he talked on, but his breath was heavy.

Whenever he described a new idea to Ora or Ilan, Avram was a bundle of excitement. The heat radiated from him. Ilan tried to imagine him in his underground hovel, moving his hands and legs excitedly.

“And all of humanity knows that exactly on such and such date they will be destroyed. Not a single living thing will survive, not even animals or plants. No one gets off the hook, no exception committees, no board decisions. All of life will evaporate.

“Seven notebooks those fuckers burned!” he shouted again with sincere astonishment. “How could they screw me like that?

“Listen, the clocks will only show the time left until the evaporation. And when someone asks what time it is, it’ll only have one meaning: How long left until—

“Get it? Wait, there’s more.”

Ilan ran his tongue over his lips. Avram’s excitement had begun to infect him. He could see Avram’s inner light, which made him almost beautiful.

“For example, the museums will take their pictures and statues out of the galleries and warehouses. All the works of art. Everything will be out on the streets. Just think, Venus de Milo and
Guernica
leaning on a fence outside a plain old house in Tel Aviv, or Ashkelon, or Tokyo. All the streets will be full of art and everything people have ever painted or sculpted or created. The great masters, alongside grannies from the art class at
the Givatayim community center. Nahum Gutman and Renoir and Zaritsky and Gauguin, next to drawings by kindergarten kids. There’ll be pictures and sculptures everywhere, clay, iron, plasticine, stone. Millions of art works of every kind, from every age, from ancient Egypt and the Incas and India and the Renaissance, all out on the streets. Try to see it, try to see it for me. In the squares, in the tiniest alleys, on the beach, in the zoos, everywhere you look there’ll be some work of art, doesn’t matter what, a kind of massive democracy of beauty—

“And maybe—what do you think?—regular people can take home the
Mona Lisa
for one night. Or
The Kiss
. D’you think that’s too much? Wait, wait, o ye of little faith, I’ll convince you …” Avram smiled, and Ilan ached, feeling the burn of a private joke between Avram and Ora.

Ilan could see the look on Avram’s face when he was testing out a new idea. All his force would narrow into a spark of light in the depths of his eyes, one hovering glow, and at the same time his face would take on a remarkably corporeal expression, making him look almost suspicious, as though he were guessing the weight of some dubious goods he’d been handed, and then the eruption: the glow would ignite, a smile would spread, his hands and arms would open wide. “Come on, world!” Avram would bray. “Fuck me hard!”

“Well, there is one big issue I haven’t completely solved yet,” Avram murmured to himself, focused and distracted at once. “Will people dismantle all the frameworks of their lives, like their families, or will they want to leave everything just like it is right up to the last minute? What do you say? I’m also wondering if people will start telling each other nothing but the truth, right to their faces, ’cause time’s running out, you know? There’s no time.”

“In this kind of situation,” he mumbled after a few moments of silence, “even the most trivial thing, like the illustration on a can of corn, or like a pen, or even that tiny spring inside a pen, suddenly looks like a work of art, doesn’t it? The essence of all human wisdom, of all culture.

“Shit, no pen. Now. I’d really start writing it right now. Now I feel like I’m right there.”

Ilan got up and hurried to the bunker. He dug through some drawers and found a few papers the Military Rabbinate had given out for Yom Kippur. They were printed on both sides, but they had wide margins.

“Sweet Queen Elizabeth,” Avram sang over the radio. Ilan wrote.

“My queen, my sweet queen.

“How I wish to protect you from the impending disaster.

“Kings must die slowly, my queen,

“With the heavy toll of bells,

“With flower-strewn carriages,

“With a dozen pairs of black horses.”

He sang and breathed into the mouthpiece. It was hard to follow. The tune was only an awkward hum, a recitation full of pathos and air, and Ilan distractedly began to ponder the musical score that could go with the song.

“But!” Avram croaked, and Ilan could have sworn he was waving his hand up high. “Perhaps we shall kill you slightly before, beloved Queen Elizabeth.

“An expressionless servant will hand you a goblet,

“So that we can see you off appropriately,

“We will lay you down to sleep three days before the rest of us,

“In a coffin of ebony,

“(or mahogany).

“So that you shall not suffer the shame

“Of common, faceless death,