To the End of the Land (84 page)

• • •

Ofer arches his eyebrows to express his opinion of her curious performance. He is still moving very slowly. His distracted look gets trapped by a newspaper on the table and he stares at a cartoon without comprehending it, without knowing the context. He asks if there was anything on the news this week. Ilan gives him a report and Ofer flips through the paper. He’s not interested, Ora thinks. This country, which he is protecting, doesn’t really interest him. She’s sensed that in him for a while now: it’s as though the connection between the outer layer, where he spends most of his time, and the interior one, here, has been severed. “Where’s the sports?” he asks, and Ilan extricates the sports section from the recycling pile. Ofer buries his head in it. Ora asks cautiously if he hears the news over there, if he’s been following what’s going on in Israel. He shrugs one shoulder wearily but also with a strange bitterness: all those arguments, right, left, same difference, who can be bothered.

He gets out of his chair, kneels, unfastens the straps of his backpack, and starts emptying it out. His skull amazes her: so large, full of power, and solid. Such a complex structure of heavy, mature bones. She stands there wondering when he had time to develop bones like that and how this head could have passed through her body. When he opens the backpack, a sharp stink of dirty socks fills the air. Ora and Ilan laugh awkwardly. The smell speaks volumes: Ora has the feeling that if she focuses on it, if she splits it into its filaments, she will know exactly what Ofer has gone through these past few weeks.

As though hearing her thoughts, he looks up at her with a pair of large eyes that are dark with exhaustion. For a moment he is very young again, needing Mom to read him. “What is it, Ofer’ke?” she asks feebly, alarmed at his expression. “Nothing is it,” he answers habitually, and forces a tired smile.
Pussycat, pussycat, where have you been?
she thinks.
I’ve been to Halhul and the kasbah in Hebron. Pussycat, pussycat, what did you there? I lay in an ambush and shot rubber bullets at kids throwing stones
.

“I’m begging you,” she’d said to him roughly a year earlier,
even before the whole thing happened, maybe a month before. “Don’t ever, ever shoot at them.”

“Then what am I supposed to do?” he asked with a smirk. He skipped and danced around her, his broad chest bare and red, holding up a filthy khaki undershirt and writhing like a matador avoiding a bull. Every so often he leaned down and planted a light kiss on her forehead or cheek. “Just tell me what to do with them, Mom. They’re a risk to people driving along the road!”

“Scare them,” she said cunningly, as though she were trying out a new theory of warfare. “Slap them, punch them, anything, just don’t shoot them!”

“We aim at the feet,” he explained calmly, with that same amused superiority she knew from Adam and Ilan and the military analysts on television and the government ministers and the army generals. “And don’t worry about them so much. The most a rubber bullet can do is break an arm or a leg.”

“And if you miss and take someone’s eye out?”

“Then that someone won’t throw stones again. Let me give you an example: one of our guys shot three boys throwing stones at the pillbox this week,
bang-bang-bang
, broke their legs, one each, very elegantly done, and believe me, those kids won’t be back there again.”

“But their brothers will! And their friends will, and in a few years their children will!”

“Maybe you should aim so they’ll never have any children,” Adam suggested as he walked by, quiet and shadowy.

The boys laughed with slight embarrassment and Ofer glanced awkwardly at Ora.

She grabbed his hand and dragged him into Ilan’s study and stood facing him. “Now! I want you to promise me right now that you will never shoot someone to hurt them!”

Ofer looked at her and the anger began to rise. “Mom,
khalas
, stop it, what are you … I have instructions, I have orders!”

Ora stomped her feet. “No! Never, do you hear me? You will never shoot to hurt a human being! For all I care, aim at the sky, aim at the ground, miss in every direction, just don’t hit anyone!”

“And if he’s holding a Molotov cocktail? If he has a gun? Huh?”

They’d already had this conversation, or one like it. Or maybe that was with Adam when he started his service. She knew all the arguments, and Ofer knew them, too. She had sworn to herself that she’d keep quiet, or at least be very careful. She was always afraid that at the decisive moment of battle, or if he were taken by surprise, ambushed, her words would enter his mind and fail him, or delay his reaction for a split second.

“If your life is in danger then okay, I’m not saying that. Then you try to save yourself any way you can, I’m not arguing about that, but only then!”

Ofer crossed his arms over his chest in Ilan’s broad, relaxed posture, and widened his grin. “And how exactly am I supposed to know whether my life is in danger? Maybe I could ask the guy to fill out a declaration of intent?”

She was trapped in the loathsome feeling she always got when he—when anyone—played with her, exploited her well-known lack of debating skills, the rickety assertions that came to her in such moments.

“Really, Mom. Wake up. Hello! There’s a war going on there! And anyway, I didn’t think you were exactly crazy about them.”

“What difference does it make what I think of them?” she screamed. “That’s not the point. I’m not arguing with you now about whether we should even be there or not!”

“Well, for all I care, we can get out of there today and let them live their fucked-up lives on their own and kill each other. But at this point in time, Mom, when I have the lousy luck of having to be there, what do you want me to do? No, tell me. D’you want me to lie there and spread my legs for them?”

He had never talked to her that way before. He was burning with rage. Her spirits fell. There must be a winning argument that would counteract all these claims of his. Her fingers spread in a mute scream next to her ears. Wait a minute. She exhaled and tried to gather her ragged thoughts. Soon she’d get it together and clarify to herself exactly what she wanted to say. She’d arrange the words along the right thread, the simple one.
“Listen, Ofer, I’m not any smarter than you” (she wasn’t) “or any more moral than you” (even the word scared her; secretly she felt she didn’t really understand its true meaning, unlike everyone else, who apparently did), “but I do have—and this is a fact!” (she shrieked this in a slightly cheap way)
“I do have more life experience than you!”
(Really? Suddenly this too melted away: Do you really? With everything he’s going through in the army? With everything he sees and does, with everything he faces every single day?) “And I also know something that you simply cannot yet know, which is—”

Which is what? What? She could see the flash of amusement in his eyes, and swore she would not react to it. She would focus on the main point, on saving her child from the barbarian standing opposite her.

“That in five years—no, not five: one year! One year from now, when you get out, you’ll look at this situation in a totally different way. Wait! I’m not even talking about whether or not it’s just, I’m only talking about how one day you will look back at what happened there”—she heroically ignored his sniffle and the smirk spreading over his lips—“and you’ll thank me,” she said stubbornly; she was a little stuck, and they both knew it, stuck and desperately searching for the elusive winning argument. “You’ll see that you’ll thank me one day!”

“If I’m still alive to thank you.”

“And don’t talk to me like that!” she screamed, her face turning red. “I can’t stand those kinds of jokes, don’t you know that?”

Dad’s jokes, they both knew.

Tears of fury came to her eyes. She had almost grasped a brilliant answer in her mind, a logical, organized point, but as usual she lost her train of thought, dropped the stitch, and so she just reached out and held his arm pleadingly and looked up at him: a final argument that was in fact a plea for mercy, if not charity. “Promise me, Ofer, just don’t try to hurt someone intentionally.”

He shook his head, smiled, and shrugged his shoulders. “No can do, Mom. It’s war.”

They looked at each other. Their estrangement terrified
them. A memory flashed in her mind. That same cold burn of terror and failure from almost thirty years ago, when they took Avram from her, when they nationalized her life. She felt the same old story again: this country, with its iron boot, had once again landed a thundering foot in a place where the state should not be.

“Okay, Mom, enough. What’s up with you? I’m just joking. Stop, enough.” He reached out to hug her, and she was seduced—how could she not be? A hug of his own initiative. He even held her whole body to him, until she felt the mechanical signal on her back:
thwack-thwack-thwack
.

And throughout the squabble, she tells Avram with her gaze lowered, she actually did have one crushing argument, which of course she didn’t tell Ofer, and which she is never allowed to use. Because what was really raging in her was not the eyes or the legs of some Palestinian kid, with all due respect, but rather her absolute certainty that Ofer could not hurt a human being, because if that happened, even if there were a thousand justifications, even if the guy was about to detonate an explosive device, Ofer’s life would never be the same. That was it. Quite simply, and irrefutably, he would have no life after that.

But when she took a step back and looked at him, at the strength of his body, at that skull, she wasn’t even certain about that.

Now, in the kitchen, he tells them he hasn’t changed his clothes or even showered for a week. He speaks tightly, hardly moving his lips, and Ora and Ilan strain to decipher his words. Ora watches Ilan surreptitiously move to the balcony, to close a window or open a door, or just stand there on his own for a moment. She leans over the damp, sticky, greasy pile that has tumbled out of Ofer’s backpack and gathers up uniforms, stiff socks, a military belt, undershirts, underwear. When she picks up the mess, sand leaks from pockets, and one bullet and a crumpled bus ticket fall out. She shoves the clothes into the machine and turns the dial to the most vigorous cycle. When the machine
buzzes and the drum starts spinning, she feels the first sense of relief, as though she has finally revved up the process of domesticating this stranger.

And he sits at the table laid out for him, his head buried in the newspaper, and he can’t find the strength to talk. He hasn’t slept for thirty-some hours. There was lots of activity this week, but he’ll tell them later. They quickly concur:

“Of course, yes, the main thing is that you’re here,” Ora says, “we almost lost our minds waiting.”

“Mom’s been cooking for you all morning.”

“Don’t exaggerate! Dad’s exaggerating as usual, I haven’t had time to make anything at all. It’s a good thing I baked the brownies yesterday.”

“Oh come on,” Ilan moans, and presents his argument for Ofer to judge: “She was out shopping all afternoon yesterday. Robbed the greengrocer, looted the butcher. By the way, how’s the food over there?”

“Better, there’s a new cook and we don’t have rats in the kitchen anymore.”

“Are you with the same guys from training?”

“More or less. A few new ones came from another battalion, but they’re all right.”

“And did everyone go home this weekend?”

“Please, Dad, let’s talk later. I’m dead tired now.”

A strange silence falls on them. Ilan squeezes oranges and Ora heats up the meatballs. A strange boy with a strange smell sits at the kitchen table. Long threads untangle behind him all the way to a place that is difficult to see and hard to think about. Ilan is telling her something. Some minutiae about a deal he’s been working on for two years between a Canadian venture-capital fund and two young guys from Beersheba who are developing a way to prevent drunk driving. Everything was ready to be signed, almost a done deal, and then at the last minute, when they took their pens out …

The words fail to penetrate her. She cannot act out her role in this play, all of whose actors are real. Her lines are familiar, but the space in which the play is staged—the shell of Ofer’s tired,
depressed silence—makes everything ridiculous and broken, and eventually Ilan also ebbs away and stops talking.

Standing over the sink, Ora shuts her eyes for a stolen moment, concentrates, and says her usual prayer—not to an exalted God, but the opposite. A pagan at heart, she makes due with little gods, day-to-day icons, and small miracles: If she gets three green lights in a row, if she has time to bring the laundry in before it rains, if the dry cleaner doesn’t discover the hundred-shekel note she left in her jacket, then … And of course there are her usual bargains with fate. Someone rear-ends her bumper? Excellent: Ofer just won immunity for a week! A patient refuses to pay a two-thousand-shekel debt? Penance! Another two thousand credits for Ofer are recorded somewhere.

From within the unpleasant silence a new round of domestic chatter starts up.

“Where’s the onion left from the salad?”

“Do you need it?”

“I was thinking of frying some up with the meatballs.”

“And put black pepper on it, he likes black pepper, don’t you, Ofer?”

“Yes, but not too much. Our cook is Moroccan, his
shakshuka
sets my mouth on fire.”

“So you eat
shakshuka
?”

“Three times a day.”

And the strand thickens furtively, slyly, weaving back and forth, and then Adam calls and says he’s two seconds from home, he’s just stopping to buy the paper and some snacks and they shouldn’t start eating without him. The three of them exchange grinning looks—Adam, operating us all by remote control. Ilan and Ora blather on about everything that’s changed in the house in the weeks since Ofer left. “He was always involved in all the goings-on at home,” she tells Avram on a path near Tzippori that cuts through an open field covered with thousands of brown-orange woolly-bear caterpillars squirming in unison inside their silk cocoons, so that the entire field seems to be dancing. “He always wanted to know about every piece of furniture we were thinking of buying and demanded that we report
to him whenever an appliance broke and how much it cost to fix and what the repairman was like. He made us swear we would never, God forbid, throw out any broken appliance, or even the old parts, until he could examine them. When he started the army he even asked us to keep minor repairs for him to do when he was on leave—electrical work, plumbing, stopped-up drains, broken blinds, and yard work, of course.” But it seems to Ora that he’s a little tired of that now. The mundane defects of the house no longer concern him.