To the End of the Land (86 page)

Day after day, for three or four weeks, Ora took the 18 bus
and spent at least an hour traveling around the city. She discovered that the bad thoughts loosened their grip on her while she was on the bus. Most of the time she did not have a single complete thought, merely transposing her body from one stop to the next. She grew accustomed to the jolting, the screeching brakes, the potholes, and the religious radio stations blasting their admonitions at full volume. And she realized that Ilan never asked her what she did for long stretches of the day, and she could keep her activities from him. Sometimes, when they sat down for dinner, she would stare at him and silently scream with her eyes: How can you not sense where I am and what I’m doing? How can you let me go on like this?

“Just then, the thing with Ofer happened,” she says cryptically to Avram, who has been quiet for a long time. “We had a crazy month, with the constant questionings in the battalion and the brigade, and the inquiries and investigations. Don’t ask.” She sighs and swallows her saliva. Here comes the moment when I have to tell him. He has to hear it, to know, to judge for himself.

In those days it seemed to Ora that every word she uttered, every look she gave, and even every silence were perceived by Ofer, Ilan, and Adam as a provocation, the premise for a fight. On these bus journeys, she felt a slight reprieve from them, and from herself too, from her strange insistence on bickering with them over and over again, and from her petty, circuitous questions, which were honestly starting to drive her mad. They burst out of her like acidic hiccups every time she so much as thought about what had happened there, when she merely heard the beeps signaling the hourly radio news, or even when she just thought about Ofer. “It’s like I couldn’t think of him without going through the incident first.”

“But what happened?” Avram asks.

She listens inside herself, as though the answer will come, finally, from there. Avram holds his backpack straps with both hands—grips them.

• • •

One day Ora left the clinic, apologized distractedly to a couple in the waiting room, and hopped on the 18 bus for a quick ride. When they were near the Mekasher bus depot, she heard a very loud explosion. Then there was a moment of bottomless silence. The passengers’ faces slowly foundered and turned to pulp. A powerful stench of excrement spread through the air, and Ora was flushed with cold sweat. People started to shout, curse, and cry, and begged the driver to let them out. The driver stopped in the middle of the street and opened the doors, and the passengers streamed out, fighting one another, kicking and punching to get out first. The driver looked in the mirror and asked, “Are you all staying?” Ora turned back to see who else he was talking to, and there was her elderly couple, huddled against each other, the woman’s tiny, almost bald head buried in the man’s body as he leaned over her and caressed her shoulder. Their expressions were difficult to describe: a mixture of shock and fear and also terrible disappointment. The radio immediately switched to emergency broadcast format—“First of all, allow me to express my condolences, to wish a speedy recovery to the injured, and to grieve with the families,” said ministers and security experts one after the other. The explosion had occurred on a bus going the opposite way, near Davidka Square, which Ora’s bus had driven past only moments before. The ambulances were already roaring to Shaare Zedek and Hadassah hospitals.

The next morning, soldiers and policemen manned all the bus stops, and the few passengers were even more nervous, irritable, and suspicious than usual. There were outbursts of anger at anyone who pushed in line, trod on a toe, or bumped into someone. People talked loudly on their cell phones. Ora felt they were using the phones as breathing tubes to the outside world. When the bus passed the site of the attack, there was a silence. Through the window she saw a bearded Orthodox man, a volunteer from the victim-identification unit, standing in a treetop and using a cloth and tweezers to peel something gently off a branch and place it in a plastic bag. A group of kindergarten children got on the bus in Beit HaKerem, and a few of them were holding colorful balloons. They laughed and chattered
and ran around, and everyone stared at the balloons. When one inevitably popped, although everyone could see it was just a balloon, a bitter screech of panic pierced the bus, and a few of the children burst into tears. The passengers, ashamed and exhausted, avoided one another’s eyes.

More than once on those circular journeys, Ora realized that if she happened to see someone she knew, she wouldn’t know how to tell that person what she was doing there or where she was going. Sometimes she thought to herself: What is this ridiculous behavior? Just think how Ilan and the boys would feel if something happened to you, or if Ofer thought, God forbid, that it was because of him. Or that because of him you wanted something to happen to you. Yet still, for three or four weeks, every single day, a moment would come when she could not stop herself from leaving home or work and walking in a shamefaced, defeated sort of daydream state to the nearest bus stop, where she stood at some distance from the other people—all of whom also made a point of keeping a little distance between themselves—and got on a bus. She would walk into the middle, look dimly at an empty seat waiting for her, and search for her elderly couple, who seemed to expect her by now and who would nod with the forlorn partnership of co-conspirators. She would sit down, lean her head on the window, sometimes doze, and travel for a few stops or a whole route. She never knew in advance how much time she would have to spend on the bus, nor was she capable of picking herself up and getting off until the moment arrived when—without any apparent reason—she sensed relief, release, as though the effect of an injected substance had diminished, and only then could she get off the bus and go on with her day.

As the weeks went by, she was more and more able to summon up the image of the strange old man who had danced and laughed and frolicked, naked as the day he was born, in front of the soldiers who had finally freed him from the meat locker in the cellar in Hebron. “The building’s owner was a wealthy butcher,” she explains to Avram, who still does not understand, but he is breathing faster and his eyes dart. And the soldiers, she remembers, were so embarrassed when they talked about
it, about his nude dance, as though that was the hardest thing about the whole incident. He made a total idiot out of himself, one soldier told her when he slept over at their house the night before one of the inquiries. His name was Dvir, a kibbutznik from Kfar Szold. Six-five, lanky, stammering, and slightly juvenile. Ora drove him and Ofer to the brigade HQ—

“Wait, Ora,” Avram says with a pale face. “I can’t follow, who is this old man?”

“The army actually took the case seriously,” she says after a few moments of silence, during which they plunge to the ground, suddenly exhausted, and sit on the edge of a pool glistening with large yellow water lilies. The dog keeps jumping into the water, spraying everything around her, urging them to join in. But they do not see her. They sit side by side, hunched over.

Even though Ofer had begged her several times to stop talking about it, at least in public, Ora had to ask Dvir: “But how could you forget he was there?”

Dvir shrugged his broad shoulders. “I don’t know, maybe everyone in the platoon thought someone else had let him out.”

Ofer sniffed angrily and Ora vowed to keep quiet, not to say another word. She drove on with her brow furrowed and her shoulders hunched up almost to her ears. “But how could you forget a human being?” The words escaped her lips again after a few moments. “Just explain to me how you can forget a human being in a meat locker for two whole days!”

Avram lets out an uncontrolled grunt of pain and surprise. The sound of a body dropped from up high hitting the ground.

Dvir looked at Ofer pleadingly. Ofer said nothing, but his eyes darkened. Ora saw, but she could not stop herself.

“What can I tell you, Ora? It really wasn’t right, there’s no question about that. We’re all eating our hearts out now, but you have to take into account that everyone was busy with their assignments, we’re pulling eight-by-eight roadblock shifts that suck your brain dry, and the fact that all of a sudden they took us on an assignment we didn’t even know how to do, and we had to keep some families with us in that apartment for two days,
in one room, with one bathroom, and kids and old people and all their crying and yelling and whining, and just that is enough to make you lose your shit, and at the same time you have to do lookouts onto the street and the killing zone, and cover for the prima donna snipers, and make sure the Hamasniks don’t booby-trap our downstairs doors, so it ended up falling between the cracks.”

Ora bit her lip. Mustering up all the restraint she could find within herself, she said, “Still, Dvir, I can’t understand how a bunch of guys—”

“Mom!” Ofer yelled. A single yell that cut like a knife. They drove the rest of the way in silence. When they got to HQ, Ofer wouldn’t let her wait for him to hear the results of the preliminary inquiry, as she had intended to do. “You’re going home now,” he announced.

Ora looked at him, at her strong child with the shaved head and the pure gaze, and her eyes brimmed with tears. The question almost burst out again, and Ofer said in a terrifyingly quiet voice, “Mom, listen closely. This is the last time I’m going to tell you. Get off my case.
Get off my case!
”

His eyes were gray steel, his lips iron wire, and his shaved skull a ball of cold fire. Ora shrank back from his power, his hardness, and above all his foreignness, and he turned his back on her and left without letting her kiss him.

She drove off, wild with sorrow, hardly able to see the road. A pelting, dusty rain began to fall, and one of the Fiat Punto’s windshield wipers didn’t work, and Ilan phoned and she couldn’t say more than a few words without shouting the question, and of course he lost his patience too—it’s a wonder he kept it for so long—and said he was getting sick and tired of her sanctimonious self-righteousness and that she should really keep in mind that Ofer needed her now, needed her full support.

Ora bellowed, “Support for what? Support for what?” even though she wanted to yell, Support for whom? Because she really wasn’t sure anymore.

Ilan softened his voice. “Support for your son. Listen, you’re his mother, right? You’re the only mother he has, and he needs
you unconditionally now, do you understand? You’re his mother, you’re not some Mother for Peace, okay?”

Ora was dumbfounded: Where had he come up with that? What did she have to do with Mothers for Peace? What did she have to do with those leftist women and their supposedly neutral checkpoint observations? She didn’t even like them! There was something defiant and annoying and unfair about them and the whole idea, coming to harass soldiers while they worked. How could you blame those kids, who’d been stuck there to man those checkpoints for three years? Instead of doing that, why didn’t they go and demonstrate at the military compound, or go and shout outside the Knesset? She’d always sensed a slightly grumbling weakness about them, with their excessive self-confidence and their total lack of reverence when they faced officers at the checkpoints or debated senior commanders on television panels. If not reverence, she thought, at least they should show a little gratitude, just a tiny bit, for the people who were doing our dirty work and eating all the Occupation shit for us, to keep us safe. As she conducted this confused dialogue with herself, Ilan kept talking softly: “Yes, there was a screwup. It really is awful, I agree with you. But Ofer isn’t to blame, get that into your head. There were twenty soldiers in that building and in the periphery.
Twenty
. You can’t saddle this whole case on him. He wasn’t the commander there, he isn’t even an officer. Why do you think he has to be more righteous than everyone else?”

“You’re right,” Ora murmured. “You’re a hundred percent right, but”—and again the question dislodged itself against her will. It had been like that for weeks, she had no control over it, as though her body was independently producing the toxic compound that hiccupped out of her at regular intervals. Ilan was still in control of himself. It was amazing how all the people around her controlled themselves while she was falling apart. Sometimes she even suspected that the three of them were able to control themselves precisely
because
she was crumbling and that in some strange way, upholding some hidden and complicated home economics, she was even conducting her embarrassing,
shameful collapse
instead
of them, and perhaps for their sake. Ilan reminded her for the thousandth time that as early as Thursday morning, roughly at four-thirty a.m., nine hours after the old man was put in the room—“was put,” he said; she noticed that the three of them had started using the passive voice: “was put,” “was left,” “had been forgotten”—Ofer had actually asked his commander what about the guy in the room downstairs, and he was told that Nir, the company commander, must have sent someone to take him out by now. At six that evening he’d asked Tom, the operations sergeant, and they’d told him over the walkie-talkie that there was no way someone hadn’t let the man out by now.

And then he didn’t ask anymore, Ora thought. And Ilan said nothing. Ofer himself had told them he’d somehow forgotten, he had other fish to fry, and Ora realized that perhaps there comes a moment when you can no longer ask that kind of question, because you begin to fear the answer.

Avram listens and thrusts his head lower and lower between his shoulders. She cannot see his eyes at all.

Ilan took a deep breath and said, “What do you want, Ora? Up to now, in all the investigations, the army has even cleared Nir and Tom, because of all the chaos going on around them.”

“I don’t want anything, and I hope they really do clear all the guys. But still, just explain to me how for two whole days Ofer didn’t think to go down and check for himself—”