To the End of the Land (90 page)

Ora plunges onto a rock ledge and buries her face in her hands. “Listen, I did something … It was wrong, I know that, but I called your apartment. I picked up your messages.”

He straightens up. “My apartment? Wait, you can do that, too?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“There’s a code, a general one, the manufacturer’s default option before you set it yourself. It’s really not that complicated.”

“But why?”

“Don’t ask me.”

“I don’t understand. Wait—”

“Avram, I did it, and that’s that. I had no control over it. I dialed home first, and then my fingers just jumped to the numbers.”

The dog comes over and nestles between them, offering Ora her warm, padded body, and Ora puts her arms on the dog. “I don’t know what came over me. Listen, I’m really … I’m so ashamed.”

“But what happened? What did she do? Did she do something to herself?”

“I just wanted to hear her, to hear who she is. I didn’t even think—”

“Ora!” he practically bellows. “What did she say?”

“You had a few messages. Ten, and nine are from her. There’s one from your boss at the restaurant. They’re finishing the renovations next week, and he wants you to go back to work. He really likes you, Avram, you can feel it in his voice. And there’ll be a housewarming party that they—”

“But Neta, what about Neta?”

“Sit down, I can’t do this while you’re standing over me like that.”

Avram doesn’t appear to hear her. He stares at the gray rocks protruding all around him. Something in this place is closing in on him.

Ora rests her cheek on the dog’s body. “Listen, she called about a week and a half ago, maybe more, and asked you to call her back immediately. Then she called a few more times and asked … No, she just said your name. ‘Avram?’ ‘Avram, are you there?’ ‘Avram, answer me.’ That kind of thing.”

Avram kneels down in front of her. His head is suddenly too heavy to bear. The dog, with Ora hunched over her, turns to him with her dark, soft eyes.

“Then there was one message where she said”—Ora swallows, and her face takes on a childish, startled expression—“that she had something important to tell you, and then … Let’s see, yes, the last message is from the evening before last.” She laughs nervously. “That’s exactly the same time Ofer left his last message for me.”

Avram is hunched, rounded into himself, ready for the blow—he won’t be taken by surprise.

“ ‘Avram, it’s Neta,’ ” Ora says in a hollow voice, her eyes fixed on a spot beyond him. “ ‘I’m in Nuweiba and you haven’t been home for ages and you won’t call back your loving ones—’ ”

Avram nods, recognizing Neta through Ora’s voice.

Ora continues lifelessly, as though her entire being is operated by a ventriloquist. “ ‘A little while ago I thought I might be slightly pregnant, and I didn’t have the courage to tell you, and I came down here to think about what to do, and organize my thoughts, and of course in the end I’m not, as usual, it was a false alarm, so you have nothing to worry about, my love.’ And then there was a beep.”

He stares at her. “What? I don’t understand. What did you say?”

“What’s not to understand?” Ora rouses from her trance and sharpens her knives at him again. “What exactly don’t you
understand? Did I say anything not in Hebrew? Do you understand the word ‘pregnant’? Do you understand ‘false alarm’? Do you understand ‘my love’?”

His mouth drops. His face stiffens with immeasurable wonderment.

Ora abruptly turns away from him and the dog. She hugs herself and rocks back and forth. Stop this, she orders herself. Why are you attacking him? What did he do to you? But she cannot stop. Back and forth she rocks, finding pleasure in pulling this molten thread farther and farther out of her innards and unspooling herself until she disappears completely—if only. And poor Neta—
and of course in the end I’m not, as usual, it was a false alarm
—and suddenly Ora knows how Avram and Neta sound when they talk to each other, she knows their music, and the soft playfulness, exactly the way he used to fence with Ilan, and the way Ilan still does with the boys, with that same lightning-fast wit that Ora herself is no longer capable of and in fact never was.
False alarm
, Neta had giggled. But does he even realize how much she loves him, and how much she is suffering?

He grunts. “I still don’t understand what you’re angry about.”

“Angry?” She flings her head back and lets out a toxic spray of ridicule. “Why would I be angry? What do I have to be angry about? On the contrary, I should be happy, right?”

“About what?”

“About the mere possibility,” she explains with a serious face and a dizzy sort of matter-of-factness, “that you may have a child one day.”

“But I don’t have a child,” he says sternly. “Other than Ofer I have no child.”

“But maybe you will. Why not? Men your age can still do it, after all.” She regains her senses for a moment and almost falls into his arms to apologize for the madness that took hold of her, for the narrow-mindedness, for the smallness of her soul. Because more than anything she wants to say how good it would be for him to have a child and what a wonderful father he would be, a full-time dad. But then another flaming sword turns every which way inside her, and she jumps up with an astonished realization:
“Maybe
you’ll even have a girl. Avram, you’ll have a girl.”

“What are you talking about?” He gets up quickly and stands facing her. “Neta said she wasn’t, that she just thought she was.” He reaches out to embrace her and Ora flows through his arms and crumples into a large pit in the rock. Her hands cover her mouth as though she is sucking a finger or trying to stifle a scream.

“Come on, let’s keep walking.” He kneels beside her and speaks rhythmically, confidently. “We’ll walk all the way to your house, as far as you want me to walk with you. Nothing’s changed, Ora, get up.”

“What for?” she whispers helplessly.

“What do you mean what for?”

She looks at him with tearful eyes. “But you’ll have a girl.”

“There’s no girl,” he says tersely. “What’s the matter with you?”

“I suddenly get it, it’s suddenly tangible for me.”

“I only have Ofer,” Avram repeats insistently. “Listen: you and I, together, have Ofer.”

“How do you have Ofer?” she says, snorting into her hands. Her eyes flit emptily through the air. “You don’t know him, you didn’t even want to see him. Who is Ofer to you? Ofer is just words to you.”

“No, no.” In his distress he shakes her, hard, and her head bobs forward and back. “No. You know that’s not true anymore.”

“But all I’ve told you is words.”

“Ora, don’t you happen to have …”

“What?”

“A picture of him?”

She looks at him for a long time, as though failing to grasp the meaning of his words. Then she digs through her backpack and pulls out a small brown wallet. She opens it without looking and holds it out to Avram. In a small plastic window is a picture of two boys with their arms around each other. It was taken the morning Adam joined the army. They both have long hair, and
Ofer, young and skinny, hangs on his older brother, enveloping him with his arms and his gaze. As Avram looks at the picture, Ora thinks she can see every feature in his face begin to stir uncontrollably. “Avram,” she says softly. She puts her hand on his as he holds the picture. She steadies it.

“What a beautiful boy,” Avram whispers.

Ora shuts her eyes. She sees people standing on either side of the street that leads to her house. Some of them have already gone into the yard, others are standing on the steps to the door. They wait for her silently, eyes lowered. They wait for her to pass them and walk into her house.

So that it can begin.

“Talk to me. Tell me about him,” she murmurs.

“Tell you what?”

“What is he for you?”

She takes the wallet and puts it back into the backpack. For some reason she cannot bear to have the picture so exposed to light. He does not dare resist, even though he would like to sit there and look at it more and more.

“Ora—”

“Tell me what he is for you.”

Avram feels a burning need to get up and leave this place, get out of the shadows of this strange little crater with the craggy gray rocks. Across the way, a sun-kissed strip of green stretches out between two jagged cliffs, and here they are in the shade, too much shade.

“I can’t hear you,” she whispers.

“First of all … First of all, he is your child. That’s the first thing I know about him, that’s the first thing I think about him.”

“Yes.”

“That’s what I always think about him: that he’s yours, with your light and your goodness, and the things you’ve always given him, his whole life, the way you know how to give. Your abundance, your love, and your generosity, always. And that is what will protect him everywhere, there, too.”

“It will?”

“Yes, yes.” Avram looks beyond her and presses her limp body to him. She feels cold, and her breath is shallow.

“Tell me more, I need you to tell me.”

“And you let me hold him together with you. That’s what it is. That’s what I see. Yes.”

Her face grows distant and weak. She seems to be falling asleep with her eyes open, in his arms, and he wants to wake her, to breathe life into her. But something about her, something in her vacant gaze, her gaping mouth …

“And it’s like,” Avram struggles, “like you’re trying to take him with you somewhere, alone, but he’s too heavy for you. And he’s asleep the whole time, right?”

Ora nods, understanding yet not understanding. Her fingers move, weak and blind on his forearm, distractedly feeling the edge of his sleeve.

“It’s like he’s been anesthetized,” Avram murmurs. “I don’t know why, I don’t fully understand it. And then you come to me and ask me to help you.”

“Yes,” she whispers.

“The two of us have to take him somewhere, I don’t know where, I don’t understand why. And we hold him together, between us, all the time. It’s like he needs both of us to take him there, that’s it.”

“Yes.”

“Only the two of us can take him there.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s there?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is it good?” Ora rustles desperately. “Is it a good place there?”

“I don’t know.”

“What is this, what are you telling me? Is this a dream you had? Did you dream about him?”

“It’s what I see,” Avram replies helplessly.

“But what is it?”

“We’re both holding him.”

“Yes?”

“He’s walking between us.”

“Yes, that’s good.”

“But he’s asleep, his eyes are closed, one of his arms is on you and the other on me.”

“I don’t understand.”

Suddenly Avram shakes himself off. “Let’s get out of here, Ora.”

She moans. “This isn’t good. He has to be awake the whole time. Why is he sleeping?”

“No, he’s asleep. His head is on your shoulder.”

“But why is he asleep?” Ora shouts and her voice cracks.

Avram shuts his eyes to wipe the scene away. When he opens them, Ora is staring at him in horror.

“Maybe we were wrong,” she says, and her face is strained. “Maybe we got it all wrong, from the beginning. This whole path, all the walking we did—”

“That’s not true! Don’t say that, we’ll walk, and we’ll talk about him—”

“Maybe the whole thing was the opposite of what I thought.”

“Opposite how?”

She slowly turns her palms out. “Because I thought that if we both talked about him, if we kept talking about him, we’d protect him, together, right?”

“Yes, yes, that’s true, Ora, you’ll see—”

“But maybe it’s the exact opposite?”

“What? What’s the opposite?” he whispers.

Her body flutters at him. She grips his arm: “I want you to promise me.”

“Yes, whatever you want.”

“That you’ll remember everything.”

“Yes, you know I will.”

“From the beginning, from when we met, when we were kids, and that war, and how we met in isolation, and the second war, and what happened to you, and Ilan, and me, and everything that happened, yes?”

“Yes, yes.”

“And Adam and Ofer. Promise me, look me in the eye.” She holds his face in both hands. “You’ll remember, right?”

“Everything.”

“And if Ofer …” Ora slows down and her eyes glaze over, and a new wrinkle, vertical and deep and black, suddenly runs down between her eyes. “If he—”

“Don’t even think that way!” Avram grabs her shoulder and rocks her wildly.

She keeps talking, but he does not hear. He holds her to him and kisses her face, and she does not surrender to him and his kisses, all she gives him is the shell of her face.

“You’ll remember,” she murmurs through his shaking. “You’ll remember Ofer, his life, his
whole
life, right?”

They sit for a long time, hidden away in the small crater. Holding each other like refugees from a storm. The sounds slowly return. The hum of a bee, the thin chirp of a bird, the voices of workers building a house somewhere in the valley.

Then Ora detaches her body from his and lies down on her side on the rock ledge. She pulls her knees into her stomach and rests her cheek on her open palm. Her eyes are open yet she sees nothing. Avram sits beside her, his fingers hovering over her body, barely touching. A light breeze fills the air with the scents of
za’atar
and poterium and a sweet whiff of honeysuckle. Beneath her body are the cool stone and the whole mountain, enormous and solid and infinite. She thinks: How thin is the crust of Earth.

DECEMBER
2007

I BEGAN WRITING
this book in May of 2003, six months before the end of my oldest son, Yonatan’s, military service, and a year and a half before his younger brother, Uri, enlisted. They both served in the Armored Corps
.

Uri was very familiar with the plot and the characters. Every time we talked on the phone, and when he came home on leave, he would ask what was new in the book and in the characters’ lives. (“What did you do to them this week?” was his regular question.) He spent most of his service in the Occupied Territories, on patrols, lookouts, ambushes, and checkpoints, and he occasionally shared his experiences with me
.