To the End of the Land (8 page)

I got on your nerves, she said.

It doesn’t matter.

But you … why did you run away? Why did you run away on me just when—

I don’t know, I don’t know. I just suddenly—

Avram?

What?

Let’s go back to my room. We’re better there.

Should we leave him here?

Yes, come on, come on …

Careful, otherwise we’ll both fall.

Walk slowly, my head is spinning.

Lean on me.

Can you hear her?

She can go on like that for hours.

I dreamed about her before. Something really frightening, I was terrified of her.

Such sobbing—

Listen, it’s like she’s singing to herself.

Mourning.

Tell me, she said later, when they were in her bed.

What?

Will you write one of your …

My limericks? My tall tales?

Ha-ha. Your
stories
. Do you think you’ll write about this hospital?

Maybe, I don’t know. I actually had one idea, but it’s already—

About what? Tell me …

Avram sat up with effort and leaned on the wall. He had given up trying to understand her and her reversals, but like a kitten with a ball of yarn, he could not resist a “tell me.”

It’s about a boy lying in a hospital, in the middle of a war, and he goes up onto the rooftop and he has a box of matches—

Like me—

Yes, not exactly. Because this boy, with the matches, in the middle of the blackout he starts signaling enemy planes.

What is he, crazy?

No. He wants them to come and bomb him, personally.

But why?

I don’t know that yet. That’s as far as I’ve thought.

Is he really that miserable?

Yes.

Ora thought Avram had gotten the idea from what Ilan had told him. She didn’t dare ask. Instead she said, It’s a little scary.

Really? Say more.

She thought about it and felt the rusty wheels start to turn in her brain. Avram seemed to sense them too, and waited silently.

She said, I’m thinking about him. He’s on the roof. He lights match after match, right?

Yes, he said, and stretched out.

And he looks at the sky, in all directions, waiting for them to come, the airplanes. He doesn’t know where they’ll come from. Right?

Right, right.

Maybe these are the last moments of his life. He’s terribly frightened, but he has to keep waiting for them. That’s how he is, stubborn and brave, right?

Yeah?

Yes, and to me he looks like the loneliest person in the world at that moment.

I didn’t think about that, Avram said with an awkward giggle. I didn’t think about his loneliness at all.

If he had even one friend, he wouldn’t do it, would he?

Yeah, he wouldn’t—

Maybe you could make someone for him?

Why?

So he’ll have … I don’t know, a friend, someone who can be with him.

They sat quietly. She could hear him thinking. A rustling, rapid trickle. She liked the sound.

And Avram?

What?

Do you think you’ll ever write about me?

I don’t know.

I’m afraid to talk, so you don’t go writing down all my nonsense.

Like what?

Just remember that if I talk nonsense here it’s because of the fever, okay?

But I don’t write things exactly the way they happen.

Of course, you make things up too, that’s the whole fun, right? What will you make up about me?

Wait a minute, do you write, too?

Me? No way! I don’t, no. But tell me straight—

What?

Weren’t you planning to call me Ada in the story?

How did you know?

I knew, she said, and hugged herself. And I agree. Call me Ada.

No.

What do you mean no?

I’ll call you Ora.

Really?

Ora, said Avram, tasting the name, and the sweetness poured through his mouth and his whole body. O-ra.

Something was flowing inside her, some ancient, measured knowledge: He is an artist. That’s it, he was an artist. And she knew what it was like with artists. She had experience with them. She hadn’t used it for a long time, but now it was filling her up again. And she’d get better, she’d beat the illness, she suddenly knew for sure, she had female intuition.

She closed her eyes and a slight shock of pleasure hit her as she wondered how, in a moment’s urge, she had been emboldened to lean over a strange boy and kiss him on his lips for a long time. She had kissed and kissed and kissed. And now, when she finally dared to remember without holding back, she felt the kiss itself, her first kiss, seeping into her, awakening her, trickling into each of her cells, churning her blood. What will happen now? she wondered. Which of the two will I … But her heart was surprisingly light and cheerful.

The truth is, I also write a little, she confessed to her complete surprise.

You do?

Not seriously, nothing like you, never mind, I just said that. She tried to shut up but could not. They’re not really songs, never mind, honestly, just hiking songs, for trips and camps, nonsense, you know, of the limerick family.

Oh, that. He smiled with odd sadness, retreating into a sort of politeness that pinched at her. You should sing me something.

She shook her head vigorously. No way, are you mad? Never.

Because even though she knew him so little, she could already tell exactly how she would feel when her rhymes echoed inside his head, with all his twisted, snobbish ideas. But it was that
thought that made her want to sing—what did she have to be embarrassed about?

So you want to penetrate the profound hidden meaning of the lyrics? She flashed him a deliberate smile. This is something I wrote ages ago, she said. We wrote it together, Ada and I, for the last day of camp at Machanayim. We had a treasure hunt, everyone got lost, don’t ask.

I won’t, he smiled.

Then do.

What did you tell Ilan?

You’ll never know.

Did you kiss him?

What? What did you say? She was horrified.

You heard me.

Maybe he kissed
me
? She raised her eyebrows and wiggled them mischievously, a shameless Ursula Andress. Now be quiet and listen. It’s to the tune of “Tadarissa Boom,” d’you know it?

Of course I do, said Avram, suspicious and enchanted, squirming with unforeseen delight.

Ora sang, drumming the beat on her thigh:

We set off on a treasure hunt,
Tadarissa Boom
,

Our counselor was a real hunk,
Tadarissa Boom
,

He said he’d help us find the way,
Tadarissa Boom
,

And not get lost or go astray—

Tadarissa Boom
, Avram hummed quietly, and Ora gave him a look, and a new smile, soft and budding, lit her up inside and her face glowed in the dark, and he thought she was a pure and innocent person, incapable of pretending, unlike him. “The most innocent of its creatures,” he recalled. I am happy, he thought with wonder. I want her, I want her to be mine, always, forever. His thoughts skipped, as usual, to the brink of possibilities, a lovesick dreamer: She’ll be my wife, the love of my life—

Second verse, she announced:

We solved the clues and found the prize—

Tadarissa Boom
, Avram sang in a thick voice and drummed on his own thigh, and sometimes, distractedly, on hers.

But no one cared except the guys—

Tadarissa Boom
.

’Cause when the counselor looked at us—

Tadarissa Boom
!

He made us swoon and blinded us!

Wait. Avram put his hand on her arm. Quiet, someone’s coming.

I can’t hear it.

It’s him.

Coming here? Is he coming here from the room?

I can’t understand it. He’s barely alive.

What should we do, Avram?

He’s crawling! Listen, he’s dragging himself along with his arms.

Take him away from here, take him back!

What’s the big deal, Ora, let him sit with us for a while.

No, I don’t want to, not now.

Wait a minute. Hey, Ilan? Ilan, come on, it’s here, a little farther.

I’m telling you, I’ll leave.

Ilan, it’s Avram, from class. I’m here with Ora. Go on, tell him—

Tell him what?

Tell him something—

Ilan …? It’s me, Ora.

Ora?

Yes.

You mean, you’re real?

Of course, Ilan, it’s me. Come on in here with us, we’ll be together for a while.

The Walk, 2000

THE CONVOY
twists along, a stammering band of civilian cars, jeeps, military ambulances, tanks, and huge bulldozers on the backs of transporters. Her taxi driver is quiet and gloomy. His hand rests on the Mercedes’s gear shift and his thick neck does not move. For several long minutes he has looked neither at her nor at Ofer.

As soon as Ofer sat down in the cab, he let out an angry breath and flashed a look that said: Not the smartest idea, Mom, asking this particular driver to come along on a trip like this. Only then did she realize what she’d done. At seven that morning she had called Sami and asked him to come pick her up for a long drive to the Gilboa region. Now she remembers that for some reason she hadn’t given him any details or explained the purpose of the trip, the way she usually did. Sami had asked when she wanted him, and she’d hesitated and then said, “Come at three.” “Ora,” he’d said, “maybe we should leave earlier, ’cause traffic will be a mess.” That was his only acknowledgment of the day’s madness, but even then she didn’t get it and just said there was no way she could leave before three. She wanted to spend these hours with
Ofer, and although Ofer agreed, she could tell how much effort his concession took. Seven or eight hours were all that was left of the weeklong trip she’d planned for the two of them, and now she realizes she hadn’t even told Sami on the phone that Ofer was part of the ride. Had she told him, he might have asked her to let him off today, just this one time, or he might have sent one of the Jewish drivers who worked for him—“my Jewish sector,” he called them. But when she’d called him she’d been in a state of complete frenzy, and it simply had not occurred to her—the unease slowly rises in her chest—that for this sort of drive, on a day like this, it was better not to call an Arab driver.

Even if he is an Arab from here, one of ours, Ilan prods at her brain as she tries to justify her own behavior. Even if it’s Sami, who’s almost one of the family, who’s been driving everyone—the people who work for Ilan, her estranged husband, and the whole family—for more than twenty years. They are his main livelihood, his regular monthly income, and he, in return, is obliged to be at their service around the clock, whenever they need him. They have been to his home in Abu Ghosh for family celebrations, they know his wife, Inaam, and they helped out with connections and money when his two older sons wanted to emigrate to Argentina. They’ve racked up hundreds of driving hours together, and she cannot recall his ever being this silent. With him, every drive is a stand-up show. He’s witty and sly, a political dodger who shoots in all directions with decoys and double-edged swords, and besides, she cannot imagine calling another driver. Driving herself is out of the question for the next year: she’s had three accidents and six moving violations in the past twelve months, an excessive crop even by her standards, and the loathsome judge who revoked her license had hissed that he was doing her a favor and that she really owed him her life. It would have all been so easy if she herself were driving Ofer. At least she’d have had another ninety minutes alone with him, and maybe she’d even have tempted him to stop on the way—there are some good restaurants in Wadi Ara. After all, one hour more, one hour less, what’s the rush? Why are you in such a hurry? Tell me, what is it that’s waiting for you there?

A trip alone with him will not happen anytime soon, nor alone with herself, and she has to get used to this constraint. She has to let it go, stop grieving every day for her robbed independence. She should be happy that at least she has Sami, who kept driving her even after the separation from Ilan. She hadn’t been capable of thinking about those kinds of details at the time, but Ilan had put his foot down. Sami was an explicit clause in their separation agreement, and he himself said he was divvied up between them like the furniture and the rugs and the silverware. “Us Arabs,” he would laugh, revealing a mouth full of huge teeth, “ever since the partition plan we’re used to you dividing us up.” The memory of his joke makes her cringe with the shame of what has happened today, of having somehow, in the general commotion, completely erased that part of him, his Arabness.

Since seeing Ofer this morning with the phone in his hand and the guilty look on his face, someone had come along and gently but firmly taken the management of her own affairs out of her hands. She had been dismissed, relegated to observer status, a gawking witness. Her thoughts were no more than flashes of emotion. She hovered through the rooms of the house with angular, truncated motions. Later they went to the mall to buy clothes and candy and CDs—there was a new Johnny Cash collection out—and all morning she walked beside him in a daze and giggled like a girl at everything he said. She devoured him with gaping wide looks, stocking up unabashedly for the endless years of hunger to come—of course they would come. From the moment he told her he was going, she had no doubt. Three times that morning she excused herself and went to the public restrooms, where she had diarrhea. Ofer laughed: “What’s up with you? What did you eat?” She stared at him and smiled feebly, engraving in her mind the sound of his laughter, the slight tilt of his head when he laughed.