To the End of the Land - By David Grossman Page 0,115

and small. If you saw him now, you’d never believe it was the same person. But he made this giant leap, at around sixteen and a half, in breadth and height. Until then he was”—she draws a figure in the air, a thin reed or a twig—“he had matchstick legs, it broke your heart to see them. And he always used to walk around—I just remembered this—in huge, heavy hiking boots, a bit like the ones tied to your backpack now. From morning to night he never took them off.”

“But why?”

“Why? Do you really not know why?”

Of course he does, she thinks immediately. Don’t you understand? He just needs to hear it from you, word for word.

“Because they gave him some height, and they probably also gave him the feeling that he was stronger, more solid, masculine.”

“Yes,” Avram murmurs.

“I’m telling you, he was really small.”

“How small?” Avram scoffs in disbelief. “How small?”

She signals to him with her eyes: Very small. Tiny. Avram slowly nods, for the first time digesting with his eyes the Ofer reflected in her gaze. A wee boy. Like Thumbelino. She wonders who he’s been seeing in his mind’s eye all these years.

“Didn’t you think he—”

“I didn’t think anything.” He cuts her off, his face closing up.

“And you never tried to imagine how—”

“No!”

They sit quietly. The bird has also stopped singing. A very small child, Avram muses, and something in him moves, crushed. A weak boy, a passing shadow. I wouldn’t be able to take it, the sorrow of such a child, his envy of other boys. How can he survive at school, on the street. How do you let him out of the house. Cross the street alone. I would never be able to take it.

Love him, Ora asks silently.

“I really didn’t think,” he mumbles, “I just didn’t think anything.”

How could you? she asks with her eyes.

Don’t ask me, he responds in silence and lowers his gaze. His thumbs dart over his fingertips. The tightening muscle in his jaw says, Don’t ask me those kinds of questions.

“But I told you,” she goes on, consoling. “He sprang up all at once after that, in height and in breadth. Today he’s a real …”

But back then, thinks Avram, somehow refusing to part with a strange new pain, like a cruel pinch of the heart that ends with a light caress.

Avram himself, she remembers, was always short, but broad and solid. “Today I look like a dwarf,” he’d explained once, very matter-of-factly, to the boys and girls in his class. And then he’d continued with his boldfaced lie: “And that’s how it is with all the men in my family. But at nineteen, we suddenly start growing and growing and growing, and you can’t stop us, and then we get even!” He’d laughed. At recess, in the locker room, he once stopped Meir’ke Blutreich and announced in front of everyone that from now on Meir’ke’s appointment as the class fatty was annulled, and that he, Avram, now bore the official title and had no intention of sharing it with amateur fatties, posers whose arms and bellies were not sufficiently flabby and flaccid.

“I was thinking,” Avram whispers, “I don’t know if he …”

“What? Ask.”

“Is he also, um, a redhead?”

Ora laughs with relief. “His hair was actually pretty red when he was born, and I was really happy about that, and so was Ilan. But it changed to yellow very quickly in the sun. And now it’s a little darker. Like your beard, more or less.”

“Mine?” Avram said excitedly, smoothing the rough ends of his beard.

“He has wonderful hair, full, abundant, thick, with curls at the ends. It’s a pity he shaves it all off now. He says it’s more comfortable that way in the army, but maybe after his release he’ll start growing it—”

She stops.

Adam is surprised by her onslaught with the camera and flash but cooperates with suspicious enthusiasm. She takes pictures of him playing, drawing, watching television, lying in bed under his blanket. Ora is worried he might get celluloid poisoning. One day, in the middle of a photo shoot, he looks up with a supposedly innocent gaze and asks: “This is for the man in the shed, right?”

Ora splutters, “No, why would you think that? It’s for my friend who’s sick in the hospital in Tel Aviv.”

“Oh,” says Adam, disappointed, “the one you always go to see?”

“Yes, the one I go to see. He very much wants to know what you look like.”

But Adam never wants to