To the End of the Land - By David Grossman Page 0,159

right. To go back down, to go back, it’s not good for me.”

“The downhill is hard for you?”

“Going back is hard for me, retracing our steps—in my body. I feel all crooked, I don’t know.”

His arms hang by his sides. He stands waiting for her instructions. At such moments, she feels, he annuls his own volition. In the blink of an eye he steps out of his own being and covers himself with an impenetrable coating: nothing to do with life.

“Listen, I think—I can’t go back.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Me neither.”

“But the notebook—”

“Avram, going back is not good for me.”

As soon as she says it, the knowledge is as strong and clear as a compulsion. She reverses direction and starts going up the mountain, and it’s the right thing, she has no doubt. Avram stands there for a moment, sighs, then uproots himself and follows her, grumbling to himself, “What difference does it make?”

She walks, suddenly light-footed against the incline and against the weight of the man who is probably sitting on her rock right now, at the bottom of the valley, reading her notebook. The man she will probably never see again, who begged her with his eyes to let him help her—his lips like a ripe, cleaved plum—and from whom she now parts with a slight twinge of sorrow. She could do with his cup of coffee, but she has felt the bite of home, and she cannot go backward.

“Even before Ofer was born, ever since the war, since you came back, I’ve lived with the feeling that I’m always being watched by you.”

There. She’d told him what for years had embittered and sweetened her life at the same time.

“Watched how?”

“In your thoughts, in your eyes, I don’t know. Watched.”

There were days—but of course she will not tell him this, not now—when she felt that at each and every moment, from the second she opened her eyes in the morning, through every motion she made, every laugh she laughed, when she walked and when she lay in bed with Ilan, she was acting a part in his play, in some mad sketch he was writing. And that she was acting for him perhaps more than for herself.

“What is there to understand here?” She stops and suddenly turns around and unwillingly hurls at him: “It’s something Ilan and I felt all the time, all those years—that we were acting out a play on your stage.”

“I never asked you to be my play,” Avram mutters angrily.

“But how could we feel otherwise?”

They both get sucked back, absorbed into one moment, two boys and a girl, almost children: Take a hat, put two pieces of paper in it. But what am I drawing for? You’ll find out only afterward.

“And don’t get me wrong. Our lives were completely real and full, with the kids and our work, and the hiking and nights out and trips abroad and our friends”—the fullness of life, she thinks again in Ilan’s voice—“and there were long periods of time, years, when that look of yours in our back, we hardly felt it. Well, maybe not years. Weeks. Okay, maybe a day here and there. Overseas, for example, when we went on vacation, it was easier to be free of you. Although that’s not accurate either, because in the most beautiful places, the most tranquil spots, I would suddenly feel the jab in my back—no, in my stomach, here, and Ilan would feel it too, at the same second, always. Well, it wasn’t that hard to feel, because the minute we said anything that sounded like you, or one of your jokes, or just a sentence that begged to be said in your voice, you know. Or when Ofer folded his shirt collar with your exact movement, or when he made the spaghetti sauce you taught me how to make, or a thousand and one other things. And then we’d look each other in the eye and wonder where you were at that moment, how you were doing.”

“Ora, don’t run,” Avram groans behind her, but she doesn’t hear.

And that was part of life too, she thinks with some surprise. Part of the fullness of our lives: the void of you, which filled us.

For one moment her entire being is the look she used to give Ofer sometimes, when she gazed deep inside him as if through a one-way mirror, into the place where she saw in him what he himself did not know.

And maybe that’s exactly why he stopped looking