To the End of the Land - By David Grossman Page 0,16

She slept when she went with the team to the stadium in Ein Iron on Saturdays, and sometimes they went to the Maccabi courts in Tel Aviv, and in the back of the truck she roared cheers at the passersby along with everyone else.

She slept while she sang her heart out on hikes, and on the night trek to the beach at Atlit, and at the Machanot Olim all-nighter, and when they all took turns jumping onto a canvas held by the team, and when she did the zip line, and helped build a rope bridge and set up the fire displays. She didn’t think about anything when that was going on. Her hands moved, her legs moved, her mouth babbled constantly, she was all noise and bells, but her brain was empty and desolate, her body a desert wilderness.

And together with Miri S. and Orna and Shiffi, her new friends after Ada, she was once again brimming with funny songs and operettas for parties and trips, everything just like it was before. Life really did go on. It was almost ungraspable how it did. Her body kept making the usual moves—she ate and drank and walked, she stood and sat and slept and crapped and even laughed—it was just that for the whole first year she couldn’t feel her toes, sometimes for hours on end, and sometimes she couldn’t feel the skin on the back of her left hand, either. There were places on her thigh and her back too, and when she touched them, even scratched them softly, she couldn’t feel a thing. Once she held a burning match to the dead spot on her thigh and watched the fair skin singe and smelled the burning, but she did not feel any pain. She didn’t tell anyone about that. Who could she talk to about things like that?

There’s a hole, she thinks now, and feels cold and chilled. It’s been there for a long time. How could I not have seen it? Ever since Ada there’s an Ora-shaped hole where I used to be.

She coughed and sprang back to life. She must have fallen asleep in the middle of fighting with Avram. What were they fighting about? What was it about him that got to her? Or maybe they’d already made up? In the darkness she guessed at Avram’s sprawled figure on the other end of the bed, leaning on the wall, snoring heavily. Was this his room or hers? And where was Ilan?

He had told her he was going to die. He knew it would happen, knew it had to happen. From the age of zero he’d known he wouldn’t live long, because he didn’t have enough life energy inside him. That’s what he said, and she tried to calm him, to erase his strange words, but he didn’t hear her, maybe didn’t even know she was there. He shamelessly cried over his life, which had been ruined since his parents divorced and his father took him to his army base to live with all the animals there. Everything had been screwed up since then, he wailed, and the illness was just a natural extension of all that shit. He was burning, and half of what he said she couldn’t understand. Fragments of mutterings and whispers. So she just stood very close to him, bathed in his warmth, and carefully stroked his shoulder. Every so often she stroked his back too, and sometimes, with a pounding heart, she quickly slid her hand over his thick hair, and as she did so she realized she didn’t even know what he looked like, and perhaps she even vaguely imagined that he looked a lot like Avram, simply because they had both come into her life together. She kept telling him the things Avram said to her when she was afraid or miserable. Thanks to Avram, that idiot, she knew what to say. Ilan suddenly grasped her hand, squeezed it hard, and glided over her arm from one end to the other. She was taken aback but did not pull her hand away, and he leaned his cheek against her, and his forehead, and held her arm to his chest, and suddenly he kissed her, showering dry, burning little kisses on her arm, her fingers, the palm of her hand, and his head burrowed into her body, and Ora stood speechless, looked into the dark over his head, and thought wondrously: He’s kissing me, he doesn’t even know he’s kissing