To the End of the Land - By David Grossman Page 0,160

you in the eye? Maybe that’s why he didn’t come to the Galilee with you?

She can no longer contain what wells up inside her. She has reached some sort of peak, and something inside her crumbles and melts and relaxes and loosens with an internal surprise mingled with warm sweetness. Tall, strong, and Amazonian she stands on a rock above Avram, hands on her hips, and scans him with a penetrating look. Then she laughs. “Isn’t this nuts? Isn’t it crazy?”

“What?” he asks breathlessly. “What, out of all that?”

“That first I run away to the edge of the world, and now I suddenly can’t take half a step farther from home?”

“So that’s what this is? You’re running home?”

“I was aching before, my whole body, when I started getting farther away.”

“Oh.” He massages his hip, which hurts from the last few minutes’ sprint.

“You must be thinking, This madwoman has kidnapped me.”

He looks up at her with a large, sweaty face and smiles. “I’m still waiting to hear what to offer as ransom.”

“That’s easy.” She leans down to him with her hands on her knees, and her breasts round into the opening of her shirt. “The ransom is Ofer.”

They set off—she likes feeling the words pulse: setting off, two friends set off on their way, off we go—and the path is effortless, and they are too, and for the first time since starting the walk, their heads seem less bowed and their eyes are not simply staring at the path and the tips of their shoes. They go uphill and downhill with the path, which becomes a broad gravel road, then they climb over a security fence and lose the markers in a thicket of growth. A field of tall green thistles covers everything, so they decide to trust their nascent travelers’ intuition and walk bravely and quietly for another few hundred meters through the thistles, without a clue which way to go, without a grasp—like a baby’s first steps, Ora thinks—and her anxiety for Ofer rouses in her, and she feels that she is not helping him now, that the thread she is tying around him is suddenly loosening. Still there is no sign of the path, and their steps grow heavy, and they stop every so often to look around while other pairs of eyes watch them: a lizard pauses to scan them suspiciously, another darts by with a grasshopper in its mouth, and a swallowtail hesitates briefly before laying a pale yellow egg on a fennel stalk. All these creatures seem to sense that something in the general rhythm has gone awry, someone has lost his way. But then they spot an orange-blue-and-white marker glimmering on a rock, and they both point at it, delighting in the sweetness of their small victory. Avram runs over and scuffs his sole on the rock, a male marking his territory, and they both confess to their worry and praise themselves for having managed to keep it to themselves and not burden each other. The markers become frequent again now, as though the path is seeking to compensate its walkers for having tested them.

“I remembered something,” Ora says. “When Ofer was born, when we brought him home from the hospital, I stood over his crib and looked at him. He was sleeping, tiny, but with that big head, and the scrunched-up red face with capillaries visible on his cheeks, from the effort of being born, and his fist was clenched next to his face. He looked like a little boxer, tiny and furious, as if he was focused on an anger he had somehow dragged into this world. But mainly, he looked lonely. As though he had fallen from a planet and the only thing he knew was that he had to defend himself.

“And then Ilan came and stood next to me and hugged my shoulders and looked at him with me, and it was so different from when we brought Adam home.”

Avram watches the three of them, then quickly looks away and quotes the sign Ilan had stuck on the door to Adam’s room: “The hotel management expects guests to leave when they reach the age of 18!”

“And Ilan said that when he was in the army and they used to send him to a new base where he didn’t know anyone and didn’t want to, the first thing he would do was find himself a bed in the farthest corner, and spend his first few hours napping, just to allow himself