To the End of the Land - By David Grossman Page 0,163

his lips moving, as though he is trying to engrave her words inside him. She talks about long nights sitting with Ofer in the rocking chair when he was burning with fever, sweaty, occasionally shaking and whimpering. She used to fall in and out of sleep with him, talk to him softly, and wipe the sweat off his tortured face. “I never knew you could feel someone else’s pain like that,” she says, and throws Avram a quick glance, because who more than he had once had the capacity to overflow with another person’s pain?

She talks about breast-feeding. How for months Ofer consumed nothing but her milk, and how he held entire conversations with her just by gurgling and looking. “A whole language, so rich that no words can describe it.”

She wants him to see her there too, not just Ofer. With her stained nursing bra and her wild hair. With her potbelly that refused for months to deflate, and her desperate helplessness when faced with Ofer’s mysterious pains, as he cried and screamed. With her mother’s stinging advice, and the far more experienced neighbors’, and the nurses’ at the lactation clinic. With the joy of knowing that she herself, with her own body, was sustaining a living creature.

And the moments—the chasms—between Ofer’s cries of hunger and the second her nipple disappeared into his lips. When he screamed, his body seemed to utterly collapse, like a body that knows it will die. The fear of death flowed into him quickly, and she filled the spaces that were void of food. He screamed and wailed until the rhythmic stream of her life stuff slowly filled him up, and a glow of relief illuminated his little face: he was saved, she had saved him, she had the power to.

She, who every single time she shifted from fourth to third gear had a morbid fear that she was shifting into reverse—she was giving life to a person!

Sometimes, when he was in her arms, she would run her hand quickly over his face and body, and when she did so, she always thought of the transparent threads, a web that tied Ofer to Avram, wherever he was. She knew it made no sense, but she could not stop her hand from making that motion.

Nighttime. The two of them alone in the world, darkness all around, and warm milk gurgles secretly from her innards to his. His tiny hand on her breast, the pinky finger extended like an antenna, the others moving rhythmically with his sucking, and his other hand crushing the fabric of her robe, or a tuft of his hair, or his ear. He opens his eyes and looks at her, and she dives in, imprinted in his gaze. That is how she feels: her face is now being imprinted on his tender, still foggy brain. She experiences a thrilling moment of eternity. In his eyes she sees her own image, and she is more beautiful than she has ever been. She vows to make him a good person, at least better than she is. She will repair everything her own mother ruined in her. Her zeal gushes into a milky spurt that spills on Ofer’s mouth and nose: surprised, he chokes and bursts into tears.

As she walks now, she hugs her body while a storm washes over it in waves. Forgotten sensations: fullness and hardness, dribbles that leaked through her shirt in the middle of the street, at work, or in a café, at the mere thought of Ofer—“Just thinking of him made me drip,” she laughs, and Avram, his face bathed in her light, wonders if she let Ilan taste her milk.

• • •

A shadow falls on them at midday. They are walking through the Tsivon streambed, a deep, strange channel that silences them. The path meanders among large, broken rocks, and they must climb and take calculated steps. The oak trees around them are forced to grow tall, stretch higher and higher to reach the sunlight. Pale ivy and long ferns cascade down from the treetops. They walk over a bed of crumbling dry leaves among bloodless cyclamens and albino fungi. It’s almost dark here. Touch, she says, and puts his hand on a rock covered with green moss. It feels soft and furry. They are surrounded by silence. Not a single bird chirps. “Like a fairy-tale forest,” Ora whispers. Avram looks around him. His shoulders are slightly hunched. His fingers dart, counting each other constantly. “Don’t worry,” she says,