To the End of the Land - By David Grossman Page 0,170

us … who is to blame here …” Her voice grows weaker and weaker until she flops against his chest, her head in the round of his shoulder, amazed at herself, at what came out of her—why now, why, this was not at all what she wanted to say to him. He does not move, only holds her to him and runs his hand up and down her back, over her sweat-soaked shirt, and she breathes deeply and whispers into his body just as she spoke a few days earlier into the pit she dug in the earth. Avram somehow senses that she is praying, but not to him, rather to someone inside him, asking him to open up and let her in. His hands and body constantly knead her body, and she kneads his, fingers tightening over limbs, wondering, remembering. For one moment—no more—there is a sudden abandonment, like a fleeting moment of disorderly conduct, and Ora’s legs almost fail her, but she remains standing with the last of her strength. What is this? she wonders. What’s happening here? She holds her head back, wanting to look in his eyes and ask, but he pulls her to him with new-old fervor, imprinting himself on her again. That’s exactly how he used to be, and she suddenly remembers how the whole time they were screwing—nut-and-bolting, he called it—it was as though he were hallucinating inside her, growing intermittently harder and softer, moving in a slow somnambulism, a sort of continuous sleepwalking in which his mind and body were unshackled, so different from his usual rhythm when he was outside of her, different from his huntsman-like alertness. He once told her that from the moment he entered her, it was though a circle closed inside him and he immediately sank into a dream. “It’s like an underwater maze,” he said, when she asked him to try to describe it. “No, no, forget that. It’s like a dream that you can’t tell anyone or re-create when you wake up. That’s what’s fun about it: that I can’t find the words. That I can’t find the words.”

Of course she felt, in those distant years, the other women and girls he saw through the canopy of his closed eyelids. She felt the rhythmic, salacious alternating of his passions and fantasies as he made love to her. And every time she felt a twinge of jealousy, she told herself that you could not love Avram without loving his imagination, his parallel dimensions, his thousands of hallucinatory women. But she would quickly search for his mouth so that she could give it her kiss—deep, demanding, vigorous—or even just touch the tip of his tongue with hers, to bring him back to the source that gave rise to all that in him, and he would instantly realize what she was doing and smile with his swollen eyelids and make a movement with his body that said: Here, I’m back.

All that time, in all those years, with all the talk and the chatter, intrigues lodged between his foot and her ankle, between his eyelashes and her navel. And she was so young, she didn’t even know you were allowed to laugh like that in the midst of lovemaking. She hadn’t realized that her body was so lighthearted and mischievous and cheerful. And it all somehow comes back to her now, barely able to stand, almost falling into his body. It’s been years since she’s allowed herself to remember how interwoven they used to be, and how all of his limbs climbed over all of her limbs—“Is that why they call it climaxing?” he joked once. “We mustn’t waste even one-thousandth of a touch,” he would murmur, “not a finger or a hip or an eyelid, certainly not two thighs or an earlobe.” And when she was with him she was inexhaustible, climaxing and laughing, laughing and climaxing in short, quick spurts, while he held back like a Tibetan yogi, gathering it in from all the corners of himself, as he explained with a conspiratorial smile. From the farthest regions, from the tips of his toes, his elbows, eyelashes, neck, starting from a distance, until she felt his signals, and she would smile in her heart, here it is, here, the sharpening of all his flesh, the filling up, the high tide, and the quick departure of humor from his body—suddenly serious, determined, fateful, with his muscles weaving around her, and the grasping, like a giant clamp, and then