To the End of the Land - By David Grossman Page 0,192

sang silly songs with him.

They stood at the mirror and made funny or scary faces. Ilan would hold his face close to Ofer’s, nose almost touching nose, and whoever laughed first lost. Then he’d disappear into the kitchen and emerge with his face covered in flour and ketchup. And the way those two horsed around in the bathtub, water fights and splashing. “You should have seen the bathroom when they were done. It looked like the scene of a water terrorist attack.”

“And what about Adam?”

“Adam, yes”—she thinks of how he keeps coming back to Adam—“of course Adam was also welcome in these games, it’s not that he wasn’t.” She tightens her arms over her chest. “It’s just so complicated …”

Because when Adam was with them, she always had the feeling that Ofer and Ilan held back a little, toned down their wildness and cheerfulness to tolerate Adam’s incessant chatter, his flood of speech, which often turned into a frightening display of physical rowdiness, a tempest of hitting and kicking, aimed at them both, over some silly little excuse or an imaginary insult. Sometimes he would throw himself down in a tantrum and pound the floor with his hands and feet, and even his head—Ora remembers the thuds with horror—and then Ilan and Ofer would try as hard as they could to calm him, to appease him, to flatter him. “It was really touching to see Ofer, all of two years old, caressing Adam, sitting next to him, leaning over him and making wordless murmurs of comfort.

“It was such a difficult period, because Adam couldn’t understand what was going on, and the more he tried to get close to them, the more they seemed to pull back. And then he’d get even more anxious and turn up his volume, because what could he do? He only had one tool to express everything he wanted, he only had what Ilan had taught him.” She shakes her head angrily. Why hadn’t she intervened more? She’d been so weak, so green. “In fact, now I think he was simply begging Ilan to come back to him, to reaffirm their covenant. I also think about Ilan, about how he just let Ofer be himself and loved everything about him. He even gave up his damned judgmentalism, just so he could absolutely love everything Ofer was, without any inhibitions.”

And when he did that—she knows this, though she cannot say it out loud—he turned his back on Adam. There’s no other way to describe it. She knows that Avram also understands exactly what happened. That Avram can hear the half sounds and the silences.

Ilan didn’t do it on purpose. She knows that. He probably never wanted it to happen. He loved Adam very much. But that’s what happened. That’s what he did. Ora felt it, Adam felt it, maybe even tiny Ofer felt something. It had no name, this act of Ilan’s, the surreptitious, subtle, terrible shift, but during that period, the air in their home was thick with it—with a breach of trust so profound, so convoluted, that even now, twenty years later, when she tells Avram about it, she cannot call it by its explicit name.

• • •

One morning when Adam was about five, Ilan was feeding him eggs and toast, and Adam licked his lips in between bites and said, “Toast is what I like most.”

This had been their favorite game for a while, before Ofer was born, and Ilan responded immediately: “Better than pot roast.”

Adam laughed gleefully, thought for a minute, and said, “Scarier than a ghost!”

They both laughed. Ilan said, “You’re good at this, but now you have to get dressed so we won’t be late.”

“For a very important date.”

As Ilan was dressing him in a shirt, Adam said, “Into the sleeves, like green leaves.”

Ilan smiled. “You’re the greatest, Adamon.”

When Ilan tied his shoes, Adam said, “Put my shoes on my feet, like a blanket on a sheet.”

“I see you’re full of rhymes.”

“Go eat some limes.”

On their way to kindergarten, they passed the Tzur Hadassah playground, and Adam observed that there was a bride on the slide and a king on the swing. Ilan, whose mind was preoccupied with other matters, mumbled something about how Adam was becoming a poet, and Adam replied, “You know it.”

When Ora came to pick Adam up later that day, the teacher grinned and told her that Adam was having a very special day: he was talking to the class and the teacher only in rhymes, and