To the End of the Land - By David Grossman Page 0,20

chest—that for this sort of drive, on a day like this, it was better not to call an Arab driver.

Even if he is an Arab from here, one of ours, Ilan prods at her brain as she tries to justify her own behavior. Even if it’s Sami, who’s almost one of the family, who’s been driving everyone—the people who work for Ilan, her estranged husband, and the whole family—for more than twenty years. They are his main livelihood, his regular monthly income, and he, in return, is obliged to be at their service around the clock, whenever they need him. They have been to his home in Abu Ghosh for family celebrations, they know his wife, Inaam, and they helped out with connections and money when his two older sons wanted to emigrate to Argentina. They’ve racked up hundreds of driving hours together, and she cannot recall his ever being this silent. With him, every drive is a stand-up show. He’s witty and sly, a political dodger who shoots in all directions with decoys and double-edged swords, and besides, she cannot imagine calling another driver. Driving herself is out of the question for the next year: she’s had three accidents and six moving violations in the past twelve months, an excessive crop even by her standards, and the loathsome judge who revoked her license had hissed that he was doing her a favor and that she really owed him her life. It would have all been so easy if she herself were driving Ofer. At least she’d have had another ninety minutes alone with him, and maybe she’d even have tempted him to stop on the way—there are some good restaurants in Wadi Ara. After all, one hour more, one hour less, what’s the rush? Why are you in such a hurry? Tell me, what is it that’s waiting for you there?

A trip alone with him will not happen anytime soon, nor alone with herself, and she has to get used to this constraint. She has to let it go, stop grieving every day for her robbed independence. She should be happy that at least she has Sami, who kept driving her even after the separation from Ilan. She hadn’t been capable of thinking about those kinds of details at the time, but Ilan had put his foot down. Sami was an explicit clause in their separation agreement, and he himself said he was divvied up between them like the furniture and the rugs and the silverware. “Us Arabs,” he would laugh, revealing a mouth full of huge teeth, “ever since the partition plan we’re used to you dividing us up.” The memory of his joke makes her cringe with the shame of what has happened today, of having somehow, in the general commotion, completely erased that part of him, his Arabness.

Since seeing Ofer this morning with the phone in his hand and the guilty look on his face, someone had come along and gently but firmly taken the management of her own affairs out of her hands. She had been dismissed, relegated to observer status, a gawking witness. Her thoughts were no more than flashes of emotion. She hovered through the rooms of the house with angular, truncated motions. Later they went to the mall to buy clothes and candy and CDs—there was a new Johnny Cash collection out—and all morning she walked beside him in a daze and giggled like a girl at everything he said. She devoured him with gaping wide looks, stocking up unabashedly for the endless years of hunger to come—of course they would come. From the moment he told her he was going, she had no doubt. Three times that morning she excused herself and went to the public restrooms, where she had diarrhea. Ofer laughed: “What’s up with you? What did you eat?” She stared at him and smiled feebly, engraving in her mind the sound of his laughter, the slight tilt of his head when he laughed.

The young cashier at the clothing store blushed as she watched him try on a shirt, and Ora thought proudly, My beloved is like a young hart. The girl working at the music store was one year behind him at school, and when she heard where he was going in three hours, she went over and hugged him, held him close with her tall, ample body, and insisted that he call her as soon as he got back. Seeing how blind her son was to these