To the End of the Land - By David Grossman Page 0,220

a friend had left her. She also had a small tent, which she pitched whenever she found a place she wasn’t asked to leave. As he talks, the name “Neta” begins to etch a circle of frost in Ora’s gut, even though the sun is shining. What is this flood of speech suddenly coming out of him? What is he doing sticking Neta between us now?

“How does she make a living?” (Be generous, she commands.)

“This and that. It’s not really clear. She needs very little. You wouldn’t believe how little she needs. And she paints.”

Ora’s heart sinks a little lower. Of course she paints.

“Maybe you saw in my apartment, on the walls? That’s her.”

The huge, stirring charcoal drawings—how had she not asked him about them before? Perhaps because she had guessed the answer—prophets breast-feeding goats and lambs, an old man bending over a girl turning into a crane, a maiden being born from a wound in the chest of a godlike deer. She thinks about the drawing of a woman with a mohawk, and asks if that’s how Neta looks.

Avram chuckles. “Once, a long time ago. I didn’t like it, and now she has long hair, all the way down to here.”

“Yes. And the empty albums I saw at your place, the ones without any photos—are those hers, too?”

“No, those are mine.”

“Do you collect them?”

“I collect, I search, I aggregate. Things people throw out.”

“Aggregate?”

“You know, I put together all sorts of alte zachen.”

They are walking down the side of a cliff. The river, far below, is invisible. The dog leads, Ora walks behind her, and Avram brings up the rear as he tells her about his little projects. “It’s nothing, just something to pass the time. Like photo albums that people throw away, or albums that belonged to people who died.” He takes the photos out and puts in ones of other people, other families. He copies some of the photos onto tin boxes, right on the rust, or on the sides of ancient, rusty engines. “I’m very interested in rust lately. That place, or that moment, when iron turns to rust.”

It’s a good thing you found me, then, Ora thinks.

The path descends into the channel again, and suddenly Avram is alert and bright. He excitedly describes an atlas he found in the trash, printed in England in 1943. “If you looked at it, you wouldn’t understand anything about what happened in the world back then, because all the countries are still in their old borders, there’s no annihilation of the Jews, no occupation of Europe, no war, and I can sit looking at it for hours. So on the corners of the maps, I stuck pieces of a Russian newspaper I found in the dump, The Stalinist, also from ’forty-three, and there the war is described in detail, with battle maps and vast numbers of casualties. When I put those two objects together, I can really—Ora … I can feel electricity going through my body.”

She discovers that he and Neta do joint projects sometimes, too. “It’s this thing we have going together,” he says, blushing. They look for old objects and junk on the street, then they fantasize about what they could do with the things. “I’m always a little more practical,” he says with an apologetic snort, “and she’s much bolder.” He inadvertently drops himself from the story and describes some of what Neta has done in her brief life, her trials and tribulations, the skills she’s learned, her hospitalizations and adventures, and the men who have passed through her life. Ora thinks he is describing the life of a seventy-year-old. “She’s so brave,” he says admiringly, “much braver than I am. She may be the bravest person I’ve ever met.” He laughs softly when he remembers that Neta says she’s composed mainly of fears. Fears and cellulite.

Ora sees the crossed-out black lines over his bed, and a thick streak runs from them to the charcoal drawings in his living room. A spark lights up in her: “Avram, does she know?”

“About Ofer?”

Ora nods quickly. Her heart starts to pound.

“Yes, I told her.”

She walks ahead in confusion, with her hands held out. She steps into the stream, balancing on the slippery stones. This is the Amud River, she thinks. I hiked here in high school, on a sea-to-sea trip. It seems like it was yesterday. As if just yesterday I was still a young girl. She rubs her eyes. The hillside across the way is covered with thick growth,