To the End of the Land - By David Grossman Page 0,230

on a heap of stones in the shade of a large Atlantic terebinth on the heights of the Yavne’el mountains. The spot has a rare view of the Kinneret, the Golan, the Gilead, Mount Meron, the Gilboa mountains, Mount Tabor, the Shomron, and the Carmel. She even sensed that the boys were a little embarrassed by each other’s bodies. She found this awkwardness strange: they shared a room, and when they were little they always showered together, but to touch each other, body to body … They wouldn’t even hit each other, she thinks now. They only fought when they were little, but not much. And when they grew older, almost never.

What she wouldn’t give to know whether they talked about puberty, about the changes in their bodies, or about girls, and about masturbation and making out. She guesses they didn’t. Puberty seemed to embarrass them both, as though it were some alien force that had invaded their intimate twosome and expropriated parts they preferred to keep silent about. She often wondered, and asked Ilan repeatedly, where they’d gone wrong in bringing up the boys. Maybe we didn’t hug enough in front of them? We didn’t show them what it’s like when a man and a woman love each other?

“I find it very strange,” she says, trying to sound amused, “how modest and shy my boys are about that kind of stuff. I used to try to get them to be crude, to curse here and there, what’s the big deal? When Ofer was little he gleefully joined in. He’d say rude words and giggle and blush terribly. But when they grew up, especially when they were with the two of us, it almost never happened.”

It’s Ilan with his lousy puritanism, she thinks. Always on guard, making sure not a hint of lining sticks out, God forbid. “Sometimes I had the feeling—you’ll laugh—that they thought they had to preserve our innocence, as if we didn’t know which end was up. Come on, let’s walk, this is getting on my nerves.”

The trail is now a path of cracked, dry clods of earth. Bare stones and narrow cracks, spindly weeds trampled yet resprouting. Here and there some humble white and yellow chamomile earn the pity of their feet, which avoid them. Dry leaves from last spring, crumbled and perforated, translucent, only their spines remaining. A rocky path, yellowing brown, dusty and warty, no form nor comeliness, exactly like a thousand others, scattered with withered twigs and orange-brown pine needles. A line of black ants carries crumbs and shelled sunflower seeds. Here a deep ant-lion pit, there a pattern of gray-green lichen on fractured rocks, a shriveled pinecone, and the occasional glistening black mound of deer droppings or crumbly brown mound of a queen ant returned from her nuptial flight.

“Listen,” Ora says and holds his hand.

“To what?”

“To the path. I’m telling you, paths in Israel have a sound I haven’t heard anywhere else.”

They walk and listen: rrrrsh-rrrsh when their shoes drag in the dirt; rrrhh-rrrhh when their toes hit the path; hhhhs-hhhhs when they stroll; hwassh-hwassh when they trot; a rapidly drumming rrish-chrsh when little stones fly up and hit each other; hrappp-hrappp when their feet step through bushes of poterium. Ora laughs. “It’s a good thing they all have the right sounds in Hebrew. How would you possibly describe these sounds in English or Italian? Maybe they can only be accurately pronounced in Hebrew.”

“Do you mean these paths speak Hebrew? Are you saying language springeth out of the earth?” And he runs with the idea that words had sprouted up from this dirt, crawled out of cracks in the arid, furrowed earth, burst from the wrath of hamsin winds with briars and brambles and thorns, leaped up like locusts and grasshoppers.

Ora listens to his flow of speech. Deep inside, a fossilized minnow stirs its tail and a wavelet tickles at her waist.

“I wonder what it’s like in Arabic,” she says. “After all, it’s their landscape too, and they have rhonchial consonants too, that sound like your throat is choking on the dryness.” She illustrates, and the dog pricks up her ears. “Do you still remember the Arabic words you learned for all those thistles and nettles, or didn’t they teach you that in Intelligence?

Avram laughs. “Mostly they taught us about tanks and planes and munitions; for some reason they didn’t get around to nettles.”

“A grave mistake,” Ora decrees.

He’d asked whether they hug. She remembers going out to a restaurant on Adam’s birthday,