To the End of the Land - By David Grossman Page 0,283

the damp, sticky, greasy pile that has tumbled out of Ofer’s backpack and gathers up uniforms, stiff socks, a military belt, undershirts, underwear. When she picks up the mess, sand leaks from pockets, and one bullet and a crumpled bus ticket fall out. She shoves the clothes into the machine and turns the dial to the most vigorous cycle. When the machine buzzes and the drum starts spinning, she feels the first sense of relief, as though she has finally revved up the process of domesticating this stranger.

And he sits at the table laid out for him, his head buried in the newspaper, and he can’t find the strength to talk. He hasn’t slept for thirty-some hours. There was lots of activity this week, but he’ll tell them later. They quickly concur:

“Of course, yes, the main thing is that you’re here,” Ora says, “we almost lost our minds waiting.”

“Mom’s been cooking for you all morning.”

“Don’t exaggerate! Dad’s exaggerating as usual, I haven’t had time to make anything at all. It’s a good thing I baked the brownies yesterday.”

“Oh come on,” Ilan moans, and presents his argument for Ofer to judge: “She was out shopping all afternoon yesterday. Robbed the greengrocer, looted the butcher. By the way, how’s the food over there?”

“Better, there’s a new cook and we don’t have rats in the kitchen anymore.”

“Are you with the same guys from training?”

“More or less. A few new ones came from another battalion, but they’re all right.”

“And did everyone go home this weekend?”

“Please, Dad, let’s talk later. I’m dead tired now.”

A strange silence falls on them. Ilan squeezes oranges and Ora heats up the meatballs. A strange boy with a strange smell sits at the kitchen table. Long threads untangle behind him all the way to a place that is difficult to see and hard to think about. Ilan is telling her something. Some minutiae about a deal he’s been working on for two years between a Canadian venture-capital fund and two young guys from Beersheba who are developing a way to prevent drunk driving. Everything was ready to be signed, almost a done deal, and then at the last minute, when they took their pens out …

The words fail to penetrate her. She cannot act out her role in this play, all of whose actors are real. Her lines are familiar, but the space in which the play is staged—the shell of Ofer’s tired, depressed silence—makes everything ridiculous and broken, and eventually Ilan also ebbs away and stops talking.

Standing over the sink, Ora shuts her eyes for a stolen moment, concentrates, and says her usual prayer—not to an exalted God, but the opposite. A pagan at heart, she makes due with little gods, day-to-day icons, and small miracles: If she gets three green lights in a row, if she has time to bring the laundry in before it rains, if the dry cleaner doesn’t discover the hundred-shekel note she left in her jacket, then … And of course there are her usual bargains with fate. Someone rear-ends her bumper? Excellent: Ofer just won immunity for a week! A patient refuses to pay a two-thousand-shekel debt? Penance! Another two thousand credits for Ofer are recorded somewhere.

From within the unpleasant silence a new round of domestic chatter starts up.

“Where’s the onion left from the salad?”

“Do you need it?”

“I was thinking of frying some up with the meatballs.”

“And put black pepper on it, he likes black pepper, don’t you, Ofer?”

“Yes, but not too much. Our cook is Moroccan, his shakshuka sets my mouth on fire.”

“So you eat shakshuka?”

“Three times a day.”

And the strand thickens furtively, slyly, weaving back and forth, and then Adam calls and says he’s two seconds from home, he’s just stopping to buy the paper and some snacks and they shouldn’t start eating without him. The three of them exchange grinning looks—Adam, operating us all by remote control. Ilan and Ora blather on about everything that’s changed in the house in the weeks since Ofer left. “He was always involved in all the goings-on at home,” she tells Avram on a path near Tzippori that cuts through an open field covered with thousands of brown-orange woolly-bear caterpillars squirming in unison inside their silk cocoons, so that the entire field seems to be dancing. “He always wanted to know about every piece of furniture we were thinking of buying and demanded that we report to him whenever an appliance broke and how much it cost to fix and what the repairman was