To the End of the Land - By David Grossman Page 0,285

a whistle that only their bodies could hear, while they themselves were deaf to it. She walked faster, and her breath grew short. How do you get out of this? she wondered. How do you get away from here? When she reached a bus stop, she halted and sat down on one of the plastic seats. It had been years since she’d waited at a bus stop, and even this act of sitting on the smooth yellow plastic was an admission of defeat. She straightened up and slowed her breath. In a minute she would get up and keep walking. She remembered that in the first wave of suicide bombings, Ilan had gone with Ofer—Adam was in the army by then—to scout out safe walking routes from his school downtown to the stop where he got the bus for home. The first route was too close to where a terrorist had blown himself up on the 18 bus, killing twenty passengers. When Ilan suggested that Ofer could walk up the Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall, Ofer reminded him of the triple explosion on the mall, where five people were killed and a hundred and seventy injured. Ilan tried to outline a slightly longer route, which would go around the back and come out near the Mahaneh Yehuda market, but Ofer pointed out that this was exactly where a double suicide bombing had occurred: fifteen dead and seventeen injured. And anyway, he added, all the buses from town to Ein Karem go past the central bus station, where there had also been a bombing—the 18 again, twenty-five dead and forty-three injured.

And so the two of them roamed from street to street—as she recounts the story to Avram, she has the horrifying thought that Ofer may still have his orange spiral notebook where he writes the numbers of dead and wounded—and the streets and the alleyways where there hadn’t yet been a bombing seemed so foreordained and vulnerable that Ilan was amazed nothing had happened on them yet. Finally he gave up, stopped in the middle of a street, and said, “You know what, Oferiko? Just walk as fast as you can. Run, even.”

And the look Ofer gave him—he told Ora later—he will never forget.

As she was contemplating all this, a bus stopped at the station. When the door opened, Ora dutifully got up and stepped in, and only then realized she had no idea what the bus fare was or which route she was on. She hesitantly held out a fifty-shekel note, and the driver growled at her for change. She dug through her purse but couldn’t find any, and he hissed a curse, handed her a handful of coins, and hurried her in. She stood looking at the passengers, most of whom were older and had weary, gloomy faces. Some were on their way back from the market, propping crammed baskets between their feet. There were a few high school students in uniform who were strangely quiet, and Ora looked at them all with bewilderment and muted compassion. She wanted to turn around and get off—“I never meant to take the bus,” she tells Avram—but someone behind her pushed her farther in, and Ora padded a few steps ahead. Since there were no vacant seats, she stood holding the overhead bar, leaned her cheek on her arm, and watched the city through the window. What am I doing here? she thought. I don’t have to be here. They passed the jumble of shops on Jaffa Street, the Sbarro restaurant, and then Zion Square, where a booby-trapped refrigerator had blown up in 1975, killing, among many others, the artist Naftali Bezem’s son, whom she’d known in the army. Ora wondered if Bezem had been able to paint after his son’s death. At the YMCA stop, a few seats opened up, and she sat down and decided she would get off at the next stop. She stayed on as they passed Liberty Bell Park and Emek Refaim, and when the bus drove past Café Hillel she said, half out loud, Now you’re getting off and going in for a cup of coffee. And she kept going.

It was amazing to her how quiet the passengers were. Most of them gazed out the windows as she did, as though not daring to look at their fellow passengers. Every time the bus stopped at a station, they all sat up a little straighter and stared at the people getting on. The new passengers, in turn, scanned