To the End of the Land - By David Grossman Page 0,35

a massive fishing net, tossed up high with a sweeping motion, spreading slowly to fill the night sky. Ora quickly drops the potato, and it rolls off the counter and onto the floor between the fridge and the wall, where it shines with a pale glow as she leans on the table with both hands and stares at it.

By nine p.m. she’s climbing the walls. To her astonishment, she thinks she sees herself and Ofer on television, hugging goodbye at his battalion’s gathering point. She remembers, horrified, that there were cameras there, just after he barked at her for bringing Sami. He had stopped his barking when he noticed her reddening face, and through his fury he had wrapped her in his arms and held her to his broad chest, and said warmly, “Mom, Mom, you’re such a space cadet …” She jumps up, knocking a chair over, and practically glues her face to the screen, to Ofer—

Who holds her with a slightly authoritarian arrogance and turns her toward the camera—his move had caught her by surprise and she’d almost tripped, then held on to him with a nervous laugh, and it was all there, even the stupid purple handbag—to show the cameraman his worrying mother. Thinking back, she sees real treachery in the way he suddenly spun her around and exposed her to the camera. Her hand had flown up to make sure her hair wasn’t too disheveled and her mouth had twisted into a sanctimoniously mollifying Who, me? smile. But the treachery had been smoldering between them since last night, when he had decided to volunteer for the operation and kept it from her. When he had given up, without much deliberation, on their trip. An even greater treachery, and an intolerable foreignness, resided in his ability to be such a soldier-going-to-war, so able to do his job, so insolent and joyful and thirsty for battle, thereby imposing her role upon her: to be wrinkled and gray, yet glowing with pride (a poor man’s coat of arms: Mother of Soldier), and to be a total dimwit, blinking with ignorant charm at the men’s stance in the face of death. There he is smiling at the camera, and her mouth—on television and at home—unwittingly mimics his shining grin, and there are the three little magic wrinkles around his eyes, and she pushes away a thought: When will they broadcast this picture of him again? She sees it clearly, right on the screen, the halo of a red circle around his head. Then someone shoves a boom pole between them. “What can a son tell his mother at a moment like this?” asks the reporter, all sparkling with amusement. “Keep the beer cold for me till I get back!” the son laughs, and hearty cheers come from every direction. “Wait!” Ofer stops the merriment and holds up one finger, effortlessly drawing the attention of the reporter, the cameraman, and everyone around them—such an Ilan movement, the gesture of someone who knows everyone will be silent whenever he holds up a finger like that. “I have something else to tell her,” says her son on the television, and he smiles knowingly. He puts his lips to her ears and still looks at the camera with one twinkling eye, full of life and mischief, and she remembers his touch and his warm breath on her cheek, and she sees the camera quickly trying to invade the space between mouth and ear, and she sees the extremely attentive expression on her own face, her pathetic supplication exposed as she displays for all to see, for Ilan to see—do they get Channel 2 on the Galápagos?—what soft and natural intimacy flows between her and Ofer. The editor finally cuts away, and now the reporter is joking around with another solider and his girlfriend, who embraces him and his mother, both women with bare midriffs, and Ora feels two pinches. She drops heavily to the edge of the armchair and her hand grasps the skin of her neck, squeezing. It’s a good thing they didn’t show the way she had grimaced and pulled back when she heard what he whispered in her ear. The memory slaps her: Why did he have to tell me that? When did he rehearse that line, where did he get the idea?

She stands up quickly. She must not sit. Not be a sitting target for the beam already probing for her, for the huge fishing net slowly descending. She cocks