To the End of the Land - By David Grossman Page 0,54

because of Sami’s nervous driving and the circuitous ambling around the maze of Jaffa’s alleyways, Yazdi starts to vomit.

Ora feels his body seize up, his ribs spasmodically rise and fall, and tells Sami to stop the car. Sami gripes that he can’t pull over here: a police van is parked on the opposite sidewalk. But when he hears another fitful gargle from the back, he speeds up as if he’s lost his mind. He runs red lights, looking for a dark corner or an empty lot, and yells at Yazdi in Arabic to hold it in. He threatens the boy, and curses him and his father and his father’s father. A projectile of vomit erupts from the boy’s mouth. Sami yells at Ora to aim Yazdi’s head at the floor, away from the upholstery, but the boy’s head jerks in all directions like a balloon with its air let out, and Ora is sprayed all over her feet, pants, shoes, and hair.

Sami’s right hand reaches back like lightning, feels around, touches something, and pulls back in disgust. “Gimme his hand!” he screeches in a thin, feminine voice. “Put his hand here!” Ora mechanically obeys the urgency in his voice, dimly hoping he might know some instant cure or Palestinian-Shamanic trick, and she holds Yazdi’s limp hand on the fake-wood space between the two front seats. Sami, without even looking, slams down on the hand with his heavy sledgehammer of a fist. Ora screams as though she is the one who’s been hit, and reaches to pull back Yazdi’s hand, but Sami, who doesn’t see what is happening, lands another blow on her arm.

A few minutes later they reach the school. They stop outside a locked gate and a young bearded man, who was waiting in the shadows inside, emerges and looks in all directions, then motions to Sami to follow him along the fence. They walk with the fence between them. At a dark corner the young man holds open a broken part of the fence and comes out to Sami, and the two men whisper quickly, glancing around. Ora gets out of the taxi and inhales the damp night air. Her left arm is burning, and she knows the pain will get worse. In the light of the streetlamp she sees that she is covered with vomit stains. She tries to shake herself off. The bearded man holds Sami’s arm and walks him back to the taxi. They look at Yazdi lying inside, and Sami examines the upholstery with grieving eyes. They both ignore Ora. The young man gives some sort of signal over a cell phone, and three boys come running out of the dark school. Not a single word is uttered. The three pull Yazdi out of the taxi and carry him inside quickly, through a side gate. One of them holds Yazdi’s shoulders, and the other two hold his legs. Ora looks at them and thinks, This is not the first time they’ve carried someone inside like that. Yazdi’s head and arms droop, and his eyes are closed, and it is somehow clear to her that this is not his first time, either.

When she starts walking after them, the bearded man turns to her and then looks at Sami. Sami goes up to her: “Maybe it’s better if you stay here.”

Ora gives him a piercing look. He gives in, walks back to the bearded man, and whispers something to him. Ora assumes he is telling him it’s all right; perhaps he even said, “She’s one of us.”

Inside, the school is completely silent and dark, illuminated only by the moon and the streetlamp. Sami and the bearded man disappear, swallowed up into one of the rooms. Ora stops and waits. When her eyes grow accustomed to the dark, she sees that she is in a fairly large auditorium, with a few corridors leading out of it. Empty window boxes are placed here and there, and posters promoting quiet, neatness, and cleanliness hang crookedly on the walls. She can smell children’s sweat and a distant odor of locker rooms and above all the stench of vomit from her own clothes. She wonders how she will find Sami and Yazdi but is afraid to call out to them. She walks carefully through the darkness, taking small steps, with her arms out in front of her, until she reaches a round supporting column in the middle of the auditorium. Her gaze orbits the walls. She sees pictures of faces she