To the End of the Land - By David Grossman Page 0,6

isn’t—

Isn’t what?

Alive.

Ada?!

She heard him flinch as though he’d been hit. She folded her legs in and wrapped her arms around her knees and started rocking herself back and forth. Ada is dead, Ada’s been dead for two years, she said to herself quietly. It’s all right, it’s all right, everyone knows she’s dead. We’re used to it now, she’s dead. Life goes on. But she felt that she had just told Avram something secret and very intimate, something only she and Ada had really known.

And then, for some reason, she relaxed. She stopped rocking. She began to breathe again, slowly, cautiously, as if there were thorns in her lungs, and she had the peculiar notion that this boy could carefully remove them, one by one.

But how did she die?

Traffic accident. And just so you know—

An accident?

You have the same sense of humor.

Who?

You and her, but exactly the same.

So is that why—

What?

Is that why you don’t laugh at my jokes?

Avram—

Yes.

Give me your hand.

What?

Give me your hand, quick.

But are we allowed?

Don’t be stupid, just give it to me.

No, I mean, because of the isolation.

We’re infected anyway.

But maybe—

Give me your hand already!

Look how we’re both sweating.

It’s a good thing.

Why?

Imagine if only one of us was sweating.

Or only one was shaking.

Or scratching.

Or only one had—

What?

You know.

You’re gross.

It’s true, isn’t it?

Then say it.

Okay: shit—

The color of whitewash—

And with blood, loads of it.

She whispered: I never knew I had so much blood in my body.

What’s yellow on the outside, shakes like crazy, and shits blood? There, now you’re laughing … I was getting worried …

Listen to this. Before I got ill I thought I didn’t have any—

Any what?

Blood in my body.

How could that be?

Never mind.

That’s what you thought?

Hold my hand, don’t leave.

APART FROM THE COLOR of their hair, they were very different, almost opposites. One was tall and strong, the other short and chubby. One had the open, glowing face of a carefree filly, and the other’s was crowded and worried, with lots of freckles and a sharp nose and chin, and big glasses—like a young scholar from the shtetl, Ora’s father used to say. Their hair was completely different too: Ada’s was thick, frizzy, and wild, you could barely get a comb through it. I used to braid her hair, Ora said, in one thick braid, and then I’d tie it around her head like a Sabbath challah, that’s how she liked it. And she wouldn’t let anyone else do it.

Ada’s head was truly red, much redder than Ora’s, and it always stuck out in acclamation. Ora curled up on the bed now and saw it: Ada, like a match head, like a blotch of fire. Ora peeked at her, peeked and closed her eyes, unable to face the fullness of Ada. I haven’t seen her that way for a long time, she thought, in color.

She always walked on this side of me, Ora told Avram as she grasped his hand in both of hers, because Ada could hardly hear out of her right ear, from birth, and we always talked, about everything, we talked about everything. She fell silent suddenly and pulled her hands away from his. I can’t, she thought. What am I doing telling him about her? He isn’t even asking anything, he’s just quiet, as if he’s waiting for me to say it on my own.

She took a deep breath and tried to find a way to tell him, but the words wouldn’t come. They pressed on her heart and could not come out. What could she tell him? What could he even understand? I want to, she thought to him. Her fingers moved and burrowed into her other palm. That was how she remembered them together, she remembered the togetherness, and she smiled: You know what I just remembered? It’s nothing, just that a week before she—before it happened—we were doing a literary analysis of “The Little Bunny.” You know, the nursery rhyme about the bunny who gets a cold.

Avram shook himself awake and smiled weakly. What, tell me. Ora laughed. We wrote—actually Ada wrote most of it, she was always the more talented one—a whole essay about how dreadful it was that the plague of the common cold had spread to the animal kingdom, even to the most innocent of its creatures …

Avram whispered to himself: “Even the most innocent of its creatures.” She could feel him taste the words in his mouth, run his tongue over them, and suddenly, for the first time in ages, her memory was