To the End of the Land

  If he didn’t need me for this trip, Ora thinks, he wouldn’t have come. He’s taking out on me whatever he has against those guys who were making a scene at his house. She consoles herself with the thought that as soon as she has the chance, she will tell Ilan about the way Sami has been treating her—let’s see him act so tough with Ilan—and she knows Ilan will chew him out, for her sake, or maybe even fire him, to prove to her how committed he still is and how protective of her. Ora sits up a little straighter and pulls her shoulders back—why on earth is she enlisting Ilan to help her? This is between her and Sami, and as for that kind of protection from Ilan, that knightly patronage, she can do without it, thank you very much.

  Her body sinks down again, and her face trembles uncontrollably, because she is pierced by his desertion. Not the loneliness or the insult, but the amputation itself, the phantom pain of the empty space Ilan left at her side. In the dark she sees her reflection in the window and feels the unfamiliar yet sharp sorrow of her skin, which has not been truly loved for a long time, and her face, which no one has looked at with the kind of love that has intensified over years. The Character, Eran, who got her the job with the museum in Nevada, is seventeen years younger than she, a meteoric computer genius full of entrepreneurial projects, and she doesn’t even know how to define him: Friend? Lover? Fuck? And what is she to him? “Love” is undoubtedly a generous term for what they have, she thinks, laughing silently, but at least he is proof that even after Ilan her body still emits the particles that attract another person, another man. She sinks deeper and deeper into her thoughts, and all the while they drive in a long snarl of traffic that moves with unnatural silence through the valley of Sha’ar HaGay and becomes even thicker around the airport. “Checkpoints everywhere today,” Sami suddenly throws out. Something in his voice seems to signal her. She waits for him to say something else, but he keeps quiet.

  The boy has fallen asleep. His forehead glistens with sweat, and his head rocks with strange ease on his delicate neck. She notices that Sami has spread out a thin old blanket under him, probably so he won’t soil the new upholstery with his sweat. His wafer-thin right hand suddenly rises and flutters in front of his face, then above his head, and Ora reaches out and hugs the boy to her. He freezes and opens his eyes, which look dark and almost blind, and stares at her uncomprehendingly. Ora does not move, hoping he will not reject her. He breathes quickly and his gaunt chest moves up and down, and then, as though having lost the power to understand or resist, he shuts his eyes and falls limply against her body, and his warmth spreads to her through their clothing. After a few moments she dares to readjust her arm around him and feels his birdlike shoulders tense up at her touch. She waits again, presses his head gently against her shoulder, and only then resumes breathing.

  Sami straightens up and looks at them in the rearview mirror. His eyes are expressionless, and Ora has the peculiar sensation that he is comparing what he sees to some imagined scene. She grows uncomfortable under his gaze, and almost detaches herself from the boy, but she does not want to wake him. She finds the embrace pleasant, despite the intense heat he emits and the sweat pooling between his face and her shoulder and the thread of saliva smeared on her arm—or perhaps it is because of all these things, because of the heat and the dampness, like a forgotten stamp of childhood that now returns to imprint her. She glances at him sideways: his hair is cut crudely, and through the short bristle she can see a long sickle-shaped scar from a hurt that did not heal properly. His small face, crowded against her, is stubborn. He looks like a tiny, embittered old man, and she is happy to see that his fingers are long and thin and beautiful. He places them unconsciously on her hand, and after a few minutes he turns his hand over in his sleep, revealing a soft, cherubic palm.

  Ora feels a pang: Ofer. She hasn’t thought of him for almost an hour.

  She will not have Ofer’s hands today. Not the large, broad hands with the prominent veins and the black lines of gun grease under bitten fingernails that even three months after his release—she knows from Adam—will not completely disappear. Nor will the hard calluses covering every knuckle and joint, or the channels of healed cuts, and the scars, and the layers of skin that have been grazed, burned, scratched, cut, torn, stitched, grown and peeled, smeared and bandaged until they finally look like a brown, waxy coating. That military hand, still so expressive in its movements, in the generosity of its touch, in the fingers embracing one another, in the childlike habit of the thumb repeatedly smoothing over its brethren as if counting them, in the distracted gnawing of the skin around the little fingernail—You’re wrong, Mom, he tells her as he gnaws, but she can’t remember what they were talking about. Just a fragmentary image of his biting, furrowing his brow. You’re absolutely wrong about that, Mom.

  Now, as the boy leans on her with amazing trust and sows modest but unfounded pride in her, she seems to be getting confirmation of something she herself had begun to doubt. “You’re an unnatural mother,” Adam had explained not long ago, before he left home. Just like that, so simply and almost without any color in his voice, he had crushed and refuted her with an assertion that sounded scientific, objective. A lasso of distant memory floats over and tightens softly around her throat, and she sees Ofer’s swollen little fist right after he was born. They placed him on her chest while someone did something to her down below, digging, stitching, talking to her, joking. “We’ll be done in a minute,” the man had said. “Time flies when you’re having fun, huh?” She was too tired even to ask him to take pity on her and be quiet, and she tried to draw strength from the large blue eyes looking up at her with uncommon tranquillity. From the moment he was born he always searched for eyes. From the moment he was born she drew strength from him. And now she saw his tiny fist—fistaloo, Avram would have said had he been with her in the delivery room; even now she finds it hard to accept that he wasn’t there with her and Ofer; how could he not have been there with them?—with the deep crease around the wrist, and the bold red of the tiny hand itself, which until moments ago had been an internal organ and still looked like it. The hand slowly opened and revealed to Ora for the first time its conch-like, enigmatic palm—What have you brought me, my child, from the deep, dark universe?—with the thicket of lines drawn all over it, covered with a white, fatty layer of webbing, with its translucent pomegranate-seed fingernails, and its fingers that closed up again and gripped her finger tightly: You are hereby betrothed to me with the wisdom of thousands of years and ancient epochs.

  The boy gurgles and his tongue explores his lips. Ora asks Sami if he has any water. In the glove compartment is her bottle from the previous trip. She holds it to the boy’s lips and he drinks a little and splutters. Perhaps he doesn’t like the taste. She pours some water into her palm and touches his forehead lightly, and his cheeks, and his dry lips. Sami looks at her again with that same tensely observing gaze. It is the gaze of a director, she realizes, examining a scene he has set up. The boy shivers and his body burrows more deeply into hers. He suddenly opens his eyes and looks at her without seeing, but his lips part in a strange, dreamy smile, and for a moment he contains both poise and childishness, and she leans forward again and asks Sami in a firm whisper what his real name is.

  Sami takes a deep breath. “What for, Ora?”

  “Tell me his name,” she repeats, her lips white with anger.

  “His name is called Yazdi. Yazdi, he’s called.”

  The boy hears his name and trembles in his sleep and lets out fragments of Arabic words. His legs jerk sharply, as though he is dreaming of running, or fleeing.

  “He needs to see a doctor urgently,” Ora says.

  “The people near Tel Aviv, the family, they have the most specialist doctor for his illness.” Ora asks what his illness is, and Sami says, “Something with his stomach, he wasn’t born right with the stomach, digestion, something about that. There’s only three or four things he eats, everything else comes out.” Then he adds, as if in a forced confession, ?
??And he’s not right, here.”

  “Where?” The side of her body touching the boy tenses up.

  “In the head. A retard. Around three years ago, all of a sudden, retarded.”

  “All of a sudden? That’s not something that happens suddenly.”

  “With him it did.” Sami purses his lips.

  She turns to face the window. She can see her reflection with the boy leaning on her. They are driving very slowly. A sign alerts them to a roadblock three hundred meters ahead. Sami moves his lips quickly, as though arguing with someone in his mind. He raises his voice briefly: “What do I need this, everyone on me, yechrabethom, they think I’m some kind of …” Then his voice is swallowed up in incomprehensible mumblings.

  Ora leans forward. “What’s the story?” she asks quietly.

  “No story.”

  “What’s the story with this kid?” she demands.

  “There’s no story!” he suddenly shouts and hits the wheel with his hand. The boy grasps her and stops breathing. “Not everything always has to have a story, Ora!” She senses the contempt wrapped around her name in his voice. It seems to her that as he speaks, almost from one word to the next, he is shedding his Israeli, sabra accent, and a different sound, rough and foreign, is sneaking in. “You people,” he hisses through the rearview mirror, “you’re always looking for a story in everything. So you’ll have it for your telefision show or a movie for your bestivals, not so? Ha? Not so?”

  Ora pulls back as though she’s been slapped. “You people,” he called her. “Bestival,” he said, brandishing the accent of Palestinians from the Territories, whom he’s always derided. He was defying her with a put-on “dirty Arab” persona.

  “And this kid, it’s just a sick kid, just nothing. Sick. A ree-tard. You can’t make a movie about him! There’s no story here! We take him, we drop him at a house down there, with some doctor, we go to wherever you need, we drop you there, and khalas, everyone’s happy.”

  Ora’s cheeks are flushed. It was the way he shoved her into that “you people” that riled her up and, as though she really is not facing him alone—as though she is with them—she says slowly, almost spelling out each letter, “I want to know who this child belongs to. Now, before we reach the checkpoint, I want to know.”

  Sami does not reply. She senses that her voice, her authority, has restored his wits and reminded him of a thing or two, things she has never before wanted or needed to mention explicitly. There is a long silence. She feels her will and his arch their backs at each other. Then Sami lets out a long breath and says, “He’s the kid of a guy I know, an okay guy, there’s nothing on him in the, you know, in the security. Don’t worry. You got nothing to worry about.” His shoulders droop and crumple. He runs his hand over his bald spot, touches his forehead, and shakes his head in dismay. “Ora, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m tired, beat. You made me crazy today, the lot of you. I’ve had enough. I need some quiet. Just quiet, ya rab.”

  She leans her head back. Everyone’s going out of their minds, she thinks. He’s allowed. Through half-closed eyelids she can see him throwing nervous glances at the passengers in the cars on either side. The three lanes merge into two, then into one. Up ahead they can see blue flashing lights. A police jeep is parked diagonally on the side of the road. Without moving her lips Ora says, “If they ask me, what do I say?”

  “If they ask, tell them he’s your boy. But they won’t ask.” He stares ahead and tries not to meet her eyes in the mirror.

  Ora nods quietly. So that’s my role, she thinks. That’s why he’s wearing these clothes, the jeans and the Shimon Peres. She presses the boy to her and his head falls on her chest. She says his name quietly into his ear and he opens his eyes and looks at her. She smiles, and his eyelids shut again, but a moment later he smiles at her as if in a dream. “Turn the heat on, he’s shivering.”

  Sami cranks the heat up. She is boiling, but the boy’s shivering subsides a little. She wipes his sweat with a tissue and smoothes her hand over his hair. The fever speaks to her skin. About a year ago, an eccentric old man from the village of Dura was left in a meat locker in Hebron. He spent almost forty-eight hours there. He did not die and may even have fully recovered. But since that day her life, her family’s life, had slowly begun to unravel. The blue lights are flashing everywhere now. There are six or seven police vehicles. Patrolmen and police officers and army officers dart on the shoulders of the road. Ora is dripping with sweat. She reaches into her blouse and pulls out a thin silver chain with a shiviti amulet, an enamel pendant bearing the inscription “I have set the Lord always before me.” Gently, almost stealthily, she places the shiviti on the boy’s forehead and holds it there for a moment. Her friend Ariela gave it to her years ago. “Everyone needs a little churchagogue,” she said when Ora laughed and tried to reject the gift. But in the end she started wearing it every time Ilan went overseas, and when her father was hospitalized, and in other can’t-do-any-harm situations—a superstitious belief in God, she explained to anyone who asked—and she kept wearing it throughout Adam’s army service, and then Ofer’s. Now, in order to do the right thing with everyone and not convert the little Muslim without his knowledge, she whispers to herself, I have set Allah always before me.

  The police cars close in on their lane. Lengths of barbed wire zigzag all over the road. The cops are jumpy. They shine powerful flashlights into the cars and examine the passengers for a long time, constantly shouting to one another. A few officers stand along the side of the road talking on cell phones. This is worse than usual, Ora thinks. They’re not usually this edgy. There is only one car in front of them, and Ora leans forward and says urgently, “Sami, I want to know now, who does this child belong to?”

  Sami looks ahead and sighs. “He’s no one, really, just the son of a guy who does plaster work for me, from the Territories. Honestly, he’s an IR, you know. Illegal resident. And since yesterday night he got like this. Sick all night, and this morning, throwing up all the time, and with blood in …ya’ani, in the bathroom.”

  “Didn’t you get him any help?”

  “Sure we did. We brought a nurse from the village, ya’ani, and she said for his disease we have to go to a hospital urgent, but how can we go to a hospital with him illegal?” His voice dies down and he grunts and murmurs to himself, perhaps reconstructing some conversation or argument, and then he slams the wheel with his hand.

  “Calm down,” Ora says sharply. She runs a hand quickly to smooth over her disheveled face. “Calm down now, it’ll be all right. And smile!”

  A young policeman, almost a kid himself, comes up to them and vanishes from Ora’s sight when the brilliance of his flashlight hits her. She blinks painfully; this sort of light is torture for her defective retinas. She smiles broadly in the general direction of the light. The officer makes quick circles with his other hand, and Sami rolls down his window. “All is good?” says the policeman in a Russian accent and thrusts his head into the car to scan their faces. Sami, in a pleasant, rich, masterly voice, replies, “Good evening, everything is excellent, baruch hashem.”

  “Where are you coming from?”

  “From Beit Zayit,” Ora says, smiling.

  “Beit Zayit? Where’s that?”

  “Near Jerusalem.” Even without looking at Sami, Ora feels a spark of astonishment at the policeman’s ignorance pass between them.

  “Near Jerusalem,” the officer repeats, perhaps to gain time for scanning them. “And where are you headed now?”

  “Tel Aviv,” Ora replies with a pleasant smile. “To visit family,” she adds without being asked.

  “Trunk,” says the officer, backing away from the car window. He walks around to the trunk and they hear him rummage and shake the two backpacks. Ora sees Sami’s shoulders tense up, and a thought flies through her mind: Who knows what he’s carting back there? Possibilities flash in her mind like scenes from a deranged movie. Her eyes quickly scan Sami’s body, gather information, sort,
weigh, rule out. A completely impersonal mechanism has been activated in her, a complex array of acquired reflexes. She barely has time to realize what she is doing. A fraction of a second, no more. She flits around the whole world and back, and nothing on her face moves.

  Sami might or might not have noticed what she went through. There is no way to know from his expression. He’s had a lot of practice too, she thinks. He sits there, rigid and chunky, one finger drumming rapidly on the gearshift.

  The policeman’s face—sharp, fox-like, ears pulled back, the face of a boy whom life has chiseled too soon—reappears, this time in her window. “Whose are those two backpacks, missus?”

  “Mine. I’m going to the Galilee tomorrow, on a hike.” She smiles broadly again.

  The policeman looks at her and the boy for a long time and turns back with half his body, apparently wanting to consult with someone. One of his fingers rests sloppily on the open window beside her. Ora looks at it and thinks: amazing how a thin finger can stop, prevent, decide a fate. How thin the fingers of arbitrariness are sometimes. The cop calls out to one of the officers, but he is busy on the phone. Deep down Ora knows that she is the one arousing suspicion. Something about her signaled to the policeman that there is guilt here. His face turns back to her. She thinks that if he looks at her that way for one more minute she will collapse.

  The boy wakes up and blinks in confusion at the flashlight. Ora grins and grasps his shoulders tightly. The boy slowly moves his spindly arms in the ray of light, and for a moment he looks like a fetus swimming in amniotic fluid. Only then does he notice the face and the uniform behind the light and his eyes widen, and Ora feels a strong jerk through his body and she holds him tighter. The policeman leans in and examines the boy. A note of bitter abandonment stretches from his face to the boy’s. The beam of light drops to the boy’s body, lighting up the words Shimon Peres, My Hope for Peace. The cop pulls the corners of his mouth into a smirk. Ora feels a heavy weariness descend upon her, as though she has despaired of understanding what is going on. Only Yazdi’s wild heartbeats against her arm keep her sitting up straight. She wonders how he knows that he must keep quiet now. How can he keep so wonderfully quiet? Like a baby partridge that freezes and camouflages itself when it hears its mother’s warning chirp.