To the End of the Land

  When she confirmed, after weeks of interrogations and pleading, that she was in love with Ilan, he almost went mad. For a week he was unable to eat a thing. He did not change his clothes, and he walked the streets for nights on end, crying. He told everyone he met about Ora and explained in a measured, considered way why what had happened was inevitable, even essential and desirable, in terms of evolution, aesthetics, and in many other regards. Of course he told Ilan the secret immediately, and Ilan repeated that he had no interest in Ora, and made fun of her crazy notion that he needed her “like air to breathe.”

  “Is that what she said?” he asked Avram with slightly alarmed amazement. “That’s what she wrote about me?” He promised Avram he would never have a relationship with her.

  “Not on my initiative, at least,” he mumbled afterward in an obligatory sort of tone.

  The next day, during morning recess, Avram climbed the giant pine tree in the school yard, cupped his hands over his mouth, and announced to the dozens of onlooking students and teachers that he’d decided to divorce his body, and that he would henceforth create a total separation between body and soul. To prove his indifference to his newly divorced fate, he jumped off the tree and plummeted to the asphalt.

  “I love you even more now,” he wrote the next day from his hospital bed with his left hand. “The second I jumped, I understood that my love for you is a law of nature for me. It is an axiom, a truism, or as our Arabian cousins would say, min albadhiyat. It doesn’t matter what your objective state is. It doesn’t even matter if you hate me or if you live on the moon or if, God forbid, you have a sex-change operation. I will always love you. It will always be irredeemable and I can do nothing to stop it, unless I am killed/hanged/burned/drowned, or any other thing that brings about the conclusion of the curious episode known as ‘the life of Avram.’ ”

  She wrote to him that it was awful that they were both suffering so much from unrequited love and promised again that even if she didn’t love him the way he wanted, she still felt that she would always be his soul mate and that she could not imagine life without him. As in all of her recent letters, she could not resist asking about Ilan: How had Ilan responded to his jumping off the tree? Had Ilan come to visit him in the hospital? She then, completely against her will, in contrast to her character and her basic decency, in contrast to everything she wanted to think about herself, launched into long pages of conjectures regarding Ilan’s secret desires, his inhibitions and hesitations, and repeatedly asked Avram why he thought this had happened, why she had fallen in love with Ilan. Because, after all, she didn’t even know Ilan, and everything she had experienced with him for the past year (minus one month and twenty-one days) was as if a stranger had taken control of her soul and was dictating to her what to feel. “It’s actually very simple,” Avram replied venomously. “It’s like an equation with three factors: fire, survivor, and fireman. Which one do you think the survivor will choose?”

  Avram now gave Ilan a detailed account of each of her letters, as he listened and shrugged his shoulders. “Write something to her,” Avram begged. “I can’t take her torturing me with this anymore.” Ilan said for the thousandth time that he had no interest in Ora and any girl who pursued him like that made him sick. The problem was that Ilan had no interest in any girl. Girls buzzed and hummed around him, but he didn’t really get excited about any of them. From date to date, from experience to experience, he became more and more sad and subdued. “Maybe I should just be a homosexual,” he said to Avram one evening as they sprawled on the big soft cushions in Jan’s Tea House, in Ein Karem. They both froze at the explicit word, which had somehow hovered between them for a long time. “Don’t worry,” Ilan added forlornly, “you’re not my type.” In Avram’s pocket was Ora’s latest letter, which he had not dared tell Ilan about: “Sometimes I think that he is now in the state I was in up until about a year ago, until I met you (and him) in the hospital. Because I was really sleepwalking, afraid to open my eyes. And now, with all the terrible pain of his ignoring me, I still feel that I’ve come back to life, and that’s also in large part thanks to you (really it’s mainly thanks to you). I can also reveal to you that sometimes I deeply wish he would fall in love with some (other) girl already, even though I know it will cause me great pain. Or even with some other guy (don’t laugh, sometimes I really do think that might be what he needs and that he doesn’t dare to even comprehend it, and sometimes I even think you are the one he’s a little bit in love with, yes, yes …), and even that is something I could accept from him, as long as he found some happiness and woke up from his slumber, which scares me to death. Oh, Avram, what would I do without you?

  “Yours, the corner-store lady …”

  She woke up with a start. The room was dark (perhaps the nurse had come in and found her sleeping and turned off the light), except for the glowing red coils of the space heater. The last letter she’d read to him was still in her lap. Ilan was probably right. Not a single expression passed Avram’s face when she read to him. All she was doing was breaking her own heart. She put the letter back in the shoe box, stretched out, and stopped: his eyes were open. He was awake. She thought he was looking at her.

  “Avram?”

  He blinked.

  “Should I turn on the light?”

  “No.”

  Her heart began to pound. “Should I fix your covers?” She stood up. “Do you want me to call the nurse to change your IV? Is the heater okay for you?”

  “Ora—”

  “What? What?”

  He breathed heavily. “What happened to me?”

  She blinked. “You’re going to be fine.”

  “What happened?”

  “Wait a minute,” she mumbled and retreated to the door, her body strangely tilting. “I’m going to get—”

  “Ora,” he whispered with such profound distress that she stopped herself, walked back, and quickly wiped her eyes.

  “Avram, Avram,” she said, taking pleasure in the way her mouth pronounced the name.

  “Why am I like this?”

  She sat down by his side and moved her hand through the air above his bandaged arm. “Do you remember that there was a war?”

  His chest dropped and a drenched, heavy sigh escaped his lips. “Was I injured?”

  “Yes, you could say so. You should rest now. Don’t speak.”

  “A land mine?”

  “No, it wasn’t—”

  “I was with them,” he said slowly. Then his head drooped and he dived into sleep.

  She thought of running for a doctor to report that Avram had regained his speech, or calling Ilan to let him know, but she was afraid to leave him even for a minute. Something in his face told her not to move but to sit by his side and wait, to protect him from what he would understand when he awoke.

  His voice cracked. “Is there anyone else here?”

  “Just you. And me.” She crushed out a smile. “You have a private room.”

  He digested the information.

  “Should I get the doctor? Or a nurse? There’s a bell above the—”

  “Ora.”

  “Yes.”

  “How long have I …?”

  “Here? About two weeks. A little longer.”

  He shut his eyes and tried to move his right arm but could not. He craned his neck to look at the mess of tubes and wires growing out of his body.

  “They gave you a few … treatments,” she murmured, “some small operations, you’ll be fine. Another few weeks and you’ll run—”

  “Ora.” He stopped her with a heavy voice, exempting them both from her pretenses.

  “Should I get you something to drink?”

  “I … There are things I don’t remember.” His voice was frightening, throaty and clumsy, as though being squeezed out of a bent tube.

  “You’ll remember gradually. The doctors say you’ll remember everything.” She spoke quickly, in a high-pitched voice that was too cheerful. He slowly ran one hand
over his face, then touched his broken teeth with a surprised finger. “They’ll fix that for you, don’t worry.” She heard herself sounding like a rental agent eager to convince a hesitant tenant to keep on renting the dump. “They’ll take care of your elbow too, and the fractures here, in your fingers, and your ankles.”

  She thought about his adolescent jump from the pine tree and wondered if that divorce from his body had helped him at all recently when they tortured him there. Not for the first time, she contemplated the fact that with Avram everything ended up being connected to the depths, everything became the fundamental law of Avram, and she remembered how she used to say he was a magnet for unbelievable occurrences and amazing coincidences. But perhaps he had lost that too, now. And who knew what else he had lost? Things that did not even have names, which would only gradually become apparent to her, and to him.

  “Everything’s going to be okay,” she said. “They want to finish with the big, urgent things first”—she pulled out a crooked, apologetic smile—“and then they’ll do the cosmetic stuff, and they’ll take care of your mouth. That’s nothing, easy as pie.”

  She thought he wasn’t hearing her at all. That he no longer cared what they did with him. She kept chattering, unable to stop herself, because the thoughts of what he might have lost and what might have been lost with him—things she had not dared to contemplate while she sat by his side these past weeks—now erupted from within her. And to think that Avram himself may still not understand, that comprehension itself was still ahead of him.

  “What month is it?”

  “It’s January.”

  “January …”

  “Seventy-four.”

  “Winter.”

  “Yes, winter.”

  He sank down into himself. Thinking or sleeping, she wasn’t sure. From one of the rooms, perhaps the burn ward, came whimpers of pain.

  “Ora, how did I get back?”

  “In an airplane. You don’t remember?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You flew back from there.” I can’t take this, she thought, this talk is tearing me apart.

  “Ora—”

  “Yes, what?” She noticed that he was opening his eyes wide. A cold, strange spark shone out of them.

  “Is there … Is there an Israel?”

  “Is there a what?”

  “Never mind.”

  She didn’t understand. Then she felt the saliva drying in her mouth. “Yes. There is. Of course. Everything. Everything’s just as it was, Avram. Did you think we were—”

  His chest rose and fell quickly under the blankets. The heater that had turned off kicked on again. She stared at his fingertips, their flesh devoid of fingernails, and thought that from the place he had come from now, they would never really meet again. He was lost to her forever.

  He fell asleep, and rocked and shouted in pain. It was hard to tolerate. He was fighting someone invisible, then he started to cry softly and plead. She jumped up and snatched a piece of paper from the box and read out loud, persistently, like a prayer: “Yesterday I went with my mother to buy her a dress. I always give her advice about these things, and I saw a beautiful dress for you at Schwartz Department Store. It was green, sleeveless, really slim, the kind that would hug your slender figure. Most importantly, it had a large gold zipper from top to … bottom!” Avram moaned and writhed on the bed, and Ora quickly, almost without breathing, read the silly, wonderful lines that came from so far away, like the light of a dying planet. “At the top there’s a big ring that you pull the zipper open with, and even more thought-provoking is that it opens in the front (!!!) like in this movie I saw with Elke Sommer, where she opens her dress slowly, all the way down to her belly button, and there’s a lovely full-frontal (the audience moaned and groaned!). Anyway, 49.75 liras and the dress is yours.”

  • • •

  Hours went by.

  “The war,” Avram murmured during one of those hours.

  “Yes, it’s okay,” said Ora, waking from an elusive dream. She drank some water and ran her hands over her face.

  “What?” Avram’s breath was shallow.

  “The war is over.” She somehow felt that in saying these words she had joined an ancient dynasty of women. Climbed up a rung. But then she felt foolish: perhaps he had wanted to ask how the war had ended and who had won. But when she looked at him she could not bring herself to say that they had.

  “How long was I—”

  “There? Six weeks. A bit longer.”

  He groaned in bewilderment.

  “Did you think it was less?”

  “More.”

  “You slept a lot when you got back. And they had you sedated for part of the time.”

  “Sedated …”

  “You’re on all kinds of medications now. They’ll taper them off later.”

  “Medications?”

  The effort of conversing overcame him and he fell asleep again, sometimes coughing and moving restlessly. He looked as though he were fighting someone who kept trying to strangle him.

  The hostages had come down the ramp from the plane. Some walked on their own, others needed help. The airport was chaos. Soldiers, journalists, and photographers from all over the world, airport workers who gathered to cheer the returning hostages, ministers and Knesset members who tried to reach them and shake their hands in front of the cameras. Only the families were explicitly told not to come to the airport but to wait for their loved ones at home. Since Ora and Ilan were not Avram’s relatives, they didn’t know they were not supposed to come. And they didn’t know Avram was wounded. They waited, but he did not come off the plane. The hostages walked past with their shaved heads, wearing rubber shoes without socks, and looked at them with dim surprise. A field-security officer walked a hostage whose eye was bandaged and read to him out loud from a piece of paper: “Anyone delivering information to the enemy is subject to penalty …” A tall hostage who limped with a crutch asked one of the journalists loudly whether it was true there’d been a war with Syria, too. Ilan suddenly discovered that soldiers were carrying stretchers down the back of the plane. He grabbed Ora’s hand and they ran over there. No one stopped them. They rushed around among the wounded soldiers but could not find Avram, and they stood looking at each other, terrified. One last stretcher was carried off the plane. A team of doctors and medics walked down with it, carrying a pole swinging with an IV and other tubes. Ora took one look and her mind grew weak. She saw a large, round head, undoubtedly Avram’s, rocking this way and that, covered with an oxygen mask. He was bald, and the top of his head was shaved and partly bandaged, but the bandage had come loose, exposing glistening wounds like gaping mouths. She noticed that the men rolling the stretcher had turned their heads aside and were breathing through their mouths. Ilan was already running alongside the stretcher, glancing at its occupant every so often. Ora followed his expression and knew it was bad. Ilan helped lift the stretcher into an ambulance and tried to get in, but he was pushed away. He shouted and protested and waved his arms, but the soldiers removed him. Ora walked up and, quietly but firmly, told an elderly medical officer: “I’m the girlfriend.” She climbed into the ambulance and sat by the stretcher with the doctor and nurse. The doctor suggested that she sit next to the driver, but she refused. The ambulance driver turned on the siren and Ora watched the highway, the cars, and the people sitting in them, alone or in pairs, sometimes whole families, and she knew that her previous life was ending. And she still hadn’t looked straight at Avram.

  The nurse handed her a fabric face mask to protect her from the smell. The doctor and nurse started to undress Avram. His chest, stomach, and shoulders were covered with open, infected ulcers, deep gashes, bruises, and strange, thin-lipped cuts. The right nipple was misplaced. The doctor touched a gloved finger to each wound and dictated to the nurse in a toneless voice: “Open fracture, dry blow, cut, edema, whipping, electrical, compression, burn, rope, infection. Check for malaria, check for schistosomiasis. Look at
this—the plastic surgeons will have a field day.”

  He and the nurse turned Avram over and exposed his back. Ora stole a look and saw a lump of raw flesh bubbling in red, yellow, and purple. She felt her stomach turn. The stench from his body was unbearable. The doctor held his breath and his glasses fogged over. He bared Avram’s buttocks and took a deep breath: “Animals,” he murmured. Ora looked out the window and wept silently and tearlessly. The doctor covered Avram’s behind and cut open his pants. His legs were broken in three places. Around the ankles were bloody bracelets of puffy, raw flesh that looked as though it was seething with live creatures. The doctor mimed a noose to the nurse, and Ora saw Avram in some dark cell, hanging by his feet with his head rocking, and she suddenly grasped that the entire time he had been a POW, she had hardly dared to imagine what they were really doing to him. He was in the Intelligence Corps and knew so much. She had pushed away every scene or thought—at the moments right before she fell asleep they would lunge at her, but the sleeping pills were effective against nightmares—and now she wondered how it was possible that she and Ilan had not discussed the torture and what happens to people who are tortured, even once.

  She thought of how little they had spoken of Avram at all, despite the fact that all those days and weeks they had had little else of interest to talk about. Almost every day they drove to the Contact Center for Families of POWs and MIAs, to hear what little news and whatever rumors they could. Over and over again they examined blurry photographs of hostages published in Israel and abroad and talked to the commanders and clerks who were willing to listen. When they didn’t go to the center, they would call to find out if there was any word. They were already starting to feel that they were being avoided, shunted around, but they did not give up—how could they? They were both distraught, and when they ate anything they thought, he’s not eating this, and when a song he liked came on the radio they thought, he’s not hearing this, and when they saw something beautiful they thought, he’s not seeing this. And that way—Ora now realized—they wouldn’t have to think about what was really happening to him; they’d turned Avram into everything he wasn’t.