To the End of the Land (12 page)

At seven-thirty that evening she stands cooking in the kitchen, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and, for lyric effect, the floral apron of a real, hardworking, eager housewife: a chef. Piping-hot pots and pans dance on the stove top, steam curls up to the ceiling
and thickens into aromatic clouds, and Ora suddenly knows that everything will work out.

As befitting the adversary she faces, she plunges into battle with her winning combination: Ariela’s Chinese chicken strips with vegetables, Ariela’s mother-in-law’s Persian rice with raisins and pine nuts, her own variation on her mother’s sweet eggplant with garlic and tomatoes, and mushroom and onion pies. If she only had a proper oven in this house she could make at least one more pie, but Ofer would be licking his fingers anyway. She moves between the oven and the stove top with unexpected gaiety, and for the first time since Ilan left, since they locked up their house in Ein Karem and dispersed to separate rental houses, she feels a sense of affection and belonging toward a kitchen, toward the whole idea of a kitchen, even this old-fashioned, grubby kitchen, which now approaches her tentatively and rubs up against her with its damp snouts of serving spoons and ladles. Piled on the table behind her are covered bowls of eggplant salad, cabbage salad, and a large, colorful chopped vegetable salad, into which she snuck slices of apple and mango, which Ofer may or may not notice, if he even gets to eat this meal. Another bowl contains her version of tabbouleh, which Ofer thinks is to die for—that is to say, which he really, really likes, she corrects herself quickly for the record.

She has arrived at the moment when all the dishes have been sent on their way: cooking on the stove top, baking in the oven, bubbling in pans. They don’t need her any longer. But she still needs to cook, because surely Ofer will come home at some point and want fresh food. Her fingers flutter restlessly in the air. Where was I? She grabs a knife and a few vegetables that survived her salad assault, and starts chopping and humming quickly,
The tankists set off with screeching chains, / Their bodies painted the color of earth
—She stops herself. How in the world did she come up with that old song? Perhaps she should make a steak the way he likes it, braised in red wine, in case he gets home tonight? And the people who come to make the announcement, she wonders, are they convening in some office now, at the local
army center, undergoing training or a refresher course—but what is there to refresh? When would they have had time to forget their job? When have we had even one single day here without an announcement to a family? It’s strange to think that the notifiers were enlisted at the same time as the soldiers who take part in the operation, all orchestrated together. She giggles with a high-pitched squeak, and there is Ada again, with her large eyes, resurfacing, always there to observe how Ora acts, and Ora realizes that for several minutes she’s been staring at the semitransparent lower half of the front door. There is a problem there that requires a solution, but she does not understand what it is, and she hurries back to the pots on the stove, stirs and seasons generously—he likes his food spicy—and holds her face over the steam to inhale the pots’ thick breath. She doesn’t taste the food. She has no appetite tonight—if she puts a crumb in her mouth she’ll throw up. She watches her hand move wildly over a pot, showering its contents with paprika. There are particular movements that always make the phone ring. She noticed this odd conjunction a long time ago: when she seasons food, for example, or when she wipes a pot or pan dry after washing it, the phone almost always rings. Something in these circular motions seems to bring it to life, and also—how interesting—when she adds water to the flowers in the delicate glass vase. But only that vase! She laughs warmly at the secretive whims of her telephone, empties the pot of rice with raisins and pine nuts into the trash can, and carefully washes and dries the pot slowly, seductively. But nothing happens. The phone is dead (meaning, silent). Ofer is probably terribly busy. It will be hours until anything even starts, and they may not leave until tomorrow or the next day.
And when his tank was hit with two rockets
, she hums,
He was inside the burning fire
—She cuts herself off. She needs to find something to do tomorrow. But tomorrow is one of those days when she has nothing much to do. Tomorrow she was supposed to be skipping among the Galilee rocks with her young son, but there was a slight hitch in the plans. Maybe she should call the new clinic in Rehavia and offer to start working right away, even as a volunteer, even doing secretarial work if
necessary. They could call it her adjustment period. But they have already explained, twice, that they won’t need her until the middle of May, when their regular physiotherapist is scheduled to give birth. A new person will come into the world, Ora thinks and swallows bitter saliva. How silly of her not to have made any plans until May. She’d been so preoccupied with planning the trip with Ofer that she’d thought of nothing else, but she’d had the feeling that there would be a turning point in the Galilee. The start of a real, full recovery for her and Ofer. So much for her feelings.

She tosses the eggplant into the trash can, scrubs the pan, wipes it devotedly, and gives a sideways glance at the treacherous phone. What now? Where was I? The door. The lower part of the door. Four short bars over thick frosted glass. She takes three sheets of A4 paper from the printer and tapes them over the glass. That way she won’t see their military boots. And now what? The fridge is practically empty. In the pantry she finds a few potatoes and onions. Perhaps a quick soup? Tomorrow morning she’ll go shopping and fill the house again. It occurs to her that they could arrive in the middle of all sorts of things. Like when she’s unpacking the groceries and putting things in the fridge. Or when she sits down and watches television. Or when she sleeps, or when she’s in the bathroom, or when she’s chopping vegetables for soup.

Her breath pauses for a moment, and she quickly turns on the radio like someone opening a window. She finds the Voice of Music and listens for a couple of minutes to something from the Middle Ages. But no, she needs talk, a human voice. On the local station a young reporter is talking on the phone to an older women with a deep Mizrahi Jerusalem accent. Ora stops abusing the vegetables, leans against the cracked marble counter, wipes the sweat off her brow with the back of her hand, and listens to the woman talk about her older son who fought in the Gaza battle this week. “Seven soldiers were killed,” she says. “All of them were his friends from the battalion.” Yesterday they’d let him come home for a few hours, and this morning he was already back in the army.

“And while he was at home, did you give him your breast food?” the reporter asks, to Ora’s astonishment.

“My breast food?!” repeats the woman, also surprised.

The reporter laughs. “No, I asked if you gave him the
best
food.”

“Of course,” the woman says, laughing softly. “I thought you asked … Of course I cooked all my best dishes for him, and I pampered him.”

“Tell us how you pampered him,” the reporter urges.

And the mother, with a generosity that envelops Ora in its warmth, recounts: “I pampered him just like he deserves, with his favorite treats, and a nice warm bath and a really soft towel, and the shampoo he likes, which I bought special for him.” Then her voice turns grave. “But I want to say that, you know, I have two more sons, twins, and they also followed the way my oldest showed them, and they’re in the same battalion, Tzabar, the three of them in the same battalion I have, and I want to make a request from our army over the radio, can I?”

“Certainly you may.” Ora hears the slight derision in the reporter’s voice. “What exactly would you like to say to the IDF?”

“What can I tell you?” The mother sighs, and Ora’s heart goes out to her. “My sons, the two, when they were in basic training they signed a waiver, so they’re allowed to serve together, and that was well and good when they were in basic training, I’m not saying it wasn’t, but now they’re going down to the border, and everyone knows that the border for Givati is Gaza, and Gaza, I don’t have to tell you what that means, and I would really like to ask the army to think about it a bit more, and to think a little about me, too, I’m sorry for—”

What if they come in the middle of the potato? Ora thinks and stares at the large spud lying semi-peeled in her hand. Or in the middle of the onion? It gradually dawns on her that every movement she makes may be the last before the knock on the door. She reminds herself again that Ofer is unquestionably still at the Gilboa, and there’s no reason to panic yet, but the thoughts crawl up and wrap themselves around her hands as
they clutch the peeler, and for an instant the knock on the door becomes so inevitable, such an intolerable provocation of the capacity for disaster embodied in every human condition, that her mind confuses cause with effect and the dull, slow movements of her hands around the potato seem like the essential prelude to the knock.

During this eternal moment, she, and faraway Ofer, and everything that occurs in the vast space between them, are all deciphered in a flash of knowledge, like a densely woven fabric, so that the very act of her standing by the kitchen table, and the fact that she stupidly continues to peel the potato—her fingers on the knife whiten now—and all her trivial, routine household movements, and all the innocent, ostensibly random fragments of reality around her, become nothing less than vital steps in a mysterious dance, a slow and solemn dance, whose unwitting partners are Ofer, and his friends preparing for battle, and the senior officers scanning the map of future battles, and the rows of tanks she saw on the outskirts of the meeting point, and the dozens of smaller vehicles that moved among the tanks, and the people in the villages and towns over there, the other ones, who would watch through drawn blinds as soldiers and tanks drove down their streets and alleys, and the quick-as-lightning boy who might hit Ofer tomorrow or the day after, or perhaps even tonight, with a rock or a bullet or a rocket (strangely, the boy’s movement is the only thing that violates and complicates the slow heaviness of the entire dance), and the notifiers, who might be refreshing their procedures at the Jerusalem army offices right now, and Sami too, who must be at home in his village at this late hour, telling Inaam about the day’s events. Everyone, everyone is part of this massive, all-encompassing process, and the people killed in the last terrorist attack are part of it too, unaware of their role: they are the casualties whose death will be avenged by the soldiers now setting off on a new campaign. Even the potato she is holding, which is suddenly as heavy as an iron weight and she can no longer continue to slice it, it too might be a link, a tiny but irreplaceable link in the dark, calculated, formal course of the larger system, which comprises thousands
of people, soldiers and civilians, vehicles and weapons and field kitchens and battle rations and ammunition stores and crates of equipment and night-vision instruments and signaling flares and stretchers and helicopters and canteens and computers and antennas and telephones and large, black, sealed plastic bags. And all these, Ora suddenly feels, as well as the visible and hidden threads that tie them to one another, are moving around her, above her, like 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 soldier 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?