To the End of the Land - By David Grossman Page 0,1

do with her illness, climbed up from Ora’s toes and sparked red spots on her neck and face. It’s a good thing it’s dark, she thought, and held her loose pajama collar up to her neck. Finally, from the doorway, he cleared his throat softly and said, Well, I have to get back. But why? she asked. He said he urgently had to tar and feather himself. She didn’t get it, but then she got it and laughed deeply. Come on, dummy, enough with your act, I put a chair out for you next to me.

He felt along the doorway, metal cabinets, and beds, until he stopped way off, leaned his arms on an empty bed, and panted loudly. I’m here, he groaned. Come closer to me, she said. Wait, let me catch my breath. The darkness filled her with courage and she said in a loud voice, in her voice of health, of beaches and paddleball and swimming out to the rafts on Quiet Beach, What are you afraid of? I don’t bite. He mumbled, Okay, okay, I get it, I’m barely alive. His grumbling tone and the heavy way he dragged his feet touched her. We’re kind of like an elderly couple, she thought.

Ouch!

What happened?

One of these beds just decided to … Fuck! So, have you heard of the Law of Malicious—

What did you say?

The Law of Malicious Furniture—heard of it?

Are you coming or not?

The trembling wouldn’t stop, and sometimes it turned into long shivers, and when they talked their speech was choppy, and they often had to wait for a pause in the trembling, a brief calming of the face and mouth muscles, and then they would quickly spit out the words in high, tense voices, and the stammering crushed the sentences in their mouths. How-old-are-you? Six-teen-and-you? And-a-quar-ter. I-have-jaun-dice, how-a-bout-you? Me? he said. I-think-it’s-an-in-fec-tion-of-the-o-va-ries.

Silence. He shuddered and breathed heavily. By-the-way-that-was-a-joke, he said. Not funny, she said. He groaned: I tried to make her laugh, but her sense of humor is too—She perked up and asked who he was talking to. He replied, To my joke writer, I guess I’ll have to fire him. If you don’t come over here and sit down right now, I’ll start singing, she threatened. He shivered and laughed. His laughter was as screechy as a donkey’s bray, a self-sustaining laughter, and she secretly gulped it down like medicine, like a prize.

He laughed so hard at her stupid little joke that she barely resisted telling him that lately she wasn’t good at making people roll around with laughter the way she used to. “When it comes to humor, she’s not much of a jester,” they sang about her at the Purim party this year. And it wasn’t just a minor shortcoming. For her it was crippling, a new defect that could grow bigger and more complicated. And she sensed that it was somehow related to some other qualities that were vanishing in recent years. Intuition, for example. How could a trait like that disappear so abruptly? Or the knack for saying the right thing at the right time. She had had it once, and now it was gone. Or even just wittiness. She used to be really sharp. The sparks just flew out of her. (Although, she consoled herself, it was a Purim song, and maybe they just couldn’t come up with a better rhyme for “Esther.”) Or her sense of love, she thought. Maybe that was part of her deterioration—her losing the capacity to really love someone, to burn with love, like the girls talked about, like in the movies. She felt a pang for Asher Feinblatt, her friend who went to the military boarding school, who was now a soldier, who had told her on the steps between Pevsner Street and Yosef Street that she was his soul mate, but who hadn’t touched her that time, either. Never once in two years had he put a hand or a finger on her, and maybe that never-touched-her also had something to do with it, and deep in her heart she felt that everything was somehow connected, and that things would grow clearer all the time, and she would keep discovering more little pieces of whatever awaited her.

For a moment she could see herself at fifty, tall and thin and withered, a scentless flower taking long, quick steps, her head bowed, a wide-brimmed straw hat hiding her face. The boy with the donkey laugh kept feeling his way toward her, getting closer and