To the End of the Land by David Grossman

Author:David Grossman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Literary, Fiction - General, Fiction, General
ISBN: 9780771036347
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2010-09-15T07:00:00+00:00

“ILAN CAME HOME. After he ran away from me and Adam and tried out houses all over Jerusalem, he came back to us, to the house in Tzur Hadassah. As soon as he did, he was shocked at Adam, I mean at me, at the way I’d neglected Adam and his education and his speech, and any order and discipline, and he started improving him.” Ora laughs. “Do you understand? For almost three years, Adam and I were more or less on our own, two wild beasts in the jungle, no laws, no commandments, and then the missionary landed. And we suddenly discovered that nothing we did was right, that we didn’t have an agenda or a routine, we ate when we were hungry and slept when we were tired, and the house was pretty much a dump.

“Wait,” she says, holding up a finger, “there’s more. That Adam walked around the neighborhood naked and scarfed down massive amounts of chocolate and watched TV indiscriminately and got to day care at eleven a.m. And at his advanced age he still didn’t know how to go potty properly. And he called me Ora, not Mom!

“Ilan, being Ilan, took matters into his own hands right then and there. He did everything very nicely of course, with lots of smiles—he knew he was on probation with me—but all of a sudden, for example, clocks turned up around the house. One in the kitchen, a little one in the living room, and a Mickey Mouse clock in Adam’s room. And there were cleaning days, and we had to clear out the mess and get rid of the junk. The fun was over! ‘This Saturday we’re sorting through Adam’s toys, next Saturday your paperwork, and what about that pharmacy spilling out of the bathroom cabinet?’ ”

She laughs joylessly.

“I liked it, don’t get me wrong. It was nice to have a man in the house and to feel that someone was starting to eliminate the chaos. A sort of purification. The rescue forces had arrived. And don’t forget that I was pregnant with Ofer, so I didn’t have a lot of strength to resist, and all his enthusiasm signaled that he was pretty serious about his nesting and that maybe this time he would stay.”

Avram walks beside her, wriggling his toes in Ofer’s shoes. When he first stepped into the shoes, he immediately announced that he was swimming in them, and that it wouldn’t work. “It will, it will,” Ora mumbled and took out a pair of thick walking socks from his backpack. “Put these on.” He did, and still the shoes were a little big, but they were more comfortable than his old pair, whose soles were so worn out that he could feel the ground through them. “Just let your feet sail, and think about what a nice feeling that is,” Ora advised.

He spreads out in Ofer’s space, measuring his toes. The soles of his feet study his son’s footprints. Tiny dips and mounds, secret messages.

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