Free To the End of the Land by David Grossman

canals and tunnels running in all directions, and the fugitives live there because they know we’ll never dare follow them down.” He spoke enthusiastically, as if he were telling her about a new video game, and she kept fighting the urge to grasp his head with both hands and look into his eyes so that she could see his soul, which had been slipping away from her for years—although with warmth, with a grin and a wink, as if they were playing a casual game of tag to amuse themselves—but she did not have the courage to do it. Nor could she say to him simply, in a voice that was not drenched in complaint or accusation, “Hey, Ofer, why aren’t we friends like we used to be? So what if I’m your mom?”
    At three o’clock, Sami would come to take her and Ofer to the meeting point. Three o’clock was the farthest point in herthoughts. She did not have the strength to imagine what would occur after that, and this was further proof of her frequent claim that she had no imagination. But that was no longer true, either. That too had changed. Recently she’d been flooded by imaginings—she had imagination-poisoning. Sami would make the drive easier for her, especially the way back, which would undoubtedly be far more difficult than the way there. They had a domestic routine, she and Sami. She liked to listen to him talk about his family, about the complex relationships between the different clans in Abu Ghosh, about the intrigues in the town council, and about the woman he had loved when he was fifteen, and perhaps had never stopped loving even after he was married off to Inaam, his cousin. At least once a week, by total coincidence, he claimed, he would see her in the village. She was a teacher, and there were years when she taught his daughters, and then she became a superintendent. She must have been a strong, opinionated woman, judging by his stories, and he always drew the conversation out so that Ora would ask about her. Then he would report her news with a sort of reverence: another child, her first grandson, a prize from the Ministry of Education, her husband’s death in a work accident. With touching detail he quoted their chance conversations in the mini-market, the bakery, or on the rare occasions when he drove her in his cab. Ora guessed that she was the only person he allowed himself to talk to about this woman, perhaps because he trusted her never to ask him the one question whose answer was obvious.
    Sami was a seasoned man, a quick thinker, and his life wisdom was augmented by his business acumen, which had produced, among other things, his own small fleet of taxis. When he was twelve he had a goat, and every year she birthed two kids. And a year-old kid in good health, he once explained to Ora, can sell for a thousand shekels. “When the kid would get to a thousand shekels, I would sell it and put the money away. I put away, and I put away, until I had eight thousand shekels. At seventeen I got my license and bought a Fiat 127, an old model but it worked. I bought it from my teacher, and I was the one boy in the village who came to school with wheels. Afternoons, I didprivate drives, errands, take this, bring that, go, fetch, and that way, slowly-slowly …”
    Last year, amid the great upheavals in her life, a friend of Ora’s found her a part-time temporary job working for a new museum being built in Nevada, which for some reason was interested in the material culture of Israel. Ora liked the unusual work that had fallen into her lap to distract her from herself a little, and she preferred not to delve too deeply into the museum’s ulterior motives or what had led its planners to invest a fortune in the construction of a model of Israel in, of all places, the Nevada desert. She was on the team in charge of the fifties and knew there were another few “gatherers” like her on various other teams. She never met any of them. Every two or three weeks she set off with Sami on delightful buying trips