Free To the End of the Land by David Grossman Page A

around the country, and out of some vague intuition she avoided discussing the museum and its intentions with him. Sami never asked, and she wondered what he imagined and how he described these trips to Inaam. The two of them spent days roaming the country together. They bought a collection of stainless-steel basins from a kibbutz in the Jordan Valley, an antique milking machine from a moshav in the north, a shiny like-new icebox in a Jerusalem neighborhood, and of course the trivial, forgotten items whose discovery gave her an almost physical joy: an eighth of a bar of Tasbin soap, a tube of Velveta hand cream, a package of sanitary napkins, textured rubber “thimbles” that Egged bus drivers once used, a collection of wildflowers dried between the pages of a notebook, and vast quantities of textbooks and popular books—one of her tasks was to reconstruct a typical kibbutz household library from the fifties. Time after time she watched as Sami Jubran’s warm, earthy charm encircled everyone he met. The elderly kibbutzniks were positive that he was a former kibbutz member (which was true, he told her jokingly: “Half of Kiryat Anavim’s lands belong to my family”). In Jerusalem, at a local backgammon club, a few men pounced on him, convinced he had grown up with them in the Nachlaot neighborhood and even claimed to remember him climbing pine trees to watch Hapoel soccer games in the old stadium. And a vibrant Tel Avivwidow with bronzed skin and jangling bracelets determined that he was without a doubt from the Kerem: even though he a was little fat for a Yemenite, it was obvious that he was “with roots,” she said when she called Ora the next day for no reason. “And very charmant ,” she added, “the kind of guy who definitely fought in the Etzel. And by the way, do you think he’s available for a moving job?” Ora saw the way people agreed, for Sami, to part with beloved possessions, because they felt that these objects, which their children belittled and would undoubtedly get rid of as soon as the old people passed on, if given to him, would in some sense stay in the family. And on every trip, even a ten-minute drive, they always got into politics, keenly confabbing over the latest developments. And even though years ago, after the devastation with Avram, Ora had completely cut herself off from the “situation”—I’ve paid my price, she asserted with a narrow, distancing smile—she found herself drawn into these talks with Sami over and over again. It was not his arguments or his reasonings that pulled her in, because she’d heard them all before, from him and from others, and she didn’t believe anyone had a single unused claim left in this eternal debate. “Who could possibly come up with a new, decisive argument that hasn’t yet been heard?” she asked with a sigh when anyone else tried to take it up with her. But when she and Sami discussed the situation, when they argued with little jabs and cautious smiles—and with him, curiously, she frequently veered much further to the right than she intended, further than her real opinions, while with Ilan and the boys she was always, as they said, on the delusional left, and she herself couldn’t say exactly what she was and where she stood, “and anyway,” she would say with a charming shrug, “only when it’s all over, the whole story, will we really know who was right and who was wrong, isn’t that so?” Yet still, when Sami used his Arabesque Hebrew to undermine the long-winded, indignant, greedy pretenses of both Jews and Arabs, when he skewered the leaders of both peoples on a sharp Arab saying that often aroused from the depths of her memory the equivalent idiom in her father’s Yiddish, she sometimes experienced a subtle latency, as if in the course of talking with him shesuddenly discovered that the end, the end of the whole big story, must be good, and good it would be, if only because the clumsy, round-faced man sitting beside her