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

was able to preserve within his fleshy thickness a flame of delicate irony, and mainly because he still managed to be himself within all this . There were also times when it occurred to her that she was learning from him what she would need to know, one day, if—or when—the situation in Israel was reversed, God forbid, and she found herself in his position, and he in hers. That was possible, after all. It was always lurking behind the door. And perhaps, she realized, he thought about that too—perhaps she was teaching him something by still being herself in all this.
    Because of all these reasons it was very important that she observe him as much as she could, to learn how he had been able to avoid becoming embittered all these years. As far as she could tell he was not even suppressing a silent yet murderous hatred deep inside, as Ilan had always claimed. She was astonished to see—and wished she could learn from him—how he managed to avoid attributing the daily humiliations, large and small, to some personal defect of his own, as she would undoubtedly do with great fervor were she, God forbid, in his position—and as she in fact had been doing, truth be told, quite a bit during this lousy year. Somehow, within all the chaos, all the mess, he remained a free person, which she herself only rarely managed to be.
    Now it grows and swells and threatens to burst: her stupidity, her failure in the principled and complicated matter of being a gentle human being in this place, in these times. Not just being gentle, or ladylike —there are some words she still hears only in her mother’s voice—merely because you are incapable of being anything else by nature, but being intentionally and defiantly gentle, being a gentle person who dives headfirst into the local vat of acid. Sami was a truly gentle man, even if it was hard to tell from his size and his heaviness and his thick features. Even Ilan had to admit it, although grudgingly and always with a note of suspicion: “Gentle he may be, but just wait till he gets his chance. Then you’ll get to see some gentleness à la Allah.”
    But in all the years she’d known him, and as much as she observed him—and she constantly did—she was unable to lose the childish curiosity about some congenital handicap she sensed in him, in his condition, in his split or double existence here; she was absolutely certain that he had never failed. In gentleness, he had never failed.
    He once drove her and the kids to the airport to meet Ilan, who was coming back from a trip. The cops at the airport checkpoint took him away for half an hour, while Ora and the boys waited in the taxi. They were little then, Adam was six and Ofer around three, and it was the first time they discovered that their Sami was Arab. When he came back, pale and sweaty, he refused to tell them what had happened. All he said was, “They kept saying I was a shitty Arab, and I said, ‘You may shit all over me, but that doesn’t make me shitty.’ ”
    She never forgot that sentence, and lately she recited it to herself ever more firmly, like medication to strengthen her heart whenever they shat all over her, everyone, like the pair of obsequious managers —unctuous , Avram used to call their type—at the clinic where she’d worked until recently, and a few friends who had more or less turned their backs on her after the separation and stuck with Ilan (but I would too, she thinks to herself; if I only could, I would choose Ilan and not get stuck with me), and she could add to the list the son of a bitch judge who took away her freedom of movement, and in fact she could include her kids among those who shat on her, especially Adam, not Ofer, hardly at all, she wasn’t sure, she just wasn’t sure anymore, and Ilan too, of course, the master of shitters, who once, about thirty years ago, had sworn that his purpose in life was to protect the corners of her mouth so that they would always curl upward. Ha. She