To the End of the Land - Rilegato

Grossman, David

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0771036345 ISBN 13: 9780771036347

Casa editrice: McClelland & Stewart, 2010

Riassunto

A major, internationally bestselling novel of extraordinary power about the costs of war from one of Israel's greatest writers.

Set in Israel in recent times, this epic yet intimate novel places side by side the trials of war and the challenges of everyday life. Through a series of powerful, overlapping circles backward in time, it tells the story of Ora's relationship with her husband, from whom she is now separated, as well as the tragedy of their best friend Avram, a former soldier — and her son's biological father. When her son Ofer rejoins the army for a major offensive, Ora is devastated and decides to hike in the Galilee, leaving no forwarding information for the "notifiers" who might deliver the worst news a parent can hear. She phones Avram, whom she has not seen in 21 years, and convinces him to go with her. As they journey together, Ora unfurls the story of her family, and gives Avram the gift of his son — a telling that keeps the boy alive for both his mother and the reader.

Never have we seen so vividly the surreality of daily life in Israel, the consequences of living in a society where the burden of war falls on each generation anew. David Grossman's rich imagining of a family in love and crisis makes for one of the great anti-war novels of our time.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

DAVID GROSSMAN is one of the leading Israeli writers of his generation, and the author of numerous works of fiction, non-fiction, and children's literature. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, and been translated into twenty-five languages around the world. He lives on the outskirts of Jerusalem.

JESSICA COHEN's translations include David Grossman's award-winning Her Body Knows and critically acclaimed works by Yael Hedaya, Ronit Matalon, Amir Gutfreund, and Tom Segev.

Estratto. © Ristampato con autorizzazione. Tutti i diritti riservati.

Prologue, 1967
 
 
HEY, GIRL, quiet!
 
Who is that?
 
Be quiet! You woke everyone up!
 
But I was holding her
 
Who?
 
On the rock, we were sitting together
 
What rock are you talking about? Let us sleep
 
Then she just fell
 
All this shouting and singing
 
But I was asleep
 
And you were shouting!
 
She just let go of my hand and fell
 
Stop it, go to sleep
 
Turn on a light
 
Are you crazy? They’ll kill us if we do that
 
Wait
 
What?
 
I was singing?
 
Singing, shouting, everything. Now be quiet
 
What was I singing?
 
What were you singing?!
 
In my sleep, what was I singing?
 
I’m supposed to know what you were singing? A bunch of shouts.
 
That’s what you were singing. What was I singing, she wants to know . . .
 
You don’t remember the song?
 
Look, are you nuts? I’m barely alive
 
But who are you?
 
Room Three
 
You’re in isolation, too?
 
Gotta get back
 
Don’t go . . . Did you leave? Wait, hello . . . Gone . . . But what was I singing?
 
 
AND the next night he woke her up again, angry at her again for singing at the top of her lungs and waking up the whole hospital, and she begged him to try to remember if it was the same song from the night before. She was desperate to know, because of her dream, which kept getting dreamed almost every night during those years. An utterly white dream. Everything in it was white, the streets and the houses and the trees and the cats and dogs and the rock at the edge of the cliff. And Ada, her redheaded friend, was also entirely white, without a drop of blood in her face or body. Without a drop of color in her hair. But he couldn’t remember which song it was this time, either. His whole body was shuddering, and she shuddered back at him from her bed. We’re like a pair of castanets, he said, and to her surprise, she burst out with bright laughter that tickled him inside. He had used up all his strength on the journey from his room to hers, thirty-five steps, resting after each one, holding on to walls, doorframes, empty food carts. Now he flopped onto the sticky linoleum floor in her doorway. For several minutes they both breathed heavily. He wanted to make her laugh again but he could no longer speak, and then he must have fallen asleep, until her voice woke him.
 
Tell me something
 
What? Who is it?
 
It’s me
 
You . . .
 
Tell me, am I alone in this room?
 
How should I know?
 
Are you, like, shivering?
 
Yeah, shivering
 
How high is yours?
 
It was forty this evening
 
Mine was forty point three. When do you die?
 
At forty-two
 
That’s close
 
No, no, you still have time
 
Don’t go, I’m scared
 
Do you hear?
 
What?
 
How quiet it is suddenly?
 
Were there booms before?
 
Cannons
 
I keep sleeping, and all of a sudden it’s nighttime again
 
’Cause there’s a blackout
 
I think they’re winning
 
Who?
 
The Arabs
 
No way
 
They’ve occupied Tel Aviv
 
What are you . . . who told you that?
 
I don’t know. Maybe I heard it
 
You dreamed it
 
No, they said it here, someone, before, I heard voices
 
It’s from the fever. Nightmares. I have them, too
 
My dream . . . I was with my friend
 
Maybe you know
 
What?
 
Which direction I came from
 
I don’t know anything here
 
How long for you?
 
Don’t know
 
Me, four days. Maybe a week
 
Wait, where’s the nurse?
 
At night she’s in Internal A. She’s an Arab
 
How do you know?
 
You can hear it when she talks
 
You’re shaking
 
My mouth, my whole face
 
But . . . where is everybody?
 
They’re not taking us to the bomb shelter
 
Why?
 
So we don’t infect them
 
Wait, so it’s just us—
 
And the nurse
 
I thought
 
What?
 
If you could sing it for me
 
That again?
 
Just hum
 
I’m leaving
 
If it was the other way around, I would sing to you
 
Gotta get back
 
Where?
 
Where, where, to lie with my forefathers, to bring me down with sorrow to the grave, that’s where
 
What? What was that? Wait, do I know you? Hey, come back
 
 
AND the next night, too, before midnight, he came to stand in her doorway and scolded her again and complained that she was singing in her sleep, waking him and the whole world, and she smiled to herself and asked if his room was really that far, and that was when he realized, from her voice, that she wasn’t where she had been the night before and the night before that.
 
Because now I’m sitting, she explained. He asked cautiously, But why are you sitting? Because I couldn’t sleep, she said. And I wasn’t singing. I was sitting here quietly waiting for you.
 
They both thought it was getting even darker. A new wave of heat, which may have had nothing to 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 fi...

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: McClelland & Stewart
• Data di pubblicazione: 2010
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0771036345
• ISBN 13: 9780771036347
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 592
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile