ALSO BY DAVID GROSSMAN
Fiction
To the End of the Land
Her Body Knows
Someone to Run With
Be My Knife
The Zigzag Kid
The Book of Intimate Grammar
The Smile of the Lamb
See Under: Love
Nonfiction
Writing in the Dark: Essays on Literature and Politics
Death as a Way of Life: Israel Ten Years After Oslo
Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians in Israel
The Yellow Wind
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Translation copyright © 2014 by Jessica Cohen
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by McClelland & Stewart, a division of Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House Companies.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Originally published in Israel as Nofel mi’hutz la’zman by HaKibbutz
HaMeuchad Publishing House, Ltd., Tel Aviv, in 2011. Copyright © 2011 by David Grossman and HaKibbutz HaMeuchad Publishing House, Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Grossman, David.
[Nofel mi-huts la-zeman. English]
Falling out of time / by David Grossman; translated by Jessica Cohen.—
First edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-385-35013-6 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-385-35014-3 (eBook)
1. Bereavement—Fiction. I. Cohen, Jessica. II. Title.
pj5054.g728N6413 2014
892.4′36—dc23 2013017532
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Jacket design by Kelly Blair
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Part I
Part II
Notes
A Note About the Author
A Note About the Translator
Reading Group Guide
TOWN CHRONICLER: As they sit eating dinner, the man’s face suddenly turns. He thrusts his plate away. Knives and forks clang. He stands up and seems not to know where he is. The woman recoils in her chair. His gaze hovers around her without taking hold, and she—wounded already by disaster—senses immediately: it’s here again, touching me, its cold fingers on my lips. But what happened? she whispers with her eyes. Bewildered, the man looks at her and speaks:
—I have to go.
—Where?
—To him.
—Where?
—To him, there.
—To the place where it happened?
—No, no. There.
—What do you mean, there?
—I don’t know.
—You’re scaring me.
—Just to see him once more.
—But what could you see now? What is left to see?
—I might be able to see him there. Maybe even talk to him?
—Talk?!
TOWN CHRONICLER: Now they both unfold, awaken. The man speaks again.
—Your voice.
—It’s back. Yours too.
—How I missed your voice.
—I thought we … that we’d never …
—I missed your voice more than I missed my own.
—But what is there? There’s no such place. There doesn’t exist!
—If you go there, it does.
—But you don’t come back. No one ever has.
—Because only the dead have gone.
—And you—how will you go?
—I will go there alive.
—But you won’t come back.
—Maybe he’s waiting for us.
—He’s not. It’s been five years and he’s still not. He’s not.
—Maybe he’s wondering why we gave up on him so quickly, the minute they notified us …
—Look at me. Look into my eyes. What are you doing to us? It’s me, can’t you see? This is us, the two of us. This is our home. Our kitchen.
Come, sit down. I’ll give you some soup.
MAN:
Lovely—
So lovely—
The kitchen
is lovely
right now,
with you ladling soup.
Here it’s warm and soft,
and steam
covers the cold
windowpane—
TOWN CHRONICLER: Perhaps because of the long years of silence, his hoarse voice fades to a whisper. He does not take his eyes off her. He watches so intently that her hand trembles.
MAN:
And loveliest of all are your tender,
curved arms.
Life is here,
dear one.
I had forgotten:
life is in the place where you
ladle soup
under the glowing light.
You did well to remind me:
we are here
and he is there,
and a timeless border
stands between us.
I had forgotten:
we are here
and he—
but it’s impossible!
Impossible.
WOMAN:
Look at me. No,
not with that empty gaze.
Stop.
Come back to me,
to us. It’s so easy
to forsake us, and this
light, and tender
arms, and the thought
that we have come back
to life,
and that time
nonetheless
places thin compresses—
MAN:
No, this is impossible.
It’s no longer possible
that we,
that the sun,
that the watches, the shops,
that the moon,
the couples,
that tree-lined boulevards
turn green, that blood
in our veins,
that spring and autumn,
that people
innocently,
that things just are.
That the children
of others,
that their brightness
and warmness—
WOMAN:
Be careful,
you are saying
things.
The threads
are so fine.
MAN:
At night people came
bearing news.
They walked a long way,
quietly grave,
and perhaps, as they did so,
they stole a taste, a lick.
With a child’s wonder
they learned they could hold
death in their mouths
like candy made of poison
to which they are miraculously
immune.
We opened the door,
this one. We stood here,
you and I,
shoulder to shoulder,
they
on the threshold
and we
facing them,
and they,
mercifully,
quietly,
stood there and
gave us
the breath
of death.
WOMAN:
It was awfully quiet.
Cold flames lapped around us.
I said: I knew, tonight
you would come. I thought:
Come, noiseful void.
MAN:
From far away,
I heard you:
Don’t be afraid, you said,
I did not shout
when he was born, and
I won’t shout now either.
WOMAN:
Our prior life
kept growing
inside us
for a few moments longer.
Speech,
movements,
expressions.
MAN AND WOMAN:
Now,
for a moment,
we sink.
Both not saying
the same words.
Not bewailing him,
for now,
but bewailing the music
of our previous life, the
wondrously simple, the
ease, the
face
free of wrinkles.
WOMAN:
But we promised each other,
we swore to be,
to ache,
to miss
him,
to live.
So what is it now
that makes you
suddenly tear away?
MAN:
After that night
a stranger came and grasped
my shoulders and said: Save
what is left.
Fight, try to heal.
Look into her eyes, cling
to her eyes, always
her eyes—
do not let go.
WOMAN:
Don’t go back there,
to those days. Do not
turn back your gaze.
MAN:
In that darkness I saw
one eye
weeping
and one eye
crazed.
A human eye,
extinguished,
and the eye
of a beast.
A beast half
devoured in the predator’s mouth,
soaked with blood,
insane,
peered out at me from your eye.
WOMAN:
The earth
gaped open,
gulped us
and disgorged.
Don’t go back
there, do not go,
not even one step
out of the light.
MAN:
I could not, I dared not
look into your eye,
that eye of
madness,
into your noneness.
WOMAN:
I did not see you,
I did not see
a thing,
from the human eye
or the eye
of the beast.
My soul was uprooted.
It was very cold then
and it is cold
now, too.
Come to sleep,
it’s late.
MAN:
For five years
we unspoke
that night.
You fell mute,
then I.
For you the quiet
was good,
and I felt it clutch
at my throat. One after
the other, the words
died, and we were
like a house
where the lights
go slowly out,
until a somber silence
fell—
WOMAN:
And in it
I rediscovered you,
and him. A dark mantle
cloaked the three of us,
enfolded us
with him, and we were mute
like him. Three embryos
conceived
by the bane—
MAN:
And together
we were born
on the other side,
without words,
without colors,
and we learned
to live
the inverse
of life.
(silence)
WOMAN:
See how
word by word
our confiding
is attenuated, macerated,
like a dream
illuminated
by a torch. There was
a certain miracle
within the quietude,
a secrecy
within the silence
that swallowed us up
with him. We were silent there
like him, there we spoke
his tongue.
For words—
how does the drumming
of words voice
his death?!
TOWN CHRONICLER: In the hush that follows her shout, the man retreats until his back touches the wall. Slowly, as if in his sleep, he spreads both arms out and steps along the wall. He circles the small kitchen, around and around her.
MAN:
Tell me,
tell me
about us
that night.
WOMAN:
I sense something
secret: you are tearing off
the bandages
so you may drink
your blood, provisions
for your journey to there.
MAN:
That night,
tell me
about us
that night.
WOMAN:
You
circle
around me
like a beast
of prey. You close
in on me
like a nightmare.
That night, that
night.
You want to hear about
that night.
We sat on these chairs,
you there, me here.
You smoked. I remember
your face came
and went in the smoke,
less and less
each time. Less
you, less
man.
MAN:
We waited
in silence
for morning.
No
morning
came.
No
blood
flowed.
I stood up, I wrapped you
in a blanket,
you gripped my hand, looked
straight into my eyes: the man
and woman
we had been
nodded farewell.
WOMAN:
No
wafted dark
and cold
from the walls,
bound my body,
closed and barred
my womb. I thought:
They are sealing
the home that once
was me.
MAN:
Speak. Tell me
more. What did we say?
Who spoke first? It was very quiet,
wasn’t it? I remember breaths.
And your hands twisting
together. Everything else
is erased.
WOMAN:
Cold, quiet fire burned
around us.
The world outside shriveled,
sighed, dwindled
into a single dot,
scant,
black,
malignant.
I thought: We must
leave.
I knew: There’s nowhere
left.
MAN:
The minute
it happened,
the minute
it became—
WOMAN:
In an instant we were cast out
to a land of exile.
They came at night, knocked on our d
oor,
and said: At such and such time,
in this or that place, your son
thus and thus.
They quickly wove
a dense web, hour
and minute and location,
but the web had a hole in it, you
see? The dense web
must have had a hole,
and our son
fell
through.
TOWN CHRONICLER: As she speaks these words, he stops circling her. She looks at him with dulled eyes. Lost, arms limp, he faces her, as if struck at that moment by an arrow shot long ago.
WOMAN:
Will I ever again
see you
as you are,
rather than as
he is not?
MAN:
I can remember
you without
his noneness—your innocent,
hopeful smile—and I can remember
myself without his noneness. But not
him. Strange: him
without his noneness, I can no longer
remember. And as time goes by
it starts to seem as though
even when he was,
there were signs
of his noneness.
WOMAN:
Sometimes, you know,
I miss
that ravaged,
bloody
she.
Sometimes I believe her
more than I believe
myself.
MAN:
She is the reason I take
my life
in your hands and ask
you a question
I myself
do not understand:
Will you go with me?
There—
to him?
WOMAN:
That night I thought:
Now we will separate. We cannot live
together any longer. When I tell you
yes,
you will embrace
the no, embrace
the empty space
of him.
MAN:
How will we cleave together?
I wondered that night.
How will we crave each other?
When I kiss you,
my tongue will be slashed
by the shards of his name
in your mouth—
WOMAN:
How will you look into my eyes
with him there,
an embryo
in the black
of my pupils?
Every look, every touch,
will pierce. How will we love,
I thought that night.
How will we love, when
in deep love
he was
conceived.
MAN:
The
moment
it happened—
WOMAN:
It happened? Look