To the End of the Land - By David Grossman Page 0,272

row, feeling that he simply had to build this bed, now, and he kept seeing it in his thoughts, but it wasn’t really clear yet, it came and went.

He paced around Ora, drummed his fingertips rapidly, and bit his lower lip. Then he stopped and straightened up, and his face looked altered. He crossed the room, practically passing right through her, snatched a piece of paper and a pencil from the table, improvised a ruler, and at three a.m. he started sketching the bed.

She peered over his shoulder. The lines flowed easily and accurately from his fingers, as if they were extensions of them. He murmured to himself and conducted a lively inner debate, and she watched in amazement as a regal canopy bed emerged. But he crumpled the paper in annoyance. “Too refined, too elegant.” He wanted a peasants’ bed. He grabbed another page and sketched—how beautiful his hands are, she thought, heavy and delicate at once, and those triangular beauty spots on his wrist—and as he did so he explained: “Here, in the frame, all around, I want it to have wooden ties.”

“I can help you with that,” Ora said cheerfully. “Let’s go to Binyamina, to the place where I got that.” She pointed at the wooden shelf above the sink, which had pots and pans and dried peppers hanging from it.

“You mean, you’ll come with me?”

“Sure, we’ll go together, and afterward we can spend the day in Zichron Yaakov.”

“And I want eucalyptus tree trunks. Four, for the legs.”

“Why eucalyptus?”

“ ’Cause I like their colors.” He seemed surprised at the question. “And here, above the headboard, there’ll be an iron arc.” He quickly sketched it.

“Ofer spent almost ten months working on that bed,” Ora tells Avram. “There’s a forge in the Ein Nakuba village, and he got friendly with the blacksmith. He spent hours upon hours there, watching and learning. Sometimes, when I drove him there, he let me see how the bed was coming along.” She draws with a stick in the earth: “This is the arc, an iron arc over the head. The crowning glory.”

“Nice,” says Avram and watches her face as she looks at the dirt. An arc above their two heads, he thinks.

Just before they reach the peak, they sit down to rest among oak and pine trees. A small grocery store in the Bedouin village of Shibli had revived them. They’d even found a bag of dog food there, and there’d been no radio on. Now they gobble down a full breakfast and drink fresh, strong coffee. The wind dries their sweat, and they enjoy the clear view of Jezreel Valley’s brown-yellow-and-green-checkered fields and the expanses that roll into the horizon—the Gilead mountains, the Menasheh hills, and the Carmel range.

“Look at her.” Ora glances at the dog, who lies sprawled with her tail to them. “She’s been like that since we slept together.”

“Jealous?” Avram asks the dog and lands a pinecone next to her paw. She defiantly turns her head the other way.

Ora gets up and goes over to the dog. She scrubs her cheeks and rubs noses with her. “What’s up? What did we do? Hey, maybe you miss that friend of yours, the black one? He really was a hunk, but we’ll find you someone in Beit Zayit.” The bitch gets up and moves away a few steps, then sits facing the valley. “Did you see that?” Ora sounds amazed.

“The bed,” Avram reminds her, startled by a flash of insult that ran through Ora’s face. “Come on, tell me about his arc.”

Ofer had explained it to her: “At first I made an arc out of two identical pieces, and they were supposed to join up with this rung, here. It looked pretty good, and technically it worked, but I didn’t like it. I just didn’t like it, it didn’t work well with the bed I want.”

She couldn’t follow all the details, but she enjoyed hearing and watching him as he described his work.

“So now I’m making a different arc, this time from one piece, and I’m going to wrap iron leaves over it, and it’s going to be super-complicated, but that’s just the way it has to be—it has to, you know?”

She knew.

He disinfected wormholes in the tree trunks, sealed them with varnish, then carved into the center of each trunk at a ninety-degree angle. “ ‘This wood is hard, it’s resistant,’ ” she quotes, “but Ofer’s strong, he has your arms, kind of thick in this part”—she pats Avram lightly