To the End of the Land - By David Grossman Page 0,52

Them ones are the cheapest, the dafawim. You think I can afford a plasterer from Abu Ghosh?”

She sits back more comfortably. The boy, too. Ora wipes off his sweat and her own. She keeps looking to her side, thinking she can still see the policeman’s finger on her window ledge, pointing at her. She doesn’t think she will ever be able to go through a roadblock experience like that one again. “And what you said to him about me being ‘one of ours’?”

Sami smiles and licks his lower lip. Ora knows the gesture: he is savoring a good quip even before it comes out. She smiles to herself and massages her neck and stretches her toes. For a moment it feels as though they are putting the house back in order after a rampage.

“ ‘One of ours,’ ” says Sami, “means ‘even though you look like a lefty.’ ”

The boy relaxes a little and falls asleep again. Ora puts his head on her lap. She leans back and breathes slowly. This may be her first quiet moment of the day.

Since Sami has always been a sort of distant extension of Ilan for her, and more recently a connecting thread to him, she begins to feel homesick. Not for the house she rented in Beit Zayit after the separation, nor for the house in Tzur Hadassah that she and Ilan had bought from Avram. The home she misses achingly is the last home she and Ilan had in Ein Karem, an expansive old two-story house with thick, cool walls, surrounded by cypress trees. It had big arched windows with deep ledges, and decorative floor tiles, some of which wobbled. Ora had seen it for the first time as a student. It stood there, empty and closed up, and it was love at first sight. With Avram’s encouragement she wrote a love letter. “My dear, despondent, lonesome house,” she began, then proceeded to tell the house about herself and explain how well suited they were for each other. She promised to make it happy. In the envelope she placed a photo of herself with long, curly, copper hair, wearing orange sweats and laughing as she leaned on a bike. She sent it with a note to the owners saying that if they ever decided to sell—and they did.

She and Ilan had become increasingly affluent, even becoming wealthy over the years—Ilan’s office flourished: leaving his job twenty years ago to focus on the slightly esoteric field of intellectual property was a hugely successful gamble. Since the mid-eighties the world had filled with ideas, patents, and inventions that needed protection, requiring knowledge and swift action wherever legislation and legal loopholes were concerned in various countries; new computer applications, inventions in communication and encoding, genetic medicine and engineering, all kinds of World Trade Organization treaties and agreements; Ilan was there one minute before everyone else—and although they could afford to renovate and beautify and build and design whatever they wanted to, Ilan let her nurture and tame the house as she wished, and so she allowed it to be itself, to grow at its own pace, and happily mount into a plethora of disparate styles. For several years there was a huge glass-doored refrigerator in the kitchen, an extremely efficient eyesore that Ora had bought at a liquidation sale from a man who sold equipment to supermarkets. She got the dining-room chairs for a steal at the Jerusalem café Tmol Shilshom, because Adam once mentioned in conversation how comfortable they were. The shadowed living room was a lair of thick rugs, huge cushions, and pale bamboo furniture, with overflowing bookshelves covering three walls. The massive dining table, the hostess’s pride and joy, which could seat fifteen guests without elbows touching, was carved and adorned by Ofer as a surprise for her forty-eighth birthday. Ofer made it round: “That way, no one ever has to sit at a corner.” The house itself was finely attuned and responsive to Ora’s moods. It carefully, hesitantly shed its age-old gloominess, stretched its limbs, and cracked its stiff joints, and when it realized that Ora was permitting it to retain the occasional pocket of charming abandon and even some healthy neglect, it grew into a comfortable unkemptness, until at times, when a certain light hit, it almost looked happy. Ora felt that Ilan was also content in the house, with the collegiate mess she created in it, and that her taste—meaning, her assortment of tastes—was to his liking. Even when

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