David Grossman - To the End of the Land

“And then what?” Avram asks after a moment.

“You don’t get it,” she says, her peals of laughter rolling all the way to the valley.

“Oh,” he says awkwardly. “That’s the whole story?”

“And then, and then … That’s the main point in stories, isn’t it?”

“That’s even shorter than my shortest story.” Avram smiles and leans his hands on his knees, breathing heavily.

“Remind me.”

“ ‘On the day I was born, my life changed unrecognizably.’ ”

Ora sighs. “And then …”

“And then he made you a bed.”

“At first it was going to be for him,” she clarifies.

She heard him pacing around the house in the middle of the night, and when she went up to him he said something was driving him crazy. He wanted to make a bed, but he couldn’t decide which kind, and it kept waking him up. Ora thought it was an excellent idea: the youth bed he’d slept on since he was a boy was wobbly and creaky, almost collapsing under his adolescent weight. “I have all kinds of ideas,” he said, “but I can’t decide.” He blew on his hands excitedly, and repeated that he couldn’t sleep. He’d been waking up in the middle of the night for several nights in a 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 with unconcealed pleasure. “He worked for several weeks on those trunks and finally decided to buy, with his own money — he did it all on his own, apart from driving he wouldn’t let us help him at all — a power saw for cutting iron. But that didn’t work for what he wanted, and he bought another blade — an aggressive one,” she stresses with an expert tone—“and made channels through the trunks. And wait—” She interrupts a question forming on his lips. “He made the little leaves on his own too, from iron, for the arc over the head. Beautiful little rose leaves, twenty-one of them, with thorns.”

Avram listens and his eyes narrow in concentration. He strokes his arms distractedly.

“He designed every single leaf right down to the last detail. You would have enjoyed seeing how lovely and delicate they came out. And for the frame, the wood itself was a massive hunk, but it flows in these wavy kinds of lines”—she rounds her hands, and for an instant she feels Ofer himself between them, large and strong and tender—“I’ve never seen a bed like that anywhere.”

There was something alive about it, she thinks. Even in the iron parts there was motion.

“And when he finished making it, he decided to give it to us.”

“After all that?”

“We argued with him, we wouldn’t let him. ‘Such a special bed, you worked on it for so long, why shouldn’t it be yours?’ ”

“But he’s stubborn.” Avram smiles softly.

“I don’t know what happened. Maybe he looked at it when it was done and it frightened him a little. It was huge. The hugest thing I’ve ever seen.”

She swallows down quickly what almost escaped about the bed and its size, and how many people could lie comfortably on it. She shakes the dirt off her hands. Why did she even tell him? She has to get out of this story quickly.

“Anyway, he said that one day, when he got married, he’d build a new bed for himself. ‘For now,’ he said, ‘buy me one.’ And that was it. Just a little story. So you’ll know. Come on, let’s go.”

They get up and walk around the nipple of the mountain, avoiding the churches and monastery, then start walking back down toward Shibli. A buzzard hovers overhead, and the white down of sheep’s wool clings to a thistle. The bitch hears the village dogs barking and casually comes closer to Ora and rubs against her leg. Ora cannot keep a grudge for even three minutes, and she leans down and strokes the golden fur. “Is that it? Friends? You forgive me? You’re a bit of a prima donna. Has anyone ever told you that?”