To the End of the Land (81 page)

She wanted him to pull out of her right away. She couldn’t speak.

“Then the sun rose. We didn’t know where we were, or whether it was our territory or theirs. Or where the IDF was, if it even existed. I saw tire marks in the sand, and I remembered that the IDF only uses APCs with chains, but these tracks were from a Soviet BTR, which the Egyptians used. I told the commander, and we quickly changed course. We walked and walked until we reached a small wadi with hills and mounds, and we sat down to rest. We were dead tired. Tanks were burning on the hills around us. Giant torches. We didn’t know whose they were. The whole area reeked of scorched flesh. You can’t imagine it, Ora.”

She flinched, and he tightened closer to her body. He was barely letting her breathe. The fetus felt as if it was throbbing too quickly. She wondered if it might somehow absorb anything of what Ilan was telling her.

“On the radio they told us they couldn’t reach us. We had to wait some more. We waited. After a few hours they told us to try to reach this mountain range. They gave us a code map. We walked until we could see the range straight ahead. But see, the Egyptians are shooting at us all the time, from all the hilltops, and they’re not hitting us. It’s all miracles. We’re walking with bullets whistling past us like in the movies. When we got to the mountain range we realized it was swarming with Egyptians. We thought it was all over.”

“I can’t breathe this way, Ilan—”

“But a minute later, our tanks arrived and stormed them. A battle started. Gunfire. We just sit on our asses and watch the movie. Everything’s on fire. Burning people jump out of tanks. People getting killed ’cause they came to rescue us. We sit on our asses and watch. And we feel nothing—nothing!”

“Ilan, you’re really suffocating me—”

“They yelled at us over the radio to shoot up flares so they could see where we were. We shot a flare and they found us. One tank came down from the range, and it’s a steep incline, a wall. It came all the way to us. An M60 Patton. An officer sticks his head out the turret and motions for us to come quickly and get in the tank. We shout at him: ‘What should we do? How?’ And
he gestures: Climb up, there’s no time. ‘You mean, all of us?’ ‘Get up. Get up!’ ‘What do you mean get up? Where?’ ‘Get up already!’ And there’s thirty-three of us. Ora, what did you say?”

“Ilan!”

“Sorry, sorry. Did I hurt you?”

“Pull out, pull out now.”

“One more minute, please, just a minute, I have to tell you—”

“It’s not good, Ilan—”

“Listen, just give me one more minute. Please, Ora, that’s all.” He spoke quickly, firmly. “We climbed up on the tank, every guy grabbed on to something, people glued themselves to the MAG hatches, ten guys crowded into the turret basket, I jumped up on the back and grabbed on to the leg of the guy above me, someone else took hold of my shoes, and the tank rolled. Not just rolled but barreled, in zigzags, to get away from the Saggers, and we barely held on. And the whole time I just kept thinking: Don’t fall, don’t fall.”

This child, Ora thought, the things he’s hearing before he’s even born.

“The tank is jumping around like crazy,” Ilan murmured and clutched her again, convulsing. “Your bones are breaking, you can barely breathe, dust everywhere, stones flying, you just stop up all your holes and just stay alive.”

Dust penetrated her mouth, her nose. Yellow desert streams. She choked and coughed. She felt as though the fetus inside her was also shrinking, fighting to turn over, to turn his back. Stop, stop, she groaned inside, stop poisoning my child.

“It went on that way for a few kilometers, stuck onto the tank, and then all of a sudden—that’s it. Over. We were out of the line of fire. I could barely let go of the other guy’s leg. My hand wouldn’t open.”

His muscles relaxed. His head plunged onto her neck, heavy as a rock. His fingers slowly disengaged from her body and lay open in front of her face. She did not move. He slid out of her. A moment went by, and then another. He breathed heavily. His face was up against her and he lay in an utterly helpless huddle. A spasm went through her body.

“Ilan,” she murmured. Her temples began to throb, and little beads of sweat glistened on her skin. Her body was telling her something. She lifted herself up on her elbow as if she were listening. “Ilan, I think—”

“Ora, what have we done?” she heard him whisper in a panic. “What have I done?”

She touched her wet thighs and sniffed. “Ilan, I think this is it.”

HE ASKS ABOUT
the deep cracks that had run through the walls even in his day, mainly in the kitchen, but also in the bedrooms. He wonders if the house continued to sag over the years and how she and Ilan dealt with the lintels that protruded from their frames. He asks if the huge bureau that used to be in his room still exists, and she tells him that until the family left the house and moved to Ein Karem, the bureau ruled the room like an old patriarch. The bedroom closet had also stayed. “We hardly touched that house. Just a little work in the kitchen, like I told you, and downstairs in the basement sewing room when the boys got older.”

The path is hard going, and the day is very hot even this early. Tabor turns out to be the steepest of all the mountains they’ve climbed. Sometimes they turn to face down the incline and walk backward. “You let the quadriceps rest and make these two guys here work a little”—Ora pats her rear end with both hands—“the gluteus maximus and the gluteus medius. Let them do their part, too.”

As they walk backward, facing Kfar Tavor and the Yavne’el
Valley sprawling below, Avram goes through the house with her, room by room. He asks about the sunken floor in the hallway, the redundant step up into the bedroom, and the clumsy water pipes, some of which were exposed. He remembers every fault and defect as well as every beauty spot in that home, as though he’d never stopped walking through it and caring for it. He asks if the manhole in the basement kept overflowing every time it rained.

“That was Ofer’s domain. He used to declare flood duty whenever it rained and prepare mops and buckets and rags. Later he got more sophisticated and installed a little pump.” Ora laughs. “You should have seen it, with an engine and two hoses. But he solved a problem that I think had started when the house was built.

“He also built a bed for us,” she says. She had sensed this was something she should not tell him, but they were in a good mood, and why not?

“He built a bed himself?”

“When he was in eleventh grade, yes. Or was it twelfth?” She stops to catch her breath and leans against a boldly slanting pine tree. “Never mind, I was just thinking about it. Listen to what else I remembered”—she slyly changes the topic because when he asked, she thought Avram had a stab of pain, and she tells him about how Ofer, when he was around three, used to come up to her and announce: “I want to tell you a story.” She would say, “I’m listening,” and then wait and wait while Ofer stared into some corner of the room for a long time. Then his face would take on a ceremonial look, he’d fill his lungs with air and say in a voice hoarse with excitement:
“And then …
”

“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.