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?”
They walk side by side, Ora scolds and strokes, and the dog flicks up her tail and curls it into a loop and skips lightly around them again. Ora thinks about the night before, and about the night ahead, and looks at Avram’s back. Only last night she’d discovered that his eyebrows were not as soft and velvety as she’d remembered. And his fleshy earlobes — Ofer is the only one in the family who has them, and Ilan and Adam always make fun of his Dumbo ears; Ofer won’t even let her touch them, but now she knows their touch. Five years, she thinks. It was only five years ago that Ilan and I inaugurated the bed. Ilan was afraid it would creak. He went downstairs to the living room and shouted, “Now!” and Ora, upstairs, jumped all the way up and down the bed like a madwoman. She almost lost consciousness from jumping so hard and laughing hysterically (and not one creak could be heard downstairs).
“I like him,” Avram says suddenly.
“What?”
He shrugs, and his lips curl with slight surprise. “He’s so …”
“Yes?”
“I don’t know, he’s such …” His hands, raised in front of his body, sketch and sculpt Ofer, living matter, dense and solid and masculine, kneading him in an imaginary embrace. Were he to tell her now that he loved her, she would not be this moved.
“Even though he isn’t …” She starts but changes her mind.
“Isn’t what?”
“He isn’t — I don’t know — an artist?”
“An artist?” Avram sounds surprised. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“Nothing, never mind, forget it. Wait, I didn’t even tell you — wow,” she lets out a gasp, “you really stunned me with that.” She stops and holds his hand to her chest. “Touch here, feel. The way you said, you know, that you like him, and there’s still so much I haven’t told you about him.”
She laughs and shakes her head. “He saved a well, you know. Never mind, I’m just showing off a bit.”
Avram responds immediately, a bit insulted: “That’s called showing off?”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s telling me about him.”
She speeds up, walks in front of him, and spreads out her arms. There’s so much oxygen she can barely breathe.
“They found a well, Ofer and Adam. They were hiking at the foot of Mount Adar, near Beit Nekofa, and they found a little well that was completely stopped up with mud and stones and hardly had any water. There was just a trickle. Ofer decided he was going to restore it, and for a whole year — d’you get this? — when he came home on leave from the army, he would go to this place. Sometimes Adam went with him — Adam wasn’t really into the project, but he was afraid for Ofer to be there alone, it’s right on the border, and the two of them would go together.”
Avram has already noticed that a warmth spreads through his loins almost every time she says “the two of them.”
“They removed the stones and rocks that were blocking the spring, and dirt and mud and silt and roots”—she is so radiant when she talks, and Ofer fills her with life, and now she is certain that it’s good, that it will be good, that her crazy plan may work—“and after they cleaned it out they dug a small holding pool, about a meter and a half deep. We spent a lot of time there too, we didn’t want them to be alone. We used to go on Saturdays and take food, and their friends went too, and some of our friends — I have to take you there one day, there’s a huge mulberry tree over the pool, and Ofer was the foreman and we all worked for him.”
“But how? How did he know how to do it?”
“First he built a little model at home. Ilan helped him”—she remembers the feverish enthusiasm that took hold of the two of them and how the house filled with sketches and computations of water supplies, flow angles, and volume, with constant experiments and simulations—“and then, you know, all you have to do is …”
“What? What do you have to do?”
“Build it,” she explains gravely. “Reinforce walls, concrete, plaster. All the stages. You need a special kind of plaster. Ilan lugged a ton and a half of plaster and sand in his car. And just so you understand, he wouldn’t have sacrificed his Land Cruiser for anyone but Ofer. And then he planted a little orchard of fruit trees. We helped him. We took a plum tree, and lemon and pomegranate and almond, and a few olive trees, and now there’s a real little oasis there, and the well is alive.”
She stretches her arms out and her steps are light: she has so much to tell.
They leave Shibli behind, and the trail crosses through fields and groves, hidden paths rich with cascading greenery that shelters them on either side. Ora drags a little, burdened by some shadow she cannot clearly see, an unfocused pain. The tiny hope from earlier has melted away and seems foolish and hollow.
Avram thinks about Ofer, who is out there now. He tries to picture him there, forces himself to see the streets and alleyways, but there is only one permanent war play in his mind, staged continually in an utterly empty auditorium that he never enters. Avram has five of these auditoriums, all empty and dark, and in each one a different play is performed nonstop — when he sleeps and when he wakes. The plays must always go on, and their sounds are distant and vague when they reach his ears, and he does not go inside.