“A glass of tea? Or some brandy?” asked Yolek. “Mind you, it’s only my allergy acting up again. Otherwise I haven’t popped a tear since it happened. I don’t deny that when the door opened and you suddenly walked in and hugged me and said what you did, well, my emotions just got the better of me for a second. But there now, I’m over it. You remember Hava, don’t you. And sitting here to my left is Srulik. My replacement. Our new secretary here on the kibbutz. And a saint in disguise. Give me ten men like him and I could move the world.”
“Good to meet you, Srulik. Please don’t bother getting up. I’m no longer one-and-twenty, and believe me, this is the first time in memory that I’ve ever heard a good word from Yolek Lifshitz about anyone. As for you, Hava, words simply fail me. I embrace you in my thoughts and have nothing but admiration for your courage.”
“Hava, if it’s not asking too much, please make Eshkol a strong glass of tea. Never mind what he says. And give our good friend Srulik some too. And Rimona and Azariah. None for me. If Rimon’ka will be gracious enough to pour me a sip of brandy, I’ll make do with that.”
“My dear friends,” said the Prime Minister, who, squeezed and crumpled though he was into the narrow kibbutz chair, was still a commanding presence, a tall, broad, heavy, gullied mountain of a man, a protuberant outcropping of superfluous bulges, sagging rolls of flesh, and improbable pouches of skin, a cliff partially collapsed by a landslide. “I want you to know that what you’ve been going through has been continually on my mind these past two days. Just thinking of you makes my heart ache and my head feel like a jar of scorpions. From the moment I heard the sad news I have been beset by anxiety.”
“Thank you,” said Hava from the kitchenette, where she had been busy herself setting out her very best china on a tray, arranging quartered oranges on a plate in a chrysanthemum pattern, taking out her fancy paper napkins, and entrusting Rimona with a fresh white tablecloth. “It’s very kind of you to have taken the trouble to come.”
“Oh, don’t you go thanking me, Hava. I only wish I could have come as a bearer of good news instead of like someone paying a condolence call. Now, my friends, perhaps you should give me a blow-by-blow account. Do you mean to say the boy just got up and left without so much as a by-your-leave? Na. A shayne mayse. In Yiddish you say, small children, small tsuris, big children, big ones. Hava, please, no tea for me, or anything else. And you’ve heard nothing from him since? Na. A fine young upstart! And if Yolek will forgive my saying so, or even if he won’t, the son of an upstart too. God only knows what must have driven him to do a crazy thing like that. Why not tell me what happened right from the word go.”
“My son has disappeared,” said Yolek, gritting his teeth like a man trying to bend an iron bar with his bare hands, “and I’m to blame.”
“Yolek, please,” Srulik intervened warily. “Why cause yourself even more pain with such talk?”
“The man is right,” said Eshkol. “Let’s have no foolishness. And none of your Dostoyevskyizing either, Yolek. It won’t do us any good. I’m sure you’ve already taken all the necessary measures. Let’s wait a few more days and see what happens. I myself have already been in touch with one or two people in the right places and told them in no uncertain terms to treat the matter as if the boy were my own son. Or theirs. And I also went down on my knees before those hooligans from the press and begged them to control themselves and not splash this all over the front page. Maybe they’ll have enough heart to lay off until the boy—what did you say his name was?—comes safely home and all ends happily.”
“Thank you,” said Yolek.
“His name is Yonatan,” Hava was quick to chime in. “You were always a good person. Not like some people I’ve known.”
“That,” joked Eshkol, “is something I wouldn’t mind having from you in writing.”
Hava carried in the tray, and Rimona helped her arrange the refreshments on the plain, square table. With a housewifely fussiness that made Srulik suppress an incipient smile, Hava inquired whether the guests wanted tea or coffee? Sugar or saccharine? Milk or lemon? Cookies, tangerines, orange-and-grapefruit salad, or homemade cream cake? All the while, a large green fly kept banging against the window pane, outside of which a bottle-green day lay drenched in sunshine.
Yolek’s eyes, looking away, fell upon the ancient, bulky brown radio that stood on a low shelf within arm’s reach. He suggested that they listen to the hourly news. By the time the set had warmed up, however, the news was almost at an end. In a speech at Aswan, President Nasser of Egypt had scoffed at the delusions of the Zionist dwarf-state. Opposition leader Menachem Begin had once again accused the government of appeasement and turning the other cheek to the Arabs and called for its replacement by a strongly patriotic government. The weather: continued clearing with possible light rain in the Galilee.
“Business as usual,” sighed Eshkol. “The Arabs curse all of us, while the Jews curse only me. Ah, well, let them enjoy it. They can sound off as much as they like. Between you and me, though, you’re looking at a very tired old man.”
“Then rest,” said Rimona. As if heeding her own advice, she laid her head on the shoulder of Azariah, who was sitting beside her on the couch.
“Enough of this!” said Hava. “Turn off the radio.”
Azariah’s eyes fell upon Yolek’s books, which stood in long rows on their shelves, with photographs tucked here and there among them. Of Yonatan and Amos. Of Yolek with various socialist leaders from all over the world. Of five thistly strawflowers blossoming eternally in a porcelain vase. He felt that there was an unforgettably tormented, Ozymandian majesty about these two old men who never looked each other in the eye, who sat facing each other like two fallen Prometheans, like the ruins of two ancient castles in whose darkest keeps secret life lingered on with all its old battles, its exquisitely refined tortures, its witchcraft and foul play, its nightjars, owls, and bats. Like moss growing over a crack in a wall, an illusory peace stretched its tentacles between these ravaged citadels. Sunk in slumber, their remaining might still filled the room with an aura of palpable grandeur. A secretive, intricate, elusive current ran between them when they talked or even kept silent. The rancor of some old love, the last weary vestiges—like distant, receding thunder—of a great potency that Azariah craved with all his being to touch and be touched by. There must be a way, he thought, of penetrating this fatally charmed circle and rousing them from their repose.
He narrowed his green eyes and fixed them on the Prime Minister in a long, piercing stare of the kind that had the power (so he had once read in some book of Hindu lore) to make a person feel another’s eyes upon him. How desperately he wanted to cast his spell on Eshkol in just this kind of way, to make him look up at him or even speak to him, if only to ask the most banal question—to which his own reply would be so astoundingly momentous that the Prime Minister would want to hear more and still more.
The air of weary authority, the spellbinding ugliness of this man whom Azariah had known until now only from flattering photographs or from unkind cartoons in newspapers—the ham-like, liver-spotted hands resting limply on the arms of a chair, one of them loosely dangling a large, yellowish wrist watch from a frayed band—the swollen, cadaverish fingers—the leathery, lizardlike skin—all of this aroused in him a febrile excitement that was almost carnal.
“Now look here, Eshkol,” said Yolek after a long silence, “this may not be the time or place for it—”
“What’s that? Who? What did you say?” Eshkol, having dozed off, opened his eyes.
“I was saying that this may not be the time or place for it, but I’ve been wanting to tell you for quite a while now that I owe you an apology. For what I said about you at the last meeting. And for other things too. I was too hard on you.”
“As usual,” noted Hava dryly.
Srulik smiled ever so faintly to himself, that secret, slightly melancholy, inscrutably Buddhalike smile arrived at so long ago.
“Azoy,” said Eshkol, the sharp, humorous look in his eyes belying the catnap he had just taken. “Of course you should feel sorry, Reb Yolek. And how you should! And I, quite honestly, should have whipped you to within an inch of your life long ago. So come on now, you bandit, how about the two of us cutting a deal? Suppose you cut out feeling so sorry for yourself and I cut out wanting to punch you in the nose, eh? Gemacht, Yolek? Can we shake on that?” In a different tone of voice, he added, “Stop being such a damn fool.”
Everyone laughed. In the ensuing silence, Srulik put on his suavest smile and suggested politely, “But why not? Azariah and I will move all the furniture aside and you two gentlemen can square off once and for all. Go to it! And take as long as you like!”
“Don’t listen to him,” Rimona said softly. “He was only joking.”
“You sweet girl!” roared Eshkol, pointing a pale, fat finger at her. “Don’t be afraid, krasavitsa. The two of us, I’m sorry to say, are just a pair of old con men who do all our fighting with our mouths. The days are long gone when I could deliver a decent uppercut. And, whatever he says, our friend Yolek here wouldn’t know how to apologize if his life depended on it. In this regard, by the way, he’s just like Ben-Gurion—that is, in excellent company. Thank you, I don’t take sugar. I drink mine plain.”
Don’t be afraid. Now is the time to speak up. About everything. They’ve fallen asleep on their feet. In a burning house, these horrid old godfathers frump around as pleased as punch with themselves, cracking their inspid jokes, so bourgeois you could puke. Burned-out souls, both of them. They’d have been the death of Yoni too if he hadn’t got away just in time to save the bright first principles of his soul. Totally rotten they are from all their wheeling and dealing with shabby little intrigues, the flabby syphilitic old bastards, all bloated and gassy from their own dyspeptic hatreds, lost, creaky-souled Jews who can’t even smell the sea any more, who haven’t seen a star or a sunrise or a sunset or a summer night or a cypress tree swaying in the moonlight for a thousand years, dead Molochs devouring their children, insatiate schemers swamped by stale affections, weaving their hideous spider webs around us, deader than dead. One a big blob who looks like a putrescent dinosaur, the other a stoop-shouldered gorilla with the head of a mangy lion and arms as hairy as a caveman’s. Not even a mad dog would expect any love from these two, would even wag his tail for them. I’ll bang on the table! I’ll make the walls blanch with fright! I’ll flabbergast them down to their bootsoles! I’ll tell them that all is lost, that Yonatan, and they’d better believe it, ran for dear life because he saw the ship going down. How I wish I had a cigarette. Good God, he’s fallen asleep again.
“If I may express an opinion,” said Srulik, “I don’t think the boy has left the country. I can’t prove it, but something tells me he’s alive and well and wandering about right here in Israel with no clear destination in mind. Which of us has never secretly thought of dropping everything and taking off just as he did?”
“Mazel tov!” snorted Yolek, his face the very mirror of disgust. “A new psychologist is born. Before you know it, he’ll be defending the latest Tatar fashion of doing your own thing too.” For some reason or other, he’d chosen to pronounce the word “psychologist.”
“Comrade Eshkol,” said Hava. “Why do you think he took a gun with him?”
The Prime Minister let out a sigh. His eyes closed behind their thick lenses, as if Hava’s question were the final straw. Ponderous, much too big for his chair, dominating the room without a word or even a gesture, his shirt hanging out over his carelessly buckled belt, his shoes spattered with mud, his face like a knotty whorl in the bark of a hoary olive tree, the weary old sea-turtle finally managed to reply, almost in a whisper, “That’s a hard one, Hava. And not only that. Everything seems hard nowadays. Not that I’m drawing analogies, but everybody seems to want to reach for a gun. Something’s gone wrong somewhere. Maybe our whole way of thinking had a fatal flaw hidden in it right from the start. But you mustn’t think I came here to burden you with my own problems. On the contrary, I wanted to cheer you up. And now, without meaning to, I’ve just rubbed salt in your wounds. All any of us can do these days, I guess, is to grit our teeth and plug away and keep on hoping. No, thank you, young beauty, no more tea for me. I can’t drink another drop, even though that first cup was heavenly. On the contrary, I have to be off at once. Actually, I was just passing by here on my way to the Upper Galilee. Tonight I’m sleeping in Tiberias, and tomorrow I’m supposed to have a look at the Syrian border and hear what all my clever generals have to say about the situation. And also listen to some of our good people who live up there and, so help me, do what I can to encourage them. The Devil alone knows with what. The truth is, I don’t know whom to believe any more and whom to trust. Everyone talks like a prophet and acts like a comedian. I’m not kidding when I say it’s just one big comedy wherever I go. Yolek, you joker, stop looking at me like that. The big genius. His own skin he saves and leaves me holding the bag. The Devil only knows what they’re cooking up for us in those palaces in Damascus, much less how we can keep from eating crow. My handsome generals have a unanimous one-word answer, and they serenade me with it all day long: Bang! And to tell the truth, when all the pros and cons are toted up, I tend to agree that it’s time we let them have it in the teeth even if Ben-Gurion—and perhaps you too behind my back—keeps telling everyone I’m a senile old man. Ah well! Thanks for the tea, Hava. God bless you all. And let’s hope we’ll be hearing good news soon. How old did you say the boy was?”
“Twenty-seven. This is his wife, Rimona. And the young man next to her is a friend. Our younger son is serving in the paratroops. It was good of you to trouble yourself to come.”
“I’ll have him sent home right away. Your younger son, I mean, of course. If you’ll just jot down his name and unit on a piece of paper for me you’ll have him back before the night is out. I’m sorry, but those shmendriks in the car outside are sure to be swearing at me for being, as they say, behind schedule. You needn’t envy me, Yolek. You’re welcome to both the honor and the power. I’m worse off than a slave, and little children do lead me. If I’m in their good graces tomorrow afternoon on my way back from the Galilee, perhaps they’ll allow me to stop by here again. Maybe it will all have ended happily by then, and we can hug the lost lamb and think aloud together how we can set things right. Be well!”
He rose heavily from his chair, stretched himself to his full height and bulk, groaned, and reached out with an ugly hand to pat Yolek on the shoulder and Hava on the cheek. Putting an arm around Rimona, he added, as if for her ear alone, “My heart goes out to you, my friends. At most, I can have only the tiniest inkling of what you must be going through. In any case, you have my solemn word we’ll do all that is humanly possible to get the boy back to you. And now tell me, krasavitsa, were you really and truly afraid that Yolek and I were about to slug it out? Na, let me give the bandit a good hug so you can see for yourself how we feel. And goodbye to you too, young man. Don’t get up, for heaven’s sake! Yolek, be strong. And you too, Hava. And cheer up, my dear young woman. You’ll have your true love back in your arms soon enough. Goodbye to you all.”
“Your Excellency,” burst out Azariah, making a sudden dash for the doorway to block the guest’s path with his own skinny frame. Like a raw recruit coming to attention, he drew himself up stiffly with his hands at his sides. His voice, tinged with both arrogance and despair, quivered with his challenge. “Mr. Prime Minister, sir, if you’ll permit me just two minutes of your time, I have an observation to make. I know that it says in the Bible that the poor man’s wisdom is despised, but I’m sure Your Excellency must also remember the verse just before that one. All I’m asking for is two minutes.”
“Speak now or forever hold thy peace,” said Eshkol, coming to a halt. He smiled and his entire expression underwent a change. It was that of a warmhearted, good-natured, venerable Russian peasant stretching out a gnarled hand to stroke the mane of a frightened colt. “Ask for half of my kingdom, young man, and it shall be yours.”
“Mr. Prime Minister. You’ll have to excuse me, but I want you to know that you haven’t heard the whole truth.”
“I haven’t?” replied Eshkol patiently, leaning slightly toward the trembling young man.
“No, Mr. Prime Minister, sir. You’ve been misled. Perhaps not deliberately, perhaps only out of respect for your station, but misled all the same. A minute ago you said, sir, that you didn’t understand how it was possible for her to be left alone. I’m referring to Rimona.”
“Well?”
“That isn’t true, sir. It’s just a front. Everything you’ve heard here is a front. As you yourself said, sir, you’ve been watching a comedy. The truth is that Rimona has not been left alone. Not for a single minute. As usual, Mr. Prime Minister, you’ve been lied to.”
“Azariah!” snapped Yolek Lifshitz, crackling with anger. “That will be enough out of you!”
“I’m afraid,” said Srulik gingerly, “Comrade Eshkol is in a hurry. We have no right to detain him.”
“Your Honor,” insisted Azariah, leaning forward as if he were about to throw himself off a cliff. “I promise not to detain you, sir, for any more than exactly forty seconds. Haste, as they say, killed the bear. And it’s your right to be in possession of all the relevant information so that you can consider the matter rationally and come to your own conclusions. Yonatan Lifshitz, sir, was the only friend I ever had. He was a big brother to me. In Russian you say, ‘A friend in need is a friend indeed.’ Maybe, sir, you’ve forgotten what it means to be someone’s blood brother. Through hell and high water. Till death do us part. Never mind who I am. Let’s even say I’m a fink. Or a clown. That’s all strictly beside the point, so to speak. Perhaps I’m just a poor slob. But that’s what people call you too, sir. Behind your back, of course. What you have to know, Mr. Prime Minister, is that Yonatan set out to look for the meaning of his life. Not the meaning. The purpose. He did so because every last one of us is born free. Nobody is public property. Or the property of his parents, or of his wife, or of his kibbutz, or even—please excuse me, Your Excellency, if I’m being presumptuous—the property of the state of Israel. Truth before manners. The fact is that an individual belongs only to himself, if even that. That’s what Jewish ethics have to say about the matter, and we Jews, sir, have made that principle into a universal rule. You surely don’t need to be reminded of our prophets and all that. So what’s wrong with his having decided to go off somewhere? Is that a crime? And if he preferred not to leave a forwarding address, what law did he break? I can’t believe, sir, that all of life is like being in the army. He just wanted to go away. It’s as simple as that. So why don’t you call off your dogs? This isn’t a matter for state jurisdiction. Your Honor, too—I heard this from Yolek himself—ran away from home to come to Israel. I’m sorry if ‘ran away’ sounds invidious. I’ll take it back if you’d like. But nothing else. And in one of your debates with Mr. Ben-Gurion, sir, you said in so many words that a man’s personal decisions must be honored. That was concerning one’s relationship to the party, I’m sure you remember it, sir. Yonatan went where he did of his own free will, knowing exactly what he was doing, and before he left, he entrusted to me—or rather, I should say, he gave me—his wife. So that now she’s mine. I admit that, morally speaking, Hava and Yolek are my parents, and that Srulik is also like a father to me too, but the truth comes first. They have no right to hound Yoni and no right to demand of me that I give up my woman. There’s a limit to making concessions. A red line, so to speak. I’m quoting what you, Mr. Prime Minister, said the day before yesterday in the Knesset, and you were one-hundred-percent right. As you generally are, sir, because it’s not you, but Mr. Ben-Gurion, who is the enemy of freedom. We don’t live in a jungle. We live in a Jewish state. You should be consistent, Your Excellency. Meaning that you should back me up on this. Because she’s mine. De facto, of course., not do jure. This isn’t a matter for the police, or for the law, or even, with all due respect, sir, for the Prime Minister and Minister of Defense. No one can try to take her from me. Please explain that to them, Mr. Prime Minister, before you leave. Tell them the facts. And since you’re on your way to the Syrian border, where you’ll be fed all kinds of lies, or at most a lot of half-truths, let me suggest to you—”
“Azariah! That’s quite enough of your buffoonery. Stop it at once.”
“Comrade Yolek! Comrade Srulik, Hava, Mr. Prime Minister, I’ll have to ask you please to stop trying to silence me, because with all due respect I’m afraid I’m the only person in this country who’s willing to tell the whole truth. I’ve already promised not to take more than a minute or two of your time, and I won’t. What do you all take me for? A chiseler? A cheat? You know they don’t come any more idealistic than me. And what are two minutes? No more time than it takes to skin a cat. To get to the point, Mr. Prime Minister, I have to warn you that you’ve been sold a bill of goods, so to speak. If you’d like, I’ll be happy to say a few words about the Syrians, and Nasser, and the Arabs in general, and the Russians too. You can either hear me out or not, sir, and afterwards, of course, you’re free to decide what the country should do about it.”
“The boy is a tragic case,” apologized Hava. “He’s a Holocaust survivor whom we’ve tried to take in here. Naturally, it hasn’t been easy, but we haven’t given up on him either.”
“Hava,” interrupted Yolek. “Please be so kind as to stay out of it. There’s no need to explain. Eshkol can manage without your help.”
The Prime Minister made a weary gesture but did not alter his engagingly warm smile.
“Never mind. Those shmendriks out there can wait in the car a little longer. They don’t own me yet. And the Upper Galilee is not about to run away. Let’s let the young troubadour finish his ballad, but he’ll have to stop calling me Your Excellency and to talk a language a man can understand. Don’t be afraid of me, young fellow. Feel free to speak your mind, but try beating about the bush a little less.”
“But the Galilee will run away, sir!” Azariah cried out. “The Galilee, and the Negev, and all the rest. There’s going to be a war. We’ll be taken by surprise, fallen upon as in a pogrom. They’re already sharpening their knives. That’s why Yonatan walked out of here with a gun in his hand. It can break out at any time.”
“Zaro,” said Rimona. “Don’t get worked up.”
“You keep out of this, Rimona. Can’t you see that it’s me against the whole world? Does the woman I love have to take their side too? I’ve warned Comrade Eshkol that there’s a war on the way and that even if we win, it will be the beginning of the end. I’ve said what I have to say. Now I’ll keep my mouth shut.”
“You know,” said Eshkol, “the boy may be right. Down in my gut the whole thing scares me, and I don’t want to win any war. Ah well! A fat lot of good we’ve done each other today. What did you say your name was, young man?”
“Gitlin. Gitlin, Azariah. And I pity us all.”
“You do? Perhaps you would be so good as to tell us why we’re all so deserving of your pity?” A mischievous glint flashed behind Eshkol’s thick lenses.
“Quite simply, sir, you’ll need all the pity you can get,” continued Azariah, “because this country is surrounded on all sides by such bottomless pits of hatred. And has such bottomless pits of loneliness, because no one can stand anyone else. And this, if you ask me—I mean all the loneliness, the backbiting, and the hatred—is not only the very opposite of Zionism, it’s a sure prescription for disaster. No one loves anyone. No one even loves you, sir. They make fun of you behind your back. They say you’re a patsy, a half-and-half, a sell-out, a nebbish, a sissy, a finagler. They talk about you like Nazis. Even using anti-Semitic language. A shylock. A hymie. A cheap Jew politician. That’s how they talk about me too. Don’t you interrupt me, Comrade Yolek! You should be glad I haven’t told Eshkol the things you say about him. And I pity you too because everyone hates you as well. There are people on this kibbutz for whom you couldn’t die too soon. Most of Kibbutz Granot, and even one or two people here in this room, call you Yolek the Monster. They even say it was you that Yoni was running away from. So you better let me talk, because I’m the only one on this whole kibbutz, if not in this whole country, who still knows the meaning of compassion. It’s the heart of darkness, I tell you, all this hatred and backbiting. And all along you’ve been lied to and kowtowed to. No one loves anyone, sir, not even on a kibbutz, any more. It’s no wonder Yoni cleared out. The only one who loves all of you is myself, and Rimona loves me and she loves Yoni. When you were tastelessly joking a few minutes ago about knocking each other’s teeth out, you were simply telling the truth. Because you hate each other’s guts. Yolek is green with envy of you, Mr. Eshkol, just as you are green with envy of Mr. Ben-Gurion. If we Jews hate each other so much, why be surprised that the Gentiles hate us? Or the Arabs? Srulik is dying to be Yolek. Yolek would do anything to be Eshkol. Eshkol would give his right arm to be Ben-Gurion. Hava would gladly murder you all if only she could get up the courage to poison your tea. And then there’s Udi and Etan and your son Amos, who do nothing all day but talk about killing the Arabs. This is a snake pit, not a country. A jungle, not a commune. Death, not Zionism. When Hava calls you all murderers, she knows what she’s talking about because she knows the truth about every one of you. Not that that makes her less of a murderess herself. She’d kill me right here and now if she could, like a bug. And that’s all I am. But not a murderer. No, sir. Maybe you’ve forgotten that Rimona and Yoni had a baby girl, Efrat. She died because death has been rampant here. But I’ll give them a new child. Rimona and I still haven’t forgotten what love is. And it’s only because I love you all so much that I’m telling you there’ll be a war soon and that the writing is already on the wall.”
“Amen,” said Eshkol, his smile frozen on his sallow face. “Faithful are the wounds of a friend. I’m afraid that for the moment, however, I’ll have to waive the right of reply. Should you ever find yourself in Jerusalem, young man, drop by and we’ll pick each other’s brains. And now, be well, all of you. If the prodigal son turns up, please be so good as to inform me at once, even if it’s the middle of the night. As for writings on the wall and all that, I never did put much stock in them. I say build our strength, keep a stiff upper lip, and go on hoping. God bless you all. Goodbye.”
On his way out, the Prime Minister absentmindedly patted Azariah, who had finally stepped aside from the door to let him pass, twice on the back. He was flanked by two good-looking, smoothly shaven young bodyguards, who, with their blond, American-style crewcuts and wide, conservative ties appeared to be cut from the same cloth. The wires of their earplugs vanished discreetly into the collars of their blue suits. They opened and shut the doors of the car, which departed immediately.
“Come with me, Azariah,” said Srulik. “I want to have a talk with you right now.”
Amused but excited, Yolek objected. “What’s wrong? Frankly I’m delighted Eshkol was subjected to that fusillade. It couldn’t have done him a bit of harm when you think of that crowd of apple-polishers and diplomaed scoundrels he’s surrounded with. Azariah gave him some piss and vinegar to drink, and it did my old heart good. Leave the boy alone, will you? Come over here, Azariah, you’ve earned yourself a shot of brandy. Bottoms up! To the health of the Devil! Quiet, Hava. Nobody asked you. The murderers are having a little nip. Did you get a good look at Eshkol? Why, it frightened me just to watch his face. He looks like death warmed over. Don’t listen to her, Rimon’ka! Leave that bottle where I can reach it. And a cigarette might be a good idea now too.”
“You’re lunatics,” said Hava. “All of you.”
“Zaro has a fever,” said Rimona. “So does Srulik. Yolek’s heart is bad. And Hava hasn’t slept a wink for two days. We’ve been talking for a whole hour, and now we should all rest.”
She cleared the table, wiped it, and left the room to do the dishes. At that very moment, the front door opened again and another visitor walked in.