The Rabbi took a packet of tobacco from the pocket of his shirt and began rolling a smoke. He offered his hands toward Frank, who nodded, his thoughts far away.
He finished rolling the one and then the second cigarette. He handed both across toward Frank, who took one.
The Rabbi took a kitchen match from the same pocket of his shirt and struck it on the side rail of the iron cot. The smell of sulfur filled the room.
“Why does it make the heat less?” Frank said. He looked at his cigarette.
“Does it? I think it does. …”
“’F you thought of it …?”
“I think …,” the Rabbi said, “that it distracts us. …”
The men sat there smoking for a moment. Then the Rabbi raised his eyebrows to say, “Well? Shall we continue?” Frank nodded, and they bent over the books, spread open on the cot.
“Zachor,” he said. “To remember. Lecket, to glean. Shamar, to guard. Nagah, to touch.”
He continued. The Rabbi leaned back in his chair, to take his body out of the sun. There was some cool in the wall of the cell, and a small triangle of shade between the wall and the bars.
“Ahav, to love. Shatah, to drink. Hain, favor, or grace. Maskoret, reward. Azav, to leave. Amrim, sheaves. Poal …”
Frank’s thought went back to the trial, as always. Not his arrest, or the assault that day on the streets, not his incarceration, but the trial.
“Was I naive?” he thought, as part of his mind thought most of the day, every day; and, “Was ever anyone so naive?” He rebelled at the presence of the other man in his cell, as if, now, as his thoughts recurred to the trial, the other man were witnessing his degradation.
He looked at the shadow on the floor. The window bars, across the joint in the flooring, told an angle of thirty degrees, or two o’clock. In half an hour the Rabbi would leave. But how, he wondered, could he get through the half hour?
“Yes …?” the other man said.
Now the cigarette was hot, burnt to his fingers, and the smoke was hot in his lungs. He took the coffee can and pushed the butt into the sand in it and held it toward the other man, who shook his head and then inclined it toward the book, to say, “Let us continue.”
Frank was overcome, at that moment, by his hatred of the Rabbi—by furious, overwhelming hatred for him and for all that he represented.
“No,” he thought. “No. Wait. No. Wait. What am I going to do now? Kill him? What? Kill? Measly little Jew. Sour sweat. What is he, sweating into his cheap suit?
“Why doesn’t he take his coat off?”
The Rabbi was speaking.
“What?” Frank said. “What …?”
“Moledet,” the man said.
“What …?”
“Moledet.”
“Birth. Birth.” Frank said. “Birth. Kindred.”