At the end of the day Yonatan would return home, shower, and dress in warm, clean clothes, light the kerosene heater, and sit down with the paper. By four or four-fifteen the winter light would start to dim, but it was twilight by the time Rimona arrived from the laundry and put coffee and cake on the table. Sometimes he would wash the mugs and plates as soon as they finished their coffee. Occasionally, while changing a burned-out light bulb or fixing a leaky shower tap, he might answer a question she asked or listen wearily as she answered one of his.

One evening, on the radio news, a certain Rabbi Nachtigall talked about religious revival. He used the phrase “a desert wasteland and a wilderness.” For the rest of that night, and, indeed, through the next day, Yonatan absentmindedly recited these words as if they were a mantra: The magic of wilderness. The wasteland of Chad. The desert of Chad. The magic of wasteland. Breathe deep, friend, he told himself, and calm down. You’ve got all the time in the world between now and Wednesday.

Tia, his brownish-gray German shepherd, spent the winter days sprawled on the floor by the heater. No longer young, she seemed to suffer from rheumatism in cold weather. In a couple of places her coat had grown threadbare, like a worn-out rug. Sometimes she would open her eyes abruptly and look at him so tenderly that it made him blink. Then she would sink her teeth into her thigh or into her paws to get rid of some invisible pest, and rise with a shake of her coat, which seemed at least a size too large for her. Her ears flattened, she would cross the room and collapse again by the heater, sighing and shutting one eye, although her tail would go on twitching for a moment before it, too, fell silent. Then her other eye would shut, and she would look for all the world as if she were asleep.

Tia developed sores behind her ears, which soon filled with pus, and the veterinarian, who visited the kibbutz twice a month to check its cows and sheep, had to be consulted. He prescribed a salve and also a white powder that was to be mixed with milk and given her to drink. It was hard to get her to swallow it. He had to postpone it again. From time to time he would go over the words he had prepared for Rimona. But what words? The wasteland of Chad? Picks up and goes?