She showered and changed clothes while the water boiled in the electric kettle. Slim, shapely, and clean in a red sweater and blue corduroy pants, she served the coffee and cake. She looked like a shy schoolgirl with her long, light, freshly washed hair, enveloped in a bitter scent of almond soap and shampoo. They sat in the twin armchairs, facing each other, letting the music from the radio fill the silence. After that came music from a record, the throbbing, sensual beat of the African bush.

Even at the best of times Rimona and Yonatan spoke sparingly to each other, and then only when they had to. Quarreling had long since become pointless. Rimona was gathered in her own thoughts, her feet tucked under her, her hands pulled back into the sleeves of her sweater. She looked like a lonely little girl freezing on a park bench in winter.

“When the rain stops, I’ll go out for more kerosene. The tank’s nearly empty,” she offered, breaking the silence.

Yonatan stubbed out his cigarette on the side of a copper ashtray.

“Don’t. I’ll get it. I have to talk to Shimon anyway.”

“Why don’t you give me your jacket so I can tighten the buttons while you’re out?”

“But you spent a whole evening tightening the buttons just a week ago.”

“That was your new jacket. I want to fix the old one, your brown one.”

“Do me a favor, Rimona. Leave that old rag alone. It’s falling apart. Either throw the goddamn thing out or give it to the Italian. He makes coffee for me every morning and even thanks me for it.”

“Yoni, you’re not going to give that jacket to anybody. I can fix it, just take it out a bit in the shoulders, and you can still wear it to work to keep you warm.”

Yonatan said nothing. He emptied a matchbox onto the table, tried making a simple geometric pattern, swept it away, made another, more complicated pattern, and swept that one away too. He gathered up the matches and returned them neatly to their box. A cracked old, bone-dry, mocking voice rasped within him: That joker, he couldn’t even hit the side of a bull from three feet away. “But Their Hearts Were Not True.” Yonatan recalled the only possible answer.

“I’ll mend it,” Rimona persisted. “You can wear it to work.”

“Oh, great!” said Yonatan. “It’ll be a sensation. I’ll show up for work one morning in a sport jacket. Maybe I’ll wear a tie too, put a white handkerchief in my breast pocket like a secret agent, cut my hair short as my father has been nagging me to do. Can you hear, Rimona, how strong that wind is!”

“The wind may be strong, but the rain has stopped.”