Bolognesi sat on his bed, his back erect. One ear was torn. His lips moved as if in prayer. Twenty years had passed since the day he beheaded his brother’s fiancée with an ax. Although the details of the story were not known to the kibbutz, everyone had his own version, all equally gory and all totally contradictory. Though quiet, well-behaved, and useful, a man who had not harmed a fly since the day of his arrival, the looks of him—jaws tightly clenched like a wretch who has eaten something foul and can neither swallow nor spit it out—gave the women and children bad dreams.

For all his having become a pious Jew while in prison, his religious observance had lapsed, and he devoted himself now to the art of fine knitting for these very same children and young women of the kibbutz. He never took a day off from work, never got sick, and refused to accept any pocket money. No one from outside the kibbutz ever came to visit him, nor, except on official business, did any of its members ever drop by to see him in his shack. No one had anything more to say to him than a perfunctory “Good evening,” “How are you?” “How’s it going?” or “Thanks for the lovely new scarf.” To which he would reply, “Why do the heath’m thank’a me when I have quiet’a my soul?”

Now on these cold winter nights Bolognesi sat by himself in his tumbledown, tarpaper shack, listening to the rain beat down on the roof. Often he had been asked to move to a small bachelor room, and each time he had mumbled a refusal, though the singles committee had voted to give him a kerosene heater, an old radio, a reproduction of Van Gogh sunflowers, an electric kettle, a black plastic cup, and a ration of instant coffee. At the moment he was busy knitting a red shawl for Anat Shneour in a bold Spanish style. The needles flew in his hands. The heater crackled on the floor. In low, monotonous tones he droned on and on, “I moan’a and make’a complaint. Horror overwhelm’a me like’a water off’a da sea. Selah. Yea, though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil.”

It was pouring again. The deluge battered the tin roof and slashed at the wooden walls. Thunderclap followed thunderclap, as if a mighty tank battle were being fought in another world.

Bolognesi rose from his seat. With steps as dainty as Dresden china, he went to the window and with his prim fists beat frantically on the pane.

11