“Am I? I might be. Why the hell not? Thanks for this coffee. It’s damn good.”

Just then, as swiftly as flame, a flash of piercing joy shot through him such as he had not felt since he was wounded in the raid on Hirbet Tawfik—a wild, exquisite joy that percolated through every cell of his body to its very nerve endings, that made him feel a sweet tremor in his knees, a warm lump in his throat, a transfixing dilation in his chest, and an allergy of tears in his eyes—for at that exact moment he understood at last where he was going, and what it was that was waiting for him, and why he had taken his gun and was heading south to that place beyond the mountains from which legend had it no one had ever come back alive, and that he would be the first to do so, not only alive but flushed with triumph. And having done the thing that he had to do because it summoned him from the depths of his soul, he would take to the skies and cross the seas. Why hadn’t he done it long ago? Crossed the southeastern border al! by himself, slipped past the Jordanian patrols, eluded the rapacious Bedouin of Wadi Musa, and reached the rose-red cliffs of Petra, the city half as old as time.

Part 2
___________

Spring

12

Wednesday, March 2, 1966, 10:15 p.m.

There was no rain today. And no wind. A clear, fine winter day. And very cold. The windows are shut tight and the electric heater is on, yet the smell of wet leaves, of wet soil permeate the air. The very smells of my childhood. Thirty-six years on this kibbutz haven’t made me any less of a European. Not that I haven’t bronzed in the sun and lost the sickly pallor of my father, a middling Leipzig banker. But I still suffer in the summer and feel more at home here when it rains.

I am ashamed to admit that after all these years intimate contact with all these high-strung Russian-Polish men and women is still a strain for me.