Rimona and Yonatan continued to sit opposite each other in silence, the darkness deepening all around them. Treetops stirred noisily as though raided by an ax. A frightened lowing of cows could be heard through the shriek of the wind. Yonatan suddenly thought of the abandoned Arab village of Sheikh Dahr. This very night, the downpour might be crumbling the last of its earthen hovels, dust to dust, the ruins of its low stone walls might be surrendering at last, a loose stone toppling down, earthward in the darkness, after twenty years of clinging to its mates. There couldn’t be a soul on the hills of Sheikh Dahr on a night like this, not one stray dog, not a single bird. What a perfect hideout for a murderer like Bolognesi or Benyamin Trotsky. Or me. No one there. Only stillness and the dark and winter winds. Only the smashed minaret of the mosque, twisted like the trunk of a felled tree. A nest of killers, they told us in our childhood. A den of bloody bandits. And once it was leveled, they told us we could sleep in peace at night. The minaret from which they sniped right into the kibbutz had been sliced in two halfway up by a direct mortar hit, a hit, so they say, that was aimed by the commander-in-chief of the Jewish forces himself.