Once, when I was a boy, I went by myself to Sheikh Dahr to look for the buried treasure of gold coins that was supposed to be under the floor of the sheikh’s house. I began to pull up the painted green tiles to look beneath them for the secret steps that led to the hiding place. Shaking with fear, because of the owls, the bats, the ghosts lurking there at night to choke you from behind with their thin fingers, I kept on digging but all I found was strange gray dust like the ashes of an ancient fire and a wide rotten board. I pulled it to one side, and beneath were old harnesses, a threshing sled, some bits of an old wooden plow, and still more dust. I dug on until evening came and some ghastly bird screeched. Then I took off. I ran down the hill but made a wrong turn at the fork in the wadi and had to run back through all those crumbling houses and out into those fields full of thorns, past the hoary old olive trees—and I ran and ran till I reached the old quarry. Far-off jackals were howling. Close by I was only a boy and those dead old villagers were thirsty for blood, for a bloodbath like those Syrian doctors, I was out of breath, and all I had to show from Sheikh Dahr in the end was a stitch in my chest and that terrible fear and sadness that keeps eating you, that keeps nibbling and gnawing at your soul to get up right away and go look for some sign of life in the wasteland, that endless rain that keeps falling outside in the dark and won’t stop all night long or tomorrow or ever after. That’s been my whole life. I don’t have any other. The one I have keeps rushing by, and right now I’m being paged to get up and go because who will give me back the time that I’ve lost and what if I arrive too late?

Yonatan stood up. His hairy hand groped for the light switch. When he found it at last and turned on the light, he blinked for a moment, frightened, or perhaps amazed, by the strange circuit connecting his will, the white switch on the wall, the yellow light on the ceiling. He sat down again and turned toward his wife.

“You’re falling asleep.”

“I’m embroidering,” she replied. “By springtime we’ll have a nice new tablecloth.”

“Why didn’t you turn on the light?”

“I saw that you were thinking and I didn’t want to disturb you.”

“It’s only a quarter to five,” said Yonatan, “and we have to turn on the lights. As in Scandinavia. Or in that taiga or tundra we learned about in school. Do you remember the taiga, the tundra, Rimona?”

“Are they in Russia?” asked Rimona carefully.