With a lazy desert feeling trickling like wine through every cell of your body. And a smile winking on and off inside you. I shook them. I did it. There’s no one to tell me what I can or can’t do any more. If I want to go, I can go. If I want to stay, I can stay. If I want to mow them all down, I can do it with one beautiful burst and vanish into the desert forever. Just three hundred yards from here. The magic of Chad. And this is just the beginning.

A Bedouin was standing by the counter, a lean, bony, swarthy man in a striped robe and over it a tattered suit jacket. His long, dark fingers were crawling with lizardlike life. In a silken Hebrew he asked for a pack of cheap cigarettes. The counterman, apparently a friend of his, an excitable-looking Jew with a Rumanian accent and a rumpled plain white shirt beneath a checked apron, laid a pack of cigarettes on the sticky marble counter, swarming with flies. Adding a box of matches, he volunteered, “Go on and take ’em, they’re on the house.” A single gold tooth flashed in his mouth when he smiled. “Nu, vus hert zach, ya Ouda? Keif el hal?” “What’s doing down your way these days?”

The Bedouin weighed the question at length, as if deliberating how it might be answered with no slight to either the truth or good manners. At last he said modestly, “We are doing okay, praise God.”

“And that sorghum of yours, it’s okay too?” asked the counterman, who sounded disappointed. “That sorghum of yours that they confiscated, you think you’ll get it back in the end?”

The Bedouin was occupied with making a small rectangular incision just big enough to remove one cigarette from a corner of the pack. Then he tapped the bottom of the pack with a stiff finger as though performing a parlor trick, and a cigarette popped up like a gun muzzle in front of the counterman’s eyes. “That sorghum? Maybe yes, maybe no. Help yourself, please, Mr. Gotthilf. T’fadal. Have a smoke.”

At first the counterman declined with an ineffably Jewish gesture that signified, What, me smoke one of those? A moment later, however, with a second gesture that meant, Ah well, if I have to, I have to, he accepted the gift, thanked the Bedouin, and stuck it behind his ear. Then, after pulling down the handle of the espresso machine, he pushed a little plastic cup of coffee across the counter, sending a flurry of excitement through the convocation of impolitic flies. “Efsher you’ll tishrab, ya Ouda? How about some coffee? And why don’t we sit down for a few minutes and you tell me the gantse mayse of the sorghum. Maybe I can put in a good word for you when I see Major Elbaz?”