Yonatan was sure that Rimona was unaffected by most of what she saw and heard. I might as well be living with some expensive painting, he thought angrily, or with a governess training me to be forever content. To banish such thoughts, he would resort to the words “my wife.” This is my wife, he would whisper to himself. This is Rimona, my wife. This is my wife, Rimona. But the words “my wife” seemed to belong elsewhere—to families of long standing, to the movies, to houses full of children, bedrooms, kitchens, and maids—not to Rimona, who cared about nothing, unless perhaps tribal amulets from Swaziland, and that only when half-asleep, because at heart all things were the same to her. My wife. She has my old brown jacket on the brain again and now it’s wet.

“Listen. Rimona. Maybe enough is enough.”

“Yes. I’m almost done. I’ve taken it out in the shoulders. Would you like to try it on?”

“No way. I’ve already told you a thousand times that rag should be thrown into the garbage. Or given to that Italian.”

“Fine.”

“What’s fine?”

“Give it to the Italian.”

“So why did you spend the whole evening working on it?”

“I was mending it.”

“Why the hell did you have to mend it when I kept telling you I’d never wear it?”

“You saw yourself. It was torn in two places.”

After the ten o’clock news Yonatan stepped out on the little porch to smoke a last cigarette. By its small, round glow he could see how light, and yet how persistent, the rain was. He liked to feel the cold against his skin and inhale the damp smell of saturated earth. It was too dark to see the ground. He stood there waiting, knowing not for what. He felt sorry for his brother Amos, who might be with his buddies on this awful night setting up an ambush for Arab infiltrators behind the rocks at the mouth of some wadi near the border. He felt sorry, too, for the baby stillborn to Rimona at the end of the summer. No one had ever told them what had been done with her. Yet somewhere out there in that darkness, in the thick mud, lay the little body whose curious stirrings deep in her mother’s womb he had felt with the flat of his palm only five months before. Again there came the sound of muffled barking from afar; where, if not from the ruins of Sheikh Dahr? Suddenly he knew what had happened: the end of his cigarette had dropped to the floor. The magic of Chad, he exclaimed, much to his own surprise. He bent down to pick up the flickering butt, cast it into the rain, breathed deeply as its tiny glow was extinguished, murmured okay, okay, and stepped back inside the house.