I’m writing these last lines standing up, without taking off my coat, hat, or scarf. I’m wide awake. In fact, I have an urge to go back out and stroll some more, perhaps even join Stutchnik and help him with the night milking as I used to do twenty years ago. We could harmonize our baritones again to some old poem of Bialik’s or Tshernichovsky’s set to music. Anything to avoid talking, because we have talked more than enough.

Yes, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. I’m going to make the rounds once more. It’s been a long, complicated day, and who knows what’s in store for me tomorrow. Tonight’s report is done. And so I’ll say to myself, good night, Secretary Srulik.

17

His rifle dangled from his shoulder, his day-old beard was powdered with gray dust; his bloodshot eyes squinted in the harsh light. It took almost a quarter of an hour of wandering among the shacks and tents of Ein-Husub before Yonatan finally found the kitchen, where he wolfed down four thick slices of bread spread with jam and margarine, three hard-boiled eggs, and two cups of what passed for coffee. Surreptitiously making off with a can of sardines and half a loaf of bread for the trip ahead, he returned to Michal’s room, lay down on her rumpled bed, and, drenched in sweat, slept for over an hour. In the end, the flies and the suffocating heat roused him. He got up, stepped outside, stripped to the waist, stuck his head and shoulders beneath a faucet, and let its warm, rusty water run over him. Then, his rifle and knapsack at his feet, he sat down behind an empty corrugated lean-to. He spread two maps side by side on the sand in the shade of its asbestos wall, weighted their corners with stones against the desert wind, and began to study them. He also leafed through the booklet entitled Sites in the Arava and the Desert that he had taken from Michal’s shelf.

The route seemed simple enough. He would hitch to a spot just before Bir-Meliha. From there, in the twilight, it would be two-and-a-half kilometers by foot to the unmarked border running along the bed of Wadi Araba. He’d follow this bed in a northeasterly direction until he reached the mouth of Wadi Musa. Then a brisk walk up the wadi through the night.