Now and then he would have a chat with Hava too, often talking about his childhood. For some reason he felt the need to tell her things he had never been able, or wanted, to disclose to Yoni, Yolek, Srulik, or even Rimona. About the hungry years on the run in the forests, villages, and snows of Russia, about the freight trains all the way across the Urals, about the filthy cities of Asia and their sweltering steppes. About having no parents. About the horrid old aunt who tyrannized him until she went out of her mind in an immigrants’ camp in Israel. About his years in the army that failed to break him, though he had been humiliated and picked on, because from the time he was little he had believed he had a mission. And about how the winter night he had arrived, Yolek had been so caring toward him, and you, Hava, took me for the first time to the dining hall, and then Yoni came to take me to work the next morning. It made Yoni angry to be told that there was no choice, and angry too that nothing ever happened here, so that one day was just like the next. He used to talk to me about setting out for Bangkok or Karachi, places like that, and couldn’t believe that I was happy to stay put and live in one place. He even laughed at me for being that way and once he almost hit me, but we are brothers all the same. Whenever she asked him where he thought Yonatan was, Azariah could only tell her that Yoni had been unhappy and had gone away to be by himself and perhaps to punish everybody else.

“Oh, you can talk, all right,” Hava would say, with more wistfulness than malice, and pour him a cold soda to drink.

One evening she asked him to play something on his guitar for them, because it would make Yolek happy. Azariah complied with the haunting melody to Tshernichovsky’s “Play, Play Upon My Dreams,” but Yolek gave no sign of hearing a note. Later, Srulik dropped by to say good evening, and when the two men left together, he asked Azariah to serve as an instructor in the summer work camp for city youth. Although Azariah was thrilled, he protested that he had too much work to do already and forced Srulik to take a good five minutes to convince him. That same evening, having found a broken old fan in Etan R.’s room, he took it apart, repaired and reassembled it, and, before going to bed, carried it over to Bolognesi, whose low-ceilinged room was stifling on these hot nights.

Summarizing the day’s events, Srulik wrote in his journal: