Every morning they rose early to go to the tractor shed, returning only at nightfall because there was plenty of work. Then they would shower, drink cold tea or coffee, and sometimes play a game of chess. Azariah won as a rule, though sometimes they adjourned midway. Seated at the chess table pondering a move, Yonatan, with his black beard, slightly sunken eyes, and a cast of new-found seriousness about the mouth, resembled a young scholar of proud old rabbinical stock who was studying to become a rabbi. Yolek, however, in one of his rare moments of lucidity, made a face and muttered, “Yoh. Azoy vi a vilde chayeh.” “Yes, like a wild animal.” Yolek’s hearing aid was gathering dust. Most of the day he would sit in the garden and at dusk they would push him in the wheelchair back into the house.

For a day or two, it seemed, he had a new pastime: Bolognesi gave him knitting lessons. Yet after completing ten or twenty rows of stitches he had had enough. Most of the time he slept. He would doze sitting up and even at bedtime he would refuse to lie down. With a throw over his knees, a drop hanging from the tip of his nose, and spittle drying in the corners of his mouth, Yolek could sit sleeping for nearly twenty-four hours a day.

On summer nights Prime Minister Eshkol would sit up long after midnight in his Jerusalem office, his secretaries gone home, the night operator dozing off by the telephone, his bodyguard on the couch by the entrance, city lights shimmering in the windows, heavy trucks growling outside. Leaning his elbows on his desk piled high with documents and letters, the Prime Minister would bury his face in his hands. At last his chauffeur would appear and politely suggest, “Excuse me, sir, perhaps we’d better go home.”

“Right you are, yunger mann,” Eshkol would reply. “Geendikt. Let’s go home. What more is there to do here?”

At the end of that summer Azariah and Yoni decided to make their own wine for the winter to come. Yoni hauled ten crates of muscatel grapes from the vineyard. Azariah rolled home an old barrel he found behind Bolognesi’s metal shop. The two of them pressed the fruit, strained the juice, and added just the right amount of sugar. The must was left to ferment. When the time came, they siphoned the cloudy liquid from the barrel tap into empty soda bottles.

Rimona had grown heavy. Sometimes she would bump her shoulder against a door or run into a table. Frequently, when she started to ask for something, she would immediately forget what it was. Twice a week Hava would come to clean up the apartment. She did all the baking and took care of the laundry. Occasionally she would sit with them for a while after her chores were done, though she never seemed to know what to say.