They bandaged me up and gave me a shot and said as you’d say to a child, “Take it easy, Yoni, take it easy, Yoni,” but I couldn’t take it easy because I couldn’t stop laughing. Someone said, “This man’s in shock too. Give him ten cc.’s to calm him down.” But even in the ambulance on the way to hospital as they kept asking me to calm down, to get a grip on myself, to tell them where it hurt, I lay on the stretcher and roared with laughter so hard that I began to choke. “Look at him,” I gasped, “he’s done for! Just look at him! He’s done for!” all the way to the hospital. Then they put me to sleep for the operation and after that they published a story in the army magazine; I remember the title exactly: “Wounded Soldier Saves Comrade’s Life.”

That joker, the old-timers say when they talk about him, from three feet away he managed to miss a bull. And a bull, mind you, isn’t a matchbox. But he managed to miss it, and, believe it or not, today he’s the owner and president of the Esplanada Hotel chain in Miami Beach, Florida, where he lives like a lord.

After supper, Yonatan and Rimona returned home from the dining room. He couldn’t remember what his mother Hava had asked him when she came over to their table at the end of their meal. He could only recall saying that tonight was out of the question.

The two of them stood for several minutes by the heater to thaw out. They were so close that her oulder grazed his arm. He was enough taller than she to look down on her rain-drenched hair falling gently over her shoulders, the left one rather than the right. Had he wished, he could have stroked it. But he stooped and turned up the flame of the heater instead.

The room was lit as usual by the reddish-brown light cast by the heavy lamp shade. Everything was in its place. Everything was neat and tidy. Rimona had even folded the newspaper and stashed it on the low shelf where it belonged. Even the floor tiles gave off a subtle scent of cleanliness. Tia lay sprawled by the heater. It would have seemed a house at perfect peace had it not been for the crying of a child from the next-door apartment.

“These walls,” said Rimona.

“What’s wrong?”

“They’re so thin. You’d think they were made out of paper.”

It seemed a meaningful kind of crying, neither a whine nor a tantrum, as if the child beyond the wall had broken some toy that he loved and knew he alone was to blame. A woman sought to soothe him. Only the tone of her voice reached Yonatan and Rimona; the words could not be made out.