It would be late at night before he finally emerged from the Prime Minister’s office. Shapely secretaries would exchange whispers as he passed, his shoulders slightly stooped, his face exhibiting neither pride nor triumph, but responsibility tempered by sadness.

And one day Yolek Lifshitz, the secretary of Kibbutz Granot, would say to his friend Hava, “Well? Who was it who discovered our Azariah, eh? It was me, that’s who, although I was nearly dumb enough to chuck him down the stairs. I’ll never forget how he turned up here that winter night, a shady-looking character if ever there was one, and wetter than a drowned cat. Just look what’s become of him now!”

The one thing Azariah did not think about was the work awaiting him in the tractor shed the next day. Since he had failed, after a desultory search, to find the light switch, the dusty, naked bulb still shone feebly from the ceiling. A haze settled over his mind. Unable to get warm beneath the thin woolen blanket, he lay shivering from the cold. Sometime after midnight he heard a monotonous chant from the other side of the plywood partition, a kind of shrill prayer or incantation in a language that was neither Hebrew nor anything else, its accents guttural like the desert’s and as though risen from the depths of some evil slumber:

“Why do the heath’m rage ’n’ people imag’m vain things ’bout God ’n’ ’bout His Messiah … He was lowly ’n’ we ’steemed ’m not … He was more hon’lable than thirty but he ’tained not to Thee … And King David ’pointed ’m over his guard … Asael brother of Yo-o-av … ’n’ his cousin Elha-a-nan … ’n’ Helez the Paltite … ’n’ Ira son of Ikesh Tekoo-o-ite … ’n’ Zalmon A-hoooo-hite … He was loath’en’d, he had’a no form nor come-leeee-ness….”

Azariah Gitlin got out of bed and tiptoed barefoot to the partition. Through a crack in the plywood he glimpsed a tall, thin man sitting on a low stool, wrapped in a blanket reaching over his head, a needle in each hand and on his knees a ball of red yarn. He was knitting.

Azariah returned to bed and tried cuddling up beneath the blanket. The wind howling outside knifed into the shack through the chinks between the planks, and the rough woolen blanket scratched his skin. Desperately trying to reanimate the magical power of his thoughts he lay there half-awake and half-asleep until nearly morning, longing for the women who would come to love him, comfort him, and wait on him body and soul. Two of them, young and full-bodied, who would be utterly shameless about having him in their power, lying as he was on his back with his eyes shut tight and his heart pounding madly away.

The morning was vile. Misty vapors swirled among the houses. It was biting cold.