“The laws of nature are such,” said Azariah, “that there are no accidents. Whatever happens is necessary and predestined, even slipping on these steps.”

Yonatan did not reply. He neither liked nor trusted words. Yet he was well aware that most people were in need of more love than they ever received and that this sometimes made them try to make friends with total strangers in the most ludicrous ways, including talking too much. He’s like a lost wet puppy, thought Yonatan, wagging not only his tail but his whole rear end to get me to like him and pet him. Fat chance! You’re barking up the wrong tree, pal.

While the two of them passed farm sheds, navigated puddles, and sloshed through mud, the young man kept up his steady stream of talk. Yonatan withdrew from his silence only twice—once to ask the newcomer if he had been born in Israel, and again to inquire if he had ever worked on, or at least had a good look at, a D-6 Caterpillar engine.

Azariah answered no to both questions. He had been born in the Diaspora (it struck Yonatan as odd that he didn’t say “abroad” or simply name the country he had come from) and knew nothing about Caterpillar tractors. Not that it mattered. In his opinion, backed by experience, engines everywhere, whatever their differences, were close relatives. Once you had doped out one, you understood them all. Anyway, he would do his best. The worm and the man both do what they can. Yonatan wondered where his father had ever managed to dig up such a creep.

The corrugated tin walls of the tractor shed only made the cold day worse. The slightest contact with anything metal froze one’s fingers at once. Congealed oil, dust, mildew, and filth were everywhere. In the joints of the rafters, among the tool chests and crates of spare parts, even on the tractors, tribes of spiders had spun upside-down cathedrals. Tools were scattered, as if in anger, about an abandoned-looking yellow machine smeared with mud and black oil, its innards exposed. On the treads, on the tattered driver’s seat, in the folds of the hood that had been thrown to the floor were wrenches, pliers, screwdrivers, bolts, and iron rods. A beer bottle half filled with some slimy liquid, rubber belts, torn sacks, and rusted gears lay all over. And the whole derelict place was pervaded by the acrid chemical smell of lubricants, burned rubber, and kerosene and diesel fumes.

Yonatan, whose mood blackened every time he entered the shed, glanced about with a sullen, defiant look. The new mechanic began hopping around the tractor engine in his spotless clothes like some sort of vainglorious grasshopper. Finally he came to a halt at the front of the engine, struck a pose as if for an official photograph, and joyously launched into a manifesto.