“And now,” said Azariah Gitlin, “I need some time to think. If you don’t mind, I’ll take a few minutes to do it.”

“To think?” snickered Yonatan. “Why not? Be my guest.” He rose, picked up a ripped, greasy sack, sat down again on the crate, wrapped the tattered burlap around his torn boot, and lit himself a cigarette. “Fine. You go ahead and think. When you’re done, raise your right hand.”

He had not yet finished the cigarette when, to his utter amazement, the young man declared, “I’m done.”

“You’re done what?”

“I’m done thinking.”

“And what, may I ask, did you think of?”

“I thought,” said Azariah hesitantly, “that maybe, when you finish your cigarette, we might start working on this tractor.”

The entire repair job was performed by Yonatan himself and took no more than twenty minutes. Clean, pale, and alert, Azariah Gitlin stood looking on, telling him exactly what to do as if reading instructions from a manual, presiding over the operation from afar like one of those grandmasters Yonatan had read about who play blind chess without pieces or a board. Only once in the course of the proceedings did the young man bother to step onto a tread and peer into the bowels of the engine. Using the tip of a screwdriver, he adjusted a contact with a watchmaker’s precision and then climbed down again, taking great pains to avoid the grime.

As soon as the tractor was started up, it began to gurgle steadily and softly like a purring animal. The gears were successfully tested. The engine ran for ten minutes without a hitch. At last Yonatan switched it off and said in a voice that sounded too loud in the sudden silence, “Yup. That’s it.”

He couldn’t decide whether the newcomer was a magician or a mechanical genius, or whether the whole problem had been so simple to begin with that he could have easily solved it himself had he not been so tired, cold, and preoccupied during the last few days.