Once back in the barber’s shack, Azariah thought of the picture that hung in Yonatan and Rimona’s room, the dark, thirsty bird atop the brick wall, the surrounding murk, the diagnoal shaft of sunlight, and the flaming wound that shaft inflicted on a single brick in a lower corner. So I’m invited back to chat and play music and chess. She’ll have to make up to me a lot more than that if she expects to be forgiven. Her baby girl died and now she doesn’t even have that.

“He’s a loudmouth, a cheat, a brown-nose, and a bullshitter,” said Yonatan to Rimona, “and yet you can’t help kind of liking him. I’m going over to talk to Udi about the fruit shipments. I won’t be late.”

A thick night hung over the kibbutz. The air was cold and raw, and the biting wind did not flag. It’s a funny thing, thought Rimona, smiling in the darkness.

In the days that followed, Azariah Gitlin made still more repairs. His energy knew no bounds. He greased, tuned, and tightened; took apart and reassembled; changed dying batteries and readjusted fanbelts; washed, waxed, and polished. He undertook to reorganize the shed by arranging the work tools in a logical order, putting up a broad wooden board on which to hang screwdrivers, wrenches, and pliers according to size, labeling all the drawers and shelves, and scrubbing the filthy concrete floor with detergents. He persuaded Yonatan to climb up to the rafters to get rid of the spider webs and birds’ nests underneath the tin roof. He catalogued the spare parts and took a full inventory. As a crowning touch, he clipped a large, colored photograph of the rotund Minister of Welfare from an illustrated weekly magazine and taped it to the wall. Every day from now on, plump-cheeked and jovial, Dr. Yosef Burg would look down on the men at work, imparting a self-satisfied bliss.

Azariah arrived early each morning in dark blue work clothes that were slightly too big on him and stood waiting for Yonatan to appear with the keys to the shed. Invariably, Yonatan would be sleepy, grouchy, and often teary-eyed, and Azariah would try to cheer him up with a story about one of the old grandmasters, giants like Alekhine, Capablanca, and Lasker, compared to whom such current aces as Botvinnik and Petrosian were, so to speak, abject nonentities. To be sure, his entire fund of knowledge on the subject came from the chess journals that Yonatan had lent him and that he studied exhaustively while lying in bed.