“Okay, I was bitten by a dog.”

“What happened, Peter?”

“I was chomped on by a whore in the line of duty. Are you happy now?”

Her eyes met his, but she said nothing. She unwrapped the first cloth, palpated the swelling, and wrapped it again in a newly heated towel.

“Where did you learn to do this?” he asked.

Rina noticed his face was drenched with sweat and mopped it with a dry towel. “Yitzchak and I moved to Israel a year after we married. To Kiryat Arba—a settlement in Hebron.” She stroked his hand. “We were in hostile territory and there were no Jewish doctors handy. You learn to do things.”

“You never told me you lived in Israel.”

“For three years. It was a phase of my life that I’ve tried to forget. Except for the year of Yitzchak’s death, I don’t think I was ever more miserable. I was stuck behind barbed wire fencing with two small infants of my own, and in charge of the group’s nursery which—baruch Hashem—had forty-four kids.” She paused a moment. “All the men carried guns with them. It was open warfare out there.”

“Including Yitzchak?”

“Yes.” She took off the old towel, wrung out another, and wrapped the wound a third time.

“But you didn’t?”

“The women never left the compound. We were guarded twenty-four hours a day. What would have been the purpose of learning how to shoot? Though now I wish I had.”

“Why’d you live there?” he asked.

“Idealism.” She shook her head. “When Yitzchak announced that we were going back to the States, I cried tears of joy, then immediately felt guilty about it. I was leaving the Holy Land and ecstatic about it.”

She laughed softly.

“Then I read in the Talmud that a Jew who passes up a permissible pleasure is a fool. I was very foolish in those years.”

“Why didn’t you put your foot down and tell him you wanted to leave?”

“I didn’t make myself clear,” she said, taking off the towel. “He would have left a long time ago. I was the one who insisted we stay—always the martyr, Peter. I thought we should be religious chalutzniks—pioneers. Finally, he put his foot down. He said he couldn’t live in that kind of atmosphere. When Rav Schulman invited him to join the kollel, he quickly accepted without consulting me. I couldn’t even get mad at him. The poor guy was so miserable, and I was so oblivious to his needs because I believed in some higher purpose.

“But it all worked out in the end. Yitzchak had wanted to live and study in Jerusalem—a more beautiful and inspiring city never existed. Had we settled there, I would have never left Israel. And then I would have never met you.”

She touched his skin; it was burning and taut. She told him to hold still.