"Just that you two met."

"Did she say why she wanted to speak to Mr. Strauss?"

"No."

I could tell by her face that she did not listen in on their talk. She might prick her ears if an intriguing conversation was being conducted within earshot, but she wasn't the sort to eavesdrop on a private telephone call.

"Was this the first time she called since you started working here?" I asked.

"Yes. Unless she called on my lunch break."

"I wonder why she called Mr. Strauss today of all days."

"Perhaps to ask him for something. Mr. Strauss is a very generous man."

"Is he now?"

"Yes. He gave me this." She displayed her left wrist, from which dangled the silver bracelet I had noticed last time. "Isn't it beautiful?"

I agreed that it was.

"He said it was a gift for all the good work I've been doing. I was stunned."

She was a slim woman, with a heart-shaped face and soft dark hair. Her eyes were large and brown and guileless. Her mouth was full and lush. She really was lovely. Not exquisitely beautiful as Esther was, but attractive, in an innocent, youthful way. Fresh, inexperienced. Maybe that was why she didn't know men were not in the habit of giving silver bracelets to pretty women thirty years younger than themselves without aiming to get something in return.

"Is this your first job?" I asked.

She said that it was.

"He must like you a lot," I said, noting the slight flush that crept up her neck. Apparently she hadn't considered how odd it was for a law firm to hire an inexperienced secretary, no matter how good at typing she was.

I heard the door at my back swing open, followed by the hard, clipped voice of Mr. Strauss.

"I thought I told you to get out."

Dana tensed, eying me warily. I winked at her before turning to her boss.

"I was just admiring Dana's bracelet," I said, and walked out.

23

I took an inner-city bus downtown to the central depot and there boarded another bus to the coastal town of Netanya, some thirty kilometers north of Tel Aviv. The bus, painted red and nearly full, was twenty minutes late in departing and another forty in arriving at its destination. Along the way I was treated to the sight of rolling sand dunes, dense groves of bananas and oranges, and copses of pine and ficus trees. Looking at these divergent landscapes—arid sand to one side of the road and fertile cropland to the other—it occurred to me that this was a fair representation of Israel as a whole: a small country in which existed diverse climates and religions and ethnicities, all in close proximity to and without clear borders between one another.