After lunch I read a number of chapters from one of the novels I had bought earlier and played a few games of chess. At half past two, I left Greta's and went to pay Reuben Tzanani a visit.

12

His office was on the second floor of the police station at Yehuda Halevi 6. From the outside, the building was an architectural gem, with arched windows, a heavy metal gate, balconies supported on columns, and a wide courtyard. On the inside were frescoes and decorative floor tiles, but it still felt like any other police station I'd been in. Grimy, cramped, loud, and smelling of cigarettes, bad coffee, and body odor. The only differences between it and police stations in Budapest were that there were no mud tracks on the floor and that the air was dry and hot instead of damp and cold.

The policeman at the desk gave me the once-over when I told him my business. Apparently, I still possessed the look of a policeman, because the officer simply nodded and told me to go ahead upstairs. I took the stairs two at a time, turned right, and walked down the hall to Reuben's office.

It was a small office made even smaller by three filing cabinets that took up one wall and the simple metal desk behind which Reuben sat. The desk was piled high with papers, and Reuben was busy scribbling with a pencil on one of them. I stood in the doorway, waiting until he had ceased writing, then said, "Hello, Ant."

He raised his head and gave me a smile. Reuben's smiles were as wide as his heart was big. They radiated light as bright as a flashbulb. I sometimes wondered how a man who had seen the horrors of war could conjure such smiles. I certainly couldn't.

He had received the nickname "Ant" for saving my life. It had happened in October 1948, during Operation Yoav, when we fought the Egyptian Army in the Negev desert in the south of Israel. We were both infantrymen, and on that day our unit found itself pinned down by fire from an Egyptian machine-gun position. Four of our men had already died, and our unit was unable to advance. To this day, I'm not sure what came over me, but suddenly I found myself sprinting forward, zigging and zagging while a hail of bullets chewed into the desert sand at my feet. After what seemed like an hour but was actually less than thirty seconds, I made it to the foot of the small dune on which the gun position perched and lobbed two grenades into it.