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By Root 252 0

the cellar to set traps for the mice, wrestle with the screen door to the veranda, pulling at it furiously even though it opened outward, or curse his daughter's cats, which fled at the sound of his slippered feet. He would go down into the old farmyard, his head thrust forward almost at a right angle, which gave him the look of an inverted hoe, frantically searching for some pamphlet or letter in the abandoned incubator, the fertilizer store, the toolshed, then forgetting what he had come for, picking up a discarded hoe with both hands and starting to dig out an unnecessary channel between two beds, cursing himself for his own stupidity, cursing the Arab student who hadn't cleared the piles of dead leaves, dropping the hoe and reentering the house by the kitchen door. In the kitchen he opened the refrigerator, peered inside at the pallid light, slammed the door shut with a force that rattled the bottles, crossed the corridor, muttering something to himself, perhaps denouncing the dead Socialist icons Yitzhak Tabenkin and Meir Ya'ari, looked into the bathroom, cursing the Socialist International, marched into his bedroom, then, drawn irresistibly back into the kitchen, his beret-clad head thrust forward like a charging bull, searched in the larder and the cupboards for a piece of chocolate, groaning, slamming the cupboard doors, his white mustache bristling, staring out of the kitchen window and suddenly shaking a bony fist at a stray goat near the hedge or at an olive tree on the hillside, then once more padding with amazing agility from room to room, from cupboard to cupboard, where he had to find some vital document immediately, urgently, his little gray eyes darting hither and thither, exploring every shelf or bookcase, all the time expounding his complaints to an invisible audience, with long strings of arguments, objections, insults and rebuttals. He was firmly resolved tonight to get out of bed and make his way down to the cellar with a bright flashlight to catch those diggers, whoever they might be.

4

EVER SINCE DANNY FRANCO died and Osnat and Yifat left home and went abroad, father and daughter had no close relatives or friends. Their neighbors rarely sought their company, and they hardly ever visited the neighbors. Pesach Kedem's contemporaries had died off or were fading, but even before, he had not had friends or disciples. It was Tabenkin himself who had gradually ousted him from the inner circle of the Party leadership. Rachel's schoolwork stayed at school. The boy from Victor Ezra's grocery delivered whatever Rachel ordered by phone and carried it into the house by the kitchen door. Strangers only rarely crossed the threshold of the last house, by the cypress hedge of the cemetery. Occasionally someone from the village council came and asked Rachel to prune her hedge, which was getting overgrown and blocking the road, or a traveling salesman came to offer them a dishwasher or tumble dryer on easy payment terms. (The old man exploded: An electric dryer? What's that for? Has the sun retired? Have the washing lines all converted to Islam?) Once in a while a neighbor, a tight-lipped farm worker in blue overalls, knocked on the door to ask if they hadn't seen his lost dog in their garden. (A dog? In our garden? Rachel's cats would tear it to pieces!)

Ever since the student had taken up residence in the little building that had once served Danny Franco as his toolshed and housed the incubator for his chicks, the villagers sometimes paused near the hedge as though sniffing the air, then hurried on their way.

Sometimes Rachel, the literature teacher, and her father, the former MK, were invited to the home of one of the other teachers for a drink, to celebrate the end of the school year or to come and listen to a visiting speaker address a group at the house of one of the veteran residents of the village. Rachel would accept the invitation with thanks, but it usually turned out that a few hours before the party or the meeting the old man had an attack of emphysema or mislaid his dentures, so Rachel would