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By Root 253 0

warm-hearted man who behaved affectionately toward other people, and was not embarrassed about it. He wept on the morning of the day he died because a calf was dying on the farm. Or because one of the cats had given birth to two stillborn kittens. At midday his heart failed and he collapsed on his back outside the fertilizer shed. Rachel found him there, with an expression of surprise on his face, as though he had been thrown off some course in the army for no reason. At first Rachel couldn't understand why he was taking a nap in the middle of the day, lying on the ground on his back next to the shed, and she shouted at him: Danny, what's the matter with you, get up now, stop behaving like a child. It was only when she took hold of his hands to help him up that she realized they were cold. She bent over him and tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation; she even slapped his cheeks. Then she ran into the house to ring the village clinic, to summon Dr. Gili Steiner. Her voice barely shook and her eyes were dry. She regretted slapping his face for no reason.

16

IT WAS A HOT, humid evening, the trees in the garden were wrapped in a damp vapor, and the stars seemed to be immersed in dirty cotton wool. Rachel Franco was sitting on the veranda with her old father, reading an Israeli novel about the residents of a block of flats in Tel Aviv. The old man, his black military beret pulled down over his forehead, his baggy khaki trousers held up by braces, turned the pages of the supplements of Haaretz, mouthing angry rants as he did so. "Poor wretches," he mumbled, "they're really out of luck, lonely to the marrow of their bones, abandoned from their mothers' wombs, no one can stand them. No one can stand anyone anymore. Everyone is a stranger to everyone else. Even the stars in the sky are alien to one another."

Thirty yards away from them Adel was sitting on the top step of his hut, smoking as he calmly repaired a pair of pruning shears whose spring had come loose. Two cats lay on the parapet of the veranda as though fainting in the heat. From the depths of the hazy night came the chugging sound of a sprinkler and the drawn-out grating of crickets. Every now and again a night bird uttered a piercing shriek. And in faraway farmyards dogs were barking, with a sound that sometimes descended to a sad, heart-rending howl, answered occasionally by the wail of a solitary jackal from the orchards on the slopes of the hills. Rachel raised her eyes from her book and said, to herself rather than to her father:

"Sometimes I ask myself what on earth I am doing here."

"Of course," said the old man. "I know I'm a burden on you."

"I'm not talking about you, Pesach, I'm talking about my own life. Why do you bring everything straight back to yourself?"

"So please, go off." The old man chuckled. "Go and find yourself a new life. I'll stay on here with the little Arab to look after the garden and the house. Until it falls down. It won't be long before it collapses on top of us."

"Falls down? Until what falls down?"

"The house. Those diggers are undermining the foundation."

"Nobody is digging. I'm going to buy you some earplugs so you don't wake up in the night."

Adel put down the shears, stubbed out his cigarette, pulled out his mouth organ and played a few hesitant notes, as if he couldn't decide which tune to play. Or as if he were trying to imitate the desperate wailing of the jackal that came from the direction of the orchards. And the jackal really did seem to respond from the darkness. A plane flew high above the village, its wing lights flashing. The suffocating air was damp and warm and dense, almost solid.

"That's a lovely tune," the old man said. "Heart-rending. It reminds us of a time when there was still some fleeting affection between people. There's no point in playing tunes like that today. They are an anachronism, because nobody cares anymore. That's all over. Now our hearts are blocked. All feelings are dead. Nobody turns to anyone else except from self-interested motives. What is left? Maybe only this melancholy tune, as