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By Root 262 0

that someone is scratching the floor under her bed with a sharp instrument. She freezes and holds her breath, straining to listen. Now the scratching is punctuated with faint knocking or tapping sounds. She switches the bedside light on again and gets down on hands and knees to look under the bed: there is nothing there apart from some dust balls and a scrap of paper. Rachel does not get back into bed, but stands, alert, in the center of the room, after switching the ceiling light on too. Now, even with the light on, she can hear the gnawing and scratching sounds, and she decides that someone, perhaps Adel, or more likely her terrible old man, is bending down outside her window and deliberately scraping the wall and tapping on it lightly. Neither of them is entirely sane. She takes the flashlight from the shelf beside her wardrobe and prepares to go around to the back of the house. Or should she go down to the cellar?

First, though, she goes out on the veranda to see which of them is not sitting there, so that she will know whom to suspect. But the veranda is in darkness and the old man's window is dark too. So is Adel's hut. Rachel, in her sandals and nightdress, goes around to the side of the house, stoops between the pillars that support the house and shines the flashlight into the space under her floor: it lights dusty cobwebs and alarms an insect that scuttles away into the darkness. She straightens up and stands, surrounded by the deep stillness of the night.

Nothing stirs the row of cypresses separating her yard from the cemetery. There is no hint of a breeze. Even the crickets and the dogs have momentarily fallen silent. The darkness is dense and oppressive, and the heat hangs heavily over everything. Rachel Franco stands there trembling, alone in the dark under the blurred stars.

Lost

1

I HAD A PHONE call yesterday from Batya Rubin, the widow of Eldad Rubin. She didn't beat about the bush. She simply asked if she was speaking to Yossi Sasson, the real estate agent, and when I replied, "At your service, ma'am," she said, "It's time for us to talk."

I've had my eye for a long time on the Rubins' house in Tarpat Street, behind the Pioneers' Garden, the house we call The Ruin. It's an old house, built not long after the village was founded, more than a century ago. The other old houses that used to stand on either side of it, the Wilenski house and the Shmueli house, have been demolished and replaced by villas several stories high. These villas are surrounded by well-kept gardens, and one of them has an ornamental pond, complete with artificial waterfall, goldfish and fountain. The Ruin stands between them like a black tooth in a row of white teeth. It's a big, rambling house with all sorts of wings and extensions, built of sandstone, and most of the plaster has peeled off. It has a withdrawn air, standing back from the road, turning its back to the world and surrounded by an unkempt yard full of thistles and rusting junk. A blocked well stands in the middle, topped by a corroded hand pump. The windows are always shuttered, and the paved path leading from the gate to the house is overgrown with convolvulus, prosopis and couch grass. A few blouses and items of underwear that can occasionally be seen hanging from the clothesline at the side of the house are the only signs of life.

For many years we had a well-known writer here in Tel Ilan, Eldad Rubin, an invalid in a wheelchair who wrote long novels about the Holocaust, even though he had spent all his life in Tel Ilan, apart from a few years studying in Paris in the late fifties. He was born here in this old house on Tarpat Street, he wrote all his books here, and it was here that he died about ten years ago, at the age of fifty-nine. Ever since his death I have been hoping to buy the house and sell it for demolition and rebuilding. As a matter of fact I have tried to read Eldad Rubin's books once or twice, but they weren't my sort of thing: everything in them seems so heavy and depressing, the plots are so slow and the characters so wretched. I mostly