1929 – 1947.

I must have contracted some kind of Yid virus from wrestling with the rabbi in the river,” Bernie read to Lou Ella in her bedroom, where Lou sometimes referred to herself acidly as the unmade girl on the bed. “It was a virus with a long incubation, because many years passed before the fever woke up in me.”

WHEN HIS FAMILY arrived several weeks later, they found Ruby bivouacked beside a packing crate containing the frozen holy man in a “frigidarium” at Blochman’s Cold Storage just off North Main Street. Blochman’s was an all-purpose facility housing wine, furs, antiques, and pharmaceuticals as well as meat and produce, located around the corner from Karp’s General Merchandise, the concern owned and operated by Ruby’s Uncle Marvin. A paunchy, balding, ordinarily generous man, Marvin had initially offered his young nephew accommodations in his Mediterranean-style house out on the Parkway but had been visibly relieved when the uncommunicative kid declined his invitation. For despite having been notified of what was coming, Esther’s brother, who’d arranged for the stowage of Ruby’s freight, found the deadpan nephew and his charge a bit more than he’d bargained for. On his side Ruby had reached the end of his tolerance for newly acquired relations and preferred to stay behind the cam-locked door of the warehouse cold room, where he could continue to keep an eye on the rabbi.

Both Blochman’s and Karp’s establishments were situated in a downtown district called the Pinch, a neighborhood of mom ‘n’ pop businesses run by Russian-Jewish immigrants who lived in the rackety apartments above their shops. They were the dross of a vestigial community who, unlike the enterprising Marvin Karp (who’d voluntarily dropped the inski from the end of his name), had not prospered enough to move out of their ghetto and clung to it as to an island in uncharted seas. It was an island bounded on the west by the river, clogged with barge and packet-boat traffic, and surrounded by a city that often hosted spectacles that tried the nerves of the Jews. There were the parades down Front Street of the syklops and kleagles of the Ku Klux Klan marching in their cotton sheets, some of which had been purchased at Karp’s General Merchandise. There was the tabernacle erected on the river bluff from which the voice of an itinerant Billy Sunday challenging the devil to seven weeks’ combat could be heard all the way to North Main. Sometimes the sovereignty of the Pinch itself was violated, such as when the city fathers shut down the Suzore Theater for showing a film featuring Theda Bara (neé Theodosia Goodman), a film star of questionable morals; or when a representative from the board of health came to the Neighborhood House on Market Square to declare that dancing the Charleston (since when did Jews dance the Charleston?) could lead to death through inflammation of the peritoneum. There were the creepers and poison lianas that overtook the tenements in spring, and the sickly scent that lingered for days over the Pinch after the auto-da-fé of a Negro a few blocks north at Catfish Bay. So the Jews had enough already to rattle their composure without the additional bogey of a sinister young stranger rumored to be the guardian of an old man in a lump of ice.

For rumor was mostly what Ruby was, since he seldom appeared in the street, venturing out only to purchase an occasional plate of kishka from the sidewalk window at Rosen’s lunch counter. Unwashed and unshorn, his blue flesh mottled with chilblains, the sheep’s pelt steaming in the sun, he was an eyesore the citizens of North Main Street could frankly have done without. There was about him the unhappy air of the penitent, and what with the daily penance of making a living with which the Jews had been cursed since their expulsion from Eden, who needed more emphatic reminders of their fate? Though in truth Ruby had no formal program for scourging himself, having advanced to a state of dispassion far beyond self-loathing. It was just that, since rescuing the rabbi from watery ruin, he’d concluded that his place was now to look after the old antediluvian, an attitude as near to purpose as he could come. Also, there was the habit of numbness he’d acquired during his refrigerated transit that made the temperature in the cold storage locker seem almost favorable.

But the twins had other plans for their nephew. Certain matters had been neatly resolved, if not during the train ride down to Memphis then shortly thereafter. For one thing, Zerubavel ben Blish and Shinde Esther, both daunted by the size and disharmony of the American continent, had tended to cling to one another out of a mutual solicitude. More adaptable, Esther had summoned untapped reserves of pluck for the sake of soothing Zerubavel, who by journey’s end had come to esteem her just this side of idolatry. In the meantime Esther had been thoroughly indoctrinated by Comrade ben Blish’s Zionist propaganda, so that by the time they reached Tennessee her thoughts (when not of him) were almost exclusively of the Jewish National Home. In this way the spinster decided that, once she’d seen Jocheved comfortably settled in Memphis (there was no talk of her returning to New York), she would follow her destined one back to Eretz Israel where they would be wed. Meanwhile, though the widow, stooped and wearing items of her late husband’s apparel, no longer resembled her former self, her new persona had lost some of its fog of melancholy. This was perhaps owing in part to the city of Memphis itself, with the aromatic musk of its sultry spring, which may have worked as effectively to reduce Jocheved’s paralysis as refrigeration had to consolidate her son’s. Despite her unseasonable aging and a countenance euphemistically referred to as “bohemian,” Jocheved exhibited an animation that manifested itself, upon her arrival in the mid-South, in a furor of concocting glacés and ice cream.

Marvin and his good wife, Ida, whose pinched face belied a sanguine disposition, were understandably overwhelmed by such an infestation of family, most of whom they had never met. They were intimidated by the bullet heads and oxlike brawn of the twin brothers, nonplussed by Esther’s announcement of her wedding plans and by the widow’s idiosyncrasies. Nevertheless they provided lodging for one and all, both in their rambling house with its green-tiled roof and in a guest cottage entered through a wisteria arbor in the garden out back. It was in that little mother-in-law annex that Jocheved began to set up a kind of laboratory—assembling there the pails, spaddles, and confectionery ingredients commandeered with Ida’s consent from her well-equipped kitchen—that she would need for the manufacture of her frozen treats. In light of her own bliss the affianced Esther was now anxious to get Jocheved off her hands, and toward that end she had early on consulted with her brother. Since the guesthouse stood empty most of the year, why not reap some bonus income from renting it out to the widow? On that score Marvin had needed no cajoling: “I thought already the same thing myself.” A childless couple who compensated for their barren union with cats, Marvin and Ida had already begun to look fondly on the widow, as if in her hoydenish habits she were yet another stray. Then there were the sorbets, tutti fruttis, and frozen custards that Jocheved served at their communal dinners, which had given Marvin a bright idea. Pixilated though she was, Jocheved was at the same time a fully functioning agent: He would set her up under an awning in front of his store “where she will reign supreme as the empress of ice cream.” He grinned his pleasure at the impromptu jingle. Always in great demand in the scorching southern summers, ice cream would draw more customers to Karp’s than his squad of schwartze pullers-in ever had.

For a while Marvin and Ida, whose affluence had estranged them from their old neighbors in the Pinch, began to warm to the windfall of their sudden family, and though they’d run out of reasons to prolong their visit, the guests found it difficult to give up such hospitality. The twins, schooled for decades in collective habitation, performed the household chores unsolicited and with jugglerlike sleight-of-hand; Zerubavel, who wore his high collar and silk four-in-hand to dinner, recited the Hebrew verse of Bialik and Tchernichowsky after meals, and Jocheved plied the table with tasty desserts. The only note of discord—the one that finally spoiled everyone’s good time—originated with Esther, who under the influence of her betrothed had become something of an ideologue. For all the gladness she’d expressed at their reunion, she soon after began to try her brother’s patience with her criticisms of his bourgeois lifestyle, even taking issue with his choice of residence in such a backward jerkwater town.

“What are they anyway doing in Memphis, the Jews?” she’d asked one night as the twins, mindful bulls in a china shop, were clearing away dishes from the dining-room table.

To which Marvin, a booster for whom the Bluff City had always spelled opportunity, replied testily, “What are they doing in Palestine?”

Things degenerated from there into name-calling, the host and his sister addressing each other coolly thereafter as Red Esther and the Baron. Within a week Zerubavel and his intended had departed in a huff for New York, where they would take passage on a steamship of the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique bound for Marseilles, and from there ferry on to Haifa. But before they left, Esther had accompanied Yehezkel and Yigdal—satisfied now that their sister was in good hands—to Bloch-man’s Cold Storage, where they informed Jocheved’s son through the medium of his aunt that he would be sailing with them to Eretz Israel. Having observed him in action, his uncles had determined that the lad, despite his near hypothermia, could be of signal use in the development of the Yishuv; and since he was only marking time in America, why shouldn’t he be given the chance to apply his talents to a cause greater than himself? It never occurred to them, so habituated were they to self-sacrifice, that he might have plans of his own.

Though, beyond keeping company with the rabbi beside the reliquary of his packing crate, Ruby had none. But what was Palestine? He had only the vaguest notion: something about a country without a people for a people without a country: He’d heard the slogans. But to his hibernal mind it sounded as if each side of the equation might exclude the other, and then the Jews would be nowhere at all. Of course, reasoned Ruby, if he belonged anywhere it was nowhere. He knew also that Avner Blochman, proprietor of the facility wherein he was quartered, was fed up with his unwanted tenant, and had finally screwed up the courage to evict Ruby along with his frozen charge. “This ain’t no spookhouse,” the hangdog Avner advised, for such had been the reaction of his clients, whom reports of the rabbi and his custodian were driving away. Out on the tree-shaded Parkway, having gotten wind of Ruby’s dilemma, Marvin Karp’s guests elicited the last ounce of their host’s goodwill, prevailing on him to make room for his brother Shmerl’s bequest. Ultimately Marvin did agree to store the ghoulish memento in an old laundry tub in his wine cellar, but with the understanding that his benevolence would end upon the repeal of Prohibition, when the memento could be replaced by a case of sauvignon blanc. He also made it clear that his charity did not extend to the rebbe’s grim-visaged guardian.

Ruby received the news of his imminent eviction with a shrug. Separation from the rabbi would deprive him of his last excuse for staying put, a prospect that alternately calmed and discomfited him. The cold had in any case permeated his insides to a degree that suggested he now carried the essence of Ezekiel ben Zephyr in his bones. As for his mother, Ruby had visited her once or twice in her bower, only to discover that he had no filial feeling left for her at all. With her lick of cinereous hair and her klunky, unfeminine movements drained of the grace that once informed them, he hardly recognized her. Absently pinching his cheek or brushing the frost from his scalp before returning to her ice-making apparatus, she resembled (a chilling notion) her dead husband more than herself. In the end he concluded that, as befitted a son who’d destroyed his entire family, he was no more to her now than the cats that padded in and out of her apartment. He was cast out from everything that in theory he ought to hold dear, a situation he appreciated as heartbreaking, even tragic, the way he might have viewed some schmaltzy photoplay. Moreover, there was a fitting justice in Ruby’s being dragged by his broad-backed uncles to some godforsaken desert environment, where his anaesthetized sensibilities risked thawing in the heat of the sun.

“I’ll think it over,” he told the twins, who told him he could think it over during the voyage to the Holy Land. For having dipped into the donations they’d collected for the National Fund, the brothers had already booked passage on a cattle boat sailing from the port of New Orleans, and had taken the liberty of purchasing a ticket for Ruby as well.

THAT WAS HOW he came to find himself, some ten years later, standing on a watchtower beside an amber searchlight in an oasis reclaimed from a swamp called Tel Elohim. It was the same communal settlement folded among the foothills of the Upper Galilee to which Ruby and his uncles had retreated after the the Arab uprising of 1929. This was the slaughter that had greeted them at the moment when Ruby first set foot upon the Land; so that it was clear to the newcomer from the outset that the country without a people was already populated, and its population not eager to share its beggarly streets, moon-dusted dunes, camel tracks, and waterless wells with the people without a country. Nevertheless Ruby did what he was told by the twin brothers, who seemed to belong both everywhere and nowhere. Since categories of right and wrong existed only for those parties with something at stake, the finer points of the situation were of no concern to the recent immigrant. Just off the boat, he was interested in little more than putting himself in the way of bodily harm (the only outlook that could stimulate his sluggish brain), and Palestine looked as if it would afford him ample opportunities to do just that. Confronted with death, however, he repeatedly cheated it. This was not so much because he wanted to live as that he thought he deserved to prolong his pain—though who was he fooling? There was no pain, nor fear, or thrill of engagement, only action and the boredom between actions that was the real dread; because, while most of his senses were unresponsive, Ruby’s memory persisted, and it haunted him with unkind reminders. In the event, he’d waived his independence, placing his fate in the hands of the veteran campaigners Yig and Yez, as he called them. They saw to his formal training in arms and explosives, areas in which he already had a head start, and in stealth, which he came by naturally. They coached him in husbanding the anger that he was still able to call upon at will, although it was now entirely impersonal, which made Ruby an even more perfectly tuned instrument for redressing the offenses to the Yishuv.

Not once during the succeeding years did he relax from participating in the relentless cycles of bloodletting. Despite the end of the so-called Arab Revolt and the monotony of terror and counterterror that intervened before the beginning of the next so-called Arab revolt, Ruby never gave up his part in the general effort to turn the Promised Land into a slaughterhouse. Of course there were interludes along the way, during which Ruby’s edgy impatience caused others to keep their distance. As he and the twins moved from safehouse to smallholder farm among the ranks of the maverick irregulars, the immigrant earned not only the fear and respect of his fellows but a reputation as a solitary of forbidding countenance. The Baal Shatikah, his comrades called him (though never to his face), the Master of Silence: “Silence, too, is sometimes a midrash.”

Over time he picked up enough of the language to follow orders and conversations, though never enough to respond to questions with any exactitude. He figured that the lashon hakodesh, the holy language, albeit secularized, might sear his tongue if he spoke it, and his failure to master even the rudiments of Hebrew often left strangers to conclude he was mute. All of which contributed along with his monkish aloofness to the legend he was unintentionally cultivating as a man apart. He was perceived by the superstitious (and there were many among the settlers fresh from the rustic culture of Eastern Europe) as quite possibly inhuman, a creature fashioned from clay to avenge all affronts to Israel; it was a notion that caused his uncles to worry that they had perhaps created a golem, though who could argue with success? And over the years, as the tit-for-tactics of terror and reprisal became almost routine, Ruby’s notoriety grew, his sketchy identity further subsumed by the numerous masquerades he was forced to adopt. In the end, fabled among the Jews, to himself he was no one at all: the Master of Silence had become a symbol referred to in secret circles as Ruben ben None, and his heartlessness among a people attempting to shed millennia of acute sensitivity and guilt was universally extolled.

Ruby’s unvarying silence, so conspicuous in places where talk was a mania, was sometimes construed as endorsement, sometimes disapproval, according to the attitude of the beholder. But the truth was he neither approved nor condemned, but was finally indifferent, just as he was indifferent to the life of the k’vutzah itself—which, with its religion of labor, was identical to the dozens of others that proliferated all over the Yishuv. Nevertheless, since not even the guardians were exempt from the work of the collective, Ruby became mechanically proficient at the chores he was assigned. Though he would ultimately settle into the loner’s occupation of tending sheep, he also milked goats, dug trenches, drained septic tanks, and erected stockades; he repaired roof girders and laths and even demonstrated some ingenuity in doctoring the commune’s capricious three-phase dynamo, called ironically Ner Tamid, the Everlasting Light. His uncles, though they praised his industry, compared the facile work of the current settlement to the herculean hardships of its primitive beginnings during the time called the Second Aliyah. Ruby had arrived during the Fourth, a piece of history for which he gave not a fig. Uninspired by the labors he conducted with due diligence, neither was Ruby aroused by the festivals that were the rigorous calendar’s only breathing spells. Shabbat, when the settlers allowed themselves a thimbleful of sweet Carmel wine, was as unremarkable as Purim, when they donned costumes and flogged an effigy of Haman. They sang patriotic anthems (“Yesh Li Kinneret” and “God Will Rebuild Galilee”) and danced the hora in concentric circles, the outer circle whirling as in a game of crack the whip. Then even Yehezkel and Yigdal, still agile for all their bulk, would join in, and girls with strong thighs—wearing the shorts that caused the Mussulmen to call them whores—might approach Ruby where he sat with his back against a eucalyptus tree. These were strapping girls bred to flirting with danger and tempting fate, but when they tried to draw him into the dance, Ruby only eyed them dispassionately and waved them away as he waited for the next summons to action.

He never had to wait long. Marching orders were received from the heroes of the Resistance, who were all reputed to be half-mad: such as Orde Wingate, the philo-Semitic British colonel who’d become a sort of Lawrence of Palestine and liked to repeat with his unorthodox night squads the battle strategies of King Saul. Later came the storied leaders of the Underground like Gideon, Raziel, and the redoubtable Yair, figures whom the Yishuv simultaneously despised for their brutality and lionized for their courage. Like his uncles who reserved their independent right to attach themselves to any movement that took their fancy, Ruby swore allegiance to no special group. But he seldom missed an opportunity to participate in the lightning raids on Arab villages, where the men were pulled from their houses and selected for execution according to height or length of beard, and the women, to prove they weren’t concealing small arms, were made to bare their breasts. He tossed grenades into market stalls where the resulting carnage was indistinguishable from smashed pottery and the pulp of burst melons. Whenever there were mass attacks there was mass retaliation, but when individuals were hit a more personal response was called for, and here Ruby’s peculiar talents came into play. Always swift, he was groomed as well in furtiveness and in handling the Sten guns and pipe bombs he was familiar with from another life. He could be a sniper, a sapper, a strangler, an artist with the shiv or the ice pick (his stealth weapon of choice), and he preferred what his commanders also favored: that he work alone.

About hatsorer, the enemy, he had no detailed knowledge beyond what his fellows professed concerning Arabian culture at their fireside counsels: that they prayed on their knees with their butts in the air, inviting bullets; that to the Ishmaelite the yahudy were all wallah al mitha, the children of death. For all Ruby knew some of his victims might even have been guilty of the crimes for which they were punished, though that was not the point. What was the point? To fill the world with terror, the way a deaf composer makes music, and for this Ruben ben None had a kind of genius. Professional that he was, he left calling cards inscribed in Arabic by the partisans’ propaganda minister, notes he stuffed into some newly carved orifice, reading AKHAZA ASSAR W’NAFA ELLAR (Revenge has been taken and the shame done away with). This, he was told, was a message the enemy would comprehend. Though he took no pride in his deeds, neither did he feel any shame. He was aware that there was an end to which the Baal Shatikah was a means, but though he cared not a whit whether the nation of Israel ever came into being, he did what was expected of him to further that cause.

One night in thirty-six or -seven during the latest Arab rebellion, Ruby was dispatched with three other militia members to ambush a busload of Muslim pilgrims on their way to visit a shrine near Ein Musmus. Somewhere along the Afula Road, however, they were intercepted by a British patrol that had barricaded the highway. The patrol had been alerted by one of the informers, who abounded in those days when so many Zionists were horrified by the sanguinary tactics of the Underground. Just as the bus, with the pilgrims clinging to the luggage on its roof, disappeared over the brow of a hill, an armed blockade was erected ahead of the commandos, who swerved about only to face another obstruction behind. A shootout resulted during which three of the four passengers in the bullet-pocked landau were injured; the fourth, in the rumble seat next to Ruby, died on the spot, shards of his skull embedded in Ruby’s throat. The survivors were taken to the Jerusalem Central Prison, a massive stone citadel converted from an old Russian hostel, where after a brief stay in the infirmary they were confined to the zinzana cells on the jail’s lower level. When they were well enough, they were taken one by one from their isolation into the harsh light of the interrogation chamber, where they were tortured. The battery of questions was as relentless as the physical battery to the soles of their feet, which were whipped with leather falakot, a persecution made the more senseless due to the gag that prohibited them from answering inquiries. Cigarettes were stubbed out in their ears, fingernails and toenails extracted with plyers, their beards uprooted by the fistful. An officer donned rubber gloves with a physician’s fastidiousness to pinch their testicles; their noses were clothespinned and pitchers of water poured down their gullets in such volume that it seeped from their ears. Then they were taken back to their confinement to recuperate for the next round of abuse.

When his gag was removed, Ruby, tight-lipped as ever, refused even to divulge his name—what, after all, was his name? Then he heard one of his interrogators remark in an aside to his senior officer that the previous chap had offered as his sobriquet the very original, “My name is Death.” Which gave the Baal Shatikah a competitive pang. “My name is Death!” he asserted, and though his voice rasped from his injuries, so loudly did he make his claim that others along the corridor, upon hearing him, echoed the same declaration from their cells. It was the closest Ruby had come to laughing out loud in an age, and as for the torture, it was a blessing, really, as the exquisite pain revived the anger he could no longer generate on his own.

Then one day the torture stopped and the prisoners were marched into an open-air courtyard where an ad hoc affiliation of a military and civic tribunal summarily condemned them to be hanged. They were issued the red sackcloth uniforms reserved for the doomed and transferred to above-ground cells to await execution. Ruby’s companions were permitted to share a common cell, but the Baal Shatikah (whom the Brits never learned they had in their custody) was housed alone in deference to his own request. There in a tomb-size compartment with its bucket and lice-ridden bourge, Ruby set about determining his options for escape. This was not so much from any ardent desire to avoid the gallows as from an internal engine fueled by the years of barbarous application. He was further vitalized by the discovery, in a floor crevice where an earlier prisoner had secreted it, of a rusty razor blade. But before he had decided whether to use the blade to begin a tunnel or simply to slit a guard’s throat, the question became moot; for the wall of the adjoining cell was blown away, taking with it the cinderblock partition separating that cubicle from Ruby’s own.

It happened that his partners in crime, Aryeh and Asher, had taken it upon themselves to deprive the British command of their vengeance. Drunk on the idealism of Jewish revolution, Ruby’s neighbors called themselves Hasmoneans and were frequently heard singing the Revisionist anthem: “Soldiers without names are we.” In their ecstatic anticipation of dying for the Homeland, they had a fragmentation grenade smuggled into the jail inside a pineapple. What they had in mind was to detonate the grenade on the gallows, thereby going out like Samson taking the Philistines with him. But when they learned that the other prisoners were to witness the execution, they opted instead for a kiddish hashem, a private martyrdom. Singing “Hatikvah,” they hugged each other with the grenade wedged between their chests like a shared heart and together pulled the pin. The building was rocked to its foundation, and through the film of dust from the rubble and the mist of blood from the fallen, Ruby walked out onto the stone flags of the prison compound. While the guards were still stunned, he scaled the wall, rolling over the barbed wire on top, which claimed his uniform and bit his flesh, then dropped to the Jaffa Road on the other side. There he prevailed upon the first beggar he found to render up his rags.

He hid in attic rooms open to the weather, in flooded cellars; grew his beard and cut it again, cut his hair and grew it back out; wore cartwheel hats, tarbooshes, and sometimes the hijab burnoose and veil of the devout Muslim woman, his eyes rimmed in antimony. At some point Ruby got word to Yig and Yez that it was too dangerous for him to return to Tel Elohim. They tracked him to a fleabag safehouse in Nahariya and teased him that the mug shot that hung now in every post office in Palestine failed to do him justice, though at least the price on his head was handsome. Then they grew solemn as they informed him that his Aunt Esther and her husband Zerubavel, secretary of the Committee for National Liberation, had been identified among the martyrs at Kibbutz Szold, and Ruby had to think for a moment to remember who they were. Later on he received the news that his uncles themselves had been captured by a British squadron lying in wait for them as they set out to mine the railroad works at Emek Zvulun—for the targets of the Irgunists had shifted from Arab to Occupation holdings. They were hanged on the ramparts of the Acre fortress, whose scaffold (it was said) afforded a view over the delft blue Mediterranean as far as Europe, which like the Holy Land was becoming a charnel house.

RUBY STOOD ATOP the watchtower in the hot khamsin wind and swiveled the mercury-vapor beam. He aimed it in the direction of the Arab village in the valley, where a dog barked, a muezzin sang, and the strings of an oud were being tuned. Beyond the village were the slopes of the Galilee, the massif of Mount Carmel, and the coast above Haifa scalloped with coves wherein lay the tramp vessels of the Beth Aliyah. These were the ships teeming with refugees fleeing a continent whose crimes were so incomprehensible that even its victims could not pronounce them. When they weren’t too busy blowing up British installations, the boys of the Resistance worked in concert with the Hagganah to spirit these illegal immigrants secretly ashore from their coffin ships. Once on dry land the refugees were dispersed to the outposts of Kfar Saba, Gan Hasharon, Kiryat Anavim, and Beit Haarava, which absorbed them. Sometimes Ruby joined the rescuers, if only to distract himself from the endless rounds of bombing post offices, bridges, barracks, and trains. As effective an assassin as ever, he found himself increasingly disengaged from such operations; his famous battle frenzy seemed to be lately in mothballs, and he’d begun to eye the survivors dredged from the sea as if they might embody something he’d lost. He was invariably disappointed, ready to toss the lot of them back overboard again; Master of Silence that he was, he couldn’t seem to forgive them for having no language with which to express what they’d seen.

Slated for tonight’s catch was a crowd of refugees aboard a fishing trawler operated by a Greek ally of the Jews called the Goose. To retrieve them, once he was relieved from sentinel duty, Ruby descended the watchtower and pulled the knit cap with its elliptical eye slits over his head; he climbed into the tin-can Minerva alongside the others and was driven to the coast, where he boarded a launch and rowed out to net the survivors. They were the usual collection of phantoms and wraiths, none of whom would ever entirely occupy their own lives again, but there was among them a girl with a shorn head like a gosling’s who for some reason caught Ruby’s eye. She was wearing a long skirt of drapery-thick flannel beneath which her legs were carelessly parted; she carried slung peddler-wise over her shoulder a pillowslip containing what appeared to be books. There was nothing especially prepossessing about her, no distinguishing feature beyond the dreamy cast of her eyes—so why should his first sight of her prompt such a prickling in Ruby’s brain? Then a word from the Baal Shatikah (words from that quarter being in such short supply) and the girl was dispatched to Tel Elohim, where Ruby might continue to follow her progress.

He was hard-pressed to explain the feelings she awoke in him, feelings he neither welcomed nor rejected but only suffered like an infirmity. What was it about this particular chit of a girl that intrigued him? You certainly wouldn’t have called her beautiful. Her pale complexion was sprinkled with freckles that appeared to be in the process of peeling like dried mud, her hooked nose was as narrow as a rudder, and the remnant of her auburn hair resembled sagebrush. But for the patched lilac skirt she chose to wear despite the heat, and the slight swell of her breast, there was little about her to indicate that she wasn’t a stripling boy. Her emerald eyes, however, unlike the inwardly focused orbs of her fellow “illegals,” were wide open, their pupils (when not peering into a book) fixed intensely on a place whose center, Ruby decided, was everywhere. Among the vague emotions she provoked in him was a curiosity to see precisely what it was she was looking at.

Her name was Shprintze, which Ruby learned the way he learned everything else about her, by spying—and she remained Shprintze even as the other girls were trying on Tamara, Tirzeh, and Gabi, in the hope that a new name might erase the stain of the old. Like the other newcomers she performed the tasks the commune assigned her with a ready obedience, looking in her draggled skirt and head rag every inch the rustic peasant maid. The problem was she was playing the wrong part. Unlike the others she’d refrained from burning her old clothes and drawing new ones from the common pool, the khaki shorts, olive drab shirts, and lace-up boots that were the uniform among Zionist homesteaders. She was a milkmaid, a laundress, a bird nester; wielding her pruning shears like talons she chased sparrows from the grape arbor; she harvested olives from the grove behind the children’s house, pressed the pulp between millstones, and cranked the centrifuge that separated water from oil with the motion of a schoolgirl swinging a rope. But to Ruby’s practiced eye, as he watched her toting pails or cradling a peck of oranges in her apron, she seemed only to be making believe. While the others began in time to be assimilated into the life of the colony, Shprintze—not unlike the Baal Shatikah himself, who’d built a hut beyond the settlement’s barbed-wire perimeter—remained aloof. She did not contribute to the impromptu truth-telling sessions conducted after meals in the dining hall, when the survivors broke down in their confessions and submitted to the consolations of the commune. (The kibbutzniks had become seasoned hands at ministering to hysteria.) Nor did she ever, at least in Ruby’s hearing, attempt to use the sacred tongue.

He could only speculate as to why she chose to remain an outsider, though the answer may have been merely that she preferred the company of her books. Because when she wasn’t performing her impersonations of goose girl or serving wench, she was poring over one of the vermin-nibbled volumes that were the only baggage she’d salvaged from her past. That was the posture in which Ruby was most likely to observe her—sprawled among the flowers called blood of the Maccabees that stippled the meadow just beyond the compound—as he grazed the sheep he’d appointed himself to watch.

He was as inept a shepherd as he was skilled at the trades of cutthroat and bloodletter. Wanting only the excuse of a task that lent itself to solitude, he had no interest in the science of animal husbandry. He could barely distinguish a lamb from a ewe, and regarded the randy old ram with its shit-stained crupper as merely a shofar-on-the-hoof. He was deaf to advice concerning the best spots to graze them, often leading the herd instead of to grass or stubble into unharvested fields of wheat and flax, which they devastated. He developed some aptitude in the use of the lasso but seldom had occasion to use it, since the kibbutz had voted that branding livestock was too charged a means of identification; and he failed to renew the salt licks that lay about the wadis like a sculpture garden. With the herd dog Abimelech, who belonged to everyone and no one, Ruby had never established any rapport. An odd hybrid of border collie and dachshund, the animal was more effective at terrorizing the flock than at corralling them into their fold. Nevertheless, despite his laxity Ruby had grown rather fond of the sheep. This is not to say he was moved to protect them from predators, diseases, or the poison grasses that caused them to inflate like fleece dirigibles. What he did protect them from, however, was being slaughtered or even sheared, which meant that the herd were in essence pets and a useless burden to the cooperative. Recently the secretariat had issued an ultimatum to Ruben ben None that he should render up the sheep for wool and mutton or relinquish his position to another.

“When the Third Temple is built,” he broke his usual silence to reply, “you can use them for a blood offering.” Which statement actually satisfied some of the more canonical among the delegates.

There came an afternoon like any afternoon when he was sheltering from the five o’clock sun beneath a red clay overhang while tending his flock. The agitation that was his companion since the arrival of the girl was accompanied at that hour by the jangling of the bellwether, the bleating of the ewes, and the yapping of the idiot dog Abimelech—all of which Ruby endured like noises plucked upon his tightly strung nerves. Suddenly he was aware of someone’s sandal-shod approach from down the tussocky slope to his left, and the girl Shprintze padded into view carrying a book. Having attained the privacy of a spot beyond the settlement’s boundaries and further obscured by a herd of sheep, she hoisted the flannel skirt to her haunches and squatted to pee. At that moment, no longer silenced by curiosity, Abimelech commenced yelping again.

The girl looked up but did not start and, catching sight of the dog’s presumed master crouched in his cleft, inquired in a tone of perfect ingenuousness even as she continued watering the earth, “Bistu a shed?” Are you a demon?

Confounded on several counts, Ruby felt cornered and slid farther into the hollow until his back bumped against the dirt wall. For one thing, he was surprised that he had understood the question, so slight was his knowledge of Yiddish, though the language had been in the air again due to the influx of illegals who spoke it. (They never spoke it for long, since mameloshen was regarded as the language of victims and for that reason practically outlawed in HaEretz.) Then there was the nature of the question itself, asked so earnestly that it gave Ruby pause to consider. He’d been a number of things during his years in the Land, few of which had much in common with the lives of regular citizens. In the end, showing his palms in a gesture of surrender, he could only answer, “Ich kayn vays.” I don’t know.

Dropping the skirt, underneath which she apparently wore nothing at all, the girl rose to her feet and stepped a few paces toward him.

“Ich bin a shed,” she confided in her flutey voice, and again he was taken aback by her candor. “Ich bin a shlecht yiddisher tochter.” A bad Jewish daughter.

Ruby had no idea what he should do with this information, but it fascinated him that she’d divulged it without an apology or trace of apprehension. Who wasn’t afraid of the Baal Shatikah? But Shprintze, so remote among the settlers, stood before him now as if she recognized him as belonging to the same species as herself. Flushed out, Ruby crawled from beneath the overhang and straightened himself to confront her, his heart galloping. Countless encounters with violent death had not caused his heart to gallop so precipitously. Nor did the girl make any movement toward withdrawing, and Ruby wondered exactly what it was she expected of him. Unable to suffer her gimlet gaze any longer, he dropped his eyes, which fixed on the book she held in her hand.

“Vos leyenstu?” he muttered experimentally, his voice still raw from old wounds.

She showed him the book, a volume of tales in a weather-warped binding by the Yiddish author I. L. Peretz, revealing in the process the garter blue numbers tattooed on her arm. When he took the book from her, she inhaled deeply as if she might not be able to breathe again until he returned it. He understood that the gesture had for her some grave ritual significance, and when he opened the book on a language he’d rejected as a child, a strange thing happened: The barbed Hebrew characters seemed to spill into his head as from a barrel of tacks, filling his brain with a thousand starbursts of pain. But with the pain also came a measure of enlightenment, because some of the printed words arranged themselves into units of sense. “Un Bontshe holt altz geshvign,” he read: “And still Bontshe remained silent.” It made his head ache terribly.

He gave her back the book in a rueful transaction that reminded him of something he couldn’t quite place; then it came to him, the memory of a partisan attempting to replace a fallen comrade’s spilled intestines. He clenched his eyes shut till the image passed, and when he opened them again, there she was in her florid expectancy; her tapered nose twitched from a brush with a butterfly as she asked him, “Shtel mit mir a chupeh?” Will you marry me?

He stared at her, searching for some taint of sarcasm, and found none. Then the laughter started deep in his bowels, erupting in spasms in his chest and escaping his mouth in a volley of loud guffaws. Doubled over, he delivered himself of a hilarity that contained as much heartache as mirth and shook him till he could barely stand. The tears that scalded his cheeks mingled with the sweat bathing his skin, as if his flesh itself were weeping after so many arid years. When the seizure began to abate and he was able to pull himself together again, she remained as before, having stoically weathered the storm. Her crested head was cocked to one side as she studied him with interest. Was she crazy, he wondered, or merely stupid? The categories did not seem to pertain.

Mustering an uncharacteristic frankness along with his makeshift proficiency, he told her, “Nem mir in acht farknasn.” Consider us betrothed.

At first she visited him only at erratic intervals, usually appearing in the early evening after she’d completed her chores and before the dinner bell rang. She would sit beside him on a lava promontory or in a papyrus stand from which he watched his puny flock cropping mud and read one of her storybooks. In anticipation of her coming Ruby had begun to groom himself; he trimmed his arboreal beard and scrubbed his body in the shower bath of his own construction, a process involving half an hour’s pumping of water from a receptacle tank to the barrel above. Still he deemed the operation worthwhile since his cleanliness (plus the broadcloth shirt and duck trousers) helped, he believed, to conceal the turmoil within. Shprintze, however, showed no appreciation for his efforts, and seemed at first not even to recognize him, until he reassured her he was the same hermit troll to whom she was engaged. Neither was she as fastidious in preparing to meet him, though Ruby was a little intoxicated by the civet scent she exuded.

It wasn’t long before he learned her disturbing secret: that she only pretended to read the books whose open pages she never turned. He asked if she were illiterate, then immediately regretted the question, though she took no offense; she merely shook her head, and later, when he ventured to read aloud to her—still amazed at how the language reprised itself with near lucidity—she might anticipate sentences whenever he faltered, sometimes reciting them from memory with eyes closed. But mostly she was content to remain his passive audience.

It seemed to Ruby that Shprintze borrowed identities from the characters in those stories like costumes from a wardrobe rack in order to sustain her throughout any given day. But those temporary identities would wear thin by dusk and need replenishing from her bag of stories. When her assumed personae had run their course she came to him, and she appeared at those times practically a feral creature. It wasn’t that she was spooked or panicked but merely uncivilized and at sea until the reading domesticated her all over again. Then she could face the collective once more with the forbearance of a Sheyndele from Dovid Pinski’s “The Woodcutter’s Wife” or the vivacity of one of Tevye’s daughters, which would see her through another working day. Watching her Ruby remembered the multiple identities he’d adopted during his term as a fugitive; but since his post office photos had yellowed and been papered over by a new generation of Jewish desperados, he’d done with disguises. Now, but for his bare feet and checkered kefiyeh, he could have been mistaken for just another sunburnt halutz.

The girl’s bag of books contained a volume of Peretz Hirschbein’s stories and another collection of S. Ansky’s; there was Midrash Itzik by Itzik Manger, which included his Hershel Ostropolier tales, the moral fantasies of Glückel of Hameln, and I. L. Peretz’s fables and plays. It was a sweet and sour literature, full of worriers rather than warriors, that superseded in Ruby’s mind the news of Secretary Bevin’s Machiavellian policies and the assassination of Lord Coyne, the decimation by liquid nitro of the King David Hotel. But what of Shprintze’s own history? Was it, like the words in her books, worn so smooth by memory that her brain could find no traction there? This was Ruby’s theory, but every so often, though long out of practice in cajolery, he tried to tease her into disclosing some detail of her past. “A mol iz geven,” he might begin, chunking a shard from an ancient cenotaph at Abimelech harrassing a ewe munching nettles. “Once upon a time, Shprintzele was born…,” making a gesture indicating that she should continue the tale. And when she refused to take the bait, he would wait a day or two and try again. It was a little like trying to kick-start the commune’s old Flying Merkel motorbike, or so he told her, eliciting a flutter he took for the precursor of a smile; he had coaxed a smile. Still he was unprepared when the girl finally took up the narrative on her own.

“My papa was Reb Eliakum Feygenboim, a mokher seforim, a bookseller; my mama who I don’t remember died young. We lived on the Tsvarda Gass in Vilna, in three crowded rooms over the shop that was everywhere books, downstairs and up. As a business, the shop was nit gornisht, a failure, since my papa—if he sold shrouds nobody would die—gave away to his favored customers the prizes and discouraged who he deemed unworthy from buying the rest. It was only when he would leave the city on peddling trips to the villages that he would make from the Litvaks a few groschen. They wouldn’t let girls go in cheder so I never learned to read Toyreh, but I could read from the Tseyna Reyna and the Maaseh Bukh and I gobbled up like shnecken everything in the shop from Shaikevitch to Aksenfeld.…” She was speaking, Ruby understood, as the heroine of a story, “Shprintze the Bookpeddler’s Daughter,” who lived in her papa’s library and was every girl in every story she read.

“Then came in an evil hour the shretelekh, the devils in their helmets and boots that they piss green worms, and dragged me out of my books into Sitra Achra, the Underworld, where even God don’t go. There they put on me their mark so that always I would belong to them.…”

Before she’d been abducted, however, Shprintze had hidden a bag of treasured titles in a space under the floorboards in the shop. Her father, who lacked his daughter’s presence of mind, was still selecting books for the journey when the Germans burst in, and as he lingered too long in choosing, they stove in his satin-capped skull with their rifle butts. Broken heart notwithstanding, Shprintze was shrewd enough to swallow the shop key before being marched to the depot, and in the boxcar that transported them to perdition she voided her bowels and dug the key from her own filth. After the liberation, she made her way back to Vilna, whose desolation proclaimed the news that the Underworld now held dominion everywhere. She returned to the shop late at night, used the key that still miraculously opened the lock, and crept inside. Bereft of books, the place was an apothecary’s, its shelves boasting potions that for all she knew gave to the devils the saberlike erections upon which they spitted young girls. In haste she pried up the floorboards fearing a vacancy, fearing the discovery of her father’s bones, and reclaimed her bag of books from their cache. She hurried back into the street, where she stopped beneath the first lamppost and opened a volume at random, hoping to plunge without prelude into that element from which she’d been cast out. But the words lay on the page like flyspecks, refusing to give up their meaning, so that it seemed her exile was to be everlasting.

Transferred from one DP camp to another, she wound up on Cyprus, whence she was swept along on the current that ultimately washed ashore in the Promised Land. But the Bible was never her book, and by the same token the Jews from that epic—the kings, seers, and harlots that haunted the born-again landscape—were not her people. Then she surprised Ruby by appending to the end of her confession, “Now you.” And when he hesitated, “A mol iz geven…”

“Once upon a time,” he offered at length, feeling obliged to tender his own demonic credentials, “Ruben ben None burned down his papa’s parnosseh, his livelihood, with his papa inside.” But saying it didn’t make it a story; it would never be a story. “Since then” he added, “murder is all he knows.”

But the truth was that he wasn’t murdering anybody these days, and the anger he’d once been able to conjure for the task was no longer available to him. Now he was wholly occupied by his concern for Shprintze, who inspired sensations he couldn’t even name; though one of them was accompanied by physical symptoms—chronic bellyache, full-throttle heart—that might be ascribed to fear. Never before afraid on his own account, Ruby feared for the girl’s fragility, for the welfare of her blistered fingers, the pulse that stirred the numbers on her wrist, the russet hair which, grown out of its featheriness, was whipped into a brushfire by the desert simoom.

In the meantime Shprintze and her association with the counterfeit shepherd were the subject of much gossip among the population of Tel Elohim. Leery of the Baal Shatikah, they speculated on his pernicious influence over the girl, who was becoming if possible ever more remote herself. They observed with disapproval the way the ill-matched pair conspired over books in the company of a defective dog and a dingy flock, their hind legs matted from the runs. But nobody dared to interfere with them, as they sprawled amid spear grass or sat beneath the canvas cover of a mired truck regarding a sunset, which looked to Ruby like a hemorrhage behind a gauze dressing, to Shprintze a bedsheet after a wedding night. Then the girl would go back to her walking part among the settlers and the shepherd would return his sheep to their wattle. He would retire to his tin-roofed hut on the chalk ridge overlooking the settlement, a habitation so overgrown with ranunculus that it might have been a natural outcrop, and prepare his meager supper.

It had been a long while since he’d dined with the community, though for a time women enamored of his legend had left covered dishes at his door: savory beef and egg noodles, pita bread and sesame paste, stewed prunes. But since his withdrawal from the life of the commune and the plugatsim, the terror squads, the food had ceased to appear, and Ruby sustained himself on whatever came to hand. It might be a raw potato, a fistful of unripe carobs, oranges bruised with blue mold. It was penitent’s fare, which he ate more out of the habit of staying alive than from any real appetite. Despite his forager’s diet, though, Ruby supposed his health was sound enough, but while his muscles remained taut his body had grown alarmingly thin. He had no mirror (shaved by instinct like the blind) but could trace in his sunken cheeks the creases wrought by constant worry. He could feel the years and the toll his rearoused sensibilities had taken, and though he longed to articulate his feelings for Shprintze, he was afraid that if he expressed them they might ravage her the way they had him.

For the same reason, he had yet to touch her. He was fearful that her mostly imaginary world might not withstand the blunt impact. It was difficult to know, given all she’d been through, what did and did not constitute defilement; and while he might suffer the urge to stroke, say, the tendon at the downy nape of her neck, he knew better than to risk the intimacy. Better to ache with unrealized desires, inviting a pain that was no less than he deserved. What he didn’t deserve, however, was that the pain, though nearly unbearable, should also be unbearably sweet. Then on an evening in the month of Elul when they sat reading at the lip of a well, the chill air emanating from its stony darkness as from an ice cave, Ruby inadvertently placed a hand in Shprintze’s hair. It was not deliberate, but in some corner of his mind he registered the gesture, imagining she might incline her gamin’s head and allow herself the ghost of a grin—and that would be that. Instead, she turned toward him with a mouth that looked to have been gashed open, its stifled howl more shrill than any sound she might have uttered, and springing catlike to her feet, she ran away down the hill through the cyclone gates of Tel Elohim.

But later that night, as he lay twisting on the rack of his folding cot, castigating himself for his blunder, the door opened to starlight silhouetting her spare contours through a flimsy nainsook shift. “Murder me, my wicked one,” she importuned him in a perfect imitation of coyness—and a few months after, she began to show the swelling that indicated she was quick with child.

RUBY HAD A FRIEND of sorts, a young Arab shepherd he’d run across years before while grazing his flock in the dried-out washes west of the settlement. The boy, perhaps mistaking the assassin for a legitimate herder of sheep, had attempted to direct him through gibbering and gestures toward greener pastures, but Ruby preferred to remain in the wastes where he squatted meditating on his sins. A twiggy character in a filthy tunic, with a clump of hair like a bird’s nest, the boy shrugged his knobby shoulders and hied his flock toward the grassy heights. But he reappeared at odd intervals during the succeeding days so that Ruby suspected their meetings were not always accidental. With a broad grin proud of its broken teeth, a plaited ribbon dangling lewdly from his loincloth, he greeted his fellow shepherd with a merry “Itbach al yahud.” Death to the Jew. It was a salutation delivered with such hearty good humor that Ruby, who’d heard it often enough in other contexts, could only respond with a slightly puzzled, “Aleichem sholem.” This became their customary exchange whenever they crossed paths.

Ruby assumed at first that the boy hailed from the mud-domed village of Kafr Qusra, which could be seen from the slopes of Tel Elohim, but soon he began to realize that the shepherd swore allegiance to no place on earth. He had a name, Iqbal bin Fat Fat, which Ruby had gleaned over the course of several visits, but though he babbled incessantly—a multitude of consonants trampling a handful of vowels—his unlikely moniker was the only solid detail the amateur herdsman was ever to learn of the boy’s identity. He turned up unannounced and took for granted the Jew’s unoffered hospitality, but while he was clearly a bit deranged—a mejdoub, he called himself, a born fool—Ruby began to look forward to their encounters. Their initial meeting had occurred during the fugitive period following the Baal Shatikah’s prison escape, when he’d returned to the kibbutz after months of hiding out. He was still lying low, abstaining from the night patrols and tending to avoid the settlers as well—who were themselves not altogether happy to be hosting him, especially since his uncles of blessed memory were gone. So it surprised Ruby to discover that he welcomed the unscheduled visits of this quaint interloper; nor did it seem to matter that communication between them was so restricted, as the Arab apparently required no comprehension from his audience and the Jew had long since lost the habit of conversation.

They would sit together for hours, Ruby nodding at the weird modulations of Iqbal’s chin music and sometimes sharing his water pipe. Their flocks never mingled; Iqbal’s dog, Dalilah, saw to that. A nobler, curlier breed than Abimelech, she would weave among the lambs and ewes, encircling them in an invisible fold, though the snowy Arab flock would have shunned the Jewish bunch for their uncouthness in any case. It never occurred to Ruby to draw a moral from the situation any more than he was moved to speculate about the boy’s origins: Iqbal was a denizen of the wilderness who had befriended the Jewish incendiary the way a jackal might approach a campfire to partake of the warmth. For the boy was very like a wild animal, or several animals, a mimic who spontaneously impersonated the behavior of whatever creature happened into their field of vision. If, say, a long-legged bustard flew overhead, the boy would rise on one leg flapping his arms and screeching hysterically; he would bay at the brindled wildcats and hyenas, who answered him with a forlorn plangency. Throwing back his burnoose, he might reveal the cowpie of his hair twisted into love locks plastered with butter, or lift his djellaba to withdraw from his sagging diaper a warehouse inventory of utensils and tools, which he offered for sale. In the heat of the day he would erect on the single pole of his shepherd’s staff a haircloth tent whose shade he offered to share with the Jew.

His sack also contained, along with a waterskin and various spices, ingredients exceeding the uses of ordinary condiments, such as crows’ wings, powdered porcupine quills, and pressed scorpion, which Ruby figured were employed in casting spells. At some point in the afternoon or evening the boy would gather his possessions and take up his crudely carved staff; Ruby would lift his rifle and the two of them would depart without ceremony in their separate directions. Often days, weeks, even months would elapse before they set eyes on each other again, upon which they would resume their chance acquaintance as if no time at all had intervened. But time did pass, and though the shepherd remained as unreconstructed as ever, Ruby noted that sparse hairs had begun to sprout over his tawny cheeks, and a knavish cast had entered his eye. Moreover, certain of his sheep had conceived the suspicious habit of nuzzling their backsides against him with a brazen immodesty.

The mongrel Abimelech, who barked at shadows and chased echoes, never bothered to signal the shepherd’s approach. (He adored Dalilah and attempted to court her with acrobatics resembling rabid convulsions, though she spurned his overtures and left him to hump the sultry air.) Iqbal, however, always announced his own advent with the usual insults, most of which remained unintelligible to Ruby. But mostly Ruby was indifferent to the shepherd’s language and satisfied to hunker beside him as he dredged a brazier from his bottomless sack for roasting gobbets of shashlik. Then the two of them would gnaw the leathery meat, their faces slathered with the grease, and afterward Iqbal, still unweaned, would suck the teat of his single goat until it staggered.

Once, as they sat among the saline bushes in a sandy stream bed, their sheep resting in the shade of the shallow chasm, the sun clouded over and a sudden storm came up. Even Iqbal, attuned though he was to every mood of the weather, was caught off guard. So torrential was the downpour that before the sheep could stir or the shepherds, languid from the afternoon’s hashish, rouse themselves, a flash flood had filled the empty channel like the bursting of a dam. Struggling against the surging current, Ruby and Iqbal attempted to harry their animals to higher ground. Most found footholds among the rocks of the defile and were able to scramble to safety in advance of the rising trough, but a few were deluged by the instantaneous wall of water and carried away. At one point Ruby himself was swept off his feet by the turbulence, and though he didn’t suppose himself in any danger, the shepherd plunged into the rushing conduit to rescue him. An aggravated Ruby found himself clutched by the beard, tugged from beneath the armpits, and dragged up the steep bank of what had become a roaring watercourse. But even then the boy did not let go his embrace (which was leavened now by an element of tenderness) until Ruby shoved him abruptly away, sitting up in time to see the incontinent old ram he’d been trying to save being swept downstream.

Not long after that the girl came to live at Tel Elohim. Then the shepherd discovered that he had been demoted in his friend’s affections to something like the rank held by Abimelech—to whom Ruby occasionally tossed scraps though mainly the dog had to fend for itself. Soon the Jew was no longer alone and the company he kept was exclusive, so that even Iqbal, who had never been shy about intruding on his solitude, knew enough to steer clear of their dalliance. From time to time, however, Ruby was aware that the boy had not entirely vanished and every so often might catch sight of him standing storklike on a single leg in the distance, leaning pensively on his graven staff. After a while, however, he no longer looked out for the shepherd and had all but forgotten the existence of Iqbal bin Fat Fat.

Meanwhile Shprintze’s pregnancy was the talk of the commune. For one thing, every pregnancy in the Yishuv was a participatory event and every expectant mother considered the property of the entire kibbutz, since the child she carried was destined to become another hero of labor. This was how the notion of a universal redeemer had been translated into the argot of the Zionist enterprise. That the child in question was also the fruit of an unsanctified union was of little consequence to most, but that it belonged to an individual whose status in the community was dubious at best, made it the more incumbent on the settlers to claim the mother and her offspring as their own. The women especially began to show an inordinate interest in Shprintze, a concern from which the girl retreated, sticking all the closer to the companion whose domicile she now shared. The tension between the misfit couple and the tribe to which they only marginally belonged increased throughout the months of the girl’s gestation, during which she and the semi-retired assassin seldom left the vicinity of his firebrick hut. The hut itself had been somewhat transformed from its previously Spartan interior by the shelves Ruby built to display Shprintze’s books. There were the Yid artifacts as well, the spice boxes and candelabra, that the girl had reclaimed from items the other survivors had discarded, which lent a certain coziness to the decor of what had previously been a monastic cell.

Contributing to that warmth (infernally whenever the Primus stove was lit) were the dishes that Shprintze served her man. But as cooking was for her a largely make-believe activity like her reading, the women of the settlement, anxious for the health of the unborn, had begun again to leave anonymous offerings on the doorstep. These usually consisted of dense tcholent, figgy compotes, and ragouts, though occasionally some more outré concoction might appear—such as boiled sheep’s eyes in a camel’s-urine marinade seasoned with spices found in no Jewish pantry. (Such reminders that the shepherd had not completely quit the scene were noted only in passing.) While Ruby viewed the commune’s charity as an unbidden invasion, Shprintze appeared to accept it as her due, the propitiation of demons having, as she knew, a long tradition. Their domesticity was in any event something they both seemed to savor, and even Abimelech, who’d always valued his own independence, now stayed close to the hovel. Having come to acknowledge the girl in her delicate condition as his mistress, the dog established himself as the guardian of hearth and home.

At night by the light of a spirit lamp strafed by moths, they performed their ritual affinities. They read the tales about this one’s headstrong daughter and that one’s bumpkin son in search of their bashert, their fated one. During interludes they stepped out into the evening air, where Ruby would lift Shprintze’s shift to bare her distended belly in a direct challenge to the waxing moon. Sometimes on the pallet that had replaced the folding cot that was too narrow for the both of them, the girl would walk the length and breadth of Ruby’s nakedness with her fingers. She lingered over his scars, each of which had its origin in a different place, so that examining them was tantamount to making a tour of the Holy Land. And though the Baal Shatikah was half a stranger to Ruby now, the pressure of her fingers on his wounds revived each episode (in Nur Chams, Al-Qibilya, on the Damascus Road) with a sharpness that was a relief from the more excruciating pain of loving and being loved.

They never discussed what they would do when the baby came, so permanent a condition did Shprintze’s tumescence seem. And while Ruby was constantly thumping her belly to test for ripeness, placing an ear to her extruded navel to hear the burbling beneath, while he rubbed her like a lamp containing a captive genie, he never expected that anything would really emerge. Of course, neither prospective parent had any education in these matters, nor was there a resident physician to advise them, but there was scarcely a woman who had not been schooled in midwifery. So, when the labor throes began and Shprintze gave herself up to wave upon wave of banshee shrieks, Ruby lost what was left of his pride and, leaving Abimelech to guard the girl, ran down the hill, calling to the women for help. They had apparently been waiting for just such an alarm. With them they brought provisions for almost every eventuality, though once they’d arrived at the hut on the ridge, the midwife-in-chief, a Rumanian immigrant with a nubbly frown, discovered the one thing they were missing. For there on the doorstep wrapped in a date frond was a gift: a taproot shaped like a seahorse, which the woman, sniffing before licking, determined to be a rare herbal parturifacient: “Der kishef!” she proclaimed. Magic! She had her assistants mash it to powder with a pestle, stir it into a glass of mint tea, and administer it to the caterwauling girl, who was soon after delivered of an infant with pipestem limbs and a gourdlike head—a peevish boy whom she and her demon lover proceeded to cherish beyond reason.

THERE WAS NEVER a specific moment when Ruby bowed out of military operations altogether. Rather, he had removed himself by degrees, until he was a warrior no more but only the shepherd of a flock of blighted sheep dwelling on the outskirts of a community that regarded him as extraneous. He still had his allies among the fresh breed of freedom fighters, young men in flared breeches and riding boots who had replaced their maimed and imprisoned forebears. They had been reared on tall tales of the Baal Shatikah’s deadly expertise, and assured one another that when the time was ripe the old campaigner would rise up phoenixlike to deal the coup de grâce to Israel’s foes. Whenever the opportunity arose, they attempted to curry favor with him, singing his praises within his earshot and entreating him to fill the vacuum left by the martyred Yair Stern, though Ruby seldom dignified their blandishments with a response. Moreover, the presence of Revisionists in their midst had always been a source of controversy among the settlers, who had never asked for their protection in the first place and were additionally irked at having to carry the dead weight of Ruben ben None. But after the birth of his son, when the women had rallied to the young mother’s aid, things began to change.

The inveterately private couple still refrained from placing their off-spring among the pool of infants in the children’s house while they did the work of the collective, work they had in any case opted out of. But since Yudl’s delivery and his subsequent cranky demands, the new parents had found it necessary to reintegrate themselves little by little into the society of the kibbutz. In exchange for pabulum, nappies, and the quinine-laced formula the baby required, Shprintze began to take her turn again among the mortals. With the squinch-faced infant dangling marsupial-like from a sling around her neck, she arranged the books in the recently established colony library, where she infiltrated the small Hebrew collection with her Yiddish texts. Lest his son be regarded a pariah like himself, Ruby offered his services for odd jobs, again displaying the talent for tinkering he’d inherited from his own starry-eyed papa. He devised a mechanical scarecrow to frighten away birds from the vineyard, used his skill at setting booby traps to blow a hole for a rainwater cistern, and recalling his sojourn among moonshiners designed a still for the manufacture of potato schnapps. In his absence his neglected flock strayed into alien pastures, where they were slaughtered by hostile neighbors to the dismay of nobody but Ruby himself, who silently mourned their sacrifice to higher priorities. No longer afraid of him, the colonists relaxed into a general impression that paternity had tamed the assassin: He was judged a reformed character whose past all somewhat self-righteously forgave. So when the circuit-riding rabbi traveled through the settlement on his sumpter nag, they felt confident enough to approach the regenerate Ruby about having his son circumcised. He had no reason to refuse provided he be allowed to guide the palsied old rabbi’s knife—“like,” observed a waggish onlooker, “cutting a wedding cake.” The remark inspired the colonists to propose that, as one good turn called for another, the rabbi might as well go ahead and consecrate the mother and father’s union. “They can stroke the prepuce,” the same wag suggested, “till it spreads to a bridal canopy.”

Since there was no time to advertise the spur-of-the-moment event, the wedding was a modest affair. Still, the few women in attendance insisted that, maiden or no, Shprintze should wear the communal bridal gown, which they altered then and there to fit her no longer so boyish frame. Also made available was a much recycled gold-filled wedding band, a decanter of plum brandy, and the machinist Kotik Gilboa playing “Rozhinkes mit mandlen” on his fiddle at the bride’s request. The handful of IZL boys drew straws for the honor of standing up for the Baal Shatikah, and the ceremony—the old rabbi seemed anxious to wash his hands of it—was over in a matter of minutes. Ruby crushed the glass with his heel as if stomping a dormouse and, with the colicky Yudl squirming larvalike between them, kissed the bride. Then the witnesses toasted their health before dispersing, though one uninvited guest, tarrying with his dog behind a medlar at a distance of some hundred yards, continued to look on with an invidious eye.

However tentative, Ruby’s reentry into the life of the settlement gave him an aura of accessibility, which made the young bravos of the revolutionary underground think he might now be fair game; and so they came calling. By this time the mood of the Yishuv had altered, and even the most accomodationist among the settlers were now in favor of hastening the departure of the British at any cost. The abuses of the centuries had culminated in such obscenities that enough was finally enough: Amale-kites be blotted out, give us a home! For his part Ruby was so wracked by devotion to his wife and child that he could scarcely abide the thought of leaving them for even a day. But when the lads, some of whom had seen action in Europe in the Jewish Brigade and so could not be easily ignored, appealed for his assistance, he listened; though when they insisted that his participation in the next major tactical strike would be a boost to morale, he deprecated the idea: His soldiering days were over. But eventually they began to wear down his resistance, and in his new capacity as member in good standing of the Kibbutz Tel Elohim, Ruby was at last persuaded to yield just this once to their pleas.

This was during the Days of Awe, when the newlyweds ate apples and honey and attended Rosh Hashonah services in the sweatbox of the cinderblock chapel. Shprintze wore the toweling sling containing the baby, which Ruby had almost come to regard as an auxiliary appendage, almost as if mother and son were one flesh; and though the whiffy Yudl might have been an obstacle to their intimacy, his doting father found the contrary to be the case: He adored his wife and child as a single entity. While it amused him at first that the baby’s unhappy face did seem to partake of the demonic, he now insisted with Shprintze that the boy appeared more normal every day. After the heat of the shul even the arid air of the biscuit-dry Galilean hills was refreshing, and the couple strolled along with the congregation down the gravel road to the irrigation well. Dividing a fistful of challah crumbs between herself and her husband, to the accompaniment of the baby who hadn’t stopped bawling since his bris, Shprintze invited her man to perform the tashlikh ritual with her. This involved tossing the crumbs representing their sins of the past year into the well.

“Better,” said Ruby, thinking of all the years prior to the last, “I should throw the whole of myself in.” But Shprintze assured him it wouldn’t matter anyway, since during the holy days when the Book of Life remained open, no one could die. Then it seemed as if the ritual they observed was their real life, while demon and demoness was something that Ruby and Shprintze only played at to add spice to their unpublic hours.

The action, planned for just before Yom Kippur, involved robbing a bank, which Ruby considered a purposeless exercise. The eroding British occupation, clearly on its last legs, had lately resorted to desperate measures: They attempted to enforce curfews after bombings and cordoned off various settlements, though nothing helped; the harassment of their troops and installations was unrelenting. Having realized that keeping the peace between Arabs and Jews—a plague on both their houses—was more trouble than it was worth, the occupiers were all but ready to pull up stakes and bugger off forever. But the directorate of Lehi or Palmach, or whatever high command the boys were taking their orders from these days, had decided that ordinary life should be disrupted at every instance in order to prove that the Brits had lost control. So one simmering September morning, having bid a guilty good-bye to his wife and child, Ruby set out for Tel Aviv with a carload of callow guerillas in a backfiring old canvas-roofed landaulet. The vehicle’s smelly interior was crammed with lads singing “Hazak hazak venithazak, from strength to strength we grow stronger,” until their older comrade, by the authority they’d vested in him, told them to please shut up.

After an interminable couple of hours they arrived in the city, where they proceeded to bungle the whole operation. The robbery of the Barclay’s Bank in Nahalat Benjamin Street itself went off smoothly enough, but the aftermath was a disaster. It didn’t help that the dauntless Baal Shatikah, curled up in a craven funk, had refused to leave the car. Giving up on him, three of the boys, themselves seasoned conspirators, tied bandannas over their faces, entered the art deco building with an empty suitcase, and emerged minutes later, as the alarm began to sound—two of them with weapons drawn while the third lugged the suitcase now bulging with piasters and pounds sterling. They jumped into the car and urged the driver to step on it, but the driver, a recent recruit from whose rabbity eyes the tears were streaming, may have been infected by the behavior of their celebrity passenger; because instead of heading along the prescribed escape route down Allenby, he became disoriented and steered the car into the nearby Carmel Market. He ploughed into a throng of shoppers at a Gazos stand, wounding several including a little girl in a hijab, whose legs were crushed beneath the screeching wheels. In the succeeding melee a mixed crowd of Arabs and Jews, united for once in their outrage, attacked the car (which was mired in produce) and dragged out its passengers. The boy in the watchcap hugging the suitcase to his chest, having received a boot to the gut, dropped his burden onto the pavement, where it burst open, releasing a blizzard of currency. Their anger instantly transformed to greed, the mob scrambled over one another in pursuit of the fluttering bills, and under cover of the commotion Ruby managed to make a getaway on foot. He took cover under the beach promenade among starfish and discarded “French yarmelkes,” waiting for shame to overtake him, but instead felt only relief at having preserved himself for the sake of his family. After dark he stole from his hideout to catch a ride in a sherut packed with winery workers headed north from the port, arriving around midnight at the village of Qever Shimon from which he walked seven desolate kilometers to Tel Elohim.

Despite the early hour there were lights on in the long dining hall, and the short-wave radio, perhaps broadcasting news of the botched robbery, could also be heard. The kibbutzniks would be seated at their benches apportioning blame, and though Ruby wondered if other militia members had escaped the fracas—or had they been apprehended, beaten to death?—he crept past the hall in his anxiousness to return to his family. Trudging up the powdery slope, however, he found himself unable to hasten his steps, his legs teetering as if suddenly bowed with age. Ordinarily Abimelech, who seldom deigned to greet him, would be snoring beside Shprintze on the plank bed Ruby had constructed for his wife and himself, but tonight the dog was outside cavorting in front of the hut, performing the stunts he generally reserved for Dalilah. Ruby heard his son’s hiccupping cries as he approached, which was nothing unusual, he was a fractious child; though upon entering the vine-knitted dwelling, he wondered that his wife could sleep through the sobbing of the kaddish at her breast. (Ruby had also built a cradle on rockers but the baby hardly slept in it.) He sat down in utter exhaustion on the mattress beside his bride, her features cameo-pale in the dim interior, and made to remove her arm from around the child. But when he touched it, he recoiled and sprang back to his feet, because the arm, scaly and cool, began to slide away from the bundled infant like a plump tourniquet unwinding and plopped onto the plywood floor. There, incandescently white, it lengthened and coiled and lengthened again as it slithered out the open door, where under a red moon in a lapis sky it grew dark and stiff as an axle. Then a slim figure with a sack slung over its shoulder, followed by a prancing dog, came forward from the shadows to lift the staff from the ground and, while Abimelech whimpered after them, pad swiftly away.

The autopsy was performed by a doctor called in from Haifa for the purpose. He pronounced what most had already assumed: that the young mother had died from a combination of symptoms—insults, said the doctor, to both her nervous and circulatory systems—consistent with the virulent bite of the adder native to that region. It never occurred to anyone that the death might have been due to happenstance, the diagnosis having satisfied all concerned that the Arabs of the district, notorious for employing venomous serpents to get even, were responsible. Given the bad blood over boundary disputes between Tel Elohim and the village of Kafr Qusra, the wonder was that no such homicides had taken place before. The couple of partisans who’d survived the bank debacle, anxious for a chance to redeem themselves, recommended an immediate reprisal which they called upon the Baal Shatikah to lead. Vengeance, they maintained, was the best medicine; it was the only cure for such mortal grief, and also (they insinuated) for the restoration of one’s manly fortitude. But the Baal Shatikah was apparently not of their opinion. Declining both a memorial service and a plot in the newly inaugurated cemetery, Ruby buried Shprintze himself along with a storybook and the infant’s empty sling at the foot of an oleander she’d planted outside the hut. As an afterthought he perforated Abimelech’s heart with his icepick and dropped the dog into the grave beside the girl. Then the UN voted that a people should be allowed to become a nation, and the British began a pullout that left the Jews and Arabs (twins with different fathers) to settle things between themselves. Palestinians prepared to revolt while Arab armies started to mobilize on the borders of what would emerge as the state of Israel. But before the demons could come back to retrieve the boy (for he knew they would return for one of their own), Ruben Karp gathered up his son and took flight across the oceans to a ghetto in Memphis, Tennessee.

“WHEN IGOT THERE,” Ruby’s grandson Bernie read to his girlfriend, “I dumped the kid in the lap of his grandma in her ice cream parlor on North Main Street, and told her I was a murderer. She told me she was a whore. I told her I used to be a Jew.

“‘I said once the same thing to your papa,’ she replied, dandling the fretful pisher whom she’d pacified with a cinnamon stick on her knee, ‘and you know what he told me?’

“‘What?’ I asked.

“He said, ‘I used to be a hunchback.’”