AT SEVEN O’CLOCK in the evening, sitting on the balcony of his second-floor apartment, he is watching the departing day, and waiting. What does the last light promise, and what can it deliver?

Below lies an empty garden with a patch of lawn, some oleander bushes, a bench and a neglected bougainvillaea bower. The garden ends in a stone wall marked with the outline of an opening which is blocked with courses of stones that are newer, lighter in colour – in fact, at this moment they even seem slightly lighter in weight than the original stones of the wall. Behind the wall rise two cypress trees. Now, in the evening light, he finds they look black rather than green. Beyond stretch barren hills. That way lies the desert, where, every now and again, a grey eddy whirls up, quivers for a moment, wriggles, sweeps away, subsides. Only to start up somewhere else.

The sky turns grey. There are some still clouds, one of which faintly reflects the glow of the sunset. The setting sun itself is not visible from this balcony. On the stone wall at the end of the garden a bird shrills excitedly, as though it has just discovered something that cannot be bottled up. How about you?

Night is falling. Around the town the street lights are coming on, and windows shine out between intervals of darkness. The strengthening wind carries a breath of campfires and dust. The moonlight casts a mask of death on the nearest hills, which are no longer hills but like the notes of a muffled tune. This place seems to him like the end of the world. He does not mind being at the end of the world. He has done what he can, and from now on he will wait.

He leaves the balcony, goes indoors, sits down, his bare legs on the coffee table, and his arms hanging down heavily on either side of the armchair as though being pulled towards the cool floor. He does not switch on the television, or the light. From down the street comes a whispering of car tyres, followed by the barking of a dog. Someone is playing a recorder, not a whole tune but simple scales repeated without any apparent variation. These sounds agree with him. In the bowels of the building the lift passes his floor without stopping. In a neighbouring apartment a woman’s voice is reading the news on the radio, probably in a foreign language, though he is not certain of that right now. A man’s voice on the stairs says, It’s out of the question. Another replies, Okay then, so don’t go, it’ll come.

When the throbbing of the refrigerator stops, crickets can be heard in the wadi, as though punctuating the silence. A faint breeze rustles the curtains, ruffles the pages of a newspaper on a shelf, crosses the room, stirs the leaves of a houseplant, exits through the other window and returns to the desert. He momentarily hugs his shoulders. The pleasure reminds him of a summer evening in a real city, maybe Copenhagen, where he once stayed for a couple of days. Over there the night does not suddenly pounce, it feels its way gently. There the veil of twilight stretches for three or four hours, as though the evening aspires to reach out and touch the dawn. Various bells were ringing, one sounding hoarse, like a cough. A soft drizzle joined the evening sky to the water of the straits and the canals. An empty, brightly lit streetcar passed in the rain, and he thought he saw the young conductress leaning over in conversation with the driver, resting her hand on his, then the drizzle again, as if the evening light were not passing through it but coming from it, and the droplets met with the spray of a fountain in a small square, where the quiet water was illuminated from within all night long. A shabby middle-aged drunk was sitting on the parapet dozing, his grey-bristled head sunk deep on his breast, and his feet, sockless in his shoes, immersed in the water, motionless.

What time is it now?

He peers in the dark at his watch, but as he looks at the luminous hands he forgets what the question was. Is this perhaps the beginning of the gradual decline from pain into sadness? Dogs start barking again, furiously this time, in backyards and empty lots, and from the direction of the wadi, and beyond, from the distant darkness, from the hills, Bedouin shepherd dogs and strays, perhaps scenting a fox, one bark subsiding into a whine and being answered by another, piercing, desperate, as though mourning an irreparable loss. This then is the desert on a summer night, ancient, impassive, glassy. Neither dead nor alive. Simply there.

Looking at the hills through the glazed balcony door and across the stone wall at the end of the garden, he feels a sense of gratitude, but for what he is not sure. Could he really be grateful to the hills? A man in his sixties, stockily built, with a broad, peasant face and a suspicious or doubtful expression with a hint of concealed cunning. He has close-cropped grey hair and a distinguished-looking brindled moustache. In any room he seems to occupy more space than his body really takes up. His left eye is almost always half-closed, not as though he were winking but as though he were staring fixedly at an insect or a tiny object. He sits wide awake yet limp, as if after deep sleep. He finds the calm connections between the desert and the darkness satisfying. Let others be busy this evening having fun, making arrangements, feeling regret: for his part he willingly endorses this moment, which does not seem empty. The desert seems right to him and the moonlight justified. In the window opposite, two or three stars glow sharply over the hills. Softly he declares: Now you can breathe.

IT’S ONLY IN the evening you can breathe a bit, when the heat lets up. Another crazy day is over. I’ve spent all my time just running after time. From eight o’clock till one forty-five, at school: two hours’ general literature, two hours’ matriculation revision, and an extra hour for Russian immigrant kids whose minds were definitely not on the Exile of the Godhead. A pretty girl called Ina or Nina said in a lesson about Bialik: His words are Biblical, the sentiment he took from Lermontov, the poesy is anachronistic. She went on to recite some lines of poetry in Russian, perhaps to demonstrate the sort of poetry she liked. I silenced her. Even though I was not entirely captivated with the subject and had difficulty restraining myself from saying that, as far as I was concerned, the Godhead could stay in exile.

During my break, at eleven fifteen, I sat down near the air conditioning in the reading room to prepare for my next lesson, but almost at once I was called to the Deputy Head’s office for a meeting with a younger teacher who had taken umbrage at something an older one had said. I agreed to some extent with both of them and suggested they forgive and forget. It’s a miracle how this kind of cliché, and especially words like forgive, provided they are used at the right moment and with impartiality, can make tears flow and bring about a truce. Such petty words can soothe the hurt, perhaps because it was petty words that caused it.

I skipped lunch and ate a falafel on the hoof to make a meeting at twelve fifteen at the Workers’ Council office. We were going to try to stir up some sympathy for the idea of the refuge. The square was empty and sunscorched. In the middle of the mangy bed of rosemary stood a podgy bespectacled immigrant with a black beret, leaning motionless on a hoe as though he had passed out. The sun above him was cloaked in a fiery haze. At four o’clock, an hour late, Avraham Orvieto’s lawyer, Ron Arbel, arrived from Tel Aviv, a spoiled child whose mother had made him dress up as a businessman. We sat in the California Café with him and listened to a complicated explanation about the finances. By quarter to five, when I took him to meet the Town Treasurer, the perspiration had turned sticky and my armpits smelled sour like a strange woman’s; from there to a consultation with Muki, who had promised to write a memorandum but hadn’t, instead of which he spoke for half an hour about himself and what the government hadn’t got the hang of. Across his T-shirt was a loud print of a new rock group called Devil’s Tear. Then to the Education Centre and the chemist’s in the square and I just made it to the supermarket a quarter of an hour before it closed, and managed to get some cash from the machine and collect the iron which was being repaired. It was dark when I got home, wiped out by the heat and exhaustion, and I found him sitting in an armchair in the living room, with no light on and no sound. Another sit-in to remind me that the cost of my activities is his loneliness. It’s a ritual that has more or less fixed rules. I am, on principle, to blame for the difference of fifteen years in our ages. He, on principle, forgives me because he’s such a thoughtful person.

He prepared supper on his own: You’re tired, Noa, sit down, watch the news. He made an onion omelette, produced a geometrical salad, sliced some black bread and served it on a wooden board with some cheeses, and radishes that he had carved in the shape of rosebuds. Then he waited for my admiration as if he were Count Tolstoy who had once again deigned to light the stove in the hovel of one of his serfs.

After the news he put the kettle on, made us some herbal tea, placed a cushion under my head and another one under my feet and put a record on. Schubert. Death and the Maiden. But when I picked up the phone and rang Muki Peleg to ask if the memorandum was typed yet, and Ludmir and then Linda to sort out something to do with the planning permission, his generosity ran out and he got up, cleared and washed up the dishes, and shut himself up in his room, as though I were liable to chase after him. If it hadn’t been for this demonstration I might have had a shower and gone to him, to tell him what had happened, ask his advice. On the other hand, I’m not sure I would have done. He’s hard to take when he gets going – he knows exactly what’s wrong with our project and what I should never have said to whom – and even harder when he says nothing and listens, trying not to let his attention wander, like a patient uncle who has decided to devote some precious moments to listening to a little girl explaining what it was that frightened her dolly.

At quarter past ten, after I had taken a cold shower and then a hot one, had collapsed on my bed and was trying to concentrate on a book about the symptoms of addiction, I half-heard from his room the sound of the BBC. The World Service. Recently, like Menachem Begin in his years of seclusion, he has taken to tuning in to London every night. Is he on the lookout for some item of news that they’re keeping from us here? Or searching for a different perspective? Or using the broadcast to talk to himself? Maybe he’s only trying to get to sleep. His insomnia infiltrates my sleep and robs me of the few dreams I might have had.

Later, groggy with tiredness, when I’d abandoned my glasses and the light and the book, I could still catch the underwater sound of his bare feet in the passage, no doubt on tiptoe so as not to disturb me, and the fridge opening and the tap running and the lights being systematically switched off, and the apartment being locked up, his stealthy nocturnal wanderings that year after year have made me afraid a stranger has broken in. Some time after midnight I thought I sensed his touch on the door and I was so exhausted that I nearly submitted to his sadness and said yes, but he was already tiptoeing away down the passage – perhaps he had gone out onto the balcony without turning a light on. He likes the balcony on the summer nights. Or perhaps there was nothing, the footsteps, the touch on the door, his wall-piercing sadness, it may all have been mere fog, because I was already asleep. I had had a hard day and tomorrow after school there’s another meeting at Muki Peleg’s and I may have to go to Beersheba to try to finalize the planning permission at long last. I must get some sleep and try to be even more wide-awake tomorrow than I was today. Tomorrow is another hard day. And there’s the heat. And the way time flies.

THIS TIME IT did not go straight past on the other side of the wall, up to the next floor, but stopped with a faint scratching sound, and at once slammed and continued on its way. Cold and silent, a gecko, stony-eyed in the darkness, watching a colourful insect fluttering in the light, that is how I receive her: the swish of her skirt, the electrical impulse of her will before she moves, then the motion itself, the rumour of her heels between the door of the lift and the door of the apartment the lock already turning: as always, with no fumbling, the key slips straight into the slot.

She went from room to room, talking in full spate, voice young and bright, abandoning the ends of her sentences, she crossed the apartment from one end to the other, turning on lights one after another in the hall, the kitchen, the toilet and above my head in the living room, wafting a trail of honeysuckle scent and setting up a row of electric lights in her path as though to illuminate the runway for her landing. The whole apartment screwed up its eyes, dazzled.

When she reached me she dropped her shopping basket and her briefcase and two overflowing plastic bags on the coffee table and asked: Why are you sitting in the dark, Theo? And she answered herself: You fell asleep again, sorry I woke you, actually you should thank me, otherwise how would you get to sleep tonight?

She bent over me and gave me a hasty comradely kiss on my hair, then removed my bare feet from the coffee table and made as if to sit down next to me, but no, she kicked off her shoes, whirled round in her light skirt with the blue pattern of diamonds, and flounced off to the kitchen, came back with two tall glasses of mineral water saying, Dying of thirst, drank, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand in a childlike gesture and said, What’s new? She leapt up again to switch on the TV and only then did she sit down for a moment on the arm of my chair, almost leaning on me but not really leaning, she pulled her blonde hair away from her eyes as though drawing back a curtain, and said, let me tell you what a crazy day I’ve had.

She stopped. She suddenly slapped her forehead and leaped away from me to the other armchair, saying, Sorry, Theo, just a minute, I must just sort out a couple of quick phone calls, do you feel like making a salad? I’ve had nothing to eat since this morning apart from a falafel, I’m starving, I’ll only be a minute or two, then we’ll talk. She pulled the telephone over onto the curve of her lap and held it there for an hour. While she was talking she wolfed down the supper I made and served her without noticing, alternating suggestions, feelings and snap judgments, munching the food only in the pauses when she permitted her interlocutors to defend themselves. I noticed that she said several times, Come off it, You’re joking and also, What the hell, Come on, Don’t make me laugh, and Great, Perfect, Grab it with both hands. Her hands are much older than the rest of her, her labourer’s fingers wrinkled, the skin shrivelling, the back of her hand with its crisscrossed blue blood vessels and patches of pigment resembling a clod of earth. As if her true years have been temporarily driven back from her body to her hands, where they are patiently building up their reserves of decay in readiness for some weakening.

Then through the bathroom door for twenty minutes I could hear the jets of water and her young voice singing a song from years back, about a white rose and a red rose, followed by the sounds of the hairdryer and a drawer being opened. She eventually emerged scrubbed and scented, in a light blue cotton bath robe, and said, I’m whacked, I’m knocked out, let’s talk in the morning. She did not seem tired to me, but lithe and fetching, her thighs alive and breathing under the light bath robe, as she said, Good night, Theo, don’t be angry, don’t stay up late yourself. And again she said: What a crazy day I’ve had. And she closed the door behind her. She rustled the pages of a book in there for a few minutes and apparently she came across something amusing that made her laugh softly. A quarter of an hour later she switched the light off.

As usual she had forgotten to turn the shower tap right off. I could hear water running from where I was in the passage. I went and turned the tap as hard as I could, put the cap back on the toothpaste, turned the light off in the toilet, and went right round the apartment turning off the lights after her until there were none left on.

She has this gift of falling fast asleep in a moment. Like a popular little girl who has done her homework, tidied her desk, remembered to brush her hair and confidently believes that everything is all right and everybody is happy with her and tomorrow is another day. She is so much at peace with herself, with the darkness, with the desert at the end of the garden beyond the two thick cypresses, with the sheet that she has wound round her and the embroidered cushion that she clasps tightly to her chest in her deep sleep. Her sleep arouses a sense of injustice in me, or perhaps it is just plain jealousy; in the midst of the anger it is clear to me that there is no reason to be angry, but this knowledge does not quell my resentment and simply irritates me all the more.

I sat in my vest at the desk in my bedroom and tuned my transistor to London. Between news bulletins there was a programme about the life and loves of Alma Mahler. The presenter said that the male world was incapable of understanding her heart and saw in her a different character, not who she really was; then she began explaining what Alma Mahler was really like. I cut her off in mid-sentence, to show her that the male world has not improved, and went barefoot to the kitchen to raid the fridge. I was only after a sip or two of cold water but the soft light inside the fridge ambushed me like a caress. So as not to lose it and be left in the dark I poured myself some cold wine and peeled a triangle of cheese and meanwhile I found that I was tidying up the shelves. I sniffed the open carton of milk a couple of times, suspicious both of the milk and of my own sense of smell. I dropped a cluster of sausages in the bin because their colour looked off. I drew up the yogurts in a rear line in order of date and closed up the ranks of the eggs in the plastic trays. I hesitated before a jar of tuna, but compromised by covering it in plastic film. I pulled down some bottles of juice from a cupboard and slotted them into the door of the fridge to plug some gaps in the line. I arranged an orderly display in the vegetable tray and again in the fruit basket. It was only with difficulty that I fought off the temptation to attack the freezer compartment. I advanced on tiptoe to the door of her bedroom: I’m here if I’m called for. If not, at least I can try to catch a whiff of her slumber; perhaps I will absorb some of her surplus sleep.

From there, to the balcony, and the faded, old-fashioned chair.

The night is almost transparent. The whole world is bathed in a cold silvery light. It is not breathing. The two cypress trees seem to be carved out of basalt. The moonlike mountains look swathed in lunar wax. Hazy creatures crouch here and there, and they too look moonlike. In the valleys there are shadows within shadows. There was a single cicada that I notice only when it stops. What did the men mistakenly see in Alma Mahler and what was she really? If an answer to this question was possible, I missed it. It is almost certain that the question is meaningless, that it is framed in an empty fashion, and that no answer is theoretically possible. The presence of the barren hills in the darkness cancels words like “almost certain” or “theoretically possible”, and empties out the question, what did I see in you, Noa, or what do you see in me? I shall stop. Let’s suppose that you see in me what I sometimes see when I look at the desert. And how about me? Let’s say: a woman who is fifteen years younger than I am with a pulse like that at the core of life itself, a protoplasmic, rhythmic pulse, from before words or doubt existed in the world. Sometimes, without meaning to, she suddenly touches your heart. Like a cub, or a chick.

Years ago I learned to find my way around the map of the stars. It was something I learned in the army, or even earlier, in the youth movement. On clear nights I can still identify the Great Bear and the Little Bear and the Pole Star. As for the planets, I can still locate them but I forget which one is Jupiter, Venus or Mars. Right now in the total silence everything seems to have stopped and even the planets seem to have ground to a halt. It seems as though the night will go on for ever. All the stars look like tiny pinholes in the floor of the upper storey, droplets of luminosity from the light of the sky shining on the other side. If the curtain is drawn back, the world will be flooded with radiance and everything will become clear. Or be burned up.

There is a good telescope indoors, behind the bed linen on the second shelf on the left. I could go inside and get it so I can see better. Maybe Nehemia left her the telescope that used to belong to Peeping Gorovoy. Or to Yoshku, her cousin. There are still three or four such objects lurking around the house. The rest have gone. Disposed of. Even more spoiled than he was she once said during a row, even more of a Neanderthal male. She stopped short. She never repeated it. Even when we fight she keeps tight control of herself, and of me, her foot always firmly on the brake pedal. I am careful too, I know the limits: like touching glass with glass and drawing back just in time.

From the east, from the mountains, comes a gust of piercing desert wind. Like a cold sharp scythe. The wilderness is secretly breathing. The dust and stone look like an expanse of calm water in the dark. It is even, suddenly, cool. Nearly two o’clock. I’m not tired but I’ll go to my bedroom without switching the light on, I’ll get undressed and go to bed. Radio London will tell me what is not known here yet. How is the world tonight? Tribal clashes in Namibia. Floods in Bangladesh. A big rise in the number of suicides in Japan. What’s coming next? Let’s wait and see. What comes next is punk music, merciless, penetrating, rough and bloodthirsty, from London, at a quarter past two on Wednesday morning.

I WOKE UP at six and managed to write the memorandum. Muki Peleg will go over it and Linda has offered to type it out. At lunchtime I’ll send it to Avraham Orvieto, with copies for the Mayor and the Treasurer. Who else should I send it to? I must find somebody who has some idea. Perhaps I should get hold of a copy of the official regulations and learn them all up. Should I consult Theo anyway? That’s all he’s waiting for, like a hunter. He knew from the start that I’m not up to the challenge. He knew that after one or two slip-ups and failures I’d come running straight to him. Meanwhile, he’s tactful enough to say nothing and not interfere. Like a grown-up who allows a toddler to climb wherever he likes but keeps a close watch and holds his hands out, where the child can’t see him, to catch him if he falls.

I began the memorandum with an account of the “development of the idea”. I found this expression unsuitable, but I couldn’t find a better one. One of our students died in an accident “consequent upon drug-taking”. There are various conflicting accounts circulating in the staff room about the circumstances of the incident. I was interested in the young man in question, even though I never actually managed to exchange more than a few words with him. Immanuel Orvieto was a quiet pupil. One of three boys in a literature class containing thirty girls. In recent years shy pupils have disappeared, they are all noisy during break and drowsy during literature lessons. Tired, disconnected, they stare blankly at Flaubert and me with a stubborn expression of amused contempt, as if we were trying to sell them fairytales about storks and babies. But there was something about Immanuel that always reminded me of winter. Once he was late handing in an essay on Agnon. I stopped him in break and asked why. He lowered his eyelashes, as if he had been asked a question about love, and answered softly that the story in question was not particularly relevant to him. I interrupted sharply, Who’s talking about relevance, we’re talking about an obligation. He found no answer to this, even though I kept him there cruelly for a whole minute before I said coldly, All right, let me have it by next week.

He handed me the essay ten days later. It was a fine, carefully reasoned, understated piece of work. After the concluding sentence he had added a personal line in brackets: In the end I did find some relevance the story, despite the obligation.

Once I asked him on the stairs why he never put his hand up in class, surely he had things to say, I’d have liked to hear him talk occasionally. Again he had to pause before he answered hesitantly that he found words a trap. Not long before Pesach, I voiced the opinion in class that Yehuda Amichai wanted to express his opposition to war, and suddenly there was Immanuel’s introverted voice, as though talking in his sleep, and with an interrogative note at the end of the sentence: Whatever the poet did or didn’t want to say gets in the way of the poem?

I decided I should find the time to get him to talk.

But I didn’t find the time. I forgot. Put it off. I have three classes and two literature sets, including the special set for recent immigrants. Each one has close on forty pupils most of whom have a tortured look. I’m rather fed up myself, after all these years. Now I don’t even bother to remember their names. They’re almost all girls; they mostly wander around all through the summer in bright-coloured shorts with a tear at the very edge of the crotch; they’re almost all called Tali. Actually, there’s always one in every class who keeps correcting me, it’s not Tali it’s Tal, or vice versa.

The truth is that until after it happened I didn’t even know as much about Immanuel Orvieto as his class teacher and his counsellor did: that he had been living here in Tel Kedar from the age of ten with an unmarried aunt who worked in a bank. That his mother was killed a few years ago in the Olympic hijack. That his father is in Nigeria as a military adviser. There was a vague story circulating in the staff room that the boy had fallen in love or got involved with some girl in Elat, several years older, who was junkie and might even be a pusher. Before the incident, I listened to this with only half an ear, because the staff room is always full of all sorts of gossip. So is the whole town, for that matter.

He was found not far from the abandoned copper mine near Elat, after he had disappeared from his aunt’s home and been missing for ten days. He had fallen off a cliff. Or jumped. He had broken his back and apparently lay dying at the foot of the cliff for a day and half a night before he finally expired. It was to be hoped that he had not been conscious all that time, but there was simply no way of knowing. He had previously been taken there and been drugged, or drugged himself, or been tempted. I tried not to listen to these things, which here always come accompanied by excitable voices and gestures of stunned self-righteousness and a hint of secret glee: Look, what do you mean a backwater, look, we’ve made it to the national news, real-life excitement has come to us, too, and there’s a well-known journalist and a photographer, they’ve been prowling around outside since this morning but the executive have decided that none of us must be interviewed, we have to answer No comment.

The funeral was postponed twice because the father was delayed. A couple of days later the aunt died too, and the talk in the staff room was of a stroke, guilt feelings, the hand of fate. All kinds of cackle that I tried not to listen to. The fact is, I loathed the father even before seeing him. An absentee father, an arms-peddler, in Nigeria, probably full of complaints, probably only blaming us. It isn’t difficult to pass judgment from a distance, on the basis of a few hints that converge into a conclusion. I imagined the father as a kind of ex-stormtrooper, prosperous, judgmental and self-righteous. I made up my mind not to participate in the delegation from the staff room that went to see him in his room at the Kedar Hotel even before the funeral. From the African jungle, here he was at last condescending to come here only to blame us for the awful fate of his son, how did we fail to see, why did we ignore, surely it was inconceivable that the entire teaching staff? In the end I went anyway, maybe because I recalled the boy’s way of standing, quiet yet nevertheless disturbing, shy, as though plunging to his own seabed before surfacing and telling me almost in a whisper that words are a trap. There was a quiet plea for help in these words that I either didn’t catch or caught and ignored. And so, refusing to recognize and recognizing and rejecting the recognition that if I had chatted with Immanuel, if only I had tried to get a little closer to him, and shrugging what the hell, drop it, you’re crazy, I went along with the other teachers to meet Avraham Orvieto a few hours before they buried the boy and his aunt. There, in the hotel, in the father’s room, this thing began that has filled the whole of my being ever since.

There was also the episode of the dog. Immanuel Orvieto had a dog, a depressive creature that always kept its distance. From the morning to the end of lessons he would lie and wait for the boy in the sparse tamarisk grove which grew, or rather decayed, opposite the school gate. If you threw stones at him he would get up wearily and pad a few yards away and lie down again to wait. After the calamity, this dog started coming into the classroom each morning, oblivious of the chaos in the corridors, mangy, floppy-eared, his drooping muzzle almost touching the dusty floor. Nobody dared to shoo him away or bother him during the days of mourning. Or even afterwards. He lay there the whole morning, with his sad, triangular head resting, motionless, on his front paws. He had selected a regular spot in a corner of the classroom next to the wastepaper basket. If anyone threw him half a roll or even a slice of salami in break, he did not bother to sniff it. If he was spoken to, he did not react. He had a pitiful, brown, bewildered look that forced you to look away. At the end of lessons he would slink out abjectly with his tail between his legs, and vanish until the eight o’clock bell the next morning. A Bedouin dog, not young, the colour of the earth hereabouts: a faded grey. Dusty. Now, in hindsight, I think he may have been dumb, because I don’t recall him ever uttering a bark or even a whine.

Once he made me want to take him home with me, to bath and feed him and make him happy: his undying devotion to a boy who would never return suddenly touched me. If I fed him milk from a spoon and got the vet to take care of him and made him a bed in the passage, he might eventually get used to me and let me stroke him. Theo detests dogs but he’d be bound to give in because he’s the giving-in sort. If only I knew how to make him understand how oppressive I find his overwhelming consideration. I could see him screwing up his small eye, the left one, with his silvery retired British army major’s moustache concealing a slight quiver: Look here, Noa, if it really matters to you, and so forth. So I gave up the dog. He was a pretty repulsive creature and the truth is that he showed no sign of needing a new attachment.

One morning he was run over. Nevertheless, he still arrived in class precisely on the first bell. His hind legs were smashed and looked like broken twigs. He dragged himself to his regular spot and lay there as usual. There was not so much as a whimper. I made up my mind to call the Public Health Department vet to come and take him away, but at the end of the day he vanished and the next day he didn’t come back. We thought he must have dragged himself away to die in some secluded place. A couple of months later, the evening of the form party, after the greetings and the sketches and the refreshments and the headmistress’s speech, when we left at one o’clock in the morning, the dog appeared again, bony, misshapen, cadaverous, wriggling along on his forelegs and dragging his paralysed hindquarters, crossing the light of the lamp in front of the grubby tamarisk grove opposite the school gate, creeping from darkness to darkness. Unless it was another dog. Or just a shadow.

Avraham Orvieto stood to greet us, leaning back against the door of the balcony from which the mountaintops to the east could be seen shimmering in the heat haze. A small suitcase was lying shut on the hotel double bed. Two lemons on the table. A lightweight summer jacket draped over the back of the chair behind it. He was a small, frail, narrow-shouldered man, his thinning hair was turning white, his wrinkled face was suntanned, he looked like a retired metal worker. This was not the image I had of a military adviser or an international arms-dealer. I was especially surprised when he started talking to us, without waiting for the formal condolences, about the need to prevent other schoolchildren from falling victim to drugs. Speaking in a colourless voice, with a kind of hesitancy, as though he were afraid of making us angry, he asked whether Immanuel was the only one of our pupils to succumb. And he asked us to tell him how long we had known about it.

There was an embarrassed silence, because the truth is that we knew nothing until afterwards, discounting the staff-room gossip. The Deputy Head, stammering with tact, pronounced the opinion that Immanuel started taking drugs only at the end, in Elat, after he disappeared, that is to say more or less in the last days perhaps. Even the aunt had not noticed any problematic changes, although it was hard to tell. To which the father replied that we would probably remain in ignorance for ever. There was another silence. This time it was protracted. Avraham Orvieto put his two wrinkled hands to his face, brown peasant-like hands with scaly fingers, then he laid them back in his lap, and the Deputy Head began saying something, and at the same moment Avraham Orvieto asked which of us knew Immanuel best. The Deputy Head resorted to vague mumbling. There was a silence. A young Bedouin waiter, dark-skinned and slender like a pretty girl, wearing a white bow tie, wheeled in a trolley covered with a white cloth and holding fruit and cheeses and a selection of soft drinks. Avraham Orvieto signed the bill and added a folded banknote. Help yourselves, he said, twice, but nobody touched the refreshments. Suddenly he turned to me and said quietly: You must be Noa. He liked your lessons, he had a talent for literature.

I was so startled I did not deny it. I muttered a few banalities, a sensitive boy, withdrawn, rather, um, reserved. The father smiled in my direction like someone who is not used to smiling: like someone opening a crack in a shutter for an instant to reveal a beautiful room with a chandelier and bookcases and a fire burning in the grate, then closing it as though it had never opened.

Six weeks later Avraham Orvieto turned up one morning in the staff room during the mid-morning break to ask our help in realizing an idea: he was considering giving some money to set up here in Tel Kedar a small rehabilitation centre for young people, schoolchildren, perhaps from other parts of the country, who were addicted to drugs. He wanted this centre to be a memorial to his son. Tel Kedar was a quiet little town, the desert itself might help: seeing the wide open spaces could inspire various reflections, it might be possible to rescue one or two. Of course there would be local opposition which he could well understand, still, why not try to sort out some basic terms that would allay the fears.

I was startled when he chose to ask me, who was not Immanuel’s class teacher, to agree to put together a sort of informal team whose task would be to make a preliminary study and jot down on a sheet of paper what the difficulties would be and what aspects were liable to antagonize the local residents. He himself came to Israel only every few months, but he had a lawyer, Ron Arbel, who would be at my disposal whenever I needed him. If I refused, he would understand and would look for someone else.

Why me in particular?

Look, he said, and again he smiled at me as though momentarily opening that shutter a crack to reveal the fireplace and chandelier, you were the only one he was fond of out of the whole school. Once he wrote me a letter and told me you had given him a pencil. He wrote the letter with the pencil you gave him.

I couldn’t remember any pencil.

Still, I agreed to do it. Perhaps because of a vague urge to maintain a link with Immanuel and his father. What link? And why maintain it? When Avraham Orvieto talked about the non-existent pencil, there flickered a fleeting resemblance, not between him and his son, but to a man I met many years ago. His face, his sloping shoulders, and particularly his gentle voice and