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at a quarter past nine—on the steps of Mr, Bialig's shuttered grocery shop and wept, almost. And so too I was found by a tall and taciturn man who came walking along the deserted street, smoking, peacefully, a pipe with a silver lid; Esthie's father, Mr. Engineer Inbar.
    "Oh," he said, after he had leaned down and seen me. "Oh. It is you. Well, well. Is there anything I can do to help?"
    It seemed beautiful to me, miraculous even, that Engineer Inbar should speak to me like that, as one adult to another, without a trace of that special kind of language and tone of voice that people use to children.
    "Can I help you in any way?" I might have been a driver whose car had broken down, struggling to change a tire in the dark.
    "Thanks," I said.
    "What's the problem?" asked Engineer Inbar.
    "Nothing," I said. "Everything's fine."
    "But you're crying. Almost."
    "No. No, not at all. I'm not crying. Almost. I'm just a bit cold. Honestly."
    "All right. We're not going the same way by any chance? Are you on your way home too?"
    "Well ... I haven't got a home."
    "How do you mean?"
    "I mean ... my parents are away in Tel Aviv. They're coming back tomorrow. They left me some food in the icebox. I mean ... I had a key on a piece of white string."
    "Well, well. I see. You've lost your key. And you've got nowhere to go. That's it in a nutshell. Exactly the same thing happened to me when I was still a student in Berlin, Come on then. Let's go. There's no point in sitting here all night, weeping. Almost."
    "But ... where are we going?"
    "Home, Of course. To our place. You can stay the night with us. There's a sofa in the living room, also a camp bed somewhere. And I'm sure Esthie will be glad. Come on. Let's go."
    And how my foolish heart ran wild; it beat inside my T-shirt, inside my vest, inside my skin and bone. Esthie will be glad—oh, Esthie will be glad.
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Pomegranate scents waft to and fro

From the Dead Sea to Jericho.
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    Esthie will be glad.
    I must never lose it; my pencil sharpener, my perfect, lucky pencil sharpener that I held in my hand that I held inside my pocket.

One Night of Love

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How only he who has lost everything may sue for happiness. "If a man offered for love all the wealth of his house And how we were not ashamed.
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    So there we sat at supper together, Engineer Inbar and I, discussing the state of the country. Esthie's elder brother was away building a new kibbutz at Beit she an, while her mother must have eaten before we came. Now she set before us on a wooden dish slices of some peculiar bread, very black and strong-tasting, together with Arab cheese, very salty, and scattered with little cubes of garlic. I was hungry. Afterwards we ate whole radishes, red outside, white and juicy inside. We chewed big lettuce leaves. We drank warm goat's milk, (At our house, that is to say the house that used to be mine, I'd get a poached egg in the evening, with tomato and cucumber, or else boiled fish, and afterwards yoghourt and cocoa. My father and mother ate the same, except they finished up with tea instead of cocoa.)
    Mrs. Inbar gathered up the plates and cups and went back to the kitchen to prepare lunch for the next day. "Now we'll leave the men to talk men's talk," she said. Mr. Engineer Inbar pulled off his shoes and put his feet up on a small stool. He lit his pipe carefully, and said, "Yes. Very good."
    And I tightened my fingers round the pencil sharpener in my pocket and said, "Thank you very much."
    And afterwards we exchanged opinions on matters of politics. Him in his armchair; me on the sofa.
    The light came from a lamp the shape of a street lamp on a copper column, which stood in one comer beside the desk and between one wall covered in books and maps and another hung with pipes and mementoes. A huge globe stood in the room too, on a pedestal. At the slightest touch of a finger I thought it could be made to spin round and round. I could hardly take my eyes off it.
    All this time Esthie