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suffers.
    —Ha! the driver laughed again and sought Kotler’s eyes in the rearview mirror. What a girl! You’re a lucky man.
    —Evidently, Kotler said.
    —Does your missus know? the driver asked.
    —Pardon?
    —Your missus, the driver repeated affably. Mine is in Donetsk, where I’m from. I’m here only in the summers. To earn money. I have a girl here too. It’s natural. My missus knows but she has a modern attitude.
    —Well, Kotler said, mine has an ancient one.
    At the house, the lights were on in the front rooms. Through the closed windows, the unintelligible sound of a television program surged and plummeted. Holding hands, Kotler and Leora fumbled in the darkness along the side of the still-unfamiliarhouse. Kotler kept expecting to rouse a goose or a hen but the birds had apparently retired to their roosts. Sensible, reliable, domestic chicken life. Short on excitements but also on dismays.
    Kotler found the lock with his key and opened the door. Leora crossed the threshold but Kotler tarried, still holding her hand.
    —I should call home, he said. Call Dafna.
    A look of apprehension played fleetingly across Leora’s face, quickly replaced by her native composure.
    —I have to let them know I’m all right.
    —Of course.
    Leora stepped inside, leaving Kotler to close the door behind her.
    He walked away from the house and stood in the middle of the patch of grass. It was the best he could manage under the circumstances. A father calls his young daughter to confess a sin of the flesh: such a call should be placed from the highest mountaintop or bobbing in the middle of the ocean, as a speck on a dark stage, reduced by biblical vastness. A conversation that, God forbid, none but God should overhear.
    Three practiced swipes of his finger across the screen—a sequence of tiny movements so routine as to be almost unconscious—and Kotler was looking at Dafna’s name and phone number. He tapped the screen, and the little glass rectangle beamed its signal. Thus were such daunting actions undertaken now, with a few twitches of a fingertip. Nothing like the old mindful ceremony of writing a letter, bent at the kitchen table or in the solitude of a prison cell. Not even like the experience of the telephone booth, with the solid, goading, reproachful machine. Still, ceremony or no, the consequences remained thesame. You made decisions and, sooner or later, you were called to account.
    Kotler listened to the beseeching sound of the ringtone. He knew how the technology worked. At the other end, his name would appear, and Dafna would know who was calling. It was past eleven thirty at night in Yalta, the same time as Jerusalem. Dafna often spoke on the phone with her friends at this hour or later. He and Miriam had occasionally scolded her for it, though not with any conviction. She was a good girl, a conscientious student. By the standards of a modern eighteen-year-old, she could not even be called rebellious. Miriam would have liked her to be more devout, but given that Kotler’s own level of religious devotion left a lot to be desired, there was only so much Miriam could legitimately expect. Within a family there were any number of possible configurations, alliances, and affinities—none set in stone, all open for renegotiation unto the grave—but for them, things had assumed a fairly standard alignment: the son took after the mother, the daughter after the father. What enabled Miriam to wholeheartedly embrace God and His strictures, she had passed on to Benzion. And whatever independence, whatever unruliness of spirit Kotler possessed, had been imbibed or inherited by his daughter. Even if angry with him, her way, like his, would be to confront, not to evade.
    —Where are you? he heard his daughter say in a parental tone.
    —A quiet place, Kotler replied.
    —Another secret? Dafna said acerbically. I’ve been calling you.
    —I know, Dafnaleh, Kotler said. I would have liked to call you sooner, but it wasn’t