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sight, a preposterous American invention. No other country but America could have produced such a thing. He wanted to smile at the idiocy of it.
    America!
    Land of wealthy fools!
    Yet he continued to breathe heavily as the machine passed from view. Why? What frightens me about this monstrosity? You’ll be among them soon, if things go well. Is this how you’ll perform, frozen with terror at the sight of the outlandish?
    You’ll never make it.
    I must make it.
    But it had been terror in his heart. Why?
    Was it the shooting at the border? Would there be a huge manhunt for him? Would his mission be endangered? These things troubled him, but not nearly so much as the killing of the two men.
    It put a darkness on his journey, a bad beginning. Damn that fat Mexican! They had told him this Mexican knew the best way, the safest way. The Mexican would get him across.
    What would happen to the Mexican now? He was glad he wasn’t the Mexican, because he knew now the Mexican was expendable. They would have to take care of the Mexican, because of the stir the shooting would make.
    Death, more death, still more death. It was a chain. Every little thing leading out of the past into the future: heavy with death.
    The two policemen, dead, for being in the wrong place. The Mexican, dead. And he himself, ultimately, finally …
    “If they catch you, you have failed. They will never free you. They will use you and use you. Do you understand this?”
    “I do.”
    “It is not that in captivity you no longer can advance your cause; it is that you hurt it. You destroy it. Do you understand?”
    “I do.”
    “Swear then. We will help and support you, but you must swear. You will not be taken alive. Do you swear?”
    “Kurdistan ya naman,”
he swore. Kurdistan or death.
    He lingered in the mountains a week, for in them he went unhunted. He lived on the flat Mexican bread in his pack and on jojoba nuts and mesquite beans, as he had been instructed. But the land began to flatten beneath him until on the eighth morning there were no mountains except the ones rimming the horizon, crusty brown in the distance, and to get there he had to cross the flatness wavering before him in the sun, sending off a smoky radiance of pure heat. It was the desert valley that led to Tucson, a journey too dangerous for the dark.
    “Beware the desert,” he’d been told. “If you have to cross the desert you are an unlucky man.”
    But beyond the desert lay Tucson and in Tucson lay a bus route into America and toward the Northeast, where his destiny was
ser nivisht
, written above.
    He set out early. He found it a wilderness of needles, of things that could hurt. It was, in its cruel way, quite beautiful too, an abstract of the textures of death. Over each rise or gentle dip, through the crumbling rocky passes, down the easy glades, up the rock buttes, each shift yielded a new panorama. Yet what impressed him most in this long day’s journey was not the danger or the beauty but something entirely else: the silence.
    There is no silence in the mountains, for always there is wind, and always something to blow in its path. Here, on the bright floor of the earth, he could hear nothing. There was no wind, no noise, nothing but the sound of his own boots sloughing through the dust or across the fine rocks.
    There was no water either, and the heat was suffocating. He thought only of water. But there was no water and no mercy, only the sense that he had to move ahead. Milesbeyond stood a last escarpment of hills, and beyond that had to lie Tucson.
    He hurried onward, the dust thick in his throat. The saguaro cactus towered above him, exotic and beckoning. And a hundred other needled monsters, some whose delicate flowers mocked their ugly spikes. Small tough leaves slashed at his boots. He raced ahead, exposed in the great undulating flatness. He knew he had only a day to make the journey, for he’d freeze out here at night, and the next day the sun would come and bake