Read Triple for Free Online Page B

developed the film. It's blank."
    With a deep sense of satisfaction, Borg reassembled the box and put it into
    his pocket. Now it all made sense; now he understood; now he knew what he
    had to do. A train came in. "You want to catch this oner' he said.
    Kawash frowned slightly, nodded assent, and moved to the edge of the
    platform as the train stopped and the doors opened. He boarded, and stood
    just inside. He said, "I don't know what on earth the box is."
    Borg thought, You don't like me, but I think you're just great. He smiled
    thinly at the Arab as the doors of the subway train began to slide shut. "I
    do," he said.
    33

Two
    The American girl was quite taken with Nat Dickstein.
    They worked side by side in a dusty vineyard, weeding and hoein& with a
    light breeze blowing over them from the Sea of Galilee. Dickstein had
    taken off his shirt and worked in shorts and sandals, with the contempt
    for the sun which only the city-born possess.
    He was a thin man, small-boned, with narrow shoulders, a shallow chest,
    and knobby elbows and knees. Karen would watch him when she stopped for
    a break-which she did often, although he never seemed to need a rest.
    Stringy muscles moved like knotted rope under his brown, scarred skin.
    She was a sensual woman, and she wanted to touch those scars with her
    fingers and ask him how he got them.
    Sometimes he would look up and catch her staring. mid he would grin,
    unembarrassed, and carry on working. His face was regular and anonymous
    in repose. He had dark eyes behind cheap round spictacles of the kind
    which Karen's generation liked because John Lennon wore them. His hair
    was dark, too, and short: Karen would have liked him to grow it. When he
    grinned that lopsided grin, he looked younger, though at any time it was
    hard to say just how old he might be. He had the strength and energy of
    a young man, but she had seen the concentration-camp tattoo under his
    wristwatch, so he could not be much less than forty, she thought.
    He had. arrived at the kibbutz shortly after Karen, in the summer of
    1967. She had come, with her deodorants and her contraceptive pills,
    looking for a place where she could live out hippy ideals without getting
    stoned twenty-four hours a day. He had been brought here in an ambulance.
    She assumed he had been wounded in the Six-Day War, and the other
    kibbutzniks agreed, vaguely, that it was something like that
    34

TRIPLE
    His welcome had been very different from hers. Karen's reception had been
    friendly but wary: in her philosophy they saw their own, with dangerous
    additions. Nat Dickstein returned like a long-lost son. They clustered
    around him, fed hun soup and came away from his wounds with tears in
    their eyes.
    If Dickstein was their son, Esther was their mother. She was the oldest
    member of the kibbutz. Karen had said, "She looks like Golda Meir's
    mother," and one of the others had said, "I think she's Golda's father,"
    and they all laughed affectionately. She used a walking stick, and
    stomped about the village giving unsolicited advice, most of it very
    wise. She had stood guard outside Dickstein's sickroom chasing away noisy
    children, waving her stick and threatening beatings which even the
    children knew would never be administered.
    Dickstein had recovered very quickly. Within a few days he was sitting
    out in the sun, peeling vegetables for the kitchen and telling vulgar
    jokes to the older children. Two weeks later he was working in the
    fields, and soon he was laboring harder than all but the youngest men.
    His past was vague, but Esther had told Karen the story of his arrival
    in Israel in 1948, during the War of Independence.
    Nineteen forty-eight was part of the recent past for Esther. She had been
    a young woman in London in the first two decades of the century, and had
    been an activist in half a dozen radical left-wing causes from suffragism
    to pacifism before emigrating to Palestine; but her memory went back
    further, to pogroms in