excuse for staying put, a prospect that alternately calmed and discomfited him. The cold had in any case permeated his insides to a degree that suggested he now carried the essence of Ezekiel ben Zephyr in his bones. As for his mother, Ruby had visited her once or twice in her bower, only to discover that he had no filial feeling left for her at all. With her lick of cinereous hair and her klunky, unfeminine movements drained of the grace that once informed them, he hardly recognized her. Absently pinching his cheek or brushing the frost from his scalp before returning to her ice-making apparatus, she resembled (a chilling notion) her dead husband more than herself. In the end he concluded that, as befitted a son who’d destroyed his entire family, he was no more to her now than the cats that padded in and out of her apartment. He was cast out from everything that in theory he ought to hold dear, a situation he appreciated as heartbreaking, even tragic, the way he might have viewed some schmaltzy photoplay. Moreover, there was a fitting justice in Ruby’s being dragged by his broad-backed uncles to some godforsaken desert environment, where his anaesthetized sensibilities risked thawing in the heat of the sun.
“I’ll think it over,” he told the twins, who told him he could think it over during the voyage to the Holy Land. For having dipped into the donations they’d collected for the National Fund, the brothers had already booked passage on a cattle boat sailing from the port of New Orleans, and had taken the liberty of purchasing a ticket for Ruby as well.
THAT WAS HOW he came to find himself, some ten years later, standing on a watchtower beside an amber searchlight in an oasis reclaimed from a swamp called Tel Elohim. It was the same communal settlement folded among the foothills of the Upper Galilee to which Ruby and his uncles had retreated after the the Arab uprising of 1929. This was the slaughter that had greeted them at the moment when Ruby first set foot upon the Land; so that it was clear to the newcomer from the outset that the country without a people was already populated, and its population not eager to share its beggarly streets, moon-dusted dunes, camel tracks, and waterless wells with the people without a country. Nevertheless Ruby did what he was told by the twin brothers, who seemed to belong both everywhere and nowhere. Since categories of right and wrong existed only for those parties with something at stake, the finer points of the situation were of no concern to the recent immigrant. Just off the boat, he was interested in little more than putting himself in the way of bodily harm (the only outlook that could stimulate his sluggish brain), and Palestine looked as if it would afford him ample opportunities to do just that. Confronted with death, however, he repeatedly cheated it. This was not so much because he wanted to live as that he thought he deserved to prolong his pain—though who was he fooling? There was no pain, nor fear, or thrill of engagement, only action and the boredom between actions that was the real dread; because, while most of his senses were unresponsive, Ruby’s memory persisted, and it haunted him with unkind reminders. In the event, he’d waived his independence, placing his fate in the hands of the veteran campaigners Yig and Yez, as he called them. They saw to his formal training in arms and explosives, areas in which he already had a head start, and in stealth, which he came by naturally. They coached him in husbanding the anger that he was still able to call upon at will, although it was now entirely impersonal, which made Ruby an even more perfectly tuned instrument for redressing the offenses to the Yishuv.
Not once during the succeeding years did he relax from participating in the relentless cycles of bloodletting. Despite the end of the so-called Arab Revolt and the monotony of terror and counterterror that intervened before the beginning of the next so-called Arab revolt, Ruby never gave up his part in the general effort to turn the Promised Land into a slaughterhouse. Of course there were interludes along the way, during which Ruby’s edgy impatience caused others to keep their distance. As he and the twins moved from safehouse to smallholder farm among the ranks of the maverick irregulars, the immigrant earned not