from oil with the motion of a schoolgirl swinging a rope. But to Ruby’s practiced eye, as he watched her toting pails or cradling a peck of oranges in her apron, she seemed only to be making believe. While the others began in time to be assimilated into the life of the colony, Shprintze—not unlike the Baal Shatikah himself, who’d built a hut beyond the settlement’s barbed-wire perimeter—remained aloof. She did not contribute to the impromptu truth-telling sessions conducted after meals in the dining hall, when the survivors broke down in their confessions and submitted to the consolations of the commune. (The kibbutzniks had become seasoned hands at ministering to hysteria.) Nor did she ever, at least in Ruby’s hearing, attempt to use the sacred tongue.
He could only speculate as to why she chose to remain an outsider, though the answer may have been merely that she preferred the company of her books. Because when she wasn’t performing her impersonations of goose girl or serving wench, she was poring over one of the vermin-nibbled volumes that were the only baggage she’d salvaged from her past. That was the posture in which Ruby was most likely to observe her—sprawled among the flowers called blood of the Maccabees that stippled the meadow just beyond the compound—as he grazed the sheep he’d appointed himself to watch.
He was as inept a shepherd as he was skilled at the trades of cutthroat and bloodletter. Wanting only the excuse of a task that lent itself to solitude, he had no interest in the science of animal husbandry. He could barely distinguish a lamb from a ewe, and regarded the randy old ram with its shit-stained crupper as merely a shofar-on-the-hoof. He was deaf to advice concerning the best spots to graze them, often leading the herd instead of to grass or stubble into unharvested fields of wheat and flax, which they devastated. He developed some aptitude in the use of the lasso but seldom had occasion to use it, since the kibbutz had voted that branding livestock was too charged a means of identification; and he failed to renew the salt licks that lay about the wadis like a sculpture garden. With the herd dog Abimelech, who belonged to everyone and no one, Ruby had never established any rapport. An odd hybrid of border collie and dachshund, the animal was more effective at terrorizing the flock than at corralling them into their fold. Nevertheless, despite his laxity Ruby had grown rather fond of the sheep. This is not to say he was moved to protect them from predators, diseases, or the poison grasses that caused them to inflate like fleece dirigibles. What he did protect them from, however, was being slaughtered or even sheared, which meant that the herd were in essence pets and a useless burden to the cooperative. Recently the secretariat had issued an ultimatum to Ruben ben None that he should render up the sheep for wool and mutton or relinquish his position to another.
“When the Third Temple is built,” he broke his usual silence to reply, “you can use them for a blood offering.” Which statement actually satisfied some of the more canonical among the delegates.
There came an afternoon like any afternoon when he was sheltering from the five o’clock sun beneath a red clay overhang while tending his flock. The agitation that was his companion since the arrival of the girl was accompanied at that hour by the jangling of the bellwether, the bleating of the ewes, and the yapping of the idiot dog Abimelech—all of which Ruby endured like noises plucked upon his tightly strung nerves. Suddenly he was aware of someone’s sandal-shod approach from down the tussocky slope to his left, and the girl Shprintze padded into view carrying a book. Having attained the privacy of a spot beyond the settlement’s boundaries and further obscured by a herd of sheep, she hoisted the flannel skirt to her haunches and squatted to pee. At that moment, no longer silenced by curiosity, Abimelech commenced yelping again.
The girl looked up but did not start and, catching sight of the dog’s presumed master crouched in his cleft, inquired in a tone of perfect ingenuousness even as she continued watering the earth, “Bistu a shed?” Are you a demon?
Confounded on several counts, Ruby felt cornered and slid farther into the hollow until his back bumped against the dirt wall. For one thing, he was surprised that he had understood the question, so slight was