his knowledge of Yiddish, though the language had been in the air again due to the influx of illegals who spoke it. (They never spoke it for long, since mameloshen was regarded as the language of victims and for that reason practically outlawed in HaEretz.) Then there was the nature of the question itself, asked so earnestly that it gave Ruby pause to consider. He’d been a number of things during his years in the Land, few of which had much in common with the lives of regular citizens. In the end, showing his palms in a gesture of surrender, he could only answer, “Ich kayn vays.” I don’t know.
Dropping the skirt, underneath which she apparently wore nothing at all, the girl rose to her feet and stepped a few paces toward him.
“Ich bin a shed,” she confided in her flutey voice, and again he was taken aback by her candor. “Ich bin a shlecht yiddisher tochter.” A bad Jewish daughter.
Ruby had no idea what he should do with this information, but it fascinated him that she’d divulged it without an apology or trace of apprehension. Who wasn’t afraid of the Baal Shatikah? But Shprintze, so remote among the settlers, stood before him now as if she recognized him as belonging to the same species as herself. Flushed out, Ruby crawled from beneath the overhang and straightened himself to confront her, his heart galloping. Countless encounters with violent death had not caused his heart to gallop so precipitously. Nor did the girl make any movement toward withdrawing, and Ruby wondered exactly what it was she expected of him. Unable to suffer her gimlet gaze any longer, he dropped his eyes, which fixed on the book she held in her hand.
“Vos leyenstu?” he muttered experimentally, his voice still raw from old wounds.
She showed him the book, a volume of tales in a weather-warped binding by the Yiddish author I. L. Peretz, revealing in the process the garter blue numbers tattooed on her arm. When he took the book from her, she inhaled deeply as if she might not be able to breathe again until he returned it. He understood that the gesture had for her some grave ritual significance, and when he opened the book on a language he’d rejected as a child, a strange thing happened: The barbed Hebrew characters seemed to spill into his head as from a barrel of tacks, filling his brain with a thousand starbursts of pain. But with the pain also came a measure of enlightenment, because some of the printed words arranged themselves into units of sense. “Un Bontshe holt altz geshvign,” he read: “And still Bontshe remained silent.” It made his head ache terribly.
He gave her back the book in a rueful transaction that reminded him of something he couldn’t quite place; then it came to him, the memory of a partisan attempting to replace a fallen comrade’s spilled intestines. He clenched his eyes shut till the image passed, and when he opened them again, there she was in her florid expectancy; her tapered nose twitched from a brush with a butterfly as she asked him, “Shtel mit mir a chupeh?” Will you marry me?
He stared at her, searching for some taint of sarcasm, and found none. Then the laughter started deep in his bowels, erupting in spasms in his chest and escaping his mouth in a volley of loud guffaws. Doubled over, he delivered himself of a hilarity that contained as much heartache as mirth and shook him till he could barely stand. The tears that scalded his cheeks mingled with the sweat bathing his skin, as if his flesh itself were weeping after so many arid years. When the seizure began to abate and he was able to pull himself together again, she remained as before, having stoically weathered the storm. Her crested head was cocked to one side as she studied him with interest. Was she crazy, he wondered, or merely stupid? The categories did not seem to pertain.
Mustering an uncharacteristic frankness along with his makeshift proficiency, he told her, “Nem mir in acht farknasn.” Consider us betrothed.
At first she visited him only at erratic intervals, usually appearing in the early evening after she’d completed her chores and before the dinner bell rang. She would sit beside him on a lava promontory or in a papyrus stand from which he watched his puny flock cropping mud and read one of her storybooks. In anticipation of her coming Ruby had begun