the settlement, a habitation so overgrown with ranunculus that it might have been a natural outcrop, and prepare his meager supper.
It had been a long while since he’d dined with the community, though for a time women enamored of his legend had left covered dishes at his door: savory beef and egg noodles, pita bread and sesame paste, stewed prunes. But since his withdrawal from the life of the commune and the plugatsim, the terror squads, the food had ceased to appear, and Ruby sustained himself on whatever came to hand. It might be a raw potato, a fistful of unripe carobs, oranges bruised with blue mold. It was penitent’s fare, which he ate more out of the habit of staying alive than from any real appetite. Despite his forager’s diet, though, Ruby supposed his health was sound enough, but while his muscles remained taut his body had grown alarmingly thin. He had no mirror (shaved by instinct like the blind) but could trace in his sunken cheeks the creases wrought by constant worry. He could feel the years and the toll his rearoused sensibilities had taken, and though he longed to articulate his feelings for Shprintze, he was afraid that if he expressed them they might ravage her the way they had him.
For the same reason, he had yet to touch her. He was fearful that her mostly imaginary world might not withstand the blunt impact. It was difficult to know, given all she’d been through, what did and did not constitute defilement; and while he might suffer the urge to stroke, say, the tendon at the downy nape of her neck, he knew better than to risk the intimacy. Better to ache with unrealized desires, inviting a pain that was no less than he deserved. What he didn’t deserve, however, was that the pain, though nearly unbearable, should also be unbearably sweet. Then on an evening in the month of Elul when they sat reading at the lip of a well, the chill air emanating from its stony darkness as from an ice cave, Ruby inadvertently placed a hand in Shprintze’s hair. It was not deliberate, but in some corner of his mind he registered the gesture, imagining she might incline her gamin’s head and allow herself the ghost of a grin—and that would be that. Instead, she turned toward him with a mouth that looked to have been gashed open, its stifled howl more shrill than any sound she might have uttered, and springing catlike to her feet, she ran away down the hill through the cyclone gates of Tel Elohim.
But later that night, as he lay twisting on the rack of his folding cot, castigating himself for his blunder, the door opened to starlight silhouetting her spare contours through a flimsy nainsook shift. “Murder me, my wicked one,” she importuned him in a perfect imitation of coyness—and a few months after, she began to show the swelling that indicated she was quick with child.
RUBY HAD A FRIEND of sorts, a young Arab shepherd he’d run across years before while grazing his flock in the dried-out washes west of the settlement. The boy, perhaps mistaking the assassin for a legitimate herder of sheep, had attempted to direct him through gibbering and gestures toward greener pastures, but Ruby preferred to remain in the wastes where he squatted meditating on his sins. A twiggy character in a filthy tunic, with a clump of hair like a bird’s nest, the boy shrugged his knobby shoulders and hied his flock toward the grassy heights. But he reappeared at odd intervals during the succeeding days so that Ruby suspected their meetings were not always accidental. With a broad grin proud of its broken teeth, a plaited ribbon dangling lewdly from his loincloth, he greeted his fellow shepherd with a merry “Itbach al yahud.” Death to the Jew. It was a salutation delivered with such hearty good humor that Ruby, who’d heard it often enough in other contexts, could only respond with a slightly puzzled, “Aleichem sholem.” This became their customary exchange whenever they crossed paths.
Ruby assumed at first that the boy hailed from the mud-domed village of Kafr Qusra, which could be seen from the slopes of Tel Elohim, but soon he began to realize that the shepherd swore allegiance to no place on earth. He had a name, Iqbal bin Fat Fat, which Ruby had gleaned over the course of several visits, but though he babbled incessantly—a multitude of consonants trampling