of Qever Shimon from which he walked seven desolate kilometers to Tel Elohim.
Despite the early hour there were lights on in the long dining hall, and the short-wave radio, perhaps broadcasting news of the botched robbery, could also be heard. The kibbutzniks would be seated at their benches apportioning blame, and though Ruby wondered if other militia members had escaped the fracas—or had they been apprehended, beaten to death?—he crept past the hall in his anxiousness to return to his family. Trudging up the powdery slope, however, he found himself unable to hasten his steps, his legs teetering as if suddenly bowed with age. Ordinarily Abimelech, who seldom deigned to greet him, would be snoring beside Shprintze on the plank bed Ruby had constructed for his wife and himself, but tonight the dog was outside cavorting in front of the hut, performing the stunts he generally reserved for Dalilah. Ruby heard his son’s hiccupping cries as he approached, which was nothing unusual, he was a fractious child; though upon entering the vine-knitted dwelling, he wondered that his wife could sleep through the sobbing of the kaddish at her breast. (Ruby had also built a cradle on rockers but the baby hardly slept in it.) He sat down in utter exhaustion on the mattress beside his bride, her features cameo-pale in the dim interior, and made to remove her arm from around the child. But when he touched it, he recoiled and sprang back to his feet, because the arm, scaly and cool, began to slide away from the bundled infant like a plump tourniquet unwinding and plopped onto the plywood floor. There, incandescently white, it lengthened and coiled and lengthened again as it slithered out the open door, where under a red moon in a lapis sky it grew dark and stiff as an axle. Then a slim figure with a sack slung over its shoulder, followed by a prancing dog, came forward from the shadows to lift the staff from the ground and, while Abimelech whimpered after them, pad swiftly away.
The autopsy was performed by a doctor called in from Haifa for the purpose. He pronounced what most had already assumed: that the young mother had died from a combination of symptoms—insults, said the doctor, to both her nervous and circulatory systems—consistent with the virulent bite of the adder native to that region. It never occurred to anyone that the death might have been due to happenstance, the diagnosis having satisfied all concerned that the Arabs of the district, notorious for employing venomous serpents to get even, were responsible. Given the bad blood over boundary disputes between Tel Elohim and the village of Kafr Qusra, the wonder was that no such homicides had taken place before. The couple of partisans who’d survived the bank debacle, anxious for a chance to redeem themselves, recommended an immediate reprisal which they called upon the Baal Shatikah to lead. Vengeance, they maintained, was the best medicine; it was the only cure for such mortal grief, and also (they insinuated) for the restoration of one’s manly fortitude. But the Baal Shatikah was apparently not of their opinion. Declining both a memorial service and a plot in the newly inaugurated cemetery, Ruby buried Shprintze himself along with a storybook and the infant’s empty sling at the foot of an oleander she’d planted outside the hut. As an afterthought he perforated Abimelech’s heart with his icepick and dropped the dog into the grave beside the girl. Then the UN voted that a people should be allowed to become a nation, and the British began a pullout that left the Jews and Arabs (twins with different fathers) to settle things between themselves. Palestinians prepared to revolt while Arab armies started to mobilize on the borders of what would emerge as the state of Israel. But before the demons could come back to retrieve the boy (for he knew they would return for one of their own), Ruben Karp gathered up his son and took flight across the oceans to a ghetto in Memphis, Tennessee.
“WHEN IGOT THERE,” Ruby’s grandson Bernie read to his girlfriend, “I dumped the kid in the lap of his grandma in her ice cream parlor on North Main Street, and told her I was a murderer. She told me she was a whore. I told her I used to be a Jew.
“‘I said once the same thing to your papa,’ she replied, dandling the fretful pisher whom she’d pacified with a cinnamon stick on