A man chewing sesame and drinking soda held a fragrant wormwood leaf between his fingers and the smell was tormenting and sweet. The desert wildness in the city street was sudden and assuaged some pain that gnawed in him. The man paid and the young man started walking and Boaz found himself hopping behind him, he was hopping because now he had a pain in his foot, wanted to stop, settle things, but he followed the young man like a blind man. And then he said: That young man took off Minna's ring, loves blood, is disguised as a crow. They eat sesame seeds in Tel Aviv with desert wormwood. I'm walking behind a yell that came from inside me, he said to himself, but what's happening to me, what am I, a car thief, a warmonger, that silence will drive me out of my mind: the young man turned into a dark street and went off toward a house with a thick tree sprouting from it. The tree was dead but the house around the tree wasn't destroyed. The crest of the tree wasn't seen in the dark. He searched for a house number on the wall and didn't find one. The name of the street wasn't written there either. The fence was low and beyond the house tombstones were seen, the dark obliterated the tops of the tombstones, but one tombstone was seen clearly and even the writing etched on it was seen prominently, maybe because of the light falling from a window where a broken shutter didn't block it. Then it became clear that aside from the tombstone lying here waiting to be moved to the cemetery, this was a cemetery for dead cars, maybe even the spoils of war. A person was walking in the yards, he had stones in his pocket and was searching for cats to throw the stones at. The cats looked like flashes in the headlights of the passing cars, slithering around tree trunks that looked as if they didn't have crests. The young man looked as if he were hesitating. I wanted to go back, he'll say years later, as an end of a story about people searching for themselves, I wanted to go back like a melody played long ago. In the yard the young man entered you could feel rusty nails and shards of bottles and hear the claws of cats leaping toward the hewn trunks. The tree that burst out of the house was seen from the corner where Boaz stood as if pickled in vinegar, maybe the house was merely a box.
The young man searched for a path among the shards of bottles and nails and suddenly felt a stream of water flowing from the next yard. In the window with the shallow light, a radio was heard and in his fantasy, Boaz could imagine the street going on even beyond the house that stood in the middle and cut it off. And farther on there was a building like a Greek temple with the municipal courthouse next to it and then the sea, whose breakers were heard even through the water rustling and the cats purring. On a small balcony latticed with crosses, an iron weave like an army range, maybe against snakes or other afflictions of nature, in a rusty can sprouted a geranium bush and its sharp smell, which surely came to him because of the water that had recently sprinkled it, filled Boaz's nostrils. Now he followed the young man and turned right toward the front of the house, a bare bulb hung there without a shade and a woman's robe on a peg that looked like a hook. On the hook stood a bird. The bird kept moving and its beak explored the source of the music coming from the radio and even in the gloom you could make out the gold color of its beak, maybe it was red and Boaz couldn't make the slim distinction. He thought: we had the barn in the settlement and now there's destruction there.
Then a scene flickered in his mind and he smiled. Teacher All's Well stands before the class in the settlement, excited, a dark spot starts showing at his fly, his pocket is puffed up from the cotton he bought at noon for his wife Eve, and put in his pocket, and the girls are giggling and the boys are weeping with laughter and Teacher All's Well is talking excitedly about Jacob's ladder… standing on the earth, the whole Land of Israel folded under the stone pillow of Our Father, the ladder facing up… Oh, what a wretched and sublime nation, he said, and Boaz now remembers the blush on the faces of the farmers' only daughters who had often seen bulls mounting cows and Mrs. Czkhstanovka standing next to the national flags and waiting for a bridegroom who never came, but they weren't used to seeing a teacher with wet trousers saying: Oh, what a wretched and sublime nation, struggling with God! Israel! An eternal struggle of the nation and its God, Nation and Land, Language and Fate… And the girls are giggling, the spot's spreading, maybe touching the cotton Margalit saw him buying with her own eyes from old Greenspan whose son committed suicide. And he said: Stiffnecked, struggling fateful struggles, disappointed but not ceasing to believe… maybe in order to lose! And that's something modern writers don't understand at all! And he looked at his flock, who had no idea who the modern writers were and what they meant and here, thinks Boaz, stands a young man, maybe I'm standing there, and thinking about spots on the trousers of Hebrew teachers. A garden of nails caught in a pale light and the smell of geraniums intoxicates and the crumbling stone fence and the tree inventing the house and everything here is longing.
And we're all of us acting in a Jewish Western, somebody will say later on, and then this moment will be remembered. The young man who may be he averts his face, Boaz knows it's impossible. The geranium, the longings, everything is mixed up here in a restrained essence. He didn't come to Tel Aviv to seek a new war, especially not against himself. But the enemy, it seemed to him, is shrouded in a smell of mothballs, I and not I, thought Boaz. When the young man turned to him, something forgotten flickered in Boaz's mind. He recalled that once he was in the battle the man in the cafe told him about, but he knew he didn't remember it, he thought then that the Boaz who went into the battle hadn't come out of it at all. Thirty-two killed. Menahem Henkin was killed there, too. But I didn't come out of it, somebody else came out of it, disguised as me. Now it was clear to him. The dark was such that as soon as the young man's face turned aside from the balcony and turned to him, he was blinded for a moment by the harsh light cast from the window when the light now came on. Out of a vague fear, he knew he had to choose, so there was a struggle between Boaz and the very tall mute young man. The light in the window went out and another light came on and a fire engine siren was heard wailing, racing in the next street, the young man was a cruel fighter, nobody could come out a winner in such a battle, thought Boaz. The nails stuck in his feet, the broken glass tore chunks out of his body, the geranium bush was abandoned. Its smell was forgotten in the smell of the cruel battle, blood flowed, and he didn't know if it was his blood or the young man's blood, the young man didn't talk, just groaned and roared, and Boaz tried to talk but no words were heard. Only afterward the young man groaned: You're all shit, what do you know. But now Boaz wasn't sure if he had really heard those words, he was just as struck as his enemy, the flight of the two of them was the most ridiculous thing Boaz could think of later on. How the two of us fled at the same time. He tramped on nails and glass shards and fled and saw another back fleeing from there and groaning and he groaned too, but now he couldn't know who was who, and Boaz imagined that that was all he wanted to know, who he wasn't, the bird with the gold beak flew off, the robe hanging on a peg before disappeared in a panic, a woman's hand was seen tugging the robe and maybe tore it, lights went on and off. Voices burst out of apartments where maybe they were trying to listen to a funny program at the end of the war, Hasidic music was heard in the distance, but what was clear to Boaz was that only one of them came from there and again he vaguely recalled that battle and he thought, Only one came out of that too even though maybe two of us were in it, who came out? Me or him, who comes out now: me or him, and he didn't know. And so, for a moment, when he stood in the street and people started appearing before his eyes, he could take pity on himself. But he was immediately disgusted with himself and stopped. Cleaned his wounds, but he recalled that he had gotten a tetanus shot some time ago and was protected from that harm; he wanted to be sure he wouldn't get rabies but that only embittered him even more.