Haaroon zipped up his collar and watched the wind swiftly carry the clouds. He knew that the hawk preferred to wait until the sky was fully light before flinging himself out for the hunt. Feeling himself beginning to nod off, the doorman blinked and drove his fingernails into his palm. After the night shift he normally went straight home to bed, and slowly his fatigue began to win out, his eyes drifted closed, and his chin fell forward onto his chest.
He couldn’t have been asleep for long before he jerked awake and saw the white underside of the hawk soaring above. Heart pounding, head thrown back, he leaped to his feet with a shout. Oh, the magnificence! What beauty under heaven! The doorman could barely believe his luck. Riding a current of air, the hawk’s wings were outstretched and nearly still; it was only the tilt of its body that caused it to wheel, turning a circle high above the treetops. Then it stopped in tense idle, hovering, and plummeted down in a dive.
Haaroon raced in the direction where it had gone down, pushing the lashing branches out of his way until he was through to the grassy clearing on the other side of the trees. And there, in a patch of sunlight, stood the magnificent bird, shoulders hunched and neck curved almost tenderly over the prey struggling in its talons. In a moment, it was over. The limp mouse hung from the hawk’s beak, and the bird flapped, its heavy wing beats carrying it up again.
Only after he had lost sight of the hawk did Haaroon look down and realize that his own hands were empty. Once more he shouted. Heart pounding, he raced back through the trees toward the bench. But he could already see that it was empty. Not wanting to believe it, he desperately ran his fingers over the wooden seat, as if the Madonna might still be shining there invisibly.
When he turned, he saw that the bench where the homeless man had lain was now empty, too, but for the brown blanket that hung shapelessly from the seat. The doorman moaned, raised his hands to his head, and pulled on his thin hair. Turning in a desperate circle, he scanned the paths and trees. But all was still but for the sparrows.
To the Desert
I had no sense of how much time passed after Schectman dropped me there. In the silence of the desert, at the mercy of a fever, I lost track completely. It could have been a week or ten days, or far longer. By then my family might have been searching for me quite desperately. My father would have been the most stalwart and indefatigable of the searchers. He has an extraordinary capacity to organize and accomplish under great duress, my father; has what people often call a commanding presence and an iron will. Right away he would have gotten Shimon Peres—who’d been an acquaintance of my grandfather’s half a century ago, attended my parents’ wedding at the Hilton, and once even told me over an expensive meal that he had read my books and liked them, though I was not inclined to believe him—on the phone. But despite all of these threadbare connections, what Shimon Peres could have done for my father is anyone’s guess, since by then Peres was only a figurehead of what he knew had been lost. Yes, I decided, my father would have been the most obvious and cogent leader of the search party, whereas my mother, in her distress, would have been disorganized and largely useless. Surely my children would not yet have been told anything. As for my husband, I really had no idea how he would have responded to the news that I’d disappeared: it was very possible that he might have felt ambivalent, and perhaps even relieved at the prospect of being able to go through the rest of his life without me looking skeptically over at him.
Schectman had said that someone would come for me. His orders had been to drop me in that desert shack with the suitcase and the dog, and in due time, presumably after I’d completed my assignment, someone would be back to get me. The assignment itself was never mentioned outright. He must have assumed that I knew what I was supposed to be doing there. Carefully, with the shy, delicate pride of a groom leading his bride into their new abode, he brought me into the house and showed me the kitchen with its black stove, the narrow bed covered in a tartan wool blanket, and finally the worktable by the window, on whose sill two or three flies had given up the ghost. The house was tiny, almost comically so in proportion to the vastness pressing up against it from all sides. On the desk was a glass containing a few pens, a stack of paper held down by a smooth oval stone, and an old typewriter. But it’s Hebrew, I said, awkwardly clutching the shopping bag with my change of clothing. I’d never written anything on a typewriter, and had no use for one, and so I can only surmise that my reason for pointing this out was to subtly bring to Schectman’s attention the problematic nature of the situation in general. But he kept up an air of insouciance, and only looked at the typewriter appraisingly, with, at best, the interest of someone who likes to take mechanical things apart into tiny pieces.
He offered to make me coffee, and I stood leaning against the wall with my arms crossed, watching him move about the tiny kitchen. He couldn’t have been more than twenty, but he handled the kettle and the stove in a way that suggested he’d been used to doing things for himself from a young age. The window was framed by the sort of white lace associated with alpine chalets, as if whoever had hung it had hoped to look past it to drifts of sparkling snow. But all that could be seen was the blanched, dry landscape stretching out in all directions, and the driver smoking a cigarette as he leaned against the jeep.