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better-off residents live, professional people, regular army officers, managers, engineers and senior technicians.
    On the opposite side, to the south-east; in a long narrow valley, stretches a potholed road invaded by shifting sands. Along this road there are ceramic and metal works, a small washing-machine factory and, after that, workshops, garages, depots, corrugated-iron huts and cement-block sheds, and structures without foundations constructed of blocks of bare concrete and planks. All kinds of workshops proliferate here: locksmiths, carpenters, electricians, bodywork shops, aerials, television repairs, plumbing and solar water-heaters. The sheds are separated by barbed wire that has collapsed and rusted and been buried by the sand. The dust at the entrances is thick with engine oil and grease. All through the summer there is a smell of stale urine and burning rubber. The sun blazes down harshly on everything. Further down the hill is a dumping ground for old vehicles and then the municipal cemetery. Here the road ends opposite a row of cliffs crowned with a double wire fence. It is said that on the other side there is a forbidden valley containing secret installations. Beyond this valley there is another row of dark cliffs pierced with caves and crannies. That is the hiding-place of the ibexes that occasionally appear on the horizon and descend towards the curtain of the evening twilight; that too is where the foxes have their dens and the scorpions and asps their holes. And, further still, are expanses of chalky boulders and slate slopes scarred by gullies and deposits of dark scree extending to the edge of the barren mountains, which are sometimes shrouded in shimmering haze and sometimes seem blue in the distance like a mirage of clouds rising from an invisible sea to which they will soon return.
    Six times a day the bus arrives from Beersheba and stops outside the shopping centre, in the square that is popularly referred to as "by the lights", although its real name is Irving Koshitsa Square. Here the passengers from Beersheba alight, and the driver disappears into the California for twenty minutes for a cappuccino and a smoke while the passengers travelling to town gather at the bus stop. Opposite the square is an unpaved parking lot, from which the fine grey dust that settles like a veil on the shops, restaurants and offices constantly billows. The square is enclosed by four multi-storey buildings in the style of the coastal plain, two banks, the renovated Paris Cinema, a number of cafés that double as restaurants, and a run-down billiard hall that also sells tickets for the national lottery. Within the area defined by these structures is a square expanse paved with alternating red and grey tiles. In the centre of the square is a column of bare concrete in memory of the fallen. Four cypress trees have been planted at the four corners of the monument. One of them has died. On the column are inscribed in metallic letters the words T HE BEAUTY OF I SRAEL IS SLAIN UPON THY HIGH PLAC S . The penultimate letter is missing. Beneath is fixed a tablet in the form of the tablets of the Law bearing twenty-one names, from Aflalo Yosef to Shumin Giora Georg. The tablet is cracked right across, and bindweed is growing in the crack. Beside the monument is a drinking fountain made of concrete, inscribed in Hebrew and English with the biblical verse, H O , EVERYONE THAT THIRSTETH, COME YE TO THE WATERS—ERECTED IN MEMORY OF D ONIA AND A DALBERT Z ESNIK , 1983. Three faucets curve down towards the basin: two of them are weeping.
    On the roof of the bank building among a jumble of tin billboards is a gigantic slogan: IVE done the pools today. In the building on the left of the Town Hall, opposite the Health Fund, is Theo's office. The name on the office door is "Planning". On the same floor there is also the dental surgery of Drs. Dresdner and Nir; and, further along, Dubi Weitzman, notary and accountant, also photocopying and