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afterthought. If you were here on your own, and stopped walking, and listened for a bit, you’d no doubt hear the earth quietly smacking its lips, drinking, sucking, and lapping up the water, and the remains of autumn melancholy, dry and fevered, warmed and spread soothingly like the soporific effect of suckling.
    Finally, when the road straightened out and stopped winding and meandering, alternately exposed and sheltered by hedges of prickly pears and acacia, and twigs threaded through rusting barbed wire, and became simply a damp dirt path running down toward the valley, the jeep stopped, where the machine gun mounted on it could cover the whole road ahead while we got out and went into the huts and yards to check them. And even if there was, it seemed, nothing easier than to disregard it, simply to deny it, it mattered to me that it was beginning. I was impatient for the beginning of things that I imagined differently from everyone else. I was content with everything and hated starting to feel differently, and I didn’t want to stand out from the others in any way. It always ended in disillusionment. The tiniest crack attracted attention, turned into a gaping hole and started to shout. I took hold of myself and forced myself to keep quiet.
    The huts appeared to have been uninhabited for a very long time. A harvest of fear and a crop of evil rumors had reaped untimely haste and the writhing of a worm hurrying to meet its fate. We kicked in the wicket in the big wooden gate in the clay walls and entered a square courtyard with a hut on one flank and another hut on the other. Sometimes, when they had the means and the time was right, these people would erect a clay hut over the casing of the well house below, training a vine or two and making an arbor, and bringing some concrete blocks, which didn’t need plastering, at least as long as their corners were so attractive; pepper bushes and autumn eggplants were rotting below in the grass and moldering near the water tap, and roses peeped out of the rampant weeds and climbed above them, and paths extended to some place inside the groves. Another kick and a casual glance into an abandoned home, and a storage room where the dust of crops coated cobwebs both tattered and greasy-looking. Walls that had been attentively decorated with whatever was at hand; a home lined with plaster and a molding painted blue and red; little ornaments that hung on the walls, testifying to a loving care whose foundations had now been eradicated; traces of female-wisdom-hath-builded-her-house, paying close attention to myriad details whose time now had passed; an order intelligible to someone and a disorder in which somebody at his convenience had found his way; remnants of pots and pans that had been collected in a haphazard fashion, as need arose, touched by very private joys and woes that a stranger could not understand; tatters that made sense to someone who was used to them—a way of life whose meaning was lost, diligence that had reached its negation, and a great, very deep muteness had settled upon the love, the bustle, the bother, the hopes, and the good and less-good times, so many unburied corpses.
    But we were already tired of seeing things like this, we had no more interest in such things. One glance, a step or two were enough for the courtyard, the house, the well, the past and the present, and their attentive silence. And although there might be an abandoned pitchfork or a fine-looking hoe, or a good, and valuable, pipe wrench, momentarily enticing you to pick it up and weigh it in your hand, as one might in a market or a farmyard, and things that ought to be in their place, and even stirring an urge, incidentally, to take the motor from the well and the pipes, five inch, and the beams from above, and the bricks from below, and the wooden boards (we could always find a use for them in our yard) and send them home, there was such a tickling pleasure in getting such easy