Grandpa let him take the pickup—this was our old pickup truck, the rickety Ford with the rounded fenders—from the age of fourteen, on condition that he not drive on the roads but only through the fields. At the pond he would undress and swim and then float naked on an inflated inner tube, which he called Dovik in the Basket, and imagine, so he told me, that if Pharaoh’s daughter were to arrive, preferably with her handmaidens—as it is written in the Bible, so why change it—he would explain to them exactly how to pull him from the water and what to do with him after that. As you surely understand, he would steal away and go there quite a lot, lying there and fantasizing about battling crocodiles like a king of the Zulu, and about our mother and what she was doing in America and whether she thought about us, and what it would be like to visit her there and pester her to buy him a Harley-Davidson as compensation for abandoning her son. And how on the one hand she handed us over to Grandpa, but on the other how good it was that she left us with him, and how could it be that everyone in the moshava was afraid of him but with us he was so good and gentle.
