I was restless at S’de Boker. It was March, 1955. A sandstorm had blurred the sky. The sun shone like a smoky disc. The dogs on a running leash barked at their shadows. The grounds inside the barbed wire enclosure were deserted. I had the room of a settler who was on a visit to Jerusalem. I cocked his rifle to make certain I would know how to use it. It was like the first rifle I had been handed in the army, bolt action wtih a five-cartridge clip. There were additional bullets in an ash tray. I looked at the books on a rack. Most of them were technical, studies of the soil. I picked up a text on soil irrigation, waiting for the knock on the door.

I fell asleep waiting for the knock. The long ride out from Beersheba had tired me. I had hitched a ride on the provision truck from S’de Boker that had come into Beersheba for fresh meat and supplies. In the truck I sat on a sack of potatoes, trying to keep my seat and trying to see the Negev I wanted to see, the stretches of desert and the rock and sand formations that made you feel you had at last arrived at one point where you felt time had a beginning. The shapes thrust themselves out of the earth without the neat resolve of the Pennsylvania countryside. The earth is raw and looks untouched until you begin to walk in the Negev on foot. Then you can see the stones formed in a circle, the mark of a camp that may have been made yesterday or a thousand years ago.

I awoke without hearing a knock. I was disappointed, for I had grown accustomed to the routine of entering a new kibbutz. First there is food if you haven’t eaten, then you’re taken to a room to rest, and after an hour’s nap one of the people from the kibbutz, usually someone who speaks good English, comes to fetch you and introduce you to the members he feels you can talk with. For you’re a stranger in a community where there are no street lights, no cafés, no restaurants, no hotel lobbies, no groups of idling people, only the dark of a country night.

In Beersheba, at the café, Ben-Adi had introduced me to the settlers from S’de Boker who were eating and drinking coffee and sitting around a big table looking more like extras in a cowboy movie than desert farmers. They stared at my baggy gray flannels, the heavy green fisherman’s sweater and plaid sport jacket that I wore, as though I had just gotten off the stagecoach from Dodge City wearing dancing slippers. One of the settlers gave me a steel-gray stare. His voice was American; his accent Western. He nodded his head slightly. The rest just stared past me into their own conversation. But they agreed I could ride on their provision truck and that was all I was interested in.

The girl at the table put five simple straight questions to me: who was I, where was I from, how long had I been in Israel, was I planning on staying, what was I doing in Israel. She wore blue jeans and spoke English with authority. Her face was broad and handsome, her body had the swift sure movement that you immediately felt a woman would have to have to survive S’de Boker. Ben-Adi quickly told me that she had commanded troops in the Negev, that she had fought the Germans as a partisan and then as a captain in the regular Russian army. I later learned she was also an intelligence officer for the Negev.

There was only one gun available when the provision truck started back from Beersheba. The girl took the rifle and gave it to the American (who I learned was her husband).

“You may need it,” he told her.

“No,” she told him, “there’s one pistol, that will be enough.”

“But just in case—”

“We won’t need the rifle and you will,” she told him. He was staying behind to visit the Bedouins in an attempt to buy horses.

“All right,” he said, “but be careful.” He took the rifle. The truck turned into the main street of Beersheba which enters the desert in about a minute’s time.

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I decided that I wouldn’t get a knock on the door at S’de Boker. And I didn’t feel like reading any further into the text on soil irrigation. I left the room. I saw a party of soldiers getting ready to leave the settlement. They were loaded down with BAR’s, rifles, machine guns. It looked like a war party. Then I saw Ben Gurion come out of his house with his wife. She was bundling him into a heavy three-quarter army coat. He wore rough army pants. His head was uncovered. His white shock of hair looked just as it did in the photographs in the New York Times. I asked if I could join the party. No one objected. I got into the scout car alongside Ben Gurion. We seemed to have more guns and fire power than the Palmach troops who took Safed.

We rode out of the gate of S’de Boker just across the field to where the earth was turned for growing. We got out of the scout car and the soldiers took up defensive positions to guard Ben Gurion. He walked over to where an irrigation sprinkler was whirling water into the desert.

“Is this the first irrigation?” I asked Ben Gurion.

“Yes,” he said, “since the creation.”

“Of the kibbutz?” I asked.

“No,” Ben Gurion said, “since the creation of the world.”

We watched the whirling water and then got back into the scout car and rode past the barbed wire fence into the settlement.

I walked over to the house of the girl who had OK’d my stay at the settlement. She wore an apron over her blue jeans. She was sweeping out the dust from her living room. She lived next door to Ben Gurion. The houses at S’de Boker are square, wooden, built for raw utility.

She told me that the sand had been blowing for three days in the Negev.

“And you can’t keep it out. It gets into everything.”

She kept sweeping as she talked.

I told her I had ridden out with Ben Gurion to see the new irrigation sprinkler and what he had said about the irrigation.

She said that that was Ben Gurion’s way of speaking. Ben Gurion’s wife came out of their house with a pail of wet wash. She hung up a suit of winter underwear, socks, more underwear.

The girl kept sweeping and dusting. I stood in the doorway.

“I can’t invite you in,” she said, “until I’ve cleaned the house. It’s too dirty this way. This dust spoils the house.”

“I’ll look around the settlement,” I told her.

S’de Boker didn’t seem to be thriving. It looked desolate, wind-swept. The barbed wire and the soldiers on guard gave you a feeling of being in a concentration camp. The settlement sits in the middle of nowhere. The closest buildings are the ruins of a city that was lived in two thousand years ago. You didn’t feel that you were in a kibbutz like K’far Blum or even the younger, tougher kibbutzim in the Jerusalem Corridor. I saw no one walking about. But strangely, I heard the high-pitched voice of a boy reciting the prayers that I remembered from my Bar Mitzvah.

In the evening I ate in the small communal dining hall. No one spoke to me and I didn’t start any conversations. But Mrs. Ben Gurion called me over to where she was sitting. She asked me who I was, how long I had been in Israel, why had I come to S’de Boker, and did I know her nephew Will Maslow. I didn’t know Will Maslow but I knew of him, and I said so and it seemed to please her.

I went back to my room. It was a black night and very cold. I checked the rifle and propped it against the chair alongside my bed. I turned out the light and walked out of the room to stand in the doorway. I didn’t want the light to illumine me as a target. My room was just a stone’s throw from the barbed wire. I stood in the doorway to get a good look at the Negev sky. The sky is not as extraordinary as it is at Masada, the low sky with the great hanging stars. It’s a vast sky in the Negev and you quickly realize how small a niche S’de Boker takes up, how great is an Ohio spring rain to the whirling sprinkler propped up against an oil drum.

But I heard voices from the girl’s house. And it was the same sky that listens with indifferent patience to all of the quarrels between husbands and wives.

I heard the cowboy yelling, the American from the West. The girl yelled. She wept and raged. He tried to tell her that it was nothing. She yelled that he was crazy for risking his life. I began to pick out what had happened. He had ridden all night through the Negev on a horse he had bought from a Bedouin chief. You could have been killed, she yelled at him. But I wasn’t! I don’t want you dead! I don’t want any more dead!

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The sun was still clouded by the sand the next day. Now the sun looked heavy, as though it were going to fall into the desert. I walked out of the dining hall and the cowboy came toward me with a big hello. He didn’t look like the same person who had given me the dead-pan greeting in Beersheba.

“Come and see my horse,” he said. He told me he had bought the horse from a Bedouin chief. He had ridden about sixty kilometers from the Bedouin camp to S’de Boker.

“Weren’t you in danger?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I know this territory. You can’t let it frighten you. You just have to be prepared. Like this knife.” He pointed to a hunting knife hanging from his belt. “You can’t tell when some crazy Arab out there will crawl through the barbed wire and decide to make you his passport to heaven. So you’re prepared but not frightened. When I rode through the Arab territory I wore white Arab headgear and when I got near Israeli territory, I sang American songs. Nobody took a shot at me. And there aren’t too many people in this territory who can hit a man riding at night at a good pace on an unspoiled Arab horse. C’mon and look at this beauty.”

The horse was a light speckled gray with clean swift lines.

“Watch her in action.”

The cowboy mounted the horse and rode her bareback, taking her for a fast gallop, pulling her up to a sudden stop, talking to her in that special language of coaxing and praise that horses appear to understand.

“Why did you buy the horse?” I asked.

“To breed them out here.”

“What about grass and the Arabs?”

“There’s plenty of grass in this territory. Right in between these hills you see fine patches. The Arabs manage to find grass for their sheep. You just have to get to know this territory. You can’t stay behind barbed wire fences. You’ve got to move free.”

“Aren’t the Bedouins dangerous?”

“They’ll kill but not too often. And I think they might like to get into the horse business if only through the rustling end. You know, there aren’t too many horses in Israel. Everybody says this isn’t a country for horses. Well, this territory is something like the territory I come from, only of course this is something special. This territory has a special kind of history buried in almost every inch of the place. You see some strange stuff when you go out riding in the desert. And I think horses would be perfect for working this territory. A lot of it is flat country and you can cut through the hills without too much trouble.”

He asked me if I wanted to try out the horse. I told him the last horse I had ridden was at Coney Island.

“How do you like it here?” I asked.

“I like it because it is something special. That gives it an excitement. But I’m getting tired of S’de Boker. I’d like to breed horses and build a house where there’s not another house in front of you. You know, I come from Western farming and grazing land. I grew up to be a farmer. I can do just about everything a man has to do on a farm. But these people here,” and he pointed to some of the settlers entering the dining hall, “they’re not farmers yet, though some of them have done the best farming I’ve seen. But they know only one or two things, they’re not farmers yet the way the farmers are farmers back in the States, and that’s what this territory needs. We’ve got to break out and be on this Negev territory or it won’t be ours.”

His wife came toward us and I heard that her name was Judith. She still wore her apron over her blue jeans. She looked pleased that her husband was friendly with me.

“Let’s make a dinner tonight,” he suggested.

“All right,” Judith said, “the house will be cleaned up by then.”

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The house was clean. It shone. The sandstorm had been swept out. The table was set with napkins, gleaming modern stainless flatware, water glasses that sparkled. We ate a fine Italian spaghetti and Judith served a lemon pie she had baked. She served the dinner like a suburban housewife, careful to see that the water glasses were filled, anxious about the portions, happy when we said the pie was excellent and you couldn’t get better pie in New York City. Ed told me while she was in the kitchen that his wife could write her initials with a 50-caliber machine gun. He said she was a better shot with a rifle than he was. And he was pretty good, having handled a gun since he was a boy. He showed me a rifle he had brought home from the army in Germany. “It’s a good gun for this territory. You need range and a lot of accuracy.” Their dog was curled up under the table. The dog roamed the barbed wire fence on a running leash all day. Ed said they used to let the dog roam loose at night within the settlement but the dog attacked too many settlers. “He’s only trained for us,” Ed said. A huge German police. The dog growled. It leaped from under the table while we were eating and barked at the door. Then there was a knock at the door. Judith held the dog and Ed opened the door. It was a friend, who didn’t come in when he saw us eating supper. Judith let go of the dog and he stretched out across the threshold.

“He heard before us,” I said.

“He’s trained for this,” Ed said. “He’s not a spoiled German police dog. Judy is the only one who can really take him on.”

“Do you get many intruders?” I asked.

“Not now. But Judy was here when the settlement opened for business. The Arabs attacked the first night and two of the settlers got killed. The Arabs got it too. Not too long ago they killed a girl waiting for a ride on the highway.”

I told Ed I had ridden out of the settlement with a tractor driver who was going up the road for a few minutes and he didn’t have a gun.

“I wouldn’t go out without a gun,” Ed said. “He was just crazy. You need a gun just because there’s nothing like a gun when the other man has a gun. But some of the people out here like to think of themselves as pretty tough guys. Being at S’de Boker makes them tough. They haven’t seen too much real action anywhere else. The tough days are just about over. Now we need herds of horses to breed on this territory, that’ll open up the land.”

“What about sheep farming?” I asked. “Doesn’t it open up the land?”

“We’re not too good at sheep farming. An Arab kid of six can do a better job with sheep than any of us can. And you don’t get too far with sheep. But with horses this whole territory is yours.”

I noticed a rifle against the bed, another rifle against a chair.

Judith poured coffee for us.

“You’re talking more,” she said to Ed, “more than I’ve ever heard you talk to anyone.”

“He’s a writer like you,” Ed said. “He can listen to what somebody else says. You don’t get too many people out here like that. Most of the people who pass through this territory are me me me me or I I I I.”

“What did you write?” I asked Judith.

“It’s a long story—”

“And a good one,” Ed said, “and she wrote it in English. She can read and write in about eight languages.”

“Can I see what you wrote?” I asked.

“It’s too long for you to read now. I’ll pick out a couple of chapters. But you should know what went on before.”

And then she told me a story that was fantastic even for Israel where almost every single person can look back on his life like Homer beginning the Iliad.

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Judith washed the dishes and I started to read the chapter she selected. It told of a wild New Year’s Eve party in the house of a German chief of police where she was working as a maid and an espionage agent. How she saw the Germans! The Germans overwhelmed by their fat successes, their absolute power to kill. A Nazi officer slapped her face when he didn’t like her answers after she was arrested on suspicion of espionage. “Why don’t you go and fight on the Russian front instead of slapping servant girls!” That calmed the German. She told me the biggest mistake people made was to take the Germans on their own terms. You had to see them as men who could be bribed, murdered, laughed at, frightened, men who started whimpering when you put a revolver to their head.

“What do you think of the way I write?” Judith asked. “Is my English all right?”

“Your English is perfect. And you have a style. One person is talking on the pages. That’s impossible to do unless you’re really writing.”

“I think it’s the lemon pie in the Negev desert that makes you say that!”

“What will you do with the book?”

“Keep writing it, until it’s finished.”

She cut into the lemon pie.

“Take some more,” she said. “This is probably the only lemon pie in all Israel. Ed insists on pie.”

We finished the pie and I said I ought to be leaving. Ed cautioned me to lock the door of my room. He also asked me if I had a rifle, picking up his rifle to offer it to me. I told him I had a loaded gun in the room. I thanked them for the dinner and for an instant I felt as though I were leaving an apartment on West 10th Street.

I walked the short dark distance to my room with a hurried step. I locked the door and checked the rifle. I also checked the window to make certain that it was locked. Sometimes hand grenades are quietly dropped through unlatched window screens. I fell asleep not at all certain that I would fall asleep.

In the morning I got up at six to hitch a ride on the Elath road back to Beersheba. A girl from S’de Boker was waiting by the side of the road. She was carrying a briefcase. She told me that the cars and trucks usually left Elath before dawn. She was on her way to Haifa. We waited and no cars came down the highway. A young settler joined us. He wanted to get to Jerusalem. He suggested we walk ahead up the road. We started walking away from S’de Boker. There were no settlements on the road between us and Beersheba. And the only traffic would come from Elath or perhaps an army truck returning to Beersheba. I looked at the settler to see if he was carrying a gun. He didn’t have a rifle but I thought he would at least have a pistol. I didn’t see a gun. The wild Negev landscape, beginning now to overwhelm the newly laid road, made me ask, “Why aren’t you carrying a gun?” He looked at me as though an answer wasn’t necessary. But I asked again, “Don’t you need a gun? You can be ambushed any minute along this road.” He didn’t speak English well enough to answer. The girl translated for him. She said he said that fifteen kilometers away was the S’de Boker sheep-herding outpost and there we could get lunch if we didn’t pick up a ride.

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