in the parking lot and the beam laid on an angle, the lower part leaning on the back of the truck and the top rising above the edge of the roof. Until the baby started crying inside the house, she stood at a little distance, her hands in the pockets of her slacks, and watched how one of them drew out a tangle of ropes with a saddle-shaped yoke at the end. He stood on the roof and harnessed himself with knots, looking like a coolie in a historical film. One of the others loaded block after block into the basket on the rope, and the worker on the roof pulled them up along the apartment beam, while the third worker, standing on the edge of the roof, leaned over and gathered the bricks one by one. Examining them from below, she saw how their faces grew sweaty with the effort, and their hands became dusty and scratched by the rough blocks. By the time she had put the baby to bed and come out again, she saw that they had unloaded the rest of the blocks on the lawn and disappeared with the truck, though she hadn’t heard the sound of the motor. The next day, after turning the matter over in her mind for sleepless hours, she decided she must demonstrate her authority over them, and was ready and waiting for them in her window, cradling the baby in her rounded arms, anger lending force to her movements. From the window she shouted at them as they approached, “Why did you leave in the middle of work yesterday? And today . . .” She looked at her watch with a clumsy movement, stretching her neck over the baby lying at her breast. “Today you come at nine! You said you’d start working at six! This way you won’t finish in ten months!”
“Lady,” said the one with the golden eyes, insulted, “Today was police roadblocked. Not possible we leave early before four morning, lady.”
Something in her recoiled at the sight of the beaten dog’s eyes he raised up toward her in her window, at the sound of his broken voice. But she, tensing her strength to suppress the tremor that awoke within her, threatening to soften her anger, shouted, “And yesterday what happened? Was also roadblocked?” Maliciously she imitated his grammatical error. “You went away and left half the blocks down there on the grass.”
For the first time she saw the movement that was later to become routine: the jaws clamping down on each other as though chewing something very hard, digging a channel along the line of his teeth. Later she was to learn: that’s how they suppress anger, hatred. They clench their teeth to suppress the wild rage that surges up, that only rarely breaks out and flashes in their pupils.
“Yesterday my friend Ahmad, he hurted his, the nail his finger.”
Behind him his companion raised a bandaged hand, and she looked out of her pretty window, framed with Catalan-style wooden blocks, feeling how the three men in their tattered work clothes were defeating her, looking up at her from their places.
And two hours later, when she had fed and changed the baby and put him to sleep in his crib, her mind was constantly on the uncomfortable feeling that had dwelt in her ever since her conversation with them, when she had spoken to them like a cruel lord of the manor. Now, knowing full well she was doing something she shouldn’t, but still letting the spirit of the moment drown out the voice of reason, she went out of the front door carrying a large tray, bearing a china coffeepot decorated with rosebuds, surrounded by cups with matching saucers, spoons with an engraved pattern, and a platter of round honey cakes. She stood there clutching the heavy tray, her head tilted back, debating whether to put the tray down on the marble landing of the stairs, climb up the wooden ladder that leaned against the building, reaching the edge of the roof, and invite them down for coffee; or perhaps it would be better to call them from where she stood. Relentlessly aware of her ridiculous position, she suddenly discovered she didn’t remember any of their names. Then a head appeared over the edge of the roof, and she found herself calling to him quickly, before he disappeared, “Hello, hello, I have some coffee for you.” Ashamed of the shout that had burst from her, she set down the tray and escaped before one of them came down and brought her offering up to his companions.
That afternoon, placing her wide-awake baby in his crib, she put on old jeans and Yoel’s army jacket and climbed up to the roof to see how they were getting along with the work. The tray with the rosebud pattern coffeepot and the pretty cups stood in a corner of the roof, cigarette butts crushed in the remainder of the murky liquid in the saucers. She stood and looked for a long while at the sight, which she would recall afterward as a kind of symbol: the fine Rosental china from the rich collection her grandmother had brought from Germany heaped up carelessly, lying next to sacks of cement and heavy hammers.
“We finished the concrete rim,” said Hassan, who seemed to have taken upon himself the task of spokesman. “Now we have to put water and it dry.”
“Is it twenty centimeter?” she spoke like them.
“It twenty to the meter” He took a metal measuring tape out of his pocket.
“Is it two centimeters over the edge of the floor?”
It seemed to her they exchanged hurried glances, as if they had conspired together before she came, and she grew tense and suspicious.
“Did you bring it up two centimeters above the floor?” she repeated her question, her voice sharp and higher than at first.
“It twenty to the meter,” he told her again.
“But does it come out above the floor or not?”
“Level with the floor,” he spread out his hand to emphasize his words, with a satisfied expression, like a merchant praising his wares.
“That means it’s no good,” she said.
“Why no good, lady?”
“Because the rain will leak in,” she said impatiently, her anger growing at the game he was playing with her while the concrete band was drying steadily. “It has to be two centimeters higher. That’s what David said to you, and that’s what’s written in the contract.”
“We say David twenty centimeter.”
“At least twenty centimeters,” she corrected him, her voice rising and turning into a shout. “And of that, two centimeters above the floor.”
“There is twenty centimeter, lady,” he said again, his voice like a patient merchant standing up to a customer making a nuisance.
She pursed her lips as if to demonstrate the conversation was useless. She swung her legs over the low wall around the roof and placed her feet on the rungs of the ladder.
“I’m going to get David,” she said to the three men standing and looking at her, anxious to see how things would develop. “If that’s the way you’re starting—then it’s no good,” she added. She went down the ladder with a rush to demonstrate the bellicose spirit that animated her steps, inwardly calculating how long it would take her to get to the building on Herzl Street and locate David, and whether it would be better to take Udi with her, or leave him in his crib and hope he was asleep. Planting her feet on the ground, she strode vigorously toward her car, determined to call David in before the concrete band dried. Then she heard a thick voice calling to her from the roof: “Lady, you don’t need David. We add two centimeters.”
She turned her face upward, suppressing the feeling of relief and victory that surged over her anger, seeking the three dark heads bunched together. “Quickly then, before it dries,” she said in a loud, hard voice.
That evening, her sister Noa declared, her voice coming through the pay phone from Jerusalem mingled with other voices, “You made a mistake about the coffee. Let them make it themselves, and don’t serve them anything anymore. If they enter the house—you’ll never get rid of them.”
“Don’t worry.
