Scenes from Village Life

Despite the scattered restaurants and galleries, Tel Ilan has a desolate edge-of-the-earth feel, its farm buildings collapsing and the library almost deserted. And strange things are happening there. A real estate agent on his way to negotiate purchase of a past-its-prime mansion, so that he can tear it down and rebuild, has an eerie feeling "that there was something I had to do, something serious and important"—the same feeling that compels a man attending an evening sing-along to go hunt through his pockets and under his hosts' bed. A crotchety old man tells his daughter that someone is digging under the house at night and blames their young Arab tenant, who in turn suspects the father. An injured soldier set to visit his aunt never arrives; the mayor's wife writes him a cryptic note then vanishes, leaving her husband to wait on the bench where she was last seen.