The cabin was past the house and the barn, up the continuation of the sloping pasture. Behind it, dense forest rose to rocky bluffs. The

Alpine air smelled pure and sweet, tinged with the fragrance of evergreens. The cabin was small, single-story, made from logs whose bark had long ago disintegrated. A rusty stovepipe projected from a roof mat needed re shingling Saul turned to survey the view: the lush lower part of the valley, a far-off small lake, the towers of the town, partly obscured by intervening fir trees, a kilometer to his right Why would

Avidan choose such primitive, secluded lodgings? Saul wondered.

"How long did Avidan live here?" he asked the woman. "He came last fall. In October."

"He planned to spend all winter here?"

"He said he was a writer. He needed solitude and privacy to finish a novel." A retired Mossad operative a novelist? Said thought. It was possible. Anything was possible. But probable? Once the winter storms started blowing... Solitude and privacy? Avidan had certainly gone to an extreme for those conditions. What had made him choose this place?

They entered the cabin. It was divided into a bedroom and a kitchen. In the absence of a fireplace, a large black wood burning stove served for heating the cabin as well as preparing food. The rooms were spartan.

Plain pine boards covered the walls. A slab of wood on trestles was the kitchen table, a bench beside it There were austere cupboards, a rocking chair, another bench along one wall. The bed was a top-and bottom bunk, its mattresses packed with straw. A cracked minor hung above a battered bureau, the drawers of which were lined with yellowed newspapers from

1975. The drawers contained a few items of clothing. Books, mostly histories related to Israel, filled a shelf beside the bureau.

Photographs of Israel's desert, along with images of crowded downtown

Tel Aviv, were tacked here and there on the walls. In the kitchen, Erika found plastic cups and plates in a cupboard, along with cans of food.

Dish detergent was in a compartment beneath the sink. A man could go crazy spending a winter up here, Saul thought He turned to the woman.

"You said you didn't remove Avidan's possessions because you thought he might come back. It doesn't look like he had all that much to pack up."

"And if he was working on a novel," Erika said, "he must have taken it with him. I don't see a typewriter. I can't find a manuscript." The woman stood silhouetted by sunlight at the open doorway. "From October to February, I almost never saw him. From my house, sometimes I couldn't see the cabin for the gusting snow. Sometimes I thought the snow would smother the cabin. But on clear days, as long as I saw smoke from the stovepipe, I didn't worry. And the first of every month, he waded down through the drifts to pay his rent" Saul remembered that the woman had said she'd been deserted by her husband. Avidan's monthly rent must have been sufficient comfort for her to ignore her tenant's eccentricities. "Something was wrong,"

the woman said. "I knew that. And when he disappeared, in case the police reopened the investigation, I was determined not to touch anything."

"But so far as you know, you don't think the priest and the two Israeli men learned anything from their search," Saul said. "We could sort through the pages of these books. We could sift through the packages of food. We could test for loose floorboards. My guess is we'd be wasting our time. Avidan was a professional."

"The priest and the two Israeli men assumed they could take advantage of me, trick me, dominate me," me woman said angrily. "They never offered money."

Saul's skin tingled. "But if we offered money... ?"

"It's difficult to manage this farm alone."

"Of course," Erika said. "We want to help you. Our resources are limited. We recently had to leave our home in Israel. But we're willing to make a contribution." The woman moved her head from side to side, calculating, and named an amount It was high, almost half of what Misha

Pletz had given to Saul and Erika. But it was insignificant if the woman's information was as important as her rigid features suggested.

"Done," Saul said. "Provided you don't merely show us an out-of-date address book or..."

"A diary," the woman said. "The dates are from October of last year until he disappeared. It's about this cabin. It's about him. There are photographs. They made me sick." Saul's chest contracted. Erika stepped forward. "How did you get them?"

"I found where they were hidden."

"Yes. but how?"

"After the priest searched this cabin, I wondered what he was looking for. When I felt he was really gone, I came up here and searched as well. I tested the floor. The walls. The ceiling. I even budged the stove and pried up the firebricks beneath it."

"And?"

"I found nothing.

But the priest wasn't thorough," the woman said. "He didn't identify with Avidan's routine. He didn't put himself in Avidan's mind. There's another building.

Saul knew. "The outhouse."

"I found the diary and the photographs attached beneath the platform of the hole above the pit. Each day when he came and went along the path he dug through the snow, he must have taken them with him, possibly even concealed them beneath his clothes."

"And they're worth the sum you asked?"

"The worth is your concern. The sum you know." Erika reached into a pocket. "The money's Austrian."

"It could be Japanese for all I care. This is Switzerland. Every currency is welcome here." The woman counted the bills. "Where's what we paid for?"

"Come down to the house."

They sat at a table in a rustic kitchen. As the woman made coffee, Saul opened the plastic-wrapped packet she'd given them. He winced when he saw the photographs. Erika's hands shook sorting through them.

Nazi concentration camps. SS soldiers aiming submachine guns at refugees being shoved from trucks and railway cattle cars. Gaunt-faced prisoners staring with haunted eyes through barbed-wire fences. Endless trenches, quicklime- covered corpses, bulldozers poised to fill in dirt.

Gas chambers, naked people--mostly children, old men and women--so squeezed together they'd died standing up. Open doors of massive ovens.

Unimaginable quantities of ashes and bones. Saul studied them all, every obscene one, and when he'd finished, he'd learned what he already knew--mat the human ability to invent new methods of brutality was boundless.

He stacked the photographs and turned them face down on the table. "The examined life isn't worth living," he said, his voice trailing off. He stared at the diary. "God knows what else is in..."

"The night I looked through that packet, no matter how many logs I put on the fire, I was still cold," the woman said. "I paced until dawn. I knew about such atrocities, but to see them, to read about them..."

"Read about... ?" Erika looked at the diary, reached for it, hesitated, and drew her bands back as if from vomit

"Yes, the diary,"

the woman said. "Avidan, his parents, his sister, and two brothers lived in Munich. In 1942, when the Holocaust was set into motion, the SS arrested them and trucked them to the concentration camp at Dachau. It was only twenty kilometers away from their home. A work camp, not a death camp, though the way he describes it, there wasn't much difference. With the other prisoners, he and his family were used as slave labor at an ammunition factory. They received a minimum of food.

They were given little time to rest or sleep. Sanitary facilities were inadequate. Toilets were nothing more than open trenches. Drinking water was contaminated.

Their barracks leaked. There were rats. For two years, Avidan and his family slaved for Hitler's war. And one by one, they died. Avidan's mother went first--she collapsed in the factory and died from exhaustion. When Avidan's father couldn't get off the barracks' floor one morning, the SS dragged him outside and shot him in front of the other prisoners. His corpse was left in the assembly area for three days before prisoners were ordered to put the body on a cart and push it to a burial pit outside the camp. Next, Avidan's ten-year-old sister coughed herself to death. His older brother didn't move fast enough to suit a guard and had his head split open with a club. His remaining brother went insane and gashed his wrists with a splinter of wood.

Avidan himself became determined to survive. In small unnoticeable ways, be rested while he worked, conserving his strength. He devoured spiders, flies, worms, anything he could find in camp. And he succeeded.

In 1944, in September, he was part of a work force trucked from the camp to pick up liquor and food from town for an SS party that night The truck blew a tire. In the confusion, prisoners fled. The SS soldiers recovered quickly and shot three of the four escaping prisoners. The fourth was Avidan. The thrill of freedom was so overwhelminghe pushed himself to limits he didn't know he had. He stole food from storage bins. He slept in haystacks. He kept moving. Dachau is a hundred kilometers from Switzerland. In his diary, he doesn't say how he passed the Bodensee, but he arrived at neutral territory, and still kept going, still not sure he'd reach sanctuary, till he finally came to rest here.

My former husband and I bought this farm in 1978.1 have no idea who owned it during the war. But whoever lived here found Avidan cowering in the barn one night They understood his circumstances, took pity, and let him stay in the cabin. They supplied him with food. He remained from October of 'forty-four till the end of the war the following May, when he went to Palestine." The woman stopped. The room became eerily silent Saul had listened so raptly that it took a moment before a reference to the end of her words tugged at his memory. "He reached the cabin in October of 'forty-four?"

Heat rushed into Saul's stomach. "But didn't you say he came back last year... ?"