The road into Kfar Rumman is closed at one end by two concrete blocks and a car set crosswise. At the other end is the mound, as high as the first floor of the house that is no longer there, and above the mound the dust has not yet settled. The light comes in low from behind the houses.

Nabil Jaber climbs into the cab on the side with the wedge. The wedge is a piece of wood shaped by hand, jammed into the frame, holding the window halfway since the crank broke, a year ago. The dust comes in there and settles on the armrest, in a layer that shows against the black of the plastic. Nabil wears no gloves, on the Civil Defence machine as on the gravel quarry machine of ten years before; he lays his palms on the two controls, closes them.

He moves two beams off the edge, opens a passage the width of a man for the ones digging by hand. The bucket comes back clean.

The radio on the dashboard is turned low; a voice says a street name, a number, nine, moves on to something else.

At six twenty Nabil stops the arm in midair, turns the key. The engine goes quiet. He puts his right hand out through the window open halfway and raises his palm toward the mound; fifteen people stop moving where they stand. From the valley side a distant engine, nothing else. A man in a white helmet goes back to pulling rubble away with a shovel before Nabil brings his hand in.

The slab is the ground floor ceiling, fallen on its edge; it rests on the mound for three quarters of its length. At the corner toward the road it is raised a hand's width above a heap of blocks, and under that corner there opens a void that from the edge looks black and whose end cannot be made out.

A man from the edge comes up to the cab, says the two knocks reached him too, a moment before. Nabil looks at him for as long as it takes the man to finish the sentence. He does not answer, puts his open hand on the man's arm, moves him aside, out of the line of the bucket.

Kamal comes on foot from the road, opens the cab door, holds it open with his hand; he speaks into the radio, gives the address of the other site, a street, a house number, a time, and while he says it he looks at Nabil. "One machine only," he says. "Nobody is getting there."

Nabil turns the key a second time, raises his palm, the site stops as it did before. Through the window fixed halfway everything outside comes in at once: two knocks from under the slab, two seconds apart, the radio repeating the street, the house number. The sound is two knocks and two knocks are a hand and a hand is someone and someone is alive under the slab, if it is a hand. From the far end of the line someone begins to say something out loud.

The hand leaves the lever, stays open in midair for the length of a breath, comes to rest on the knee. Nabil opens the door on the side with the wedge and goes down the three steps without holding the handle, the last stretch he jumps. His knees go into the dust a metre from the edge of the mound; the dust comes up to the wrist.

He starts at the edge. He takes a piece of ceiling as wide as a door, lifts it by the corner, sets it down outside the line where the others walk. Underneath is a length of rebar bent at an angle that will not come straight out; he turns it twice on itself until the angle finds the gap, pulls it out, lays it on top of the slab. Bare hands on the face of the concrete, which at this hour is still cold. The mix, he calls it, as in the quarry.

He stops. He puts his ear against the sloping face of the slab, stays in that position until someone behind him moves a foot on the gravel. He starts again. One piece, another piece, from the edge toward the centre.

The cab door closes above him. Kamal sits in the seat that was his, starts up, and the arm rises empty over the heads of the men digging. The machine comes off the mound in reverse, one track at a time, with the side window fixed halfway and the wedge jammed in the frame. Out on the road Kamal lowers the window on his own side, the one that works. "I'll be back," he says.

From the ground the cab stands high above the mound, with the seat empty and the window open halfway.

The engine starts up again behind him. The track turns on the gravel, takes the road toward the valley, and the sound drops away until it is gone. From under the slab nothing comes. The time passes to clear the passage at the edge twice over, and one knock comes, dry, in the same place as before. After that nothing else comes; the morning goes on without anyone establishing whether it was the last.

From the radio of another machine, at the far end of the road, a voice says twelve. No one answers.

Nabil kneels a metre from the raised corner; his hands take hold and shift, the sweat works the dust into a paste on his fingers, the fingers leave a dark mark on the concrete. A man takes his place on his right, another behind him, a third further down. The pieces pass from one hand to the next along the line to the edge of the road. The light rises above the houses and changes colour on the mound, from grey to white.

The wedge fell from the frame when the machine took the road. It lies on the mound among the pieces of concrete, the size of the pieces, the same colour. A hand takes it, passes it to the hand that follows.