“Someone like you, Udi,” he said, “doesn’t have to go hunting for the Bible in old Arab villages. Just look at yourself in a mirror and you’ll see the whole Bible from Joshua to the second book of Kings. As for the Prophets, Psalms, Ecclesiastes, and Job, though, this country still needs to wait a couple of hundred more years for them. I’m not really contradicting myself, although maybe I am just a bit, because history moves in cycles, and in zigzags too, as we were taught to run in the army, so that if you’re aimed at while you’re zigging, you’ve already zagged by the time the shot is fired, and vice versa. You see, when we went into exile, and even before that, we Jews began to hassle the world by telling everyone how to live, what they could do and what they couldn’t, what was bad and what was good, until we got on everybody’s nerves—just like that uncle of mine I mentioned, Manuel, the musician. He played in the Royal Philharmonic and was a professor too and such a bosom friend of King Carol’s that the King felt he just had to give him a gold medal. Only right in the middle of the ceremony, Manuel began ranting like a mad prophet about all the decadence and corruption and recrucifying of Jesus each day by people who called themselves Christians. That’s why the goyim hate us like poison and always will. As the Russians say, ‘You can give Sergei a new suit of clothes, he’ll still be the same wherever he goes.’

“It’s only on the kibbutz that one sometimes sees a calmer, how can I put it, slower type of Jew. I swear I’m not trying to insult you. I mean Jews who have begun to learn the art of relaxing and the secret of sending down roots. They may be on the crude side, of course, but if you take, say, those olive trees over there, there’s something crude about them too. What I’m trying to say is that we should learn to live without talking so much. If we have to talk, it should be like you, Udi, when you tell us in a few words, without preaching or promising salvations, that it’s a damned nice day. Good for you, Udi! We should learn to live simply and to the point. To work hard. To be close to nature. Close, so to speak, to the rhythms of the cosmos. We should learn from those olives. We should learn from everything, the hills, the fields, the mountains, the sea, the wadis, the stars above. That’s not my own idea. It’s Spinoza’s. In a word, we should relax.”

“Then why don’t you?” asked Anat, laughing as if someone had tickled her in the right place.