It was raining hard. Orange picking came to a halt. The cheerful teenage girls were sent to the kitchen and the stockrooms. Udi volunteered to fix the tin roof of the cowshed and the sheep pen that had been blown away by the winds. And Yonatan Lifshitz agreed to take over the shed as his father had asked several weeks earlier. “I want you to know that this isn’t a permanent arrangement,” he said. “It’s just for now.”

To which Yolek replied, “Eh? Right! Good. Just get the place into shape, while we catch our breath. Who knows? Maybe you’ll find an unknown source of self-fulfillment there. Maybe some day the fashions will change and that kind of work will be it again.”

“Just remember,” said Yonatan, “I haven’t promised you anything.”

And so Yonatan began to put in six hours a day in the tractor shed. There wasn’t much to do except take routine care of the tractors and make an occasional repair if it was simple enough. Most of the other farm machinery, still and frozen, slumbered away the winter beneath the tin roof that rattled in the wind. The engine oil grew black and viscous. The instrument panels were clouded by vapors. You had to be out of your mind to try to wake these monsters from their sullen hibernation and get them running again. Let them rest in peace. I’m here because of the cold and the rain, he told himself, and not for long either.

At ten o’clock every morning he would slosh his way from the tractor shed to the metal shop to drink a cup of coffee with the lame Bolognesi and have a look at that day’s sports section.

Bolognesi was not really an Italian. He was a Tripolitanian hired hand with a dark, stubbly face, a mouth that smelled slightly of arak, and a torn ear that resembled a rotten-ripe pear. A lanky, stooped man in his middle fifties, he lived by himself in a shack, one half of which had once housed a shoemaker, while the other half still served on occasion as a barbershop. Although he had served fifteen years for chopping the head off his brother’s fiancée with an ax, the precise details of the affair were not known. Naturally, different and occasionally gruesome versions of it circulated. He wore a permanently pinched look, as if he had just bitten into a piece of spoiled fish that he could neither swallow nor spit out. Whether it was because he had become a pious Jew while in jail, or for some other reason, President Ben-Tsvi had decided to pardon him. In a letter to the kibbutz, the Committee for Reformed Convicts had officially vouched for his character, and so he was taken on as a helper in the metal shop and given his tumbledown, tarpaper half of a shack to live in.