Regarding your offer to donate a sum of money for the construction of a public building in Kibbutz Granot, firstly, let me express my own and our members’ gratitude for both the proposal itself and the generous intention behind it. Secondly, permit me the liberty of pointing out that the idea itself is not without its difficulties, some of them rooted in principle. No doubt you can imagine the existence of certain long-held feelings, sensitivities, and questions concerning both your present situation and events of the distant past that are best left unmentioned and forgotten. A word to the wise, etc. The rub is, Benyamin, that there are among us, I’m sorry to say, some stubborn souls who insist on raking up that past and opening old wounds. Besides which, to be perfectly candid with you, I too find myself in a quandary, seeing as how I, so to speak, was on the butt end of it all. In light of which, it may be that your kind offer needs to be given more thought. See here, Benya. Why don’t we agree to put the whole matter aside for the moment and do some plain speaking with each other. I want you to tell me something. Please. In two or three lines. On a postcard. Or even a telegram. Just answer me yes or no. Have I in any way wronged you? Yes or no? As God is my witness, how have I sinned against you? What strings, as it were, have I pulled to your detriment? Of what intrigues against you am I guilty? Granted, it was not with malice aforethought that you fell in love with my friend. Who purports to plumb the vagaries of the human heart? And she—let’s face it—suffered, frightfully, until she made up her mind. But make it up she did. I did not, after all, bludgeon her into doing so. Does anyone seriously think I could have kept her by force had she really preferred you to me? Honest to goodness, Benya, was I really the villain of the piece, and she and you, as it were, the helpless victims? The crucified saints? What, in the name of God, did I do to the two of you? What made me deserve to be treated with such savage rancor? Do you mean to tell me that I was the Cossack with the whip and you my innocent whipping boy? Which one of us, may I ask, pulled a gun as his final argument? Was it me? Was I the murderer? Did I really destroy a grand passion, so to speak, by snatching her from your arms? Was it I who turned up uninvited one day and took all of us by storm with my shepherd’s pipe and my Russian peasant’s blouse and my romantic airs and my wild head of hair and my erotic bass voice? Why then should I be spat at and reviled? Why should I be punished all my life? What are she, you, and the boy continually tormenting me for? For having tried to behave decently and rationally? For not having reached for a knife or gun myself? For having kept you from being handed over to the British police? For the six English pounds I stuck into your broken-down suitcase at the last minute when you couldn’t close it that morning and I had to tie it together with rope before you hit the road? For what? Is it just for the nasty intellectual face I had the hard luck to be born with?