As it is about our youth in general. Sometimes, when I look at these young men who have been through wars, and have shot and killed and been shot at, and have plowed fields by the thousands of acres, they make me think of wrestlers lost in thought. You can’t get a word out of them. At most a shrug of the shoulders. Their entire working vocabulary consists of yes, no, maybe, and what difference does it make? Inarticulate peasants? Roughewn warriors? Just earthen clods? Not necessarily. Sometimes, passing by late at night, you come across four or five of them sitting and singing like a pack of wolves baying at the moon. For what? Or now and then, one of them shuts himself up in the recreation hall and scrimmages savagely with the piano. Technically clumsy he may be, but you can hear the longing in it. For what? For the overcast lands of the north abandoned by his parents? For strange cities? For the sea? I have no idea. For the past nine years—ever since I stopped working in the chicken coop on doctor’s orders—I’ve been keeping the kibbutz books, and now I’ve been given a new and unwelcome responsibility. Whatever made me accept it? That’s a good question. I need time to solve it, though.

“Solve.” How odd this verb sounds to me. We have spent our entire lives in this place, coming up with one solution after another. To the youth problem, to the Arab problem, the Diaspora problem, the elderly problem, the soil and water problem, the guard duty problem, the sex problem, the housing problem—every conceivable problem under the sun. It’s as if all these years we’ve been painstakingly seeking to inscribe a few ingenious formulae on the waves of the sea or to make the stars line up in the sky by threes in drill formation.

And now back to today’s events. It’s late, and tomorrow is another day. On my own initiative, and without bothering to explain, I called off tonight’s rehearsal by leaving a laconic note on the dining-hall bulletin board; I didn’t think any of us was able to concentrate on music. The whole kibbutz is in an uproar. And everyone expects me to know what to do. Which is—what? The quintet will have to wait for a calmer night, when all of us are less preoccupied.