Correction: I personally need some music right now. In private. Brahms perhaps. My door is locked. I’m wearing my pajamas and over them the heavy sweater Bolognesi knit for me six or seven years ago. I’ve made some tea with lemon. I am jotting down a few pages in my journal. Then I’ll go to bed and try to sleep. What I must do is write down the events of the day and one or two thoughts of my own. Some sixteen years ago I took it upon myself to keep a daily record of life on the kibbutz, even though I haven’t the vaguest idea who on this kibbutz, or anywhere else in this world, for that matter, will take an interest in it. Who indeed?

(A somewhat theological aside. The dogs are barking, the night birds are screeching. The silence is hovering over the darkness—in the valleys, in the mountains, on the sea—mutely but insistently demanding a response from us all, man, dog, bird. And it’s up to us to make ourselves understood.)

From a purely technical point of view, Yolek Lifshitz is still secretary of this kibbutz. Officially I won’t assume office until after the vote at the general meeting scheduled for Saturday night. Practically speaking, though, for the past several days I’ve been acting as secretary. I feel I have no choice. When it comes to emotions, my own or anyone else’s, I’m at a total loss. They’re a closed book to me, an enigma within a mystery. And though I’ve done my share of reading in my solitary years, whatever I’ve found there, whether fact or fiction, has only made the enigma more enigmatic and the mystery more mysterious. First Freud comes along and says one thing. Good enough. Only then along comes Jung and says something else and no less plausible. And Dostoyevsky was no slouch either at showing us other abysses of the soul. Well, more power to them all. Yet I am not convinced. I have my doubts.

Not one of them can enlighten me on where young Yonatan Lifshitz might be right now. Is he sleeping in some abandoned house or shack? Outdoors? In a city? On an old mattress in a deserted watchman’s hut? In a tent in an army camp? Or is he wide-awake and desperate, still on the move? Is he in a car? A plane? A halftrack? Is he looking for a streetwalker in the alleys of south Tel Aviv? Or is he navigating by the stars in the wilderness of Judea or the Negev? Is he serious, or just playing a practical joke on somebody? Is he taking revenge, acting the desperado, or simply being a spoiled child? Is he looking for something or running away from it?