The responsibility is now mine. It’s up to me to decide what must be done. Call in the police? Sit tight and wait it out? Make discreet inquiries in the neighboring villages? Treat the matter as urgent? Or try to take it in stride?

Just who are these youngsters anyway? What is going on in their heads? They’re first-rate farmers, no doubt about it. What we ourselves did with enormous effort, they toss off without any sweat. Presumably they’re brave and proficient soldiers. Yet always with an air of melancholy about them. As if they stemmed from another race, an entirely different tribe. Neither Asiatics nor Europeans. Neither Gentiles nor Jews. Neither idealists nor on the make. What can their lives mean to them, raised in this whirlwind of history, this place-in-progress, this experiment-under-construction, this merest blueprint of a country, with no grandparents, no ancestral homes, no religion, no rebellion, no Wanderjahre of their own? With not a single heirloom—not a chest of drawers, not a gold watch, not even a single old book. Growing in a place that was hardly a hamlet, in tents and shacks, amid pale young saplings. Just a fence and searchlights, howling jackals and distant shots. What got into you, Yonatan?

How little good I was able to do today. And even that just by groping in the dark. Perhaps I managed to soothe a soul or two. And take a few steps I thought were called for. And all on my own because there’s no one here to consult with. Stutchnik is a nice fellow. More or less a friend. Warmhearted, demonstrative, but unruly. Just the way he was when I first met him in the youth movement forty years ago. He is stubborn and opinionated, incapable of listening. I have never heard him admit to being wrong. Not once. Even in the most picayune matter. One time he wouldn’t speak to me for half a year because I proved to him with a map that Denmark isn’t a Benelux country. Six months later he sent a note to inform me my atlas was “badly out-of-date.” And yet in the end he decided to make up and brought me a lambskin rug for the foot of my bed.

As for my good friend Yolek, far be it from me to judge his contribution to the nation or to the kibbutz movement. Who am I to say? His enemies accuse him of talking like a prophet but carrying on like a small-time politician. To which his supporters reply, “Oh, he’s cagey, all right, but the man has imagination and vision!”