“Srulik, excuse me for saying so, but I feel I must tell you that I appreciate you greatly. Not appreciate. That’s a ridiculous word. On the contrary, I respect you and wish I could be like you. In control of myself. While I agree with practically everything Spinoza ever said, I haven’t been very good at living up to it. I keep catching myself all the time in the ugliest lies. Not ugly really. Unnecessary and low. Lying only to impress, though in the end I achieve the opposite. Yet I want you to know I’m working on myself. Little by little I’m changing. You’ll see. And when Yoni comes back—”

“Azariah, please. We can discuss all this some other time. Right now I’m in a hurry.”

“Of course. Excuse me. I just wanted you to know that, how should I put it, I’m entirely at your service. And at the kibbutz’s. Twenty-four hours a day. I may be a fink. I definitely am. But I’m not a parasite or a leech. And I am going to marry her.”

“You’re what?”

“Because that’s what Yoni wanted, I swear. And if it will make Yolek happy, because he’s been like a father to me, and Hava, and the rest of the kibbutz, then that’s what I’ll do, marry Rimona. And now I’m off to tend to the switchboard. To keep the line free day and night. Srulik?”

“Yes. What?”

“They don’t come any better than you, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

Azariah spoke these last words with his back to me and set off on a run. Yoni, Udi, Etan, and that whole crew strike me as a strange tribe. They will never accept Azariah, and yet he isn’t strange to me. In fact, he seems almost intimately familiar, yet he doesn’t have a chance of fitting in. I never did believe a Jew could really and truly assimilate. That’s what turned me into a Zionist.