After lunch I returned to my room. I seem to be coming down with the grippe. And so I’ve got into bed in my long underwear and put on a Bach fugue. And written a few more pages in this journal. On Saturday night I will be officially elected secretary of the kibbutz unless I have the gumption to announce that I’m not a candidate. Determination has never been a trait of mine, though, and people will think badly of me. So we’ll have to wait and see. Could it possibly be that I’m the only sane person in all of this? Father, son, mother, Azariah, even my precious Rimona, to say nothing of Stutchnik—there’s something strange about every one of them. True enough, a genius I never was. Twice this morning I picked up the office phone to call the police, and once even dialed the number, but changed my mind both times. I’ll put it off until tomorrow after all.

Meanwhile I have read a suggestive passage in Donald Griffin’s Bird Migration, from which I quote the following lines:

Many species of birds begin their spring migration when the weather is still very different from that prevailing in their nesting areas. Species that winter in tropical islands, for example, where climatic conditions are highly stable, must leave such regions by a given date if they are to spend the short-lived summer in the far north.

And this as well:

Whatever informs a bird in a tropical rain forest in South America that the moment has come to fly north if it is to arrive in the Canadian tundra just in time for the spring thaw?

I’ve copied out these lines because, absurd as it may seem, if even a great man like Yolek can allow himself to believe in the most crackpot hypothesis, why shouldn’t I try out my own modest powers of divination, no matter how wild the hunch?

Roughly an hour-and-a-half ago, at about twenty after two, while I was lying in bed, reading Griffin, there was a knock on my door. Before I could answer it, the door burst open. It was Hava. She had to have a serious talk with me. At once. This minute.

That she found me in my long underwear, a tattered woolen scarf wrapped around my throat, looking like a refugee from the underworld, didn’t faze her one bit or make her feel the least need to apologize. She marched across the room in a huff and sat down on my unkempt bed. I fled to the bathroom, locked the door, and dressed hurriedly before emerging.

An obviously aging woman, her hair braided in a circle around her head, a Polish severity about her, a wispy mustache above lips perpetually pursed, righteous to her fingertips but determined to be tolerant as a matter of principle, having no choice but to put up with the despicable weaknesses of others.