“Good to meet you, Srulik. Please don’t bother getting up. I’m no longer one-and-twenty, and believe me, this is the first time in memory that I’ve ever heard a good word from Yolek Lifshitz about anyone. As for you, Hava, words simply fail me. I embrace you in my thoughts and have nothing but admiration for your courage.”

“Hava, if it’s not asking too much, please make Eshkol a strong glass of tea. Never mind what he says. And give our good friend Srulik some too. And Rimona and Azariah. None for me. If Rimon’ka will be gracious enough to pour me a sip of brandy, I’ll make do with that.”

“My dear friends,” said the Prime Minister, who, squeezed and crumpled though he was into the narrow kibbutz chair, was still a commanding presence, a tall, broad, heavy, gullied mountain of a man, a protuberant outcropping of superfluous bulges, sagging rolls of flesh, and improbable pouches of skin, a cliff partially collapsed by a landslide. “I want you to know that what you’ve been going through has been continually on my mind these past two days. Just thinking of you makes my heart ache and my head feel like a jar of scorpions. From the moment I heard the sad news I have been beset by anxiety.”

“Thank you,” said Hava from the kitchenette, where she had been busy herself setting out her very best china on a tray, arranging quartered oranges on a plate in a chrysanthemum pattern, taking out her fancy paper napkins, and entrusting Rimona with a fresh white tablecloth. “It’s very kind of you to have taken the trouble to come.”

“Oh, don’t you go thanking me, Hava. I only wish I could have come as a bearer of good news instead of like someone paying a condolence call. Now, my friends, perhaps you should give me a blow-by-blow account. Do you mean to say the boy just got up and left without so much as a by-your-leave? Na. A shayne mayse. In Yiddish you say, small children, small tsuris, big children, big ones. Hava, please, no tea for me, or anything else. And you’ve heard nothing from him since? Na. A fine young upstart! And if Yolek will forgive my saying so, or even if he won’t, the son of an upstart too. God only knows what must have driven him to do a crazy thing like that. Why not tell me what happened right from the word go.”

“My son has disappeared,” said Yolek, gritting his teeth like a man trying to bend an iron bar with his bare hands, “and I’m to blame.”

“Yolek, please,” Srulik intervened warily. “Why cause yourself even more pain with such talk?”