That same night a young man arrived at the kibbutz. He had walked all the way from the main road, a distance of six kilometers, and entered the village by way of the muddy tractor road that passed the farm buildings. He soon enough encountered the smells of the place—the sour fumes of the poultry run, the stench of the sheepfold, the pungent rot of wet hay, the fetid stink of cow manure and a plugged sewage pipe by the barn, the bubbly ferment of moldy orange peels in the slop pile.

The first person to run across him in the fading twilight was Etan R., who was carrying fodder to the feedstalls in the cowshed. Noticing a thrusting, scrambling movement in the thick bushes behind the fertilizer shed, Etan surmised that another calf had escaped from the cow pen and the thought of it made him hopping mad.

That latch came loose again because Stutchnik forgot to fix it and I didn’t wire the gate shut. Only this time, for a change, I’m not going to do a thing about it. No, I’m going to go yank that Stutchnik right out of his Jewish philosophy group in the lecture hall and haul him down here in his best clothes to take care of his own mess. I don’t give a damn. It’s the second one broken loose this week, and Stutchnik is going to lose his chance to sound off any more about how careless we all are and about how the young ones are going to seed from too much easy living. But hold on, that’s not a calf.

The young stranger came plunging out of the bushes face first, followed by shoulders and hands, the latter frantically pushing the wet foliage aside. He was wearing corduroy pants and a short, light-colored jacket, and he appeared to be running straight for Etan R., who was tempted for a second to trip him up and get in the first blow, but the stranger suddenly stopped in his tracks and stood there wet and shivering. He must have come a long way in the rain before getting lost in the underbrush. The water that streamed down his cheeks from his soaking-wet hair made him look pitiful. Over one shoulder hung a skimpy army knapsack; one hand held a large guitar case.

Etan R. eyed the newcomer. He was hardly more than a boy, skinny, with narrow, sharply slanting shoulders, and so unsteady on his feet that a modest push would have been enough to knock him down. Etan’s initial apprehensions gave way to a feeling of mild impatience. A large, blond, hairy man, pug-nosed and lantern-jawed, he planted his heavy work boots far apart and stared hard at the newcomer before finally speaking.

“Good evening.”

The two words sounded more like a question than a greeting, because Etan still regarded the stranger as very strange indeed.