At 3:30 this morning I woke up in a sweat from all the aspirin I took Saturday night. My grippe was gone, though I still felt weak and dizzy. By the light of the reading lamp I put a bookmark in my Donald Griffin, which had fallen on the blanket beside me, put the book on the night table, donned Bolognesi’s old sweater and my bathrobe, turned on the electric heater, and sat there for a moment thinking that on just such a winter morning as this Death may come for me as I’m pulling on my trousers or making my bed. For that matter, it could even come this very moment so that my life would stop without my having managed to understand a thing. What a pity! After thirty years of playing my flute, the two of us haven’t experienced even one moment of total harmony, much less ecstasy. After twenty-five years of loving P., I still haven’t given her so much as a hint. I’m still alone, and she has four grandchildren. Yes, it will probably be on a morning like this that I’ll keel over right here and die.

And so I made myself a glass of tea with honey and lemon and took it to the east window to await the first light. Something inside kept telling me that Yonatan was in trouble but unharmed, that Rimona was pregnant, and that the father could be either of them. What made me so sure? But then, who’d ask an inner voice for logical demonstrations at four o’clock in the morning?

Far off in the darkness a cow lowed. Something moved outside the window, perhaps Tia, patiently snuffling among the hibiscus bushes, exploring the thicket of bougainvillea, pushing on into the honeysuckle arbor deep in the garden and vanishing there. I moved the electric heater closer because I was having a slight chill, then returned to the window. A light, grayish rain coursed down the pane against which my forehead was pressed for a good ten minutes. A freight train hooted in the west. Roosters crowed from the far end of the kibbutz. How desolate this garden looks on a winter day before sunrise. The puddles of muddy water. The sopping wet garden table, its chairs upended on it, their legs in the air. The thick-fallen leaves of the grape vine. The dripping of the pines in the fog as in some Chinese painting. And not a living soul.