I went back to my post at the window. It was early evening, and the sky had begun to turn blue and red in the west. In the sunset light, the bougainvillea in the garden seemed to catch fire. It had been thirty-nine years ago in Poland that Yolek Lifshitz first introduced me to his group of young Zionist pioneers who later founded this kibbutz. He called me “a cultured youth” and, on the same occasion, referred to German Jews like me as “first-rate human material.” It was he who taught me how to harness a horse, who persuaded a general meeting of our commune to buy me a flute at a time when “artistic tendencies” were considered a grave bourgeois deviation, who more than once scolded me for not getting married and even tried fixing me up with a widow from a nearby kibbutz. And now here I had been holding his hand. From somewhere deep inside me came a feeling of indefinable peace. As if I were someone else. Or as if I had managed at long last to play a particularly difficult passage on my flute, one that for years I had been unable to master, and had acquired the confidence that I could effortlessly repeat it from now on without a single false note.

“We can’t force you to go to the hospital,” said the doctor, “but your life will be in danger, and I’ll have to wash my hands of all responsibility for it.”

“Forgive me for everything,” implored Hava. “I swear I’ll be good from now on. Just listen to the doctor, I beg you.”

I turned around to take a look. Yolek was gripping the couch with his packing-crate hands as if he were really about to be dragged away by brute force, and there was a contemptuously bitter look on his ugly face. There was something quite horrid about him, yet at the same time—why deny it?—something positively majestic that I admired and envied with all my heart.

“He has to go to the hospital,” said the doctor.

“Yolek is staying here,” I heard myself say. “That’s his wish, but there will be a driver on duty all night long.”

I then set out to arrange the matter with Etan R. and astonished myself even more by issuing a second command when I reached the doorway.

“Rachel, you stay here with Yolek. Not you, Hava. You’re coming with me. Yes, right now.”

She followed me, all obedience.. Her eyes were full of tears. Although, as I’ve said, touching a woman is, for personal reasons, very hard for me, I put my arm around her shoulders. From the path outside I called back to the doctor, “We’ll be in the office. And afterwards at my place.”