Finally yielding to suasion, Yashek had agreed to take over Srulik’s old job as bookkeeper. Since it was off-season in the citrus groves, Udi Shneour was once again working in the grain fields, swearing he would straighten out the mess come hell or high water. His wife Anat was due in December.

From time to time the two of them would have Azariah and Rimona, who also expected to give birth in early winter, over for Turkish coffee with cardamom. Udi still enjoyed talking about past and future wars. Azariah had a penchant for politics—Nasser’s trouble in Yemen, the dilemmas facing King Hussein, the blindness of Eshkol and his cabinet—and for the dark labyrinths of the Russian soul. Azariah was no longer the object of snickers behind his back. He had learned the art of pausing for effect between one sentence and the next and of making people laugh when he wanted them to. He had also mastered the trick of interrupting himself with an unexpected rhetorical question, the unconventionality of which tended to make his audience feel it was considering the subject without prejudice for the first time.

Azariah had long since given up strutting about in cuffed gabardine slacks, haunting the high-school girls’ dorm, boasting of telepathic and telekinetic powers, and exasperating Srulik with his feverish confessions of undying love. Upon leaving the dining hall after supper he would put an arm around Rimona’s waist, his green eyes glinting with the unspoken arrogance of a male who has taken another male’s female and might do it again any time he wants. At last all could see who he really was. And they had seen nothing yet. The day would come when only historians would recall Yolek Lifshitz, but every child in the land would know that Kibbutz Granot was the home of Azariah Gitlin. Gitlin? Shouldn’t he perhaps adopt a more Hebrew-sounding name, like Gat or Geytal?

These days he was in consistently high spirits. After putting in fourteen hours in the tractor shed, he still managed to find time to be with Rimona, to socialize, to help out Hava, to play the guitar, to chat with Srulik, to bone up on professional literature, to improve his chess, to keep up with world and national affairs, to crack a book of poetry, and even, now and then, to take yet another peek at Spinoza.

Azariah had grown tan. The summer sun had singed his light head of hair, which had grown longer since his arrival last winter, when it was short as a hedgehog’s. A scar on his chin courtesy of some red-hot engine oil had given him a no-nonsense look. Come August, he promised himself, he would learn to swim and take driving lessons.