Yolek’s voice brimmed with sympathy and affection the way it always did when he spoke at a party or kibbutz meeting and wished to placate a particularly uncompromising opponent by making up to him and striking a chord of brotherly solidarity that would transcend all passing disputes. Azariah, for his part, nodded all the while Yolek was talking. At the same time he moved still closer to the edge of his chair, straining forward as if he had grasped the fact that Yolek was hard of hearing and, by a kind of somnambulistic logic, had begun to fear that he too might miss what was being said.

Yolek started out by explaining what winter meant on a farm. The earth was waterlogged. Hardly anyone could go out to work. The tractor drivers slept all day long. The field hands were sent off for courses in Judaism and Marxism and psychology and modern poetry. Even the citrus picking had to stop. Not to mention the problem of housing. There were young couples on the kibbutz who still had to make do with a single room without a private shower or bath until the new construction, also interrupted by the rain, was completed. This was no time for taking on newcomers. There was no work to give them, nowhere to put them up, and no one to be responsible for them. It was for this reason alone that Yolek couldn’t recommend that Azariah be accepted for a trial period. Not, by the way, that he put much stock in trial periods. A trained eye could see at a glance what stuff a man was made of. And if it couldn’t, that simply proved that the man had such a closed personality that ten years wouldn’t help to figure him out. There were always, of course, exceptions, but exceptions on kibbutzim never lasted for long.