His plan was to go far away, as far as he could get, to a place as different as it could be from the kibbutz, from the youth camps, from desert bivouacs, from the long lines of hitchhiking soldiers at road junctions blasted by hot dry winds and the stench of thistles, sweat, dust, and dried urine. Perhaps a strange, truly big city, with a river, with bridges, and towers, and tunnels, and fountains with monstrous gargoyles spouting water—fountains nightly fingered by a rare, electric light, where a lonely woman might be standing, her face turned to the light of the water and her back to a square paved with cobblestones. A faraway place where anything is possible—love, danger, arcane encounters, sudden conquests.

He fancied himself stalking with the light tread of a young jungle-cat the carpeted corridors of a cold, tall building, pushing past doormen into elevators whose ceilings glowed with round eyes, carried along in a stream of strangers, all intent on their own affairs, each utterly alone, his own face as inscrutable as theirs.

And so he had the idea of going overseas to study while working at some odd job, as a night watchman, say, or an attendant, or even a courier such as he had seen advertised for in a brief notice in the Help Wanted column of the newspaper. Not that he had the vaguest notion of what a courier might do, but something told him nonetheless, that’s for you, friend. He imagined himself at the controls of the latest machines, before instrument panels and blinking lights, surrounded by determined men and cunning women. By himself at last, in a rented room high up in a skyscraper in some foreign city—no doubt in America; no doubt in the Middle West of the movies, where he would spend his nights preparing for entrance exams, acquiring a profession that would set him out on the high road to life itself. And then on to the place where he was waited for, and would not be waited for forever.

At the end of that autumn Yonatan got up the courage to hint of his plans to his father.

Though it was Yolek, in his capacity as secretary of the kibbutz, who initiated the conversation. Early one evening he cornered his son at the foot of the stone stairs leading up to the recreation hall and urged him to take over the management of the tractor shed.