Yolek spoke in a low, secretive voice. A moist breeze blew over them. The evening light was clouded, the light between one rain and the next. A sodden bench was covered with wet walnut leaves. Wet walnut leaves had already buried a broken sprinkler and a pile of burlap sacks. Yolek was a broadly built man. From the shoulders down he was drawn in rough, straight lines, like a heavy packing crate, but his gray unhealthy face, with its scattered pouches of wasted skin, looked more like an aging philanderer’s than a principled old socialist’s. Whereas Yonatan was tall, thin, and slightly distracted-looking. He stubbornly kept his eyes on the bench, the buried sacks, and the broken sprinkler. Suddenly, in a low, rapid voice, he burst into a torrent of speech.

No! Absolutely not! He didn’t even want to hear about it. Running the tractor shed was not for him. He had work in the citrus groves and there was still the grapefruit to get in. “When it stops raining, I mean. Today, of course, we couldn’t pick, but as soon as it clears we’ll start again. And besides, the tractor shed—what do I have to do with tractors?”

“That’s something totally new,” said Yolek. “Nowadays no one wants to work in the tractor shed. Mazel tov. Some years ago we had fierce battles around here because everybody wanted to be nothing less than a mechanic, and now suddenly working with nuts and bolts is beneath all of you. Scyths! Huns! Tatars! I don’t mean you personally. I’m talking in general. Look at your young Labor Party hacks. Look at your young littérateurs. Never mind. All I ask is that you take over the shed for as long as it takes to find a permanent solution. And if I ask such a favor from you, I expect you to give me better reasons for refusing than just sobs.”

“Look,” said Yonatan, “look, I simply don’t feel I’m right for it.”

“Not right for it!” said Yolek. “You do feel, you don’t feel, you’re right, you’re not right—what is this here, a drama ensemble? Are we a bunch of actors trying to decide who’s going to play Boris Godunov here? Tell me, once and for all, will you, what this is all about with you people—the right person, the wrong person, all this spoiled, capricious nonsense of self-fulfillment, or whatever the hell you call it. What’s being the right or wrong person got to do with work, eh?”