Yonatan felt sorry for his parents. For the Sabbath eves and the holidays when the men, women, and children, nearly all dressed in their very best, freshly ironed white shirts and blouses, assembled in the recreation hall to sing the old songs. For the tin shed in the citrus groves where he sometimes stole twenty minutes from work to browse in the sports pages. For Rimona. For the sun coming up like a bloodbath at five on a summer morning, behind the rocky hills to the east above the ruins of the abandoned Arab village of Sheikh Dahr. For the Saturday hikes among those hills and ruins—he and Rimona, Rimona and he with Udi and Anat, or sometimes just he alone.

In bed at night, unable to sleep, Yonatan thought that whatever was waiting for him must be wondering where he was and would, if he didn’t hurry, move on without him. In the morning, he padded out to the porch barefoot and in his underwear, to put on his work clothes and mud-caked boots, one of which had yawned open a few days before, its laughing mouth full of rusty nails. Over the frozen screams of the birds he heard himself being paged to pick up and go, not to the grapefruit grove, but to some wholly different place, a place that would be the right place because it would be his own. He had better not be late.

Day by day he could feel something fading in him. Was it illness? Sleeplessness? Sometimes, of their own accord, his lips would murmur: Enough. That’s it. Finished.

All the beliefs and ideas that they had instilled in him since childhood had shriveled. Rather, they had simply paled away in his heart. If they discussed at a general kibbutz meeting repeated violations of the egalitarian ethic, or the need for collective authority, or even for plain honesty, Yonatan, sitting by himself at the farthest table in the dining room, behind the southernmost column, would sketch naval destroyers on the paper napkins. If the discussion turned into a particularly long one, he would proceed to aircraft carriers, ships he had never seen except in the movies and illustrated magazines. Whenever he read in the paper of the growing threat of war, he would say to Rimona, nonsense, that’s all these idiots ever do, and turn to the sports section.