Shortly before the high holidays he resigned from the Youth Committee. Ideas and opinions seemed to fade away. A sadness rose and fell like the wail of a siren, though even when it fell, as it sometimes did at work or during a chess game, he could feel it pierce him like a foreign body in his heart, in his throat, in his chest, in his gut, just as when he was small and did something bad and wasn’t caught or punished but still he shook with fear all day long and at night in bed in the dark staying up till all hours—you crazy fool, you, what have you done?

Yonatan longed to get far away from this grief like those rich people in books, in Europe, who fled to snow-covered mountains to escape the summer heat or to the warm south to cheat the winter. Once, when the two of them were unloading sacks of fertilizer from a truck, he said to his friend Udi:

“Hey, Udi, what’s the biggest fraud in the world?”

“Those meatballs Fayga cooks for lunch three times a week. Nothing but stale bread with a little meat seasoning.”

“No,” Yonatan persisted. “I mean really. The most colossal fraud there ever was.”

“All right,” said Udi unenthusiastically. “I guess it’s religion. Or communism. Or both.”

“No,” said Yonatan. “It’s the stories we were told when we were children.”

“Stories?” marveled Udi. “What in the world made you think of that?”

“They were the exact opposite of life, that’s what they were—got any matches, Udi? Remember that time, that commando raid on the Syrians in Nukeib, how we left a dead Syrian soldier with half his body shot away in a jeep and put his hands on the wheel and stuck a lit cigarette in his mouth and took off? You remember that?”

Udi took his time answering. He dragged a sack off the truck, carefully squared it off to form the base for a new pile. Then, exhaling, scratching himself, he turned around to look at Yonatan, who was leaning against the side of the truck, smoking. Udi laughed.

“What are you doing? Philosophizing on me in broad daylight?”

“Nonsense,” said Yonatan. “I was thinking of a dirty little book I once read in English about what the seven dwarfs really did to Snow White while she was sleeping off the poisoned apple. It was all a fraud, Udi. That, and Hansel and Gretel, and Little Red Riding Hood, and The Emperor’s New Clothes, and all those sweet stories where everybody lived happily ever after. It was all a fraud.”

“Talking about fraud, take my matches out of your pocket and give them back. Come on, let’s unload the rest of this fertilizer before Etan R. comes along. Only thirty more to go. Take a deep breath.”

Yonatan took a deep breath and calmed down.