As for Yonatan, he returned to his silence. Rimona, too, never brought up the conversation they had had. She took to poring over a little English book from India about the depths of karmic suffering and the heights of astral purity. She had borrowed it from Azariah, and its margins bore his penciled comments in an agitated hand. Every evening, without fail, she sat down with it. The stove burned with a blue flame as always, and soft music continued to come over the radio.

All was calm between Rimona and Yonatan.

5

The land was calm, too. The fields were sodden and vapors rose from the earth whenever the winter sun emerged between one rain and the next.

One morning, as he was taking an early bus to Tel Aviv, where he was to attend a meeting of the Labor Party Central Committee, Yolek Lifshitz looked out the window at the washed pine trees whispering in the wind, redolent of peace and good will. All along the road running through the coastal plain new settlements had sprung up, gleaming white with roofs of red tile. All were constructed in straight lines, the houses equally spaced, as if designed by a bright, logical child. Between the houses the residents had already strung laundry lines, built shacks and storerooms, erected fences, put in trees and bushes, planted lawns, and hoed up beds of earth for flowers and vegetables.

Why, these are no less than the very things we set out to accomplish when we were young, thought Yolek. It’s just that we gave them all kinds of high-flown names so that we could take ourselves seriously. We were coming to free this land of the primeval curse of its desolation, to tame its wilderness, to propitiate it, and to make it our home. Well, now the high-flown words are rooftops and treetops. Only why, O foolish heart, this shame of feeling poetic about it? Instead of meeting today in Tel Aviv, we should all, every last one of us, be getting together under the open sky and breaking out into song, into a mighty paean of old pioneers. We should come just as we are, cracked of voice, wrinkled of face, stooped of shoulder. And what if we’re laughed at? We can join in the laughter ourselves. If there are tears, let there be tears. We did what we said we would. Here it is, all around us, but why, then, this chill in an old heart?