On an inner page, Yolek came across a brief item about a man he had known in passing many years ago, an engineer named She’altiel ha-Palti, who had come to Palestine in the early twenties from the small town of Novozhivkov in Russia. This ha-Palti now claimed to have invented a top-secret, giant rocket that would ensure the state of Israel once and for all against any attack. His letters and memoranda on the subject having gone unanswered, however, the old man had irately turned up one day in the offices of the National Land Trust, slightly wounded a young typist with an ancient Italian revolver, and then nearly taken his own life in the mimeograph room in the basement.

We are a mob of the strangest individuals, thought Yolek, who ever pretended to be a people. To speak the same language. Exchanging old songs for new. Forever talking and writing of our hopes and longings as if mere longiloquence could still the promptings of one’s inner voice. But why does the weary heart feel so chill?

In the basements of their new houses, these men and women build shelters just in case the bombs should start to fall. The army keeps beefing up its forces. Perhaps there’s more than petty politics behind the disinterest in She’altiel ha-Palti’s invention. Perhaps his rocket, or something like it, has already been built under wraps. Ben-Gurion always had a soft touch for scientific projects, and Eshkol, too, for the military ones. Who knows what goes on in the back rooms, what wild schemes are discussed by the generals and the savants, even as they are by husbands and wives in their beds at night? How will it all end? What will happen if, God forbid, things take a turn for the worse. Anything is possible. Everything has more than one interpretation. The shouting, the laughter, the curses, the fistfights, the nightmares, the horrid memories, even the war threats coming from Cairo. That’s something I should say a few words about, too, when I take the floor. Here is Eshkol promising the nation its dreams are coming true, even if slowly. And there are the wise men of Zion bombarding us in article after article with their historical lessons, their cyclical theories, their grim musings about the common destiny. Is this, then, just an illusion, this winter slumber we’re in? Beneath our quilts we are all tossing, turning, debating, wrestling with demons, fighting off legions of nightmares, making all kinds of desperate calculations. What man has never murmured to his wife, “Just in case. You never know. Why not be on the safe side? We have to be prepared for the worst”? And aren’t Yonatan and his friends saying to each other: “For as long as we can. Who knows what’s ahead”?