It was almost a surprise how easy the decision was. The obstacles turned out to be minor. Shaving in front of the mirror, he would whisper:

“He just picked up and left.”

The preceding summer, several months before Yonatan made up his mind to leave, a sad thing happened to his wife. Not that Yonatan saw it as a cause for his decision. Words like “cause” or “effect” meant nothing to him. Like those bird migrations Rimona loved to watch every autumn and spring, Yonatan saw his leaving as time running out.

Two years before, Rimona had lost a baby. Then, when she became pregnant again, she was delivered at the end of the summer of a stillborn girl. The doctors advised against her trying again, at least for the time being. But Yonatan no longer wanted to try anyway. All he wanted was to pick up and go.

Now, some three months later, she was borrowing books about Africa from the kibbutz library. Every evening she sat by the table lamp, in the soft, warm brown light cast by its straw shade, copying the details of various tribal rites onto little index cards: hunting rites, rain rites, ghost rites, fertility rites. In her placid hand she entered notations of drumbeats in the villages of Namibia, sketches of Kikuyu witchdoctors’ masks, descriptions of Zulu ceremonies for the appeasement of dead ancestors, of medical amulets and incantations from the land of Ubangi-Shari. One day she bought herself a new record in Haifa, on the jacket of which a naked black warrior was spearing an antelope. In English letters designed to look like campfires, it advertised The Magic of Chad.

Meanwhile, the hay was being baled in the fields and brought into the haylofts. The soil was being turned by heavy plows hitched to caterpillar tractors. The white-and-blue flames of summer gave way to a low, gray light. Autumn came and went. The days grew short and bleary-eyed, and the nights grew ever deeper. Yonatan supervised the orange picking, while his friend Udi took care of shipping the harvest.

One evening Udi proposed that over a cup of coffee the two of them review the bills of lading so they could prepare an interim statement.

“What’s the rush? The season has just begun.” Yonatan was in no mood to budge.

“If you don’t have the patience to do the accounting,” Udi suggested, “perhaps I should do it myself.”

“All right. Fine.”

“Don’t worry, Yoni. I’ll keep you filled in.”

“You don’t have to.”

“What do you mean I don’t have to?”

“Listen, Udi. If you’d like to be the boss around here, be the boss.” And he left it at that.