Housemothers had already dressed their little charges in T-shirts and gym pants, placed them four abreast in the broad laundry carts, and begun to wheel them about the kibbutz. When Yolek, still in his heavy pajamas and fur-lined slippers, looked out the window at the teeming lawns and exclaimed, “What a carnival!” his wife replied through the bathroom door, “I didn’t sleep again last night. And by five those birds were making such a racket I thought it was an air-raid siren. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.”

Men and women peeled off layers of clothing, rolled up sleeves, opened a top button or two of blouses or shirts. Some of the men went so far as to step out-of-doors undressed to the waist, baring dense mats of hair, fine golden fuzz, or graying curls. The honeyed light pampered winter-weary shoulders and waterlogged front yards, glanced glowingly off the tin drainpipes, fondled lawns that had wasted in the long, frosty nights, and trickled off into cisterns of shade beneath the huge cypress trees.

Most amazing were the flies and bees, now zooming everywhere. Where had they been hiding from the cold and rain all winter long? And the white butterflies—flurrying in bright hotspots of light—the snowflakes that fell on the high mountains to the east just four nights ago. Even dogs had run amuck and were racing back and forth across the lawns in crazy figure-eights. Were they trying to catch the bubbles of sunshine that, impelled by the soft sea breeze, speckled the grass, the lilac bushes, the dazzling bougainvillea, the hibiscus hedges, that caromed from puddle to window pane and from window pane to drainpipe, skittering wildly, evanescing, condensing, fissioning, fusing, and once again fragmenting brightly?

The real-as-rain smell of the earth and the wind-borne smell of the sea put a song on the lips of all, making everyone feel an urgent need to do something at once, to effect an immediate change, to paint a rusty railing, attack a clump of weeds with a hoe, prune a hedge, clear a culvert, shinny up a drainpipe to replace a cracked tile, or simply hoist a bawling infant high in the air. Or else, to forget about it all and instead collapse in a motionless heap like a lizard in the sun.

Most pleasant have you been to me, my brother Jonathan, thought Azariah, as he skipped across the puddles on his way to the Lifshitzes’. He planned to suggest a long Saturday hike, an offer they could not possibly refuse. Even if Yoni was too tired, perhaps Rimona would come. In the woods last night had she not already bandaged his wounds? But just when his dream had become too sweet to bear, he had opened his eyes only to hear his neighbor chanting in a tongue that resembled Chaldean.