“It could be a line in the movies,” said Yonatan. “A husband wakes his sleeping wife in the morning, and what are the first words she says? Is that you, Yoni? Who did you think it was, Marlon Brando?”

“Yoni,” said Rimona softly, “if you’ve finished your coffee and don’t want any more, let’s go outside.”

Yolek Lifshitz, secretary of Kibbutz Granot, a man neither young nor well, groaned as he bent over to pull a folding chair from the small storage space between the posts supporting his house. Carefully he dusted it off, dragged it to the paved patio at the end of his garden, opened it gingerly lest he catch his fingers, suspiciously tested the strength of its canvas seat, sat himself down, and stretched out bare feet ridden by swollen, evil-looking varicose veins. Having left his glasses in his shirt pocket he had removed before stepping outside, he set aside his weekend paper, closed his eyes, and decided to concentrate on one or two matters that needed to be resolved. Time was short.

In a dream last night he had been asked by Eshkol to inform the Syrians about the flood damage without revealing its full extent. “We want them to think that things aren’t so bad and that we can still take lots more punishment since time is on our side, although just between the two of us, Yolek, I’m telling you that it’s urgent, in the worst possible way.” No sooner had he left Eshkol’s tent than Ben-Gurion, red-faced and terrible, had sprung at him from a nearby Arab well and roared in a voice as shrill as a madwoman’s, “I don’t want to hear another word about it! You’ll shut up and kill if you have to, even with the handle of a hoe just as King Saul killed his own son!”

The cries of the birds across the blue caress of the sky were distracting. To his surprise, Yolek realized that the birds were not, as the poet Bialik had written, caroling. On the contrary, they were screaming at the top of their lungs. Especially unsettling were the complaints of pigeons coming from the roofbeams of the house. A ferocious dispute had broken out among them, and they were pursuing it in fulminous bass tones.