* PROLOGUE *

Evening. From my window I have been watching the water of Lake Kinneret turning inky blue. The forbidding Golan Heights on the eastern shore of the lake retain some light patches, but these will soon disappear and the mountains turn into faceless black giants lurking in the dark.
The weather is unseasonably sultry. The few breaths of air that had stirred some hours ago have died with the coming of the evening. Everything is still now if you except the midges and the gnats. It will be a close night and I won't be able to sleep till the small hours. I can sleep late though, for I am one of the 'cabbages' in whom no one takes real interest. I can sleep to midday or till the evening; but this is hardly likely. Old comrades get up early as a rule, which makes their days longer and emptier.
Not ten minutes ago Elisheva passed under my window on her way to the Kibbutz Guest House, with its hundred or so air-conditioned bedrooms, recreation rooms, gift shops and well-tended lawns rolling gently to the edge of the water. A night in the Guest House cost a fortune but rich, fornicating couples from Tel-Aviv won't stand on prices. How odd the old Utopian communist must look among the splendours of the capitalist system!
I can see her contemplating the shiny cars parked in front of the magnificent three-story building and muttering under her breath. Not that she lacks things to grumble about in the Kibbutz. She is always after the comrades for leaving the lights on when they are out of their rooms, for using the telephone endlessly, for wasting resources and for their general lack of enthusiasm for the old ideals of the Kibbutz. She uses her natural niggardliness and emotional poverty as a moral whip over others. In short, she is a grumpy old bitch and a holy terror to boot, and everybody tries to shun her, which, of course, adds to her righteous indignation.
All the same, I have a soft spot for her, or rather I see her point of view; which almost comes to the same thing. For she is like me a relic of a period long past though in her case she ...