I’m a soldier, a bricklayer, a miner. I listen and work. The rest is an idyll – if I may quote you.’

‘No you may not. You reason like a girl. Why do you love me? “I just do.” Why don’t you love me any more? “I just don’t.” Admit it, your argument isn’t any better. You explain yourself with “just because”. Why are you a Zionist? “Just because.”’

I wanted to interject here, though the lightning flashing in S.T.H.’s eyes made it risky.

‘I’ll ask Winkler to allow me to reply for him. I just want to tell you, dear S.T.H., that this “just because” you laugh at is still a decisive reply. To be a Zionist “just because” means to be a Zionist naturally, by destiny, it’s like being white, or blond, or dark, a Zionist because it’s raining or snowing, because the sun’s rising or setting … I think this is the point at which the Zionist drama begins. In any case, this is where my doubts begin. Because I don’t think Jews are ready to live such a collective life directly and naturally. I regret saying it – though it’s not the first time the idea has occurred to me. I have the feeling that the Zionist movement is an expression of despair: a revolt against destiny. A tragic effort to move towards simplicity, land, peace. Intellectuals who want to escape their solitude. And I believe, ultimately, that the Zionist project contains this tragic seed while we hurry on, hoping we might be able to forget about it … But won’t it rise to the surface some day? For me, this is the only question.’

‘No,’ Winkler replied, sure of himself.

S.T.H. was quiet for a while, and just looked from one of us to the other, with a certain compassion. Then he burst out with it.

‘Let’s go, we’re wasting the evening. It’s impossible to talk to you. Myths, superstition, poetry … Do you pair reason about anything? On what basis? You sing. A couple of tenors, that’s what you are. Puccini, Giacomo Puccini – our master. Waiter, the bill.’

*

I don’t think Winkler is trying to convert me to Zionism. But he has time for me, because I intrigue him a little. With his believer’s calm, my psychological doubts about Zionism throw him off much more than S.T.H.’s political objections.

He sought me out yesterday evening to invite me to a meeting.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘You’ll meet a Palestinian. A pioneer, Berl Wolf.

‘Really, until now we’ve just been talking like in books, about ideas, impressions, arguments. But this is a living man, flesh and blood. You have to meet him. I told him about you and said I’d bring you.’

Indeed, I went and, I don’t know why, on the way I was very unsettled … I had cold feet. I had asked Winkler for a few details about this Berl Wolf, whom I was going to meet and find out about. A fabulous tale, in short. At age fourteen, he flees on his own from Russia in the early days of the Revolution, a docker in a southern port several months later, stuck in Kiel in 1918 when the sailors mutiny, studies for a year at an English college, crosses the Atlantic, spends some time in the United States, where he’s a successful scandal journalist, and one day drops everything and leaves for Palestine, as a labourer in a colony.