A Tale of Love and Darkness

WHEN I LEFT home and went to live in the kibbutz, at the age of fifteen, I wrote down some resolutions that I set for myself as a test that I absolutely must not fail. If I was really to start a brand-new life, I must start by getting a tan within a fortnight so that I looked just like one of them; I must stop daydreaming once and for all; I must change my last name; I must take two or three cold showers every day; I must absolutely force myself to give up doing that filthy stuff at nights; I must not write any more poems; I must stop chattering; and I must not tell stories: I must appear in my new home as a silent man.

Then I tore up the list. For the first four or five days I actually managed not to do the filthy stuff and not to chatter. When I was asked a question like, Will one blanket be enough? or Do you mind sitting in the corner of the classroom near the window? , I replied with a movement of the head, without any sound. To the questions Was I interested in politics? and Would I consider joining a newspaper-reading circle? I answered Ahem. If I was asked about my previous life in Jerusalem, I answered in fewer than ten words, which I held back for a few seconds on purpose, as though I was deep in thought: let them know that I'm a reserved, secretive kind of man, with an inner life. I even succeeded in the matter of the cold showers, although it took an act of heroism to force myself to strip naked in the boys' showers. It even looked as though for the first weeks I could manage to stop writing.