This was his first time leaving the kibbutz since walking up this road three weeks earlier. While waiting to hear back from those organizations, he figured he could use his day off to check if Dagmar lived on one of the two other kibbutzim on the hill. The more he thought about it, the more sense it made: maybe Dagmar and his grandfather, being in love, had visited each other’s kibbutz every day. That would explain why she could refer to herself as a kibbutznik even though she wasn’t a member of Sadot Hadar, and how she might still be reminded of her old lover wherever she turned. The first kibbutz Adam called upon, halfway down the hill, sent him to their main office, where an old lady, hair yellowed from decades of smoking, rasped, “No, we’ve never had a Dagmar here.” After she double-checked their files, she offered him a taste of chocolate made in their factory. Adam hoped he’d get a different answer at the second kibbutz, nestled at the bottom of the hill, not far from the bus stop at the road’s end, where he recalled disembarking at a concrete shelter on the edge of a flaxen field.
