But why deny it, Benya? The fault is mine. Mea culpa! I’m to blame for it all, because I didn’t do what any Ukrainian peasant worth his salt would do if he caught his wife in the haystack with some kike peddler—one blow of his ax and finis! I’m to blame for not remembering what our ancient rabbis always taught. He who pities the brute is brutal to those deserving pity. I spared you like a mooncalf, Benya, like the good compassionate Tolstoyan I once was. I handed you your life on a platter. I helped you get away by the skin of your teeth, and now Hava calls me a murderer. Which I am indeed, because you with your three-ring circus and she with her black widow’s poison are planning to hypnotize my son into joining you in Florida. No doubt you’ll send him a ticket and a sack stuffed with dollars and take him into your business to be a racketeer like yourself, after which you’ll have a good belly laugh at how you made a monied gentleman out of Yolek Lifshitz’s son, one just like his mother’s father in the shtetl, that pot-bellied swell with his thumbs stuck in his belt on both sides of his paunch. My Yoni, in whom I hoped to see our dreams come true, the first of a new line of Jews whose children and children’s children would grow up in this land to put an end to the malignancy of the Exile. And now the Exile is back again, masquerading as a rich uncle. You traitor to your people, you. Goddamn your soul, Trotsky, may it rot in hell! And about that donation, the answer is, forget it. You can keep your filthy money.

Yolek Lifshitz tore this letter into little pieces and threw them into the toilet, which he carefully flushed twice. Wasn’t it the Romans, by the way, who first said that money has no smell? If he wants to make a donation, by all means. All kinds of strange people give money to Israel without having their credentials checked first. We even accepted reparation payments from the Nazis. Yolek donned his winter coat and put a cap on his head. He decided to take a walk to cool off.

Halfway along his planned route he decided he must go see Yonatan and Rimona immediately. Almost at once, however, he recalled that that Gitlin fellow often spent his nights with them, and, changing his mind with a shrug, he resumed walking downhill in the direction of the cowshed and the chicken runs. The grounds were deserted as only village paths on a winter night can be. The rain had stopped. The wind had died down.