Don’t be afraid. Now is the time to speak up. About everything. They’ve fallen asleep on their feet. In a burning house, these horrid old godfathers frump around as pleased as punch with themselves, cracking their inspid jokes, so bourgeois you could puke. Burned-out souls, both of them. They’d have been the death of Yoni too if he hadn’t got away just in time to save the bright first principles of his soul. Totally rotten they are from all their wheeling and dealing with shabby little intrigues, the flabby syphilitic old bastards, all bloated and gassy from their own dyspeptic hatreds, lost, creaky-souled Jews who can’t even smell the sea any more, who haven’t seen a star or a sunrise or a sunset or a summer night or a cypress tree swaying in the moonlight for a thousand years, dead Molochs devouring their children, insatiate schemers swamped by stale affections, weaving their hideous spider webs around us, deader than dead. One a big blob who looks like a putrescent dinosaur, the other a stoop-shouldered gorilla with the head of a mangy lion and arms as hairy as a caveman’s. Not even a mad dog would expect any love from these two, would even wag his tail for them. I’ll bang on the table! I’ll make the walls blanch with fright! I’ll flabbergast them down to their bootsoles! I’ll tell them that all is lost, that Yonatan, and they’d better believe it, ran for dear life because he saw the ship going down. How I wish I had a cigarette. Good God, he’s fallen asleep again.

“If I may express an opinion,” said Srulik, “I don’t think the boy has left the country. I can’t prove it, but something tells me he’s alive and well and wandering about right here in Israel with no clear destination in mind. Which of us has never secretly thought of dropping everything and taking off just as he did?”

“Mazel tov!” snorted Yolek, his face the very mirror of disgust. “A new psychologist is born. Before you know it, he’ll be defending the latest Tatar fashion of doing your own thing too.” For some reason or other, he’d chosen to pronounce the word “psychologist.”

“Comrade Eshkol,” said Hava. “Why do you think he took a gun with him?”