Azariah Gitlin, on the other hand, celebrated his little triumph with a delirious outbreak, slapping his companion repeatedly on the back and singing his own praises until Yonatan was thoroughly revolted. He reveled in recounting the times he had miraculously confounded his enemies, among whom were an evil major called Zlotshin, or Zlotshnikov, a beautiful female officer in an army garage with deeply ambivalent feelings about him, and that Ph.D. idiot in engineering from the Haifa Technion who failed to come up with some mechanical solution that he, Azariah, had hit upon at once. He talked about his brainstorms, about the human brain in general, about Major Zlotkin or Zlotnik, who had been driven mad by envy, about her seductive advances, about some revolutionary technical device developed by him but cunningly pirated away by Major Zlotshkin’s brother-in-law, who made a mint with it, and bought some nice little island in the eastern Aegean, from which he bombarded Azariah with letters full of threats, expressions of admiration, and offers of joint ventures.

Yonatan half listened to all this in ponderous silence. At last Azariah fell silent too, only to wipe off a bluish oil stain that had spattered on the tip of his shoe.

“All right,” said Yonatan. “It’s a quarter-past-eight. Let’s go have breakfast in the dining hall. Then we’ll come back and see what else needs to be done around here.”

On their way to the dining hall, still compulsively talking, Azariah told two different jokes about passengers on Polish trains, one involving an anti-Semitic priest and the other a big fat general, both of whom, the first despite his great malice and the second despite his great strength, were outwitted by the Jews. He alone laughed at the punch lines, which caused him nervously to joke some more about all the old canards that no one laughed at but their tellers.

Yonatan noticed for the first time that the newcomer had a faint accent. It was so well concealed as to be barely identifiable. The “l’s” were a bit too soft, the “r’s” slightly prolonged, and the “k’s” sometimes expelled from the palate as if he had swallowed something distasteful. Obvious effort had gone into overcoming this accent. Perhaps this effort, or the speed with which he spoke, was why Azariah so often tripped over his own words, nearly choking on some of them. At such times he would break off in mid-sentence, only to fling himself back into the breach at once.