Fima eyed the stainless-steel speculums intended for taking cervical smears. When he imagined to himself the mysterious entrance exposed and dilated by means of the metal jaws, he felt a dull pang of revulsion in his stomach. He made a sound like an intake of breath through clenched teeth, as though he had been scalded but was determined not to shriek. Laid out with obsessive precision beside the speculums were long-bladed scissors, forceps, IUDs hermetically sealed in sterile plastic. To the left behind the doctor’s desk, on a small trolley, stood the suction pump that was used, Fima knew, to terminate pregnancy by means of suction. His guts went into spasm at the grim thought that this was a kind of enema in reverse, and that womanhood was an irreparable injustice.

And what did they do with the fetuses? Put them in a plastic bag and drop them into the trash cans that he or Tamar emptied at the end of the day? Food for alley cats? Or did they flush them down the toilet and rinse with disinfectant? The snows of yesteryear. If the light within you darkens, it is written, how great is the darkness.

On a little stand was the resuscitation equipment, an oxygen bottle and an oxygen mask. Nearby was the anesthetic equipment. Fima switched on the electric radiator and waited for the elements to glow red. He counted the drip bags, trying to understand the formula printed on them, glucose and sodium chloride. With his duster poised in his hand he reflected on how anesthesia and resuscitation, fertility and death, rubbed shoulders with each other within this little room. There was something absurd, something unbearable about it, but what it was he could not say.

After a moment he pulled himself together and caressed the screen of the ultrasound machine with his duster. It did not seem much different from the screen of Ted’s computer. When Ted had asked him how to say “deadline” in Hebrew, he had not been able to think of the answer. The only equivalent he could think of sounded artificial and anemic. “Tasteless and odorless,” like the leading product that was widely endorsed by expectant mothers in the USA. Meanwhile he upset a neat pile of transparent plastic gloves made by a firm called Pollack, each encased in a sterile wrapping that was similarly transparent. As he carefully remade the pile, he asked himself what it meant, this transparency that was so prevalent here, as if it were an aquarium.