At half past two he undressed and showered, because he felt disgusting. The torrent of water failed to refresh him. The soap and even the water seemed sticky. He stood grumpily in front of the mirror with no clothes on, shivering with cold and recoiling from the unhealthy pallor of his skin with its feeble growth of dark hair and the ring of fat around his waist. Automatically he began squeezing the red pustules on his chest, until he managed to squirt a few white drops out of his flabby breasts. When he was an adolescent, spots like these began to appear on his cheeks and forehead. Baruch forbade him to squeeze them. Once he said to Fima: “They will vanish overnight when you have a lady friend. If you don’t manage to find yourself a lady by your seventeenth birthday, and there are reasons for supposing, my dear, that you will not, then I myself shall fix you up with one.” A rueful sickly grin spread on Fima’s lips as he recalled the night before his seventeenth birthday: how he lay awake hoping that his father would forget his promise and praying that he would not. The old man, typically, had only been making a little joke. And you, as usual, failed to grasp the real point.

And what now, dear premier? Is a second adolescence about to begin? Or perhaps the first one is not over yet? In a single day you have had two women in your arms and you managed to lose both of them and inflict embarrassment or, worse, humiliation on them both. Clearly you’ll have to go on waiting for your father to remember his promise at long last. Look what they’ve done to you, stupid, his mother had said to him in the dream. And now, belatedly, standing naked and shivering in front of the bathroom minor, he answered her peevishly, That’s enough. Leave me alone.