“Who the hell needs all this? We’ve gone out of our minds. We’ve gone right off our rockers. What are we doing squabbling with the Poles about who owns Auschwitz? It’s already beginning to sound like an extension of our usual story about ‘ancestral rights’ and ‘ancestral heritage’ and ‘we shall never hand back territory that we have liberated.’ Any moment now our dashing pioneers will be out there planting a new settlement among the gas chambers. Establishing facts in disputed territory. What makes Auschwitz a Jewish site anyway? It’s a Nazi site. A German site. As a matter of fact, it really ought to become a Christian site, for Christendom in general and Polish Catholicism in particular. Let them cover the whole death camp with convents and crosses and bells. Wall to wall. With a Jesus on every chimney. There’s no more fitting place in the world for Christendom to commune with itself. Them, not us. Let them go on pilgrimages there, whether to beat their breasts or to celebrate the greatest theological victory in their history. For all I care, they can baptize their Auschwitz convent ‘The Sweet Revenge of Jesus.’ What are we doing scurrying in there with protesters and placards? Are we out of our minds? It’s quite right that a Jew who goes there to commune with the memory of the victims should see a forest of crosses all around him and hear nothing but the ringing of church bells. That way he’ll understand that he’s in the true heart of Poland. The heart of hearts of Christian Europe. As far as I’m concerned, it would be an excellent thing if they’d move the Vatican there. Why not? Let the pope sit there from now to the Resurrection on a golden throne among the chimneys. And for another thing—”

“And for another thing, come out of your trance,” hissed Eitan, holding his elegant fingers up to the light and inspecting them sternly, as though suddenly anxious that they might have undergone some mutation. He did not trouble to specify whether he was of a different opinion.