Instead of playing the fool, better to sit down now at the desk, switch on the lamp, and compose a devastating reply to Günter Grass’s speech. Or a letter to Yitzhak Rabin. Or write that article on the heart of Christendom. And for once he’d be able to watch the nine o’clock news without interruption. Or fall asleep in front of the television in the middle of a brainless melodrama. Or, better still, curl up in bed with the book he had borrowed from Ted, study the life of the whalers in Alaska, imagine the simplicity of primitive nomads, enjoy the strange sexual habits of the Eskimos. The custom of handing over a ripe widow to the adolescent boys as part of their initiation rites suddenly caused a delicious pulsing in his loins. And tomorrow morning he would explain everything to his lovers, who would surely forgive him: after all, it was more or less a case of force majeure. Besides the sense of relief and the message in his loins, he also felt hungry. He had eaten nothing all evening. So he went to the kitchen, and without even sitting gulped down five thick slices of bread and jam, devoured two tomatoes whole without bothering to slice them, ate a jar of yogurt, swallowed two glasses of tea with honey, and rounded the whole off with a heartburn tablet. To encourage his hesitant bladder he flushed the toilet in the middle, lost the race, and had to wait for the cistern to refill. But he got bored waiting, and went around the flat turning the lights off, then stood at the window to examine what was new in the empty fields stretching away to Bethlehem: perhaps there was already some sign of a distant radiance. He took pleasure in the rattling of the windowpanes under the onslaught of the sharp black wind.

Here and there on the dark slopes a pale gleam shimmered: Arab stone cottages scattered among orchards and boulders. The shadows of the hills deluded him, as though they were exchanging elusive caresses that were not of this world. Once upon a time kings and prophets, saviors, world reformers, madmen who heard voices, zealots, ascetics, and dreamers walked around Jerusalem. And one day in the future, in a hundred years or more, new men, totally different from us, would be living here. Earnest, self-contained people. No doubt they would find all our troubles weird, unintelligible, perplexing. Meanwhile, and for the time being, between the past and the future, we have been sent to inhabit Jerusalem. The city has been entrusted to our stewardship. And we fill it with oppression, foolishness, and injustice. We inflict humiliation, frustration, torture on each other, not out of arrogance but merely from laziness and fear. We pursue good and cause evil. We seek to comfort and instead we wound. We aim to increase knowledge, and instead we increase pain.