Fima had closed his eyes. He tensed, not like someone who is afraid of being hit but like someone who hopes for it to the very tips of his nerves. As though it were not Yael, not even Yael’s mother, but his own mother bending over him and demanding that he give back at once the blue bonnet that he had hidden. But what makes her think that he hid it? And why does Yael assume it was a boy? What if it was actually a girl? A little Yael with long soft hair and a face like Giulietta Masina? He laid his arms on the table and without opening his eyes hid his weary head on them. He could almost hear Professor Talmon’s scholarly nasal voice declaring that Karl Marx’s understanding of human nature was naive and dogmatic, not to say primitive, and in any case one-dimensional. Fima responded mentally with Yael’s old father’s perpetual question:

In what sense?

The more he thought about this, the less he could find an answer. Yet on the other side of the wall, in the next flat, a young woman was singing a forgotten song which had been on everyone’s lips years ago, about a man called Johnny: There was never a man like my Johnny, / Like the man they called Johnny Guitar. The melody was feeble, childish, almost laughable, and the woman on the other side of the kitchen wall was no singer. Fima suddenly recalled making love to Yael, half his lifetime ago, one afternoon in a small boardinghouse on Mount Carmel, when he was accompanying her to a conference at the Technion. She thought up the fantasy that he should pretend to be a stranger and she a young girl who had never been touched before, innocent, shy, nervous. His task was to seduce her, taking his time. And he managed to give her pleasure that was close to pain. He drew forth cries for help, pleas, tender exclamations of surprise. The more he played the stranger, the more the pleasure intensified and deepened, until a mysterious sense of hearing developed in his fingertips, in every cell of his body, enabling him to know precisely what would feel good to her, as if he had planted a spy inside the dark network of nerves of her spinal column. Or as if he had become one flesh with her. Until they ceased to touch and be touched like a man and woman, and became a single being quenching its thirst. That afternoon he felt not like a man having intercourse with a woman but as if he had always lived inside her, that her womb was now not hers but theirs, his penis not his but theirs, and his skin and her skin both theirs.