The clinic was two ground-floor flats joined together. The windows, guarded by arabesque grilles, looked out on a typical back garden, damp and deserted, shaded by dense pine trees around whose bases a few gray boulders sprouted. A rustle of treetops started at the slightest breeze. Now, with a strong wind blowing, Fima had a fleeting image of a remote village in Poland or one of the Baltic States, with storms shrieking through the surrounding forest, whipping across snowbound fields, assailing thatched cottage roofs, and making the church bells ring. And wolves howling not far away. In his head Fima already had a little story about this village, about Nazis, Jews, and partisans, which he might tell to Dimi this evening, in exchange for a ladybug in a jam jar or a spaceship cut out of orange peel.

From the second floor came the sounds of piano, violin, and cello being played by the three elderly women who lived there and gave private music lessons. They also probably gave recitals and played at memorial meetings, at the presentation of a prize for Yiddish literature, at the inauguration of a community center or a daytime center for the elderly. Although Fima had worked at the clinic for several years now, their playing still wrung his heart, as though a cello deep inside him responded with its own mute sounds of longing to the one upstairs. As though a mystic bond was growing stronger with the passing years, between what was being done down here to women’s bodies with stainless-steel forceps and the melancholy of the cello upstairs.

The sight of Fima, pudgy and disheveled, smiling sheepishly, with his hands and knees covered with mud, filled Dr. Wahrhaftig as usual with good humor mingled with affection and a strong urge to reprimand him. Wahrhaftig was a gentle, rather shy man, so emotional that he had difficulty holding back his tears at times, especially when anybody apologized to him and asked to be forgiven. Maybe that was why he cultivated a severe manner, and always tried to terrorize those around him by shouting rebukes at them. Rebukes that turned out to be mild and inoffensive.

“Hah! Your Excellency! Herr Major General von Nisan! Straight from the trenches, I see! We should pin a medal on you!”

“I’m a little late,” Fima replied bashfully. “I’m sorry. I slipped on the path. It’s so wet outside.”

“Ach so!” roared Wahrhaftig. “Once more this fatal lateness! Once again force majeure!” And he recounted for the nth time the joke about the dead man who was late for his own funeral.