Fima remembered that when he was a child, there was an old huckster who went through the streets of Jerusalem wheeling a squeaky, broken-down handcart, with a sack on his back, buying and selling secondhand furniture and clothes. Fima remembered in his bones the old man’s voice, which sounded like a cry of despair. At first you would hear it a few blocks away, indistinct and ominous, ghostlike. Slowly, as though the man were crawling on his belly from street to street, the shout grew closer, raucous and terrifying—“al-te za-chen” —and there was something desolate and piercing about it, like a cry for help, as if someone were being murdered. Somehow this cry was associated in Fima’s mind with the autumn, with overcast skies, with thunder and the first dusty drops of rain, with the secretive rustling of pine trees, with dull gray light, with empty pavements and gardens abandoned to the wind. Fear would seize him, and it sometimes invaded his dreams at night. Like a final warning of a disaster that had already begun. For a long time he did not understand the meaning of the words al-te za-chen, thinking that the awful broken voice was addressing him, saying in Hebrew, “Al tezaken,” “Do not grow old.” Even after his mother explained to him that “alte zachen” was Yiddish and meant “old things,” Fima remained under the spell of the bloodcurdling prophecy that advanced through the streets one by one, getting closer and closer, knocking at the garden gates, warning him from afar of the approach of old age and death, the cry of someone who has already fallen victim to the terrible thing and is warning others that their time will also come.

Now, as he remembered that ghost, he smiled and comforted himself with the words of the dismissed clerk from Mrs. Scheinfeld’s café, the man whom God had forgotten: “Anyway we all dies.”

Going up Strauss Street, Fima passed the garish window of an ultrapious travel agency named Eagles’ Wings. He stood for a while contemplating a brightly colored poster picturing the Eiffel Tower between Big Ben and the Empire State Building. Nearby, the Tower of Pisa leaned toward the other towers, and next to it was a Dutch windmill, with a pair of plump cows grazing blankly below. The words on the poster read: “With G-d’s help: COME ON BOARD—TRAVEL LIKE A LORD!” Underneath, in the characters normally reserved for holy books: “Pay in sue easy installments, interest free.” There was also an aerial photograph of snow-covered mountains, across which was printed in blue letters: “OUR WAY’S POSHER—STRICTLY KOSHER.”