Fima decided to go inside and ask the price of a bargain ticket to Rome. His father would surely not refuse to lend him the fare, and in a few days’ time he would be sitting with Uri Gefen and Annette’s husband in a delightful café on the Via Veneto, in the company of bold, permissive women and pleasure-loving men, sipping a cappuccino, discoursing wittily about Salman Rushdie and Islam and feasting his eyes on the shapely girls walking past. Or he would sit alone by a window in a little albergo with old-fashioned green wooden shutters, staring at the old walls, with a note pad in front of him, and occasionally jot down aperçus and pithy musings. Maybe a crack would open in the blocked-up spring, and some new poems gush forth. Some light, easy encounters might take place, lightheartedly, with no strings attached, weightless relationships that are impossible here in this Jerusalem teeming with dribbling prophets. He had read recently in a newspaper that religious travel agents knew how to fiddle things so that they could sell flights for next to nothing. Over there in Rome, amid impeccable palazzos and stone-paved piazzas, life was carefree and gay, full of fun and free of guilt and shame, and even if acts of cruelty or injustice occurred there, the injustice was not your responsibility and the suffering did not weigh on your conscience.

An overweight, bespectacled young man, with clean-shaven pink cheeks but a broad black skullcap on his head, raised his childlike eyes from a book that he hastily hid behind a copy of Hamodia’ and greeted Fima with a smug Ashkenazic accent:

“And a very good day to you, sir.”

He was only about twenty-five, but he looked prosperous, supercilious, and eager to please.

“And what might we do for you, sir?”