Fima restrained himself and moved off toward the Bikur Holim Hospital. He asked himself whether he would go on dispersing until one day he too collapsed in the street, or expired at home like a cockroach, on the kitchen floor, and was only discovered a week later, when the smell wafted out onto the landing, and the upstairs neighbors, the Pizantis, called the police and his father. His father would no doubt be reminded of some Hasidic tale about instant, painless death, often called “death by a kiss.” Or he would make his usual remark about man being a paradox, laughing when he ought to cry and crying when he ought to laugh, living without sense and dying without desire. Frail man, his days are like the grass. Was there still a chance to halt this dispersal? To concentrate at long last on what really mattered? But if so, how to start? And what in God’s name was it that really mattered?

When he reached the Ma’ayan Shtub department store on the corner of Jaffa Road, he absent-mindedly turned right and walked toward Davidka Square. And because his feet hurt, he boarded the last bus to Kiryat Yovel. He did not forget to wish the driver a good Sabbath.

It was a quarter to four, close to the beginning of the Sabbath, when he got off at the stop on the street next to his. He remembered to say thank you and good-bye to the driver. The early evening twilight had begun to gild the light clouds over the Bethlehem hills. And suddenly Fima realized sharply, with pain, that another day was gone forever. There was not a living soul to be seen in his street apart from a swarthy child of ten who pointed a wooden submachine gun at him and made him raise his arms in surrender.

Thinking about his own room filled him with disgust: that arid stretch of time from now till tonight, and in fact till Saturday night, when the group might be getting together at Shula and Tsvi’s. Everything he’d meant to do today he hadn’t, and now it was too late: shopping, the post office, the telephone, cash from the bank, Annette. And something else that was urgent but he couldn’t remember what it was. Added to which, he still had to get ready for the painters. Shift the furniture and cover it. Pack away the books and kitchen things. Take the pictures down, and the map of the country with the compromise borders penciled in. Ask Mr. Pizanti to dismantle the bookcases for him. But first of all, he decided, he must call Tsvi Kropotkin right away. Explain to him tactfully, without offending him this time, without being sarcastic, how his article in the latest issue of Politics was based on a false and simplistic assumption.

Provided the telephone had recovered in the meantime.