Tsvi Kropotkin intercepted them in the hall, like a conscientious staff officer who has been detailed to brief newcomers before admitting them to the operations room. Despite the ambulance drivers’ strike, he said, and the approach of the Sabbath, the tireless Nina had managed to arrange on the phone from her office for his father to be moved to the mortuary at Hadassah Hospital. Fima felt a renewed affection for Tsvi’s shy embarrassment: he looked less like a famous historian and head of a department than a youth leader whose shoulders have begun to stoop, or a village schoolmaster. Fima also liked the way Tsvi’s eyes blinked behind his thick lenses, as though the light was suddenly too bright, and his habit of fingering absent-mindedly everything he came in contact with, dishes, furniture, books, people, as though he always had to wrestle with a secret doubt about the solidity of everything. If it had not been for the Jerusalem mania, and Hitler, and his obsession with Jewish responsibility, this modest scholar might have settled down in Cambridge or Oxford and lived quietly to be a hundred, dividing his time between the golf course and the Crusades, or between tennis and Tennyson.

Fima said:

“You were right to move him. What would he have done here all weekend?”

In the salon he was surrounded by his friends, who reached out from every side and touched him gently on his shoulder, his cheek, his hair, as though through his father’s death he had inherited the role of invalid. As though it was their duty to check carefully to see if he was too hot or too cold or shivering, or planning secretly to leave them without warning. Shula thrust a cup of lemon tea with honey into his hand. And Teddy sat him down gently at one end of the brocade-covered sofa on which embroidered cushions were scattered. They all seemed to be waiting expectantly for him to say something. Fima responded:

“You’re all wonderful. I’m sorry to spoil your Friday night like this.”

His father’s armchair was standing exactly facing him: deep, wide, covered with red leather and with a red leather headrest, looking as though it were made of raw flesh. The footstool seemed to have been pushed slightly to one side. Like a royal scepter, the cane with its silver band rested against the right-hand side of the chair.

Shula said:

“At any rate, one thing’s certain: he didn’t suffer at all. It was over in a moment. It’s what they used to call death by a kiss: only the righteous are granted it, so they used to say.”

Fima smiled: