“Righteous or not, kisses were always an important part of his repertoire.” As he said this, he observed something that he had never noticed before: Shula, whom he dated more than thirty years ago, before the billy-goat year, and who at that time had a fragile girlish beauty, had aged and gone quite gray. Her thighs had grown so fat that she looked like an ultrapious woman worn out by childbearing but who accepts her decrepitude with total resignation.

A dense, close smell of thick-pile carpets and antique furniture that have been breathing their own air for many years hung in the room, and Fima had to remind himself that it had always been here and was not the smell of Frau Professor Kropotkin’s advancing age. At the same time his nostrils caught a whiff of smoke. Looking around, he noticed a cigarette on the edge of an ashtray; it had been stubbed out almost as soon as it was lit. He asked who had been smoking here. It turned out that one of the two old ladies, his father’s friends, who had been here on a fundraising mission at the time, had put out her cigarette soon after lighting it. Had she done this when she saw that Baruch was wheezing? Or when it was all over? Or at the very moment he groaned and expired? Fima asked for the ashtray to be removed. And he was delighted to see how Teddy jumped to carry out his order. Tsvi asked, feeling the central heating pipes with his long fingers, if he wanted to be taken there. Fima did not understand the question. Tsvi, hardly able to control his embarrassment, explained:

“There. To Hadassah. To see him. Perhaps . . .”

Fima shrugged.

“What is there to see? I suppose he’s as dapper as usual. Why bother him?” And he instructed Shula to make some strong black coffee for Uri, because he had been on the go ever since he got off the plane in the morning. “In fact, you ought to give him something to cat too: he must be starving. I figure he must have left his hotel in Rome at about three this morning, so he really has had a long, hard day of it. Come to think of it, you look pretty tired yourself, Shula; in fact, you look worn out. And where are Yael and Dimi? I want Yael here. And Dimi too.”