The minarets on the hilltops surrounding Jerusalem, the ruins and the stone walls enclosing secretive convents, topped with sharp broken glass, the heavy iron gates, the wrought-iron grilles, the cellars, the gloomy basements, a brooding, resentful Jerusalem, sunk up to its neck in nightmares of prophets stoned and saviors crucified and redeemers hacked to pieces, surrounded by a string of barren rock-strewn hills, the emptiness of slopes pockmarked with caves and gullies, apostate olive trees that had almost ceased to be trees and joined the realm of the inanimate, solitary stone cottages in the folds of incised valleys, and beyond them the great deserts extending southward to Bab el-Mandeb and eastward to Mesopotamia and northward to Hama and Palmyra, the lands of asp and viper, expanses of chalk and salt, haunt of nomads with herds of black goats and with vengeful knives in the folds of their robes, dark desert tents, and in the midst of all this, Rehavia with its melancholy piano music in tiny rooms at dusk, its frail old scholars, its shelves of German tomes, its good manners, its raised Homburgs, silence between the hours of one and five, crystal chandeliers, exiled lacquered furniture, brocade and leather upholstery, china dinner services, sideboards, the Russian excitability of his father, and Ben Gurion and Lupatin, the monkish halo of light around the desks of dour scholars gathering footnotes on their way to acquiring world fame, and we, following in their footsteps with helpless, hopeless perplexity, Tsvika with Columbus and the church, Ted and Yael and their jet-propelled vehicles, Nina orchestrating the liquidation of her ultrapious sex boutique, Wahrhaftig struggling to defend a civilized enclave in his abortion inferno, Uri roaming the world conquering women and mocking his conquests with his wry humor, Annette and Tamar, the unwanted, and you yourself with your Heart of Christendom and your lizards and your late-night letters to Yitzhak Rabin and the price of violence in a time of moral decline. And Dimi with his slaughtered dog. Where was it all leading? Where did that Chili get lost on her way to the Aryan side?

As though this were not a district of a city but a remote camp of whale hunters who had settled at the world’s end, on a godforsaken coast in Alaska, throwing up a few shaky structures and a rickety fence in the boundless waste, among bloodthirsty nomadic tribes, and then they all set off together far out on the gray water in search of a nonexistent whale. And God has forgotten them, as the proprietress of the café across the road said yesterday.