Fima, straining his brain, almost managed to remember the Hebrew equivalents of the two English words Ted had used. They seemed to be sniggering at him from the threshold of his memory, slipping between his fingers like playful kittens just when he had almost caught them. Then he remembered, and opened his mouth to reply, but they escaped from under his tongue and vanished again into the darkness. Embarrassed, he said:

“Can I do anything to help?”

“Thanks, Fima,” Ted replied. “I don’t think there’s any need. But surely you’d be more comfortable waiting in the living room till they get back? You can watch the news.”

“Let me have Dimi’s Lego,” said Fima. “I’ll make him David’s Tower. Or Rachel’s Tomb. Or whatever. I won’t disturb you while you do your work.”

“No problem,” said Ted.

“What do you mean, no problem! I came here to see you!”

“So, talk,” said Ted. “Has anything happened?”

“It’s like this,” Fima began, without the faintest idea how he was going to continue. To his astonishment he heard himself saying: “You know that the situation in the Territories is intolerable.”

“That’s the way it looks,” Ted said calmly, and at that moment Fima had a devastatingly vivid and precise mental image of this colorless bushy-eyebrowed jackass stroking Yael’s naked body with his heavy hands, crouching on top of her, rubbing his penis between her small, firm breasts with a laborious, unvarying rhythm, like someone sawing a plank. Until Yael’s eyes filled with tears and suddenly Fima’s did too, and he hastily buried his nose in a grubby handkerchief, which, as he extracted it from his pocket, dislodged yet another note, a twenty-shekel one this time, presumably either the change from the restaurant near Zion Square or a previous offering from his father.

Ted picked up the note and handed it to Fima. Then he tamped down his pipe and relit it, spreading a fine screen that Fima wanted to hate but found himself enjoying.

“So,” said Ted, “you were talking about the situation in the Territories. It sure is complicated.”

“What the hell do you mean, the situation in the Territories,” Fima exploded. “That’s just another brand of self-delusion. I wasn’t talking about the situation in the Territories; I was talking about the situation right here in Israel. Inside the Green Line. Inside Israeli society. The Territories are nothing but the dark side of ourselves. What happens there every day is just a concretization of the process of degeneration we have been undergoing since the Six Days’ War. If not before. If not from the beginning. Yes, every morning we read our papers, all day long we listen to the news, every evening we watch What’s New, we sigh, we tell each other it simply can’t go on, we sign petitions now and then, but in fact we do nothing. Zero. Zilch.”