“My back?” said the old man. “Fortunately my back is doomed to be forever behind me. I am here, it is there; it will never overtake me. And if, God forbid, it ever does, why, I’ll simply turn my back on it. But my breath is getting shorter. Like my temper. And here the roles are reversed: It is not chasing me; I am chasing it. So, what is Herr Efraim busying himself with in these awesome days? Still bent upon setting the world to rights in readiness for the Kingdom of God?”

“There’s nothing new,” said Fima, and, taking his father’s stick and hat, he saw fit to add:

“Except that the country’s going to the dogs.”

The old man shrugged. “I’ve been hearing such obituaries for fifty years already—the country this, the country that—and in the meantime the obituarists are all six feet underground and the country is improving every day. For all your protestations: The more they afflict it, the more it flourishes. Don’t interrupt me, Efraim. Let me tell you a charming little story. Once in Kharkov, before Lenin’s revolution, a silly anarchist daubed a slogan on the wall of a church in the middle of the night: GOD IS DEAD SIGNED FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE. He was alluding to the late demented philosopher. Nu. So, the next night someone more clever comes along and writes: FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE IS DEAD SIGNED GOD. Wait a minute—I haven’t finished yet. Kindly permit me to explain to you the point of this little story, and in the meantime why don’t you put on the kettle and pour me a minuscule drop of that Cointreau I gave you last week. By the way, it’s time you had this old ruin of yours redecorated, Fimuchka. Before the evil spirits take it over. Just call in a decorator and send me the bill. Where were we? Yes, tea. Your beloved Nietzsche is a noxious contagion. I wouldn’t touch him with a barge pole. Here, I’ll tell you a true story about Nietzsche and Nachman Krochmal when they met once on the train to Vienna.”

As usual, his father insisted on adding an explanation of the point of the story. Fima laughed: unlike the story, the explanation was amusing. His father, delighted by Fima’s reaction, was encouraged to offer him a further anecdote concerning a train journey, this time about a honeymoon couple who found themselves compelled to seek the assistance of the guard. “And you do see, don’t you, Efraim, that the real point is not the bride’s behavior, but the bridegroom’s witlessness. He was a real shlemazel.”

Fima recited to himself the words he had heard Dr. Eitan say the day before: “I’d hang the pair of them.”