During the winter holidays the child spent a morning in the laboratory at the cosmetics factory in Romema. When Fima arrived to take him to the Biblical Zoo, he found that the old man had shut himself up in the lab with the child and taught him how to use acetone to manufacture explosives. Fima was furious with his father for corrupting the child: Haven’t we got enough murderers already? Why poison his soul? But Dimi interrupted the argument by observing gently, like a mediator:

“Granpa’s explosives are only good for painting fingernails.”

And they all burst out laughing.

On the wall to the left of the window, about four feet away, in a corner of a patch of peeling plaster, Fima saw a gray lizard, immobile, staring like himself, longingly, toward the Bethlehem hills. Or else watching a fly that was invisible to Fima. Once upon a time, on those hills and in their winding valleys, there wandered judges and kings, conquerors, prophets of consolation and wrath, world-reforming saviors, impostors, dreamers, priests and hearers of voices, traitors, messiahs, Roman prefects, Byzantine governors, Muslim generals, and crusader princes, and ascetics, hermits, wonderworkers, and sufferers. To this day Jerusalem still resounds with their memory in the ringing of its church bells, sobs out their names from the tops of its minarets, and conjures them back with cabbalistic incantations. And now, at this moment, there was, it seemed, not a living soul left in the city, bar himself and the lizard and the light.