Tsvi Kropotkin sometimes copied pieces for him from a literary supplement or a periodical that made reference to the Death of Augustine, when some critics bothered to drag those poems out of oblivion to use them as additional ammunition in a campaign for or against current trends in poetry. Fima would shrug and mutter, That’s enough, Tsvika, just drop it. His poems, like his prophecies, seemed to him remote and irrelevant. Why does the soul pine when it has no idea what it is pining for? What really exists and what only seems to exist? Where can you look for something lost when you have forgotten what it is you lost? Once, in his billy-goat year, during his brief marriage to the hotel owner in Valletta, he was sitting in a waterfront café in the harbor watching a couple of fishermen play backgammon. In point of fact it was not so much the fishermen he was watching as a German shepherd that sat, panting, on a chair between them. The dog’s ears were pricked forward earnestly, as though it were listening for the next move, and it kept following the players’ fingers and the rolls of the dice and the moving counters with eyes that seemed to Fima full of fascination and humble wonderment. Fima had never, before or since, seen such a concentrated effort to understand the unintelligible, as if in its longing to decipher the game the dog had achieved a degree of disembodiment. Surely that is precisely the way we ought to look at what is beyond us. To grasp as much as we can, or at least to grasp our inability to grasp. Fima sometimes pictured the creator of the universe, in whom he did not entirely believe, in the form of a Jerusalem tradesman of Middle Eastern origin, aged about sixty, lean and tanned and wrinkled, eaten away by cigarettes and arak, in threadbare brown trousers and a not very clean white shirt buttoned right up to the skinny neck but without a tie, and with worn-out brown shoes and a shabby old-fashioned jacket a little too small for him. This creator sat drowsily on a wicker stool, facing the sun, his eyes half-closed, his head sunk on his chest, in the doorway of his haberdashery shop in Zichron Moshe. A dead cigarette end hung from his lower lip and a string of amber beads hung frozen between his fingers, where a broad ring flashed from time to time. Fima stopped and dared to address him, with exaggerated politeness, in the third person, hesitantly: Might I be permitted to disturb Your Worship with just one question? A twitch of irony flitted across the wrinkled, leathery face. Perhaps just a fly buzzing? Would Your Worship deign to consider the Brothers Karamazov? The argument between Ivan and the Devil? Mitya’s dream? Or the episode of the Grand Inquisitor? No? And what would Your Worship deign to reply to that question? Vanity of vanities? Would Your Worship resort yet again to the old arguments: Where wast thou when I laid the foundation of the world? I am that I am. The old man released a kind of belch reeking of tobacco and arak, turned up his two palms, which were as pitted as a plasterer’s, and spread them empty on his knees. Only the ring on his finger glimmered for a moment and then faded. Was he chewing something? Smiling? Dozing? Fima abandoned his quest. Apologizing, he went on his way. Not running, not hurrying, yet nevertheless like one who runs away and knows he runs away, and also knows that running away is useless.