And truly it is a distant relation: there is no doubting that it belongs to a remote branch of the family. Between you and me, pal, and between both of us and Trotsky, there is much more in common than divides us: head neck spine curiosity appetite limbs sexual desire the ability to tell light from darkness and cold from warmth, ribs lungs old age digestive and secretory systems nerves to perceive pain metabolism memory sense of danger a ramifying maze of blood vessels a reproductive mechanism and a mechanism for limited regeneration programmed ultimately for self-destruction. Also a heart functioning as a complex pump and a sense of smell and an instinct for self-preservation and a talent for escape and concealment and camouflage and also direction-finding systems and a brain, and apparently also loneliness. There are so many things we could talk about, compare, learn from each other, and teach each other. Perhaps we should also take into account an even more remote kinship that links the three of us to the vegetable kingdom. Lay your hand on a fig leaf, for instance, or a vine leaf: Only a blind person would deny the similarity of form, the spread of the fingers, the branching vessels and sinews, whose function it is to distribute nourishment and eliminate waste matter. And who can say whether behind this kinship there does not lurk an even subtler one between all of us and the minerals in particular or the inanimate world in general. Every living cell is made up of a mass of inanimate substances which are not really inanimate at all but are constantly pulsing with infinitesimal electrical charges. Electrons. Neutrons. Perhaps there too is a pattern of male and female that can neither merge nor separate? Fima smiled. It would be best, he decided, to come to terms with young Yoezer, standing at this window in a hundred years’ time, staring at his own lizard. I shall matter to him less than a grain of salt. Perhaps something of me, a molecule, an atom, a neutron, will actually be present in this room, possibly indeed in a grain of salt. Assuming people still use salt a hundred years from now.

And why shouldn’t they?

Dimi is the only person I might be able to talk to about these fantasies.

At any rate, better to fill his head with prophets and lizards and vine leaves than bombs made out of nail varnish.