After his coffee he put on a worn brown sweater, the chunky one Yael had left behind for him, looked at his watch, and saw he had missed the seven o’clock news. So he went downstairs to collect the morning paper from the mailbox. But he had forgotten the key and had to tug the paper through the slit, tearing the front page in the process. On his way upstairs, reading the headlines as he climbed, he concluded that the country had fallen into the hands of a bunch of lunatics, who went on and on about Hitler and the Holocaust and always rushed to stamp out any glimmer of peace, seeing it as a Nazi ploy aimed at their destruction. By the time he reached his front door, he realized that he had contradicted himself again, and he warned himself against the hysteria and whining that were so typical of the Israeli intelligentsia: We must beware of the foolish temptation to assume that history will eventually punish the guilty. As he made himself a second cup of coffee, he rehearsed the argument he tended to use in his political discussions with Uri Gefen and Tsvika and the rest of the group: We’ve got to learn at long last how to exist and operate in interim circumstances that can drag on for years, instead of reacting to reality by sulking. Our lack of mental readiness to live in an open-ended situation, our desire to reach the bottom line immediately and decide at once what the ending will be, surely these are the real causes of our political impotence.

By the time he had finished reading what the television critic had to say about a program he had meant but forgotten to watch the previous evening, it was past eight o’clock and he had missed the news again. Angrily he decided that he ought to sit down to work right away. He repeated to himself the words from the dream, Have to separate. Separate what from what? A warm, tender voice that was neither male nor female but held a deep compassion said to him, And where are you, Efraim? A very good question, Fima replied.