At this they both fell silent, Yoezer and he, and his desire also subsided. In its stead came a burst of nocturnal energy, a sharp wide-awake lucidity, a rush of inner force and mental clarity. At this moment he was capable of taking on those three conspirators from the Café Savyon and defeating them with ease; he could write an epic poem, found a political party, or draw up a peace treaty. Words and snippets of sentences formed themselves in his mind, gleaming with cleanness and precision. He threw off his blanket, rushed to his desk, and, instead of convening the Revolutionary Council for a midnight sitting, he wrote in half an hour, without crossing out or changing anything, an article for the weekend paper: a reply to Tsvi Kropotkin on the question of the price of morality versus the price of immorality in times of everyday violence. These days all sorts of wolves and would-be wolves are preaching a primitive Darwinism, howling that in time of war morality, like women and children, should stay at home, and that if only we could shrug off the burden of morality we would be able blithely to smash whoever stood in our way. Tsvi gets bogged down in his effort to counter this with pragmatic arguments: The enlightened world, he says, will punish us if we go on behaving like wolves. But surely the fact is that ultimately all oppressive regimes collapse and vanish, while the societies and nations that survive are precisely those that foster the values of humane morality. From a historical viewpoint, Fima wrote, rather than your defending morality, morality defends you, and without it even the fangs of the most ferocious wolves are doomed to rot and decay.

Then he put on a clean shirt and trousers, the chunky sweater he inherited from Yael, and his overcoat, this time being agile enough to avoid the trap of the sleeve. He chewed a heartburn tablet and went down into the street, bubbling with a happy feeling of responsibility, taking the steps two at a time.