And as if that were not enough, you needlessly distressed your father, who feeds you and whose generosity benefits dozens of people every day. When you heard on the radio about the death of the Arab boy from Gaza, whom we shot in the head, what exactly did you do? You got worked up about the style of the announcement. And the way you humiliated Nina, after she took you in off the street all wet and filthy in the middle of the night and gave you light and warmth and even offered you her body. And how you hated that young settler, who, after all, even when you make allowances for the stupidity of the government and the blindness of the masses, has no choice but to carry a gun, because he really does risk his life driving at night between Hebron and Bethlehem. What do you want him to do—stick his neck out to be slaughtered? And what about Annette, you guardian of morality? What did you do today to Annette? Who trusted you from the first glance. Who had faith in your healing powers, like a simple peasant woman prostrating herself at the feet of a holy man in some Orthodox monastery and pouring her heart out to him. The only woman in your whole life ever to call you brother. You will never receive such a gift again, to be called brother by a strange woman. She trusted you without knowing you, so much so that she let you undress her and put her in your bed, and called you an angel, and you cunningly dressed yourself up as a saint to conceal your lust. Not to mention the cat you startled just a moment ago. And that is, more or less, the sum total of your latest exploits, you chief of the Revolutionary Council, you peacemaker, you comforter of deserted wives. To which we might add taking time off from work on false pretenses, and an unconsummated act of self-abuse. Plus the piss that’s still sitting in the toilet bowl and the funeral you gave to the first insect in history to have died of filth.

With this, Fima reached the last lamppost and the end of the street, which was also the end of the housing development and the end of Jerusalem. Beyond stretched a muddy wasteland. He felt the urge to keep on walking into the darkness, to cross the wadi, climb the hill, press on as long as his strength endured, fulfilling his allotted task as the night watchman of Jerusalem. But out of the dark came a sound of distant barking and two stray shots separated by an interval of silence. After the second shot a westerly breeze stirred, bringing a strange rustling and a smell of wet earth. Behind him in the narrow street there was an indistinct tapping, as though a blind man were groping his way with a stick. A fine drizzle filled the empty air.