At a quarter past eight he left the flat without noticing the bloodstained wad of cotton wool clinging to the cut on his cheek. But he did remember to take the trash down, and he also remembered to slip the envelope containing the article he had written in the night into his pocket, and he did not even forget the mailbox key. At the shopping center three blocks away he bought fresh bread, cheese, tomatoes, jam, eggs, some yogurt, coffee, three light bulbs, to have a reserve, and also a new electric kettle. He instantly regretted not having checked to see if it was made in Germany: he did his best to avoid buying German products. To his relief he discovered that it came from South Korea. Unpacking the shopping, he changed his mind and decided to skip the café and have his breakfast at home after all. Although, on second thought, South Korea was also a notoriously repressive country, famous for smashing the skulls of demonstrating students. While he waited for the water to boil, he reconstructed the Korean War, the era of Truman, MacArthur, and McCarthy, and ended with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The next nuclear holocaust won’t start with the superpowers, it’ll start with us here, he thought. With our regional conflict. The Syrians will invade the Golan Heights with a thousand tanks, we’ll bomb Damascus, they’ll fire a salvo of missiles at the coastal towns, and then we’ll set off the doomsday mushroom. In a hundred years there won’t be a living soul here. No Yoezer, no lizard, no cockroach.

But Fima rejected the word “holocaust” because it could also be associated with natural disasters such as floods, epidemics, and earthquakes. What the Nazis did, by contrast, was an organized, premeditated crime that ought to be called by its proper name: murder. And nuclear war will also be a criminal act. Neither “holocaust” nor “doomsday.” Fima also ruled out the word “conflict,” which might describe the business of Annette and her husband, or Tsvi Kropotkin and his teaching assistant, but not the bloody war between us and the Arabs. In fact, even the sad case of Annette and Yeri could hardly be categorized with such a sterile term as “conflict.” As for the expression “bloody war,” it was a tired cliché. Even “tired cliché” was a tired cliché. You’ve worked yourself into a corner, pal.