Finkelstein’s voice was coming from deep in his chest, and Newman suddenly knew that the quavering was the sound of his fury. He had been furious since the moment in the lot. And standing there looking into his angry face, Newman’s idea of him altered. Where once he had seen a rather comical, ugly, and obsequious face, now he found a man, a man throbbing with anger. And somehow his anger made him comprehensible to Mr Newman. His clear anger, his relentless and controlled fury opened a wide channel into Newman’s being, just as Gertrude’s had the time she had sat across the desk from him in his glass cubicle. And for a moment he felt intensely ashamed that Finkelstein, this adult and not at all comical man, was identifying him with the moronic mob at the hall. For he did not know how to answer Finkelstein as a Fronter, as a man consumed by hate. The fact of the matter was that he had no complaint against Finkelstein in particular and he could not face the man like this – and he was a man now – and tell him that he disliked him because he disliked him. Nor could he tell him that his ability to make money was objectionable, for Finkelstein obviously had no such ability. It was equally impossible to tell him that he was personally unclean because Finkelstein was not that way. True enough, Finkelstein often let his beard grow for two days, but it seemed childish to tell him to get off the block because he did not shave often enough. And looking at Finkelstein now, Newman saw that he had not really hated him, he had simply been always at the point of hating him – he had passed this man each morning with the knowledge that he had in him the propensity for acting as Jews were supposed to; cheat, or be dirty, or loud. That Finkelstein had failed to live up to expectations had not changed Newman’s feeling toward him. And in the normal course of such events his feeling would never have changed, however correctly Finkelstein comported himself on the block.

But the feeling changed now. For now Mr Newman realized that the only answer he could give to this man was that he disliked him because his face was the face of a man who should be acting in an abhorrent way.

‘What do you see when you look at me, Mr Newman?’ repeated Mr Finkelstein. Newman stared at him, troubled.

A spasm of distress began to take hold of Mr Newman’s stomach. It was as though all the tokens of the known world had been switched, as though in a dream his own house numbers had been changed, the name of his street, the location of the El in relation to his corner, as though all the things that had been true were now all catastrophically untrue. He felt he was going to throw up and cry. Without a word he strode away, and before him he saw Gertrude’s face and the way its foreign evilness had dissolved that time in Ardell’s office … the astonishing way she had become a familiar part of his life …