He crossed the macadam toward the other side of the street. And he envisioned the Blighs behind their blinds, saving, Newman is being beaten up. They found out he is a Jew. It will all pass tomorrow when he moves away. Then everything will be all right again. However close to being human a Jew might seem, he was still not as sacred as they in the blinding moment of violence. They would not come out because he would be a Jew in their eyes, and therefore guilty. Somehow, in some un-sayable way, guilty. They had no evidence that he had ever conspired against or hurt them, and yet once they were convinced he was a Jew he knew they would feel he had a curse for them in his heart, and if he were lying here on the macadam bleeding, they would be salved in their conscience by imagining that curse. And if he Cried out a thousand times that he did not hate them, and that he was hurt by blows as they would be, and that he was like them in every conceivable way, they would stare at his face and those who would believe him would not wholly believe him, and those who would not believe at all would despise him the more. ‘In other words when you look at me ….’

He walked toward the yellow-lighted window of the candy store, held by the terror of his old dream. It was this that was being manufactured beneath the innocent merry-go-round. Behind these snug, flat-roofed houses a sharp-tipped and murderous monster was nightly being formed, and its eyes were upon him; he was being insensibly branded by the snarling power of this fury that would burst through the walls of these houses and surely find him.

And there was no truth to erect against it. There were no words to lull it with. It was insanity in the darkness, and it could not be confronted and calmed.

Without hesitating at the newsstand he walked into the candy store. Mr Finkelstein was sitting on a wooden backless chair in front of the tall magazine rack which hung beside the cash register. The store was so narrow that he could, sit with his back against the showcase in one wall with his feet propped upon a shelf in the opposite wall. When he saw Mr Newman he lowered his feet to the floor, and while his black eyes inspected, his mouth smiled.

‘Good evening,’ he said, pulling up on his pants.

For a moment Mr Newman seemed not to be seeing him. Then he blinked away his vision, and nodded. Leaning against a showcase, he kept his hands in his pockets as though to feel snug and at one with himself. He pretended to examine merchandise on the shelves across the narrow store from where he stood.

‘How do you feel?’ Mr Finkelstein ventured.

His mind elsewhere, Mr Newman said he felt all right. Then he looked at the boards of the floor, and said, ‘I wanted to ask you a few things.’