Rich Melchizedek, in the eccentricity of advanced age, had made a strange proposal to his fellow citizens and his sons and grandsons. He wished to live in whichever of these tiny houses, jammed in countless stories one on top of the other, was the highest at any given time. People were only too glad to grant him this bizarre wish, since in any case no one any longer trusted the strength of the lower walls, and they built on top of them with such flimsy stones that the wind no longer seemed to take notice of the walls. Thus the old man moved from house to house two or three times a year, and Esther, who was unwilling to abandon him, was always with him. Finally, they were living at such a height that when they stepped out of the narrow confines of their apartment onto the flat roof, their heads already reached a level where a new country began, of whose customs the old man spoke in dark words, as though half caught up in the raptures of a psalm.

It was now a long way up to where they lived, a way that passed through the lives of many unknown people, over steep and slippery steps, past scolding women, past the raiding of hungry children, and the many obstacles with which it was beset stood in the way of any intercourse. Even Marcantonio no longer came to visit, and Esther hardly missed him. She had looked upon him so fully and so long over the hours she had been alone with him that it seemed to her that he had tumbled into the depths of her dark eyes and perished there and was now beginning within her a new and eternal life, the one in which he, as a Christian, had believed. With this new sensation in her young body, she stood through many long days on the roof and searched for the sea. But as high as the building stood, the furthest things that could be made out were the gable of the Palazzo Foscari, some tower or other, the dome of a church—as though frozen in the light—and then a complex pattern of masts, beams, and poles across the edge of the wet, quivering sky.