In other words, her mother is getting old. It’s nothing Tamar hasn’t already grasped. When her father was suddenly felled in the supermarket by a crushing pain in the chest, and died less than an hour later at the hospital before Tamar or Shlomi could get there, she’d understood something all at once about the fragility of her parents’ lives, understood that they had entered the stage in which death would now be always around the corner. Her mother isn’t a fool, and she isn’t frail either, but she is aging, and everyone knows how easy it is to prey on the elderly. Isn’t it their responsibility, Shlomi’s and hers, to make sure that their mother isn’t taken advantage of? A strange man, two strange men in fact, show up at her door without any warning and claim that a Husband has been found that their mother has never lost! Claim that someone who never belonged to her in fact belongs to her in the most intimate way, with all of the responsibilities, emotional not to mention financial, that that implies. Has Israel become so broken and corrupt, Tamar wonders, so wildly chutzpadik, that having failed to put aside the resources to take care of the very people it was founded to provide refuge for—the lost and dispossessed—having instead drowned all of its resources in defense, and the prime minister’s taste for cigars, pink champagne, and jewelry, that some crackpot in the administration, the Head Clown of Public Health, has hatched the crooked plot to deliver these poor old uncared-for people to innocent people’s doors, asserting that they belong to them, and so are their responsibility?