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By Root 489 0

silence of pines and stones and iron shutters, would spill down from the slopes of the hills surrounding the city and settle on the whole of Jerusalem. Men and boys in seemly festive attire, carrying embroidered tallith bags, would walk calmly to evening prayers at the innumerable little synagogues dotted around these narrow streets. The housewives would light candles, and fathers would chant the blessings in a pleasant Oriental melody. Families would gather together around the dinner table: poor, hard-working people who placed their trust in the observance of the Commandments and did not delve into things too deep for them, people who hoped for the best, who knew what they must do, and who were ever-confident that the powers that be also knew what to do and would act wisely. Greengrocers, shopkeepers, hawkers and peddlers, apprentices, lowly clerks in the municipality and the civil service, petty traders, post office workers, salesmen, craftsmen. Fima tried to picture the weekday routine of a district like this and the enchantment of Sabbaths and festivals. Even though he did not forget that the residents here no doubt earned their meager crusts with the sweat of their brow and were burdened with debts, worries about making ends meet, and mortgages, nevertheless he felt that they lived decent, truthful, restful lives, with a quiet joy that he had never known and never would, to his dying day. He suddenly longed to be sitting in his own room, or rather perhaps in the elegant salon in his father's flat in Rehavia, surrounded by the lacquered furniture, the oriental rugs, the Central European candelabra, and books and fine china and glass, concentrating at last on what really mattered. But what was it that really mattered? In God's name, what was it?

Perhaps it was this: to sweep away at a single stroke, starting today, from the onset of this Sabbath, the empty talk, the wastefulness, the lies that buried his life. He was ready to accept his misery humbly, to reconcile himself finally to the solitude he had brought on himself, to the very end, with no right of appeal. From now on he would live in silence, he would cut himself off, he would sever his repugnant links with all the do-gooding women who flocked around him in his flat, in his life, and he would stop pestering Tsvi and Uri and the rest of the group with casuistic sophistry. He would love Yael from a distance, without being a nuisance. He might not even bother to have his telephone repaired: from now on let it too be silent. Let it stop boasting and lying.

And what about Dimi?

He would dedicate his book to him. Because, starting next week, he would spend five or six hours before work in the reading room of the National Library. He would systematically recheck all the extant sources, including the most obscure and esoteric ones, and in a few years' time he would be in a position to write an objective and dispassionate history of the Rise and Fall of the Zionist Dream. Or perhaps he would write instead a sort of whimsical, half-crazy novel about the life, death, and resurrection of Judas Iscariot, based on himself.

But better not to write. Better to say good-bye now and forevermore to the papers, the radio, the television. At most he would listen to classical music programs. Every morning, summer and winter alike, he would get up at daybreak and walk for an hour in the olive grove in the wadi below his flat. Then he would have a leisurely breakfast: vegetables, fruit, and a single slice of black bread with no jam. He would shave—no, why should he shave; he'd grow a shaggy beard—and sit and read and think. After work every evening he would devote another hour or two to strolling around the city. He would get to know Jerusalem systematically. He would gradually uncover its hidden treasures. He would explore every alley, every back yard, every recess; he would find out what was hiding behind every stone wall. He would not accept another penny from his demented father. And in the evening he would stand alone at the window listening to his inner voice which up to now