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By Root 552 0

didn't wait for you, Fima? You'd simply vanished; that's why I took the liberty of dealing with the formalities. To spare you the headache. I put announcements in Sunday's Ha'arets and Ma'ariv. Maybe I should have put it in some other papers, but there simply wasn't time. We've arranged the funeral for the day after tomorrow, Sunday, at three o'clock in the afternoon. It turns out that he'd fixed himself up with a plot, not in Sanhedriya, next to your mother, but on the Mount of Olives. Incidentally, he purchased an adjacent plot for you. Right next to him. And he left detailed and precise instructions in his will about the funeral arrangements. He even chose the cantor, a landsman of his. It was a sheer miracle I managed to locate him and catch him on the phone a minute and a half before the Sabbath came in. He even left his own wording for the tombstone. Something with a rhyme. But that can wait till the end of the first month, if not till the anniversary. If a quarter of the people who benefited from his philanthropy come to the funeral, we'll have to allow for at least half a million. Including the mayor and all sorts of rabbis and politicians, not to mention all the brokenhearted widows and divorcées."

Fima waited until she had finished. Only then did he ask quietly:

"You opened the will by yourself?"

"At the office. In the presence of witnesses. We simply thought..."

"Who gave you permission to do that?"

"Quite frankly..."

"Where is it, the will?"

"Here, in my attaché case."

"Give it to me."

"Right now?"

Fima stood up and took the black attaché case out of her hand. He opened it and drew out a brown envelope. Silently he went out and stood alone on the balcony, at the very spot where his parents had stood that Friday evening a thousand years before, looking like a pair of shipwrecked survivors on a desert island. The last light had long since faded. Stillness wafted up from the avenue. The streetlights flickered with an oscillating yellow radiance mixed with drifting patches of mist. The stone buildings stood silent, all shuttered. No sound came from them. As if the present moment had been transformed into a distant memory. A passing gust of wind brought the sound of barking from the Valley of the Cross. The Third State is a grace that can only be achieved by renouncing all desires, by standing under the night sky sans age, sans sex, sans time, sans race, sans everything.

But who is capable of standing thus?

Once, in his childhood, there lived here in Rehavia tiny, exquisitely mannered scholars, like porcelain figurines, puzzled and gentle. It was their custom to greet one another in the street by raising their hats. As though to erase Hitler. As though to conjure up a Germany that had never existed. And since they would rather be thought absent-minded or ridiculous than impolite, they raised their hats even when they were not certain if the person coming toward them was really a friend or acquaintance or merely looked like one.

One day, when Fima was nine, a short time before his mother's death, he was walking down Alfasi Street with his father. Baruch stopped and began a lengthy conversation, in German or perhaps in Czech, with a portly, dapper old man in an old-fashioned suit and a dark bow tie. Eventually the child's patience ran out and he stamped his foot and started tugging at his father's arm. His father hit him and bellowed "Ty durak, ty smarkatch." Later he explained to Fima that the other man was a professor, a world-famous scholar. He explained what "world fame" meant and how it was acquired. Fima never forgot that explanation. The expression still afforded him a mixture of awe and contempt. And once, seven or eight years later, at half past six in the morning, he was walking with his father again, in Rashbam Street, when they saw coming toward them, with short, vigorous strides, the prime minister, Ben Gurion, who lived at that time on the comer of Ben Maimon and Ussishkin and liked to start his day with a brisk early-morning walk. Baruch Nomberg raised his hat and said:

"Would you be good