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By Root 567 0

of prophets stoned and saviors crucified and redeemers hacked to pieces, surrounded by a string of barren rock-strewn hills, the emptiness of slopes pockmarked with caves and gullies, apostate olive trees that had almost ceased to be trees and joined the realm of the inanimate, solitary stone cottages in the folds of incised valleys, and beyond them the great deserts extending southward to Bab el-Mandeb and eastward to Mesopotamia and northward to Hama and Palmyra, the lands of asp and viper, expanses of chalk and salt, haunt of nomads with herds of black goats and with vengeful knives in the folds of their robes, dark desert tents, and in the midst of all this, Rehavia with its melancholy piano music in tiny rooms at dusk, its frail old scholars, its shelves of German tomes, its good manners, its raised Homburgs, silence between the hours of one and five, crystal chandeliers, exiled lacquered furniture, brocade and leather upholstery, china dinner services, sideboards, the Russian excitability of his father, and Ben Gurion and Lupatin, the monkish halo of light around the desks of dour scholars gathering footnotes on their way to acquiring world fame, and we, following in their footsteps with helpless, hopeless perplexity, Tsvika with Columbus and the church, Ted and Yael and their jet-propelled vehicles, Nina orchestrating the liquidation of her ultrapious sex boutique, Wahrhaftig struggling to defend a civilized enclave in his abortion inferno, Uri roaming the world conquering women and mocking his conquests with his wry humor, Annette and Tamar, the unwanted, and you yourself with your Heart of Christendom and your lizards and your late-night letters to Yitzhak Rabin and the price of violence in a time of moral decline. And Dimi with his slaughtered dog. Where was it all leading? Where did that Chili get lost on her way to the Aryan side?

As though this were not a district of a city but a remote camp of whale hunters who had settled at the world's end, on a godforsaken coast in Alaska, throwing up a few shaky structures and a rickety fence in the boundless waste, among bloodthirsty nomadic tribes, and then they all set off together far out on the gray water in search of a nonexistent whale. And God has forgotten them, as the proprietress of the café across the road said yesterday.

Fima had a vivid image of himself standing guard, alone in the dark, over the abandoned whalers' camp. A faint lantern sways in the wind at the top of a pole, flickering, guttering in the black expanse, and there is no other light in all the length and breadth of the Pacific wastes extending northward to the Pole and southward to the tip of Tierra del Fuego. A solitary glowworm. Absurd. Its place does not know it. And yet, this precious radiance. Which it is your duty to keep alive as long as possible. It must not stop glimmering in the depth of the frozen expanse at the foot of the snow-covered glaciers. It is your duty to prevent it from being blown out by the wind. At least as long as you are here and until Yoezer arrives. Never mind who you are and what you arc and what you have to do with whalers who never existed, you with your myopia, your flabby muscles, your floppy breasts, your ridiculous, clumsy body. The responsibility is yours.

But in what sense?

He put his hand in his pocket to look for a heartburn tablet, but instead of the little tin his fingers dredged up the silver earring, which sparkled for an instant as though bewitched in the light that came from the room behind him. As he hurled it into the deep darkness, he seemed to hear Yael's sardonic voice:

"Your problem, pal."

And with his face to the night, in a low, decisive voice, he answered:

"Correct. It is my problem. And I am going to solve it."

And he smiled again. But this time it was not his habitual, sad smile of self-deprecation, but the astonished curled lip of a man who for a long time has been seeking a complex answer to a complex question and suddenly discovers a simple one.

He turned and went inside. At once he saw Yael, who was deep in conversation with