"Don't you go judging me."
Then he added sardonically:
"Anyway, in a hundred years there won't be anything here. Everything will have been destroyed."
And he added:
"Shut up, you. Who was talking to you?"
At this they both fell silent, Yoezer and he, and his desire also subsided. In its stead came a burst of nocturnal energy, a sharp wide-awake lucidity, a rush of inner force and mental clarity. At this moment he was capable of taking on those three conspirators from the Cafe Savyon and defeating them with ease; he could write an epic poem, found a political party, or draw up a peace treaty. Words and snippets of sentences formed themselves in his mind, gleaming with cleanness and precision. He threw off his blanket, rushed to his desk, and, instead of convening the Revolutionary Council for. a midnight sitting, he wrote in half an hour, without crossing out or changing anything, an article for the weekend paper: a reply to Tsvi Kropotkin on the question of the price of morality versus the price of immorality in times of everyday violence. These days all sorts of wolves and would-be wolves are preaching a primitive Darwinism, howling that in time of war morality, like women and children, should stay at home, and that if only we could shrug off the burden of morality we would be able blithely to smash whoever stood in our way. Tsvi gets bogged down in his effort to counter this with pragmatic arguments: The enlightened world, he says, will punish us if we go on behaving like wolves. But surely the fact is that ultimately all oppressive regimes collapse and vanish, while the societies and nations that survive are precisely those that foster the values of humane morality. From a historical viewpoint, Fima wrote, rather than your defending morality, morality defends you, and without it even the fangs of the most ferocious wolves are doomed to rot and decay.
Then he put on a clean shirt and trousers, the chunky sweater he inherited from Yael, and his overcoat, this time being agile enough to avoid the trap of the sleeve. He chewed a heartburn tablet and went down into the street, bubbling with a happy feeling of responsibility, taking the steps two at a time.
Jauntily wide awake, oblivious to the chill of the night air, intoxicated with the silence and emptiness, Fima marched down the road as though to the sound of a military band. There was not a soul in the sodden streets. Jerusalem had been handed over to him, to protect it from itself. The blocks of flats stood heavy and massive in the darkness. The streetlights were shrouded in a pale yellow haze. At the entrance to each staircase the numbers glimmered with a dim electric glow, which was reflected here and there off the windows of a parked car. Automatic living, he thought, a life of comfort and achievement, accumulating possessions, honors, and the routine eating, mating, and financial habits of prosperous people, the soul sinking under folds of flesh, the rituals of social position; that was what the author of the Psalms meant when he wrote, "Their heart is gross like fat." This was the contented mind that had no dealings with death and whose sole concern was to remain contented. Herein lay the tragedy of Annette and Yeri. It was the crushed spirit that knocked in vain, year after year, tapping on inanimate objects, pleading for the locked door to be reopened. Whistling sarcastically through the gap between its front teeth. The snows of yesteryear. The bones of yesteryear. What have we to do with the Aryan side?
And how about you, my dear Prime Minister? What have you ever done? What did you do today? Or yesterday?
Half-unconsciously Fima kicked at a can, which went rolling down the street and startled a cat in a trash can. You made fun of poor Tamar Greenwich simply because, due to a fluke of pigmentation, she was born with one brown eye and one green one. You detested Eitan and Wahrhaftig, but how exactly are you better than they? You were gratuitously rude to Ted Tobias, an honest, hard-working man who has never harmed you. Another man in his place would not have allowed you so much as to set foot in his home. Not to mention the fact that thanks to him and Yael we may soon have jet-propelled vehicles.
What have you done with life's treasure? What good have you done? Apart from signing petitions.
And as if that were not enough, you needlessly distressed your father, who feeds you and whose generosity benefits dozens of people every day. When you heard on the radio about the death of the Arab boy from Gaza, whom we shot in the head, what exactly did you do? You got worked up about the style of the announcement. And the way you humiliated Nina, after she took you in off the street all wet and filthy in the middle of the night and gave you light and warmth and even offered you her body. And how you hated that young settler, who, after all, even when you make allowances for the stupidity of the government and the blindness of the masses, has no choice but to carry a gun, because he really does risk his life driving at night between Hebron and Bethlehem. What do you want him to do — stick his neck out to be slaughtered? And what about Annette, you guardian of morality? What did you do today to Annette? Who trusted you from the first glance. Who had faith in your healing powers, like a simple peasant woman prostrating herself at the feet of a holy man in some Orthodox monastery and pouring her heart out to him. The only woman in your whole life ever to call you brother. You will never receive such a gift again, to be called brother by a strange woman. She trusted you without knowing you, so much so that she let you undress her and put her in your bed, and called you an angel, and you cunningly dressed yourself up as a saint to conceal your lust. Not to mention the cat you startled just a moment ago. And that is, more or less, the sum total of your latest exploits, you chief of the Revolutionary Council, you peacemaker, you comforter of deserted wives. To which we might add taking time off from work on false pretenses, and an unconsummated act of self-abuse. Plus the piss that's still sitting in the toilet bowl and the funeral you gave to the first insect in history to have died of filth.
With this, Fima reached the last lamppost and the end of the street, which was also the end of the housing development and the end of Jerusalem. Beyond stretched a muddy wasteland. He felt the urge to keep on walking into the darkness, to cross the wadi, climb the hill, press on as long as his strength endured, fulfilling his allotted task as the night watchman of Jerusalem. But out of the dark came a sound of distant barking and two stray shots separated by an interval of silence. After the second shot a westerly breeze stirred, bringing a strange rustling and a smell of wet earth. Behind him in the narrow street there was an indistinct tapping, as though a blind man were groping his way with a stick. A fine drizzle filled the empty air.