Meanwhile he shuffled past a carpenter's workshop, a grocer's that smelled strongly of salt fish, a butcher's shop that struck him as murderously bloodstained, and a dingy shop selling snoods and wigs, and he stopped at a nearby newsstand to buy the weekend editions of Yediot, Hadashot, and Ma'ariv. For once he also bought the ultrapious paper Yated Ne'eman, out of vague curiosity. And so, laden with newspapers, he entered a small café on the comer of Zephaniah Street. It was a family restaurant, with three tables covered with peeling pink Formica, and lit by a single feeble bulb that cast a sickly yellow light. Lazy flies wandered everywhere. A bearlike man was dozing behind the counter, his beard between his teeth, and Fima wondered for a moment about the possibility that this was actually himself behind the reception desk at the clinic transported here by magic. He dropped onto a plastic chair that seemed none too clean, and tried to recall what his mother used to order for him on those Fridays a thousand years ago at the Danzigs' restaurant. Eventually he asked for chicken soup, beef stew, a mixed salad, pita and pickles, and a bottle of mineral water. As he ate, he rummaged in his pile of papers until his fingers were black and the pages were grease-stained.
In Ma'ariv, on the second page, there was a report about an Arab youth in Jenin who had been burned to death while trying to set fire to a military jeep that was parked in the main street of the town. An investigation had shown, the newspaper reported, that the Arab mob which gathered around the burning youth prevented the military orderly from offering him first aid and did not allow the soldiers to get close enough to douse the flames, apparently in the belief that the young man burning to death in front of them was an Israeli soldier. He roasted for about ten minutes in the fire that he himself had lit, uttering "fearful screams" before finally expiring. In the town of Or Akiva, on the other hand, a minor miracle had occurred. A five-year-old boy who fell from an upper story, receiving serious head injuries, had been lying unconscious since the Day of Atonement. The doctors had written him off and placed him in a home, where he was expected to live out the rest of his days as a vegetable. But the mother, a simple woman who could neither read nor write, refused to give up hope. When the doctors told her the child did not have a chance and that only a miracle could save him, she prostrated herself at the feet of a famous rabbi in Bnei Brak, who told her to have a certain rabbinical student who was known to be brain-damaged himself repeat a page of the Zohar about Abraham and Isaac day and night into the ear of the child (whose name was Yitzhak or Isaac). And indeed, after four days and nights the boy began to show signs of life, and he was now fully recovered, running around and singing hymns and attending a religious boarding school, where he had a special scholarship and was gaining a reputation as a budding genius. Why not try reading the same passage of the Zohar into the ears of Yitzhak Rabin and Yitzhak Shamir, Fima thought, chuckling to himself, and then muttered when he spilled sauce on his trousers.
In the religious paper, Yated Ne'eman, he skimmed through various malicious rumblings about desertions from the kibbutzim. According to the paper, the younger generation of kibbutzniks were all wandering around the Far East and the Indian mountains, attaching themselves to all sorts of terrible pagan sects. And in Ma'ariv a veteran columnist again argued that the government should not be in a hurry to rush off to all sorts of dubious peace conferences. We should wait until the Israeli deterrent was renewed. We must not go to the negotiating table from an inferior position, with the sword of the intifada, as it were, at our throats. Discussions about peace might be desirable, but only when the Arabs finally realized that they had no chance politically or militarily, indeed no chance at all, and came pleading for peace with their tails between their legs.
In Hadashot he read a satirical piece suggesting that instead of hanging Eichmann we should have had the foresight to spare him, so we could use his experience and his organizational skills at the present juncture. Eichmann would be well received among the torturers of Arabs and those who wanted to deport the Arabs to the east en masse, an operation in which Eichmann was known to have particular expertise. Then in the weekend magazine of Tediot Aharonot he came across an article, illustrated with color photographs, about the ordeals of a once popular singer who had become addicted to hard drugs, and now, when she was fighting that addiction, a heartless judge deprived her of custody of her baby daughter by a famous soccer star who refused to recognize his paternity. The judge ruled that the baby should be handed over to a foster family, despite the singer's protest that the foster father was actually a Yugoslav who had not been properly converted and might not even be circumcised. When Fima had searched all the pockets of his trousers, his shirt, and his overcoat and almost given up hope, he eventually fished out of the inside pocket of the coat, of all places, a folded twenty-shekel note which Baruch had managed to plant there without his noticing. He paid and took his leave with a muttered apology. He left all his newspapers on the table.
Outside the restaurant he found the cold had intensified. There was a hint of evening in the air, even though it was still only midafternoon. The cracked asphalt, the rusty wrought-iron gates, some of which had the word "Zion" worked into them, the signboards of the shops, workshops, Torah schools, real estate agencies, and charities, the row of trash cans parked along the street, the distant view of the hills glimpsed beyond neglected gardens — everything was becoming clothed in various shades of gray. Occasionally alien sounds penetrated the regular hubbub of the streets: church bells, high and slow, punctuated by silence, or low, or shrill, or heavy and elegiac, and also a distant loudspeaker, and pneumatic drills, and the faint blaring of a siren. All these sounds could not subdue the silence of Jerusalem, that permanent underlying silence, which you can always find if you look for it underneath any noise in Jerusalem. An old man and a boy walked slowly past, grandfather and grandson perhaps. The boy asked:
"But you said that the inside of the world is fire, so why isn't the ground hot?"
And the grandfather:
"First you must study, Yossel. The more you learn, the more you'll understand that the best thing for us is we shouldn't ask questions."
Fima remembered that when he was a child, there was an old huckster who went through the streets of Jerusalem wheeling a squeaky, broken-down handcart, with a sack on his back, buying and selling secondhand furniture and clothes. Fima remembered in his bones the old man's voice, which sounded like a cry of despair. At first you would hear it a few blocks away, indistinct and ominous, ghostlike. Slowly, as though the man were crawling on his belly from street to street, the shout grew closer, raucous and terrifying—"al-te za-chen" — and there was something desolate and piercing about it, like a cry for help, as if someone were being murdered. Somehow this cry was associated in Fima's mind with the autumn, with overcast skies, with thunder and the first dusty drops of rain, with the secretive rustling of pine trees, with dull gray light, with empty pavements and gardens abandoned to the wind. Fear would seize him, and it sometimes invaded his dreams at night. Like a final warning of a disaster that had already begun. For a long time he did not understand the meaning of the words al-te za-chen, thinking that the awful broken voice was addressing him, saying in Hebrew, "Al tezaken," "Do not grow old." Even after his mother explained to him that "alte zachen" was Yiddish and meant "old things," Fima remained under the spell of the bloodcurdling prophecy that advanced through the streets one by one, getting closer and closer, knocking at the garden gates, warning him from afar of the approach of old age and death, the cry of someone who has already fallen victim to the terrible thing and is warning others that their time will also come.