'Solomon rebuilt the city,' said Arnold, 'but in 732 B.C. Tiglath-pileser the Third burned it down again.'

'Who?' I said.

'Tiglath-pileser the Third', said Arnold. 'The Assyrian,' he said, giving my memory a nudge.

'Oh,' I said. 'That Tiglath-pileser.'

'You act as though you never heard of him,' said Arnold.

'I never have,' I said. I shrugged humbly. 'I guess that's pretty terrible.'

'Well — ' said Arnold, giving me a schoolmaster's frown, 'it seems to me he really is somebody everybody ought to know about. He was probably the most remarkable man the Assyrians ever produced.'

'Oh,' I said.

'I'll bring you a book about him, if you like,' said Arnold.

'That's nice of you,' I said. 'Maybe I'll get around to thinking about remarkable Assyrians later on. But right now my mind is pretty well occupied with remarkable Germans.'

'Like who?' he said.

'Oh, I've been thinking a lot lately about my old boss, Paul Joseph Goebbels,' I said.

Arnold looked at me blankly. 'Who?' he said.

And I felt the dust of the Holy Land creeping in to bury me, sensed how thick a dust and rubble blanket I would one day wear. I felt thirty or forty feet of ruined cities above me, beneath me some primitive kitchen mittens, a temple or two — and then —

Tiglath-pileser the Third.

2: Special Detail ...

The guard who relieves Arnold Marx at noon each day is a man nearly my own age, which at forty-eight He remembers the war, all right, though he doesn't like to.

His name is Andor Gutman. Andor is a sleepy, not very bright Estonian Jew. He spent two years in the extermination camp at Auschwitz. According to his own reluctant account, he came this close to going up a smokestack of a crematorium there: