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fruit, Cohn got up and dunked himself in the fresh-water pool formed by the horsetail waterfall, from which a spring flowed into the savanna beyond the side of the escarpment. Here Cohn had bathed shortly after arriving in this part of the island, as though to celebrate his arrival; and now he bathed to cleanse himself of his illness.
    He dried his legs, sitting on a warm large rock in the sun, and drew on a white silk shirt of Dr. Bünder’s, his own denims, and blue-and-green sneakers. Cohn liked being dressed; Adam probably had got to enjoy his fig leaf.
    Afterwards Calvin Cohn sat in his rocker in the open but couldn’t work up energy to read. He shut his eyes and was dreaming of sleep when he heard a rustle in one of the white-flowered acacias. Glancing up, he saw to his happy surprise Buz himself sitting on a low bough, paying no attention to his former friend and mentor. He was eating a small, wrinkled, plum-like fruit with a greenish center. Cohn, an old encyclopedia hand, recognized it as passion fruit. Buz held four bunched in his pink palm. He still wore his decaying neck cloth as though out of affection. His supple toes held to the tree limb. The chimp’s phallus and fleshy scrotum were visible, a more than respectable apparatus for a boy his age.
    When Buz saw Cohn observing him he let out an instinctive squawk and chattered angrily at the fuzzy creature below; then, as if recognition had lit a lamp, hooted conversationally. Cohn spoke a few words of welcome home,
refraining from mentioning the ape’s desertion of him or engaging in a complaint of his recent woes.
    He had noticed that Buz’s shaggy coat adorned him in tufts and patches, and that the hair on his head had thinned out and left him slightly bald. He wasn’t as skinny as Cohn but had obviously been ill.
    Buz, in courteous acknowledgment of Cohn’s greetings, tossed down one of his passion fruits; it struck him on the head, and though it was a pitless fruit, knocked him cold. The ape, after eating those he held in his palm, curiously inspected Cohn’s supine body and at last climbed down to attend him.
     
    Cohn said Kaddish for one hundred souls whose names he had picked at random in a heavily thumbed copy of a Manhattan telephone directory he had snatched from the sea-battered Rebekah Q. He kept it for company in the cave as a sort of “Book of the Dead.”
    He often felt an urge to read all those names aloud. The Dead must be acknowledged if one respected life. He would say Kaddish at least once for everyone in the book, although, technically speaking, to do so one needed the presence of ten live Jews. Yet, since there were not ten in the world, there was no sin saying it via only one man. Who was counting?
    God said nothing.
    Cohn said Kaddish.
    There’s a legend in Midrash that Moses did not want to die despite his so-called old age. He was against it, respectfully, of course.

    “Master of the World! Let me stay like a bird that flies on the four winds and gathers its food every day, and at eventide returns to the nest. Let me be like one of them!”
    ““With all due regard for services rendered,”” God said, “”nothing doing. You’re asking too much. That mixes everything up. First things first.””
    Cohn said Kaddish.
    If we were bound to come to this dreadful end, why did the All-knowing God create us?
    Some sages said: In order to reflect His light. He liked to know He was present
    Some said: In order to create justice on earth; at least to give it a try.
    Cohn thought: He was the Author of the universe. Each man was a story unto himself, it seemed. He liked beginnings and endings. He enjoyed endings based on beginnings, and beginnings on endings. He liked to guess out endings and watch them go awry. At first He liked the juicy parts where people were torn between good and evil; but later the stories may have let Him down: how often, without seeming to try, the evil triumphed. It wasn’t an effect; it was an