‘Good business,’ I observed. ‘Ours is not as healthy as that.’

He shrugged. ‘It brings money. As for your business, think of what is to come. Millions of people wanting homes, all at once. God send it soon. The lash is on the back of Israel, and the salt is in our wounds.’

‘Not only Israel’s.’

‘But harder there.’

Siegfried said: ‘It is right that it should be so. Our sins are greater. We are not punished without cause.’

‘So the Germans say,’ I said. ‘I don’t see it myself.’

‘We have the Covenant,’ Siegfried said. ‘We have offended God, not the Germans. The Germans are nothing.’

I said: ‘You encourage me.’

Isaak said gently: ‘But it is the innocent that are punished as much as the guilty.’ From the way he talked it was easy to see that this was an old argument between them, one of many arguments. It was clear, too, that Isaak loved this son as he had never loved any person before, not even Jinny. ‘They are under the lash together – the just and the unjust, the sinners and the godly.’

‘God is with the innocent,’ Siegfried said, ‘and where God is, pain is a blessing.’

Siegfried’s precociousness, oddly enough, was not irritating. I think the reason that precociousness generally is, is that the mind resents seeing things won so hardly, if won at all, by oneself, being carelessly displayed by a child. There was no carelessness in Siegfried’s manner, and his words bore the impress of sweat and study. I felt sorry for him. He would not know that he had missed youth, but the loss was real.