Fima

  "Come now. I have to be back in the office in less than an hour."

  On their way to the bed Fima was glad that Nina was nearsighted, because there was a momentary glimmer in the ashtray she had stubbed her cigarette out in, and Fima deduced it must be Annette's lost earring.

  Nina drew the curtains, rolled back the bedspread, straightened the pillows, and removed her glasses. Her movements were plain and sparing, as if she were getting ready to be examined by her doctor. When she began undressing, he turned his back to her and hesitated a while before he realized that there was no way out of this, he would have to remove his own clothes too. It never rains but it pours, he said to himself. And he slipped quickly between the sheets so she wouldn't notice his slackness. Remembering how he had disappointed her last time, on the rug at her house, he was overcome by shame. He pressed himself tightly against her, but his penis was as limp and unfeeling as a crumpled handkerchief. He buried his head between her heavy, warm breasts as if he were trying to hide from her inside her. They lay motionless, clinging to each other tightly like a pair of soldiers in a trench under shellfire.

  And she pleaded in a whisper:

  "Don't talk. Don't say anything. I feel good with you just like this."

  He had a clear mental image of the butchered dog writhing and oozing the last of his blood with a whimper under a low stone wall among wet bushes and trash. As though in a profound slumber, he murmured between her breasts words she did not hear: Back to Greece, Yael. We'll find love there. And compassion.

  Nina glanced at her watch: half past eleven. She kissed him on the forehead, and shaking his shoulder she said affectionately:

  "Wake up, boy. Stir yourself. You fell asleep."

  She dressed jerkily, put on her thick glasses, and lit another cigarette, not blowing the match out but shaking it.

  Before she left, she joined the two parts of the broken radio with a faint click. She turned the knob until the voice of Defense Minister Rabin suddenly filled the room:

  "The side that displays the most stamina will win."

  "There, that's fixed," said Nina, "and I've got to go."

  Fima said:

  "Don't be angry with me. I've had a suffocating feeling for days now. As if something awful is going to happen. I hardly sleep at night. I sit writing articles as if there was somebody listening. Nobody's listening and everything seems lost. What's going to become of us all, Nina? Do you know?"

  Nina, who was already in the doorway, turned her bespectacled, vixen's face toward him and said:

  "I have a chance of finishing relatively early this evening. Come straight to my office after the clinic, and we'll go to the concert at the YMCA. Or we'll go and see that Jean Gabin film. Then we'll go back to my place. Don't be gloomy."

  23. FIMA FORGETS WHAT HE HAS FORGOTTEN

  FIMA RETURNED TO THE KITCHEN. HE WOLFED DOWN ANOTHER four slices of Nina's fresh black Georgian bread thickly spread with apricot jam. The defense minister said:

  "I urge all of us not to resort to all sorts of dubious shortcuts."

  Slightly mispronouncing the last word. And Fima, with his mouth full of bread and jam, echoed him:

  "And all of us urge you not to report to all sorts of tubeless chalk-huts."

  He immediately recoiled from this petty wordplay. As he turned off the radio, he apologized to Rabin:

  "I must run. I'm late for work." And, chewing a heartburn tablet, for some reason he pocketed Annette's earring, which he had found in the ashtray among Nina's cigarette butts. He put on his coat, taking particular care not to trap his arm in the lining of the sleeve. And because the bread had not assuaged his hunger, and because in any case he counted it as breakfast, he went into the café opposite his flat for a bite of lunch. He could not remember if the name of the proprietress was Mrs. Schneidmann or simply Mrs. Schneider. He decided it was Schneidermann. As usual, she did not take offense. She beamed at him with a cheery sparkle in her childlike eyes, which reminded him of a rustic Russian icon, and said:

  "It's Scheinmann, Dr. Nisan. Never mind. It's not important at all. The main thing is, God should give good health and prosperity to all Jewish people. And peace should come at last to this dear country of ours. It's hard to take so many deaths all the time. Today the stewed beef for the doctor, or the chicken today?"

  Fima thought about it, and ordered the stew and an omelette, and a mixed salad, and a fruit compote. At another table sat a small, wrinkled man who struck Fima as glum and unwell. He was lazily reading Yediot Aharonot, turning the pages, staring, picking his teeth, and turning the pages again. His hair seemed to be stuck to his forehead with engine grease. Fima weighed for a moment the chances that it was just he himself, glued to that table since yesterday or the day before, and that all the events of the night and the morning had never taken place. Or that they had happened to somebody else, who resembled him in some ways and differed from him in a few details that didn't matter.

  The whole distinction between open possibilities and closed accomplished facts was simplistic. Perhaps his father was right after all: There is no such thing as a universal map of reality; it simply cannot exist. Everyone has to find his own way somehow through the forest with the help of unreliable, inaccurate maps that we arc born wrapped in or that we pick up here and there along the way. That is why we are all lost, wandering in circles, bumping into one another unawares, and losing one another in the dark, without so much as a distant glimmer of the supernal radiance.

  Fima was almost tempted to ask the proprietress who the other gentleman was, and how long he had been sitting like that, squandering life's rich treasure at the green-and-white-oilcloth-covered table. Eventually he decided to make do with asking her what she thought should be done to bring peace nearer.

  Mrs. Scheinmann reacted with suspicion. She glanced all around apprehensively, before replying shyly:

  "What do we understand? Let the higher-ups decide. The generals in our government. God should only give them good health. And he should give them also plenty good sense."

  "Should we make some concessions to the Arabs?"

  Apparently afraid of spies, or of tripping herself, or simply of words themselves, she glanced toward the door and the curtain to the kitchen before whispering:

  "We need to have some pity. That is all we need."

  Fima persisted:

  "Pity for the Arabs or pity for ourselves?"

  She gave him another timid, coquettish smile, like a peasant girl disconcerted by a sudden question about the color of her underwear or the distance from here to the moon. She replied with graceful shrewdness:

  "Pity is pity."

  The man at the next table, who looked emaciated and tortured, with his greasy hair stuck to his skull, and who Fima imagined to be a petty clerk with hemorrhoids, perhaps a retired sanitation officer, intervened in the conversation with a Romanian accent and a flat intonation, picking his teeth all the time:

  "Sir. Excuse. Please. What Arabs? What peace? What state? Who needs it? While we live, we must enjoy. Why you give a damn for the rest of the world? What, the rest of the world give a damn for you? Just enjoy. The most you can do. Just have good time. All the rest, you waste your time. Excuse for interrupting."

  Fima did not think the speaker looked much like someone who had a good time; more like someone who made a few pounds now and then by informing on his neighbors to the Income Tax Department. The man's hands shook.

  Fima inquired politely:

  "You're saying we should trust to the government in everything? We should look after our own affairs and not meddle in public matters?"

  The doleful informer said:

  "Best is from the government also they go have a good time. And from the government of the Arabs also. And same thing from the goyim. All happy all the day. Anyway we all dies."

  Mrs. Scheinmann smiled conspiratorially at Fima, ignoring the dismissed clerk. Obsequiously, as though to apologize for what he was obliged to listen to here, she said:


  "Pay no attention, Doctor. His little girl is died, his wife is died, his brothers is also died. And also, he has not got a penny. He speaks not from his brains. This is a man which God is forgotten."

  Fima scrabbled in his pockets but found only loose change, so he asked the proprietress to put it on his account. Next week, when he was paid ... But she interrupted him blithely:

  "Never mind. Don't worry. Everything is fine."

  And without being asked she brought him a glass of sweet lemon tea and added:

  "Anyway, everything come from Heaven."

  He did not agree with her on this point, but the music of her words touched him like a caress, and he suddenly placed his fingers on her veined hand and thanked her. He praised the food and expressed enthusiastic agreement with what she had said earlier: "Pity is pity."

  Once, when Dimi was eight, Ted and Yael had called him in a panic at ten in the morning to ask him to help search for the child, who apparently ran away from school because the other children had been bullying him. Without a moment's hesitation Fima called a taxi and hurried to the cosmetics factory in Romema. And indeed he found Baruch and Dimi shut up together in the small laboratory, bent over a bench, silvery mane touching albino curls; they were distilling a bluish liquid in a test tube over a burner. As he entered, the old man and the child both fell silent, like conspirators caught in the act. In those days Dimi was still in the habit of calling both Baruch and Fima "Granpa." The father, with his Trotsky beard curving upward like a Saracen scimitar, refused to reveal to Fima the nature of their experiment: there was no way of knowing whose side he was on. But Dimi, serious and secretive, said he trusted Fima not to give them away. Granpa and me arc developing an antistupidity spray. Wherever stupidity shows up, you can pull out a little canister, give a squirt, and it's gone. Fima said: You'll have to manufacture at least a hundred thousand tons of it in the first batch. Baruch said: Maybe we're wasting our time, Diminka. Clever people don't need the treatment, and as for fools, tell me, my dears, why should we weary ourselves for fools? Why don't we have some fun instead? At once he rang for a tray of candy, nuts, and fruit. With a sigh he took a bundle of little sticks out of a drawer and told the child to lock the door; the three of them spent the rest of the morning absorbed in a spillikins contest. The memory of that illicit morning's fun shone in Fima's mind as a patch of happiness such as he had never known even in his own childhood. Then, at midday, he had had to stir himself and return Dimi to his parents. Ted sentenced the child to two hours' solitary confinement in the bathroom and a further two days of house arrest. Fima also received a reprimand. He was almost sorry they had abandoned work on the antistupidity spray.

  In the bus on the way to work he thought over what Mrs. Schoenberg had said about the doleful informer, and said to himself: To be forgotten by God is not necessarily to be doomed. On the contrary, it may mean becoming as light and free as a lizard in the desert. He brooded on the similarity between two Hebrew verbs, the one meaning "forget" and the other "dwindle" or "die away." The most wretched fate was not to be forgotten but, precisely, to fade away. Will, longings, memories, carnal desires, curiosity, passion, gladness, generosity—everything gradually faded. As the wind died in the mountains, so the spirit too expired. Indeed, even pain decreased somewhat with the passage of the years, but then, together with pain, other signs of life also declined. The simple, silent, primal things, those things that every child greeted with excitement and wonderment, such as die succession of the seasons, a kitten scampering in the yard, a door swiveling on its hinges, the life cycle of plants, swelling fruit, whispering pines, a column of ants on the veranda, the play of light on the valleys and the hillsides, the pallor of the moon and its halo, spiders' webs laden with dewdrops in the early morning, the miracles of breathing, speech, twilight, water boiling and water freezing, the glitter of the midday sun on a any sliver of glass, so many primal things that we once had but have lost. Things never to return. Or, worse, they will return rarely, glimmering in the distance, while the original excitement will have vanished forever. And everything is dimmed and dissolved. Life itself is gradually growing dusty and grubby. Who will win in France? What will the Likud central committee decide? Why was the article rejected? How much docs a managing director earn? How will the minister respond to the charges that have been leveled at him?

  This morning I was told, and said myself: "I'm late, I must run." But why? Run where? For what? Surely even Minister Rabin must have been excited by those primal things once, as he stood a thousand years ago, a withdrawn, ginger-haired child, a thin, freckled child with no shoes on, in a back yard in Tel Aviv, among the clotheslines, at six o'clock on an autumn morning, when suddenly a flock of cranes flew past overhead, white against the dawn clouds, promising him, like me, a pure world, hill of silence and blueness, far from words and lies, if only we dare leave everything behind and get up and go. But here we are, this minister of defense just like the rest of us who attack him daily in the newspapers, we've all forgotten and we've all faded. We are all dead souls. Everywhere we go, we leave behind us a trail of lifeless words, from which it is only a short way to the corpses of Arab children killed daily in the Territories. A short way to the fact that a man like me erases from the register of the dead, without thinking, the children of the family of settlers burned alive the day before yesterday by a Molotov cocktail on the road to Alfei Menashe. How could I have forgotten? Was their death insufficiendy innocent? Unworthy to enter the shrine of suffering of which we have, as it were, made ourselves the guardians? Is it just that the settlers frighten and infuriate me, whereas the Arab children weigh on my conscience? Can a worthless man like me have sunk so low as to make a distinction between the intolerable killing of children and the not-so-intolerable killing of children? Justice itself sounded forth from the mouth of Mrs. Schoenberg when she said to me simply: "Pity is pity." Minister of Defense Rabin is betraying our basic values ct cetera, whereas in Rabin's view I and my ilk are betraying the fundamental principles et cetera. But in relation to the distant call of the primal splendor of an autumn morning, in relation to that flight of cranes, surely we are all traitors. No difference between the minister and me. We have even poisoned Dimi and his friends. Therefore I ought to write a few lines to Rabin, to apologize, to try to explain that we are in the same boat after all. Or perhaps to ask for a meeting?

  "That's enough." Fima smiled wryly. "We have sinned. We have transgressed. That's enough."

  When he got off the bus, he muttered like a captious old man: "Wordplay. Empty wordplay." Because suddenly his earlier juggling with the words for "forget" and "dwindle" or "die away" struck him as so cheap that he did not even say thank you or good-bye to the driver as he got off the bus, which he was always very particular about doing, even in moments of absent-mindedness, including yesterday when he inadvertently got off at the wrong stop.

  Fima stood in the gray street for a moment or two, among dead leaves and scraps of paper blowing in the wind. He concentrated on the whisper of damp pines behind the stone walls, and he stared at the departing bus. What had he left on the bus? A book? An umbrella? An envelope? Perhaps a small package? Something belonging to Tamar? Or to Annette Tadmor? "Cranes wheel and whirl": a forgotten line from an old children's song suddenly came back to him. He consoled himself with the hope that what he had forgotten on the seat was merely the copy of Ma'ariv that he found there. Thanks to the minister and the cranes, he could not even remember the headlines.

  24. SHAME AND GUILT

  IN THE GARDEN, AS HE WALKED ALONG THE PAVED PATH THAT LED around the small block of flats to the clinic, he stopped and stood for a moment, because from the second floor, through closed windows, wind, and rustling pine trees, there came the sound of a cello. One of the old women, or perhaps a pupil, was practicing the same scales over and over again.

  Fima tried vainly to identify the tune, standing and listening like a man who does not know where he has come from or where he must go. If
only he could change his material state at this instant, and become air, or stone, or a crane. A cello was being plucked inside him, answering the cello overhead in its own language, a sound of yearning and self-mockery. He had a mental image of the lives of those three elderly women musicians, who ratded along rain-swept winter roads for hours in a taxi to give a recital in some remote kibbutz at the far end of Upper Galilee or at the opening ceremony of a war veterans' reunion. How did they spend their free evenings in the winter? After washing the dishes and clearing up the kitchen, they probably gathered, the three of them, in their communal room. Fima conjured up the image of a severely puritanical room containing a pendulum clock with the hours marked in Roman characters, a sideboard, a heavy, thick-legged round dining table, and dark straight-backed chairs. A gray woollen poodle crouched on the carpet in a corner of the room. On the closed grand piano, on the table, and on the chest of drawers were spread lace mats, like those that covered every available surface in his father's flat in Rehavia. There was also a heavy, old-fashioned radio set, and blue dried flowers in a tall vase. The curtains were drawn, the shutters closed tight, and a blue flame glowed in the heater, which bubbled faintly from time to time as the kerosene flowed from the reservoir to the wick. One of the women, perhaps each in turn, read softly to the others from an old German novel. Lotte in Weimar, for example. There was no sound the whole evening apart from the reader's voice and the ticking of the clock and the bubbling of the heater. At eleven o'clock precisely they got up and went to their respective bedrooms. Their three doors closed behind them until the morning. And in the main room, in the deep silence and the darkness, the clock kept ticking relentlessly, and chiming softly every hour.

  At the entrance to the clinic Fima saw the elegant plate inscribed with the words DR. WAHRHAFTIG DR. EITAN CONSULTANT GYNECOLOGISTS. As usual, he was irked by the construction that Hebrew did not tolerate.