"And for another thing, come out of your trance," hissed Eitan, holding his elegant fingers up to the light and inspecting them sternly, as though suddenly anxious that they might have undergone some mutation. He did not trouble to specify whether he was of a different opinion.
"In any civilized country," said Wahrhaftig, trying to get the conversation back on the rails, "you two would not be permitted to say such macabre words about this tragic subject. There are certain things one must not joke about even in a private conversation behind closed doors. But our Fima is addicted to paradox, while you, Gad, are only happy when you have a chance to poke fun at the government, Auschwitz, the Entebbe raid, the Six Million, anything to be provocative. You're dead inside. You'd hang the lot of them. The Hangman from Alfasi Street. It's because you both hate the state, instead of getting up every morning and thanking God on bended knee for everything we have here, including the Asianness and the Bolshevism. You can't see the cheese for the holes." And suddenly, swelling with sham fury, as though he had made up his mind to impersonate a fearsome tyrant, the old doctor turned crimson, his drunkard's face trembled, his crisscrossed blood vessels looked as though they were about to burst, and he roared politely:
"Cut the cackle now! Everyone back to work, quick march! My clinic is not a parliament!"
Barely opening the crack of his lips, Eitan hissed under his blond mustache:
"But that's just what it is. A senile parliament. Alfred, step into my room. And I need you too, you sex-starved Miss World, with Mrs. Bergman's notes."
"What have I done to you?" Tamar whispered tearfully. "Why do you torment me all the time?" And with a flicker of timorous courage she added:
"One of these days I'll hit you."
"Great." Eitan grinned. "I'm at your service. I'll even turn the other cheek, if that'll help to calm your hormones down a bit. Then Saint Augustine here can comfort you, and me, together with all those who mourn for Zion and Jerusalem, amen." So saying, he wheeled around with military precision and stalked lithely away, smoothing his white sweater and leaving silence behind him.
The two doctors disappeared into Dr. Eitan's room. Fima rooted in his pocket and managed to produce a crumpled, none too clean handkerchief, which he was about to hand to Tamar, whose eyes were brimming. But, unnoticed by him, a small object fell out of the folds of the handkerchief and landed on the floor. Tamar bent over, picked it up, and returned it to him, smiling through her tears. It was Annette's earring. Then she wiped her eyes, the brown one and the green one, on her sleeve, pulled out the requisite files, and hurried after the doctors. In the doorway she turned her harassed face toward Fima and said with desperate pathos, as though swearing by all that was most dear to her:
"One of these days I'll grab a pair of scissors and murder him. Then I'll kill myself."
Fima did not believe her, but nevertheless he picked up the paperknife and concealed it in the drawer of the desk. The handkerchief and the earring he tucked carefully back in his pocket. Then he tore off a sheet of paper and placed it in front of him, thinking to jot down his thought about the heart of Christendom. It might develop into an article for the weekend supplement.
But his mind was elsewhere. He had slept for less than three hours, and in the morning he had been worn out by his indefatigable lovers. What did they sec in him exactly? A helpless child who stirred their maternal instincts, a child to swaddle and suckle? A brother to wipe away their tears? An eclipsed poet they longed to play muse to? And what got women worked up about a cruel hussar like Gad? Or a garrulous dandy like his father? Fima marveled, smiling. Perhaps Annette was wrong after all, and there is a mysterious side? The enigma of what women prefer? Or perhaps she didn't make a mistake but was just keeping a secret from the enemy. Cunningly dissimulating its very existence. No doubt she did not really desire me this morning; she was just sorry for me and decided to give herself, so she did. Whereas I, half an hour later, didn't desire Nina but I was sorry for her and tried to give myself to her, but nature itself denied me what it makes possible for them without any difficulty.
And he muttered:
"But that's not fair."
And then, self-mockingly:
"So, why not sign a petition?"
His tired hand was doodling on the paper in front of him, drawing circles and triangles, crosses, six-pointed stars, missiles, and big breasts. Among these doodles he unconsciously inscribed the line that had come into his head earlier: "Cranes wheel and whirl." Underneath he wrote: "Wains heel and curl." Then he crossed it all out. Crumpling the page into a ball, he tossed it at the wastepaper basket. And missed.
Then he thought of making use of the spare time by composing two letters, one an open letter, a reply to Günter Grass about guilt and responsibility, and one private, a belated reply to Yael's farewell letter of twenty-four years ago. It was particularly important for him to explain to Yael and to himself why he had been so rude to the two air force colonels who had come to their home that Saturday evening specially to convince him that Yael's going to work in Seattle or Pasadena for a year or two was of national importance. He still remained unshaken in his conviction that the words "national interest" generally served as a cover for all sorts of monstrosities. But now, half a lifetime later, he no longer saw himself as entitled to preach. By what right? What have you accomplished with your life? Will it be of any use to Yoezer and his friends, living here a hundred years from now, that once in Jerusalem there lived a troublesome layabout who got on everybody's nerves with his petty linguistic corrections? Who fornicated with married women? Who reviled and insulted Cabinet ministers? Who argued with lizards and cockroaches? While even vile men like Gad Eitan healed sick women and opened barren wombs?
When the phone rang, instead of his usual greeting, "Clinic, good evening," there slipped out of his mouth the words "Clinic, good dreaming." He immediately apologized, stammered, tried to cover up his slip with a feeble joke, made a mess of it, corrected himself, tried to explain the correction, and booked an urgent appointment for Rachel Pinto for the following week when she had asked for only a routine checkup.
Who knew? Maybe her husband had also left her. Or found a younger mistress. Or been killed on reserve duty in the Territories, and she had no one to comfort her.
25. FINGERS THAT WERE NO FINGERS
AT SEVEN O'CLOCK THEY DREW THE BLINDS AND LOCKED THE CLINIC. The rain and the wind had stopped. A clear, glassy cold had descended on Jerusalem. The stars glowed with a sharp wintry radiance. And from the east, Christian bells tolled loudly and forlornly, as though the Crucifixion were happening at Golgotha that very moment.
Dr. Wahrhaftig went home in a taxi, taking Tamar with him, since he had offered as usual to drop her off opposite the Rehavia high school. Eitan sneaked through the darkness to the side street where he had parked his sports car. While Fima, in his heavy overcoat, with the collar turned up, with his battered, greasy cloth cap on his head, stood for ten minutes or so at the deserted bus stop waiting for a miracle. He had an urge to go to Tsvi and Shula Kropotkin's flat just down the Gaza Road, accept the Napoleon brandy Tsvi had promised him, put his feet up near the radiator, and expound his theory about the rift between Jews and Christians being all the deeper because it was, so to speak, in the family. Our quarrel with Islam, by contrast, is merely an ephemeral dispute over land, which will be forgotten within thirty or forty years. But the Christians in a thousand years' time will still see us as deicides and as an accursed elder brother. This last phrase pierced his heart all of a sudden, reminding him of the baby his mother had borne half a century ago, when he was four. The baby died after only three weeks, of some congenital defect which Fima knew nothing about: it was never discussed in his presence. He had no memory of the baby or of the mourning, but he had a vivid mental picture of a tiny light-blue knit bonnet laid out on his mother's little bedside table. When his father threw out all his wife's belongings at her death, the blue knit bonnet vanished too. Had Baruch given it to the leper
hospital in Talbiyeh along with all her clothes?
Fima despaired of the bus and started walking toward Rehavia. Vainly he tried to remember whether he had promised Nina to pick her up from her office after work and take her to see the Jean Gabin film, or whether they had arranged to meet at the cinema. Or was it Annette Tadmor that he had arranged to see? Was it possible that in a fit of absent-mindedness he had asked them both out? He could not find a telephone token in any of his pockets, so he went on walking the empty streets, which were lit occasionally by a yellow streetlight swathed in flickering mist. He walked, oblivious to the biting cold, and thought about his mother, who had also been fond of the cold and loathed the summer. And he wondered what his good friend Uri Gefen was doing at this moment in Rome. Uri was probably sitting in a crowded café in some piazza surrounded by witty men and pretty, provocative women, roaring in his peasant voice and fascinating his audience with stories of air battles in which he had taken pan, or amorous adventures in the Far East, letting fall as usual some wry generalization about the capriciousness of desire, describing in well-chosen words the inevitable shadow of ridicule that accompanies every action and inevitably conceals one's true motives, and concluding with some indulgent commonplace that would finally spread a sort of veil of conciliatory irony over his whole story, the loves, lies, and generalizations he had enunciated before.
Fima ached to feel the touch of Uri's broad, gnarled hand on the back of his neck. He longed for his parodies, his smell, his thick breath, and his warm laughter. At the same time and without any contradiction, he was sorry that his friend was returning from abroad in a couple of days. He was ashamed of his affair with Nina, even though he suspected that Uri had known for a long time about this sexual welfare work and might even have suggested it himself, out of benevolence and affection for the two of them, Fima and Nina, and perhaps also with a sense of detached amusement or regal irony. Was it possible that he asked for and received from Nina a detailed report after each session? Did they sit and rerun the film in slow motion, chuckling together indulgently? A couple of nights ago he had let Nina down, on the rug at her home, and this morning, thanks to Annette, he had let her down again in his own bed. His heart shrank as he remembered how she had stroked his forehead with her wonderfully shaped fingers and whispered to him that like this, with his limp cock, he was penetrating her more deeply than during intercourse. How rare, almost mystical, those words seemed now; they seemed to glow with a precious radiance as he recalled them, and he craved to mend what he had spoiled, to give her and Annette and also Tamar and Yael and every woman in the world, including the plain and unwanted ones, a proper carnal love, and a fatherly and brotherly love, and a spiritual love too.
From a dark garden an unseen dog barked furiously. Fima, startled, replied:
"What's wrong? What have I done?"
And then he added indignantly:
"I'm sorry: I don't believe we've met."
He imagined the domestic winter life behind these façades, behind shutters, windows, and curtains. A man is sitting cosily in his armchair, in his slippers, reading a book about the history of dams. There is a small glass of brandy on the arm of his chair. His wife comes out of the shower with wet hair, pink and fragrant, wrapped in a blue flannel dressing gown. On the rug a small child is silently playing dominoes. A delicate flower of flame blossoms in the grate. Soon they will have their supper in front of the television, watching a family comedy. After that they will put the child to bed with a story and a good-night kiss, then sit side by side on the living-room couch, with their stocking feet propped up on the coffee table, whispering to each other and gradually settling into silence, perhaps holding hands. The moan of an ambulance will sound outside, then only thunder and wind. The man will get up to make sure the kitchen window is fastened properly. He will return carrying a tray with two glasses of lemon tea and a plate of peeled oranges. A small wall light will cast a reddish-brown domestic glow on the two of them.
In the dark Fima felt a pang. These images not only aroused longing for Yael, but also gave him a strange feeling of nostalgia for himself. As though one of these lighted windows concealed another Fima, the real Fima, not overweight, not a nuisance, not losing his hair, not in yellowing long underwear, but a hard-working, straightforward Fima, living his life in a rational way without shame or falsehood. A calm, punctilious Fima. Even though he had understood for a long time that the truth was not within his reach, he still felt a longing, deep inside, to get away from the falsehood that seeps through like fine dust into every corner of his life, even the most intimate parts.
The other, the real Fima was sitting at this moment in a cosy study, surrounded by bookcases punctuated by prints of Jerusalem as seen by travelers and pilgrims of earlier centuries. His head floated in a pool of light from a desk lamp. His left hand rested on the knee of his wife, who sat close to him on the edge of his desk, her legs dangling, as they exchanged ideas on some new theory about the immune system or quantum physics. Not that Fima had the slightest understanding of the immune system or quantum physics, but he imagined to himself that the real Fima and his wife, there in the warm, cosy study, were both experts in one or both of these subjects, working together on developing some new idea that would reduce the amount of suffering in the world. Was this study what Chili, or his mother, meant in the dream when she called him to come over to the Aryan side?
On the corner of Smolenskin Street in front of Prime Minister Shamir's official residence, Fima noticed a little girl on top of a bundle of blankets near the trash cans. Was she on a hunger strike? Had she fainted? Had she been killed? Had some grieving mother from Bethlehem deposited here the corpse of her daughter, killed by us? Alarmed, he bent over the tot, but it turned out to be nothing more than a damp heap of garden clippings wrapped in a sack. Fima lingered beside it. The idea of lying down here and mounting his own hunger strike suddenly appealed to him: it seemed both attractive and relevant. Looking up, he saw a single yellow light behind a drawn curtain in the last room on the upper floor. He imagined Yitzhak Shamir pacing up and down between the window and the door, his hands behind his back, worrying over a telegram that lay before him on the windowsill, not knowing what to reply, perhaps feeling the winter pains of old age in his shoulders and back. After all, he was not a young man. He too had had his revolutionary years in the underground. It might be a good thing to set aside animosity for a while, go in there and cheer him up, ease his loneliness, talk to him all night, man to man, not with petty contentiousness or sermonizing or accusations, but as one good friend to another gently trying to open the eyes of one who has been involved by bad people in a rotten business from which apparently there is no way out, but which actually has a rational and indeed straightforward and affordable solution that can be driven home even to the most stubborn mind with a few hours of talking, of calm, soothing conversation. Provided the friend who is in trouble does not shut himself up and take refuge behind a barricade of lies and rhetoric, but opens his mind, listens to you with humility, and contemplates a range of possibilities that he has so far ruled out, not from arrogance but because of prejudices, ossified habits of thought, and deeply rooted fears. And what is so wrong with compromise, Mr. Shamir? Each side receives only a part of what it believes it deserves, but the nightmare is ended. The wounds begin to heal. And didn't you yourself achieve your present position as a sort of compromise candidate? Surely you must have compromised now and again with your colleagues? Or with your wife? Haven't you?
And, indeed, why not knock on the door? He would be received with a glass of hot tea; he would take off his coat and explain once and for all what reason dictates and which way history is pointing. Or, on the contrary, he would persuade the prime minister to put his own coat on and join him in a night stroll and a prolonged heart-to-heart discussion in the empty rain-swept streets lit here and there by a wet streetlight wrapped in mist and gloom. A stern, ascetic city, Jerusalem, on a winter's night. But nothing is lost yet, sir. T
here is still hope of opening a new chapter. The bloodstained introduction has occupied a hundred years here, and now let's make a compromise and move on to the main story. Let the Jewish people start living as a nation that has found rest in its own land and reveals at long last the innate powers of creativity and renewal that have been buried under murky layers of fear and resentment, pogroms, persecutions, annihilation. Shall we give it a try, sir? Cautiously? By small, well-thought-out steps?
The policeman sitting in the sentry box in front of the residence poked his head out and asked:
"Hey, you: arc you looking for something?"
Fima replied:
"Yes. Fm looking for tomorrow."
The policeman politely suggested:
"Well, go and look for it somewhere else, sir. Move along please. You can't wait here."
Fima decided to take this advice. To move along. Keep going. Not give up. Go on struggling as long as he had the strength to fit one word to another and to discriminate between ideas. The question was, where could he move along to? What should he be doing? Wasn't the truth that he hadn't even begun? But begun what? And where? And how? At that moment he heard a calm, reasonable, prosaic voice somewhere nearby calling his name: "Fima, where are you?"
He stopped and replied at once, with devotion:
"Yes. Here I am. Fm listening."
But the only sound was of cats in heat behind the damp stone walls. Followed, like a sponge that wipes everything clean, by the soughing of the wind in the pines in the dark empty gardens.