Fima said:
"Right now I haven't even got a phone."
The missionary shot him a pensive sideways glance, as though making some kind of mental assessment, and hesitantly, in a voice that was close to a whisper, he said:
"You're not in some kind of trouble, are you, sir? Shall we send someone around to sec what we can do to help? Don't be embarrassed to say. Or maybe the best thing would be, why don't you come and make Sabbath with us? Feel what it's like to be among brothers, just for once?"
Fima said:
"No, thank you." This time there was something in his voice that made the young man timidly wish him a good Sabbath and move away. He turned twice and looked back toward Fima, as though afraid he might be pursued.
For a moment Fima was sorry he had not given this peddler of pious deeds and used cars a vitriolic answer, a theological knockout blow that he would not forget in a hurry. He could have asked him, for example, whether you got five credit points up there for killing a five-year-old Arab girl. Or whether to bring a child into the world that neither you nor the mother wanted was a virtuous act or a transgression. After a moment, to his surprise, he felt some regret that he had not said yes, if only to afford a small pleasure to this North African youth in the Volhynian or Galician costume, who, despite his transparent guile, seemed to Fima to be innocent and goodhearted. No doubt in his own way he too was trying to put right what cannot be put right.
Meanwhile he shuffled past a carpenter's workshop, a grocer's that smelled strongly of salt fish, a butcher's shop that struck him as murderously bloodstained, and a dingy shop selling snoods and wigs, and he stopped at a nearby newsstand to buy the weekend editions of Yediot, Hadashot, and Ma'ariv. For once he also bought the ultrapious paper Yated Ne'eman, out of vague curiosity. And so, laden with newspapers, he entered a small café on the comer of Zephaniah Street. It was a family restaurant, with three tables covered with peeling pink Formica, and lit by a single feeble bulb that cast a sickly yellow light. Lazy flies wandered everywhere. A bearlike man was dozing behind the counter, his beard between his teeth, and Fima wondered for a moment about the possibility that this was actually himself behind the reception desk at the clinic transported here by magic. He dropped onto a plastic chair that seemed none too clean, and tried to recall what his mother used to order for him on those Fridays a thousand years ago at the Danzigs' restaurant. Eventually he asked for chicken soup, beef stew, a mixed salad, pita and pickles, and a bottle of mineral water. As he ate, he rummaged in his pile of papers until his fingers were black and the pages were grease-stained.
In Ma'ariv, on the second page, there was a report about an Arab youth in Jenin who had been burned to death while trying to set fire to a military jeep that was parked in the main street of the town. An investigation had shown, the newspaper reported, that the Arab mob which gathered around the burning youth prevented the military orderly from offering him first aid and did not allow the soldiers to get close enough to douse the flames, apparently in the belief that the young man burning to death in front of them was an Israeli soldier. He roasted for about ten minutes in the fire that he himself had lit, uttering "fearful screams" before finally expiring. In the town of Or Akiva, on the other hand, a minor miracle had occurred. A five-year-old boy who fell from an upper story, receiving serious head injuries, had been lying unconscious since the Day of Atonement. The doctors had written him off and placed him in a home, where he was expected to live out the rest of his days as a vegetable. But the mother, a simple woman who could neither read nor write, refused to give up hope. When the doctors told her the child did not have a chance and that only a miracle could save him, she prostrated herself at the feet of a famous rabbi in Bnei Brak, who told her to have a certain rabbinical student who was known to be brain-damaged himself repeat a page of the Zohar about Abraham and Isaac day and night into the ear of the child (whose name was Yitzhak or Isaac). And indeed, after four days and nights the boy began to show signs of life, and he was now fully recovered, running around and singing hymns and attending a religious boarding school, where he had a special scholarship and was gaining a reputation as a budding genius. Why not try reading the same passage of the Zohar into the ears of Yitzhak Rabin and Yitzhak Shamir, Fima thought, chuckling to himself, and then muttered when he spilled sauce on his trousers.
In the religious paper, Yated Ne'eman, he skimmed through various malicious rumblings about desertions from the kibbutzim. According to the paper, the younger generation of kibbutzniks were all wandering around the Far East and the Indian mountains, attaching themselves to all sorts of terrible pagan sects. And in Ma'ariv a veteran columnist again argued that the government should not be in a hurry to rush off to all sorts of dubious peace conferences. We should wait until the Israeli deterrent was renewed. We must not go to the negotiating table from an inferior position, with the sword of the intifada, as it were, at our throats. Discussions about peace might be desirable, but only when the Arabs finally realized that they had no chance politically or militarily, indeed no chance at all, and came pleading for peace with their tails between their legs.
In Hadashot he read a satirical piece suggesting that instead of hanging Eichmann we should have had the foresight to spare him, so we could use his experience and his organizational skills at the present juncture. Eichmann would be well received among the torturers of Arabs and those who wanted to deport the Arabs to the east en masse, an operation in which Eichmann was known to have particular expertise. Then in the weekend magazine of Tediot Aharonot he came across an article, illustrated with color photographs, about the ordeals of a once popular singer who had become addicted to hard drugs, and now, when she was fighting that addiction, a heartless judge deprived her of custody of her baby daughter by a famous soccer star who refused to recognize his paternity. The judge ruled that the baby should be handed over to a foster family, despite the singer's protest that the foster father was actually a Yugoslav who had not been properly converted and might not even be circumcised. When Fima had searched all the pockets of his trousers, his shirt, and his overcoat and almost given up hope, he eventually fished out of the inside pocket of the coat, of all places, a folded twenty-shekel note which Baruch had managed to plant there without his noticing. He paid and took his leave with a muttered apology. He left all his newspapers on the table.
Outside the restaurant he found the cold had intensified. There was a hint of evening in the air, even though it was still only midafternoon. The cracked asphalt, the rusty wrought-iron gates, some of which had the word "Zion" worked into them, the signboards of the shops, workshops, Torah schools, real estate agencies, and charities, the row of trash cans parked along the street, the distant view of the hills glimpsed beyond neglected gardens—everything was becoming clothed in various shades of gray. Occasionally alien sounds penetrated the regular hubbub of the streets: church bells, high and slow, punctuated by silence, or low, or shrill, or heavy and elegiac, and also a distant loudspeaker, and pneumatic drills, and the faint blaring of a siren. All these sounds could not subdue the silence of Jerusalem, that permanent underlying silence, which you can always find if you look for it underneath any noise in Jerusalem. An old man and a boy walked slowly past, grandfather and grandson perhaps. The boy asked:
"But you said that the inside of the world is fire, so why isn't the ground hot?"
And the grandfather:
"First you must study, Yossel. The more you learn, the more you'll understand that the best thing for us is we shouldn't ask questions."
Fima remembered that when he was a child, there was an old huckster who went through the streets of Jerusalem wheeling a squeaky, broken-down handcart, with a sack on his back, buying and selling secondhand furniture and clothes. Fima remembered in his bones the old man's voice, which sounded like a cry of despair. At first you would hear it a few blocks away, indistinct and ominous, ghostlike. Slowly, as though the man were crawling on his belly from street to street, the shout grew closer
, raucous and terrifying—"al-te za-chen" —and there was something desolate and piercing about it, like a cry for help, as if someone were being murdered. Somehow this cry was associated in Fima's mind with the autumn, with overcast skies, with thunder and the first dusty drops of rain, with the secretive rustling of pine trees, with dull gray light, with empty pavements and gardens abandoned to the wind. Fear would seize him, and it sometimes invaded his dreams at night. Like a final warning of a disaster that had already begun. For a long time he did not understand the meaning of the words al-te za-chen, thinking that the awful broken voice was addressing him, saying in Hebrew, "Al tezaken," "Do not grow old." Even after his mother explained to him that "alte zachen" was Yiddish and meant "old things," Fima remained under the spell of the bloodcurdling prophecy that advanced through the streets one by one, getting closer and closer, knocking at the garden gates, warning him from afar of the approach of old age and death, the cry of someone who has already fallen victim to the terrible thing and is warning others that their time will also come.
Now, as he remembered that ghost, he smiled and comforted himself with the words of the dismissed clerk from Mrs. Scheinfeld's café, the man whom God had forgotten: "Anyway we all dies."
Going up Strauss Street, Fima passed the garish window of an ultrapious travel agency named Eagles' Wings. He stood for a while contemplating a brightly colored poster picturing the Eiffel Tower between Big Ben and the Empire State Building. Nearby, the Tower of Pisa leaned toward the other towers, and next to it was a Dutch windmill, with a pair of plump cows grazing blankly below. The words on the poster read: "With G-d's help: COME ON BOARD—TRAVEL LIKE A LORD!" Underneath, in the characters normally reserved for holy books: "Pay in sue easy installments, interest free." There was also an aerial photograph of snow-covered mountains, across which was printed in blue letters: "OUR WAY'S POSHER—STRICTLY KOSHER."
Fima decided to go inside and ask the price of a bargain ticket to Rome. His father would surely not refuse to lend him the fare, and in a few days' time he would be sitting with Uri Gefen and Annette's husband in a delightful café on the Via Veneto, in the company of bold, permissive women and pleasure-loving men, sipping a cappuccino, discoursing wittily about Salman Rushdie and Islam and feasting his eyes on the shapely girls walking past. Or he would sit alone by a window in a little albergo with old-fashioned green wooden shutters, staring at the old walls, with a note pad in front of him, and occasionally jot down aperçus and pithy musings. Maybe a crack would open in the blocked-up spring, and some new poems gush forth. Some light, easy encounters might take place, lightheartedly, with no strings attached, weightless relationships that are impossible here in this Jerusalem teeming with dribbling prophets. He had read recently in a newspaper that religious travel agents knew how to fiddle things so that they could sell flights for next to nothing. Over there in Rome, amid impeccable palazzos and stone-paved piazzas, life was carefree and gay, full of fun and free of guilt and shame, and even if acts of cruelty or injustice occurred there, the injustice was not your responsibility and the suffering did not weigh on your conscience.
An overweight, bespectacled young man, with clean-shaven pink cheeks but a broad black skullcap on his head, raised his childlike eyes from a book that he hastily hid behind a copy of Hamodia' and greeted Fima with a smug Ashkenazic accent:
"And a very good day to you, sir."
He was only about twenty-five, but he looked prosperous, supercilious, and eager to please.
"And what might we do for you, sir?"
Fima discovered that in addition to foreign travel the shop also sold tickets for the national lottery and various other lotteries. He leafed through a brochure offering "holiday packages" in splendid religious hotels in Safed and Tiberias, combining treatment for the body under the care of qualified medical staffs with purification of the soul by means of devotions "at the Holy Tombs of Lions of Torah and Eagles of Wisdom." At that moment, perhaps because he noticed that the young travel agent's starched white shirt was rather grubby at the collar and cuffs, just like his own, Fima changed his mind and decided to postpone his trip to Rome. At least until he had a chance to talk to his father about it and consult Uri Gefen, who was coming back today or tomorrow. Or was it Sunday? Nevertheless he took his time, leafed through another brochure with pictures of kosher hotels in "splendiferous Switzerland," hesitated between the national lottery and the soccer pool, and decided to buy a ticket for the Magen David Adorn drawing so as not to disappoint the agent, who was waiting patiently and politely for him to finish making up his mind. But Fima had to make do without even this, because all he could find in his pocket, apart from Annette's earring, was six shekels, the change from his meal in the flyblown cafeteria in Zephaniah Street. He therefore accepted with thanks some illustrated leaflets containing the itineraries and the minutest details about organized tours for groups of Torah-True Jews. In one of them, he found written in Hebrew, English, and Yiddish that by the grace of Almighty G-d it was now once again possible to make one's devotions at the tombs of "aweful saints" in Poland and Hungary, to visit "Holy Places destroyed by the persecutors, may their name be blotted out!" and to enjoy "the mind-broadening beauties of Japheth—and all in an atmosphere of real yiddishkeit, strictly kosher under the auspices of qualified, pious, and seemly guides, and all with the blessing and recommendation of Leading Giants of Torah." The travel agent said:
"Maybe you will change your mind and come and sec us again when you have had a chance to think it over, sir?"
Fima said:
"Maybe. We'll see. Thank you anyway, and I'm sorry."
"Don't mention it, sir. Our honor and pleasure. And a very good Sabbath to you."
As he walked on up toward the Histadrut Building, it occurred to him that this obsequious, overfed young man with the sausagelike fingers and starched shirt that had a grimy collar and cuffs was the same age as the son that Yael had got rid of two minutes away from here at some clinic in the Street of the Prophets. And he smiled sadly because, despite the skullcap and cantorial tenor voice, it was possible that an impartial observer could find a certain resemblance between him and that pudgy, grubby, smooth-talking young travel agent who was so eager to please. But could Yael feel any maternal affection for that bloated creature, with his murky blue eyes behind thick glasses and his porky-pink cheeks? Could she sit and knit him a blue woollen bonnet with a pompom bobbing on top? Could she link arms with him and let him choose spicy black olives for her in Mahane Yehuda Market? And how about you? Would you really feel the need occasionally to tuck a folded bill in his pocket? Or get the painters in for him? Which goes to prove that Yael was right. As always. She was born being right.
However, Fima thought wryly, it might have been a girl. A miniature Giulietta Masina with soft bright hair. She could have been named after his mother: Liza, or, in its Hebrew mutation, Elisheva. Although it is fairly certain Yael would have vetoed that.
A cold, bitter woman, he said to himself with surprise.
Was it really only your fault? Just because of what you did to her? Just because of the Greek promise that you didn't keep and could not have kept and that no one could have kept? Once, next to Nina Gefen's bed he saw an old translated novel, in a shabby paperback edition, called A Woman Without Love. Was it by François Mauriac? André Maurois? Alberto Moravia? He must ask Nina sometime if it was about a woman who did not find love or a woman who was incapable of love. The title could be taken either way. Though at the moment the difference struck him as insignificant. Only very rarely had he and Yael used the word "love." With the possible exception of the period of the Greek trip, but at that time neither he nor the three girls had been particular about their choice of words.
Wains curled. And vanished.
As he crossed the road, there was a squeal of brakes. The van driver cursed Fima and shouted: