Fima

  "You there, are you crazy?"

  Fima considered, shuddered belatedly, and muttered sheepishly:

  "I'm sorry. Really. Very sorry."

  The driver screamed:

  "Damn half-wit: you've got more luck than sense."

  Fima considered this too, and by the time he reached the other curb he agreed with the driver. And with Yael, who had decided not to have his son. And also with the possibility of being run over here in the street this Sabbath eve instead of running away to Rome. Like the Arab child we killed two days ago in Gaza. Being switched off. Turned to stone. Reincarnated, as a lizard perhaps. Leaving Jerusalem to Yoezer. And he decided that this evening he would call his father and tell him firmly that the painting was off. In any case he would be going soon. This time he would not give in or compromise; he would see it through, and get Baruch's fingers out of his pockets and out of his life once and for all.

  Near the Medical Center at the corner of Strauss Street and the Street of the Prophets a small crowd had gathered. Fima approached and asked what had happened. A small man with a birdlike nose and a thick Bulgarian accent informed him that a suspicious object had been found, and they were waiting for the police explosives experts to arrive. A girl with glasses said, What do you mean? It's not that at all. A pregnant woman fainted on the steps, and the ambulance is on its way. Fima burrowed toward the center of the crowd, because he was curious to know which of these two versions was closer to the truth. Although he bore in mind that they might both be mistaken. Or both right. What if it was a pregnant woman who had discovered the suspicious object and fainted from the shock?

  From the police patrol car which drew up with flashing lights and siren blaring, someone with a megaphone told the crowd to disperse. Fima, with a good citizen's reflex, obeyed at once, but even so he was pushed roughly by a sweaty middle-aged policeman whose peaked cap was tilted back at a comical angle.

  Fima was furious.

  "All right, all right, no need to push, I've dispersed already."

  The policeman roared at him with a rolling Romanian accent:

  "You better stop being clever, quick, or you'll get it."

  Fima restrained himself and moved off toward the Bikur Holim Hospital. He asked himself whether he would go on dispersing until one day he too collapsed in the street, or expired at home like a cockroach, on the kitchen floor, and was only discovered a week later, when the smell wafted out onto the landing, and the upstairs neighbors, the Pizantis, called the police and his father. His father would no doubt be reminded of some Hasidic tale about instant, painless death, often called "death by a kiss." Or he would make his usual remark about man being a paradox, laughing when he ought to cry and crying when he ought to laugh, living without sense and dying without desire. Frail man, his days are like the grass. Was there still a chance to halt this dispersal? To concentrate at long last on what really mattered? But if so, how to start? And what in God's name was it that really mattered?

  When he reached the Ma'ayan Shtub department store on the comer of Jaffa Road, he absent-mindedly turned right and walked toward Davidka Square. And because his feet hurt, he boarded the last bus to Kiryat Yovel. He did not forget to wish the driver a good Sabbath.

  It was a quarter to four, close to die beginning of the Sabbath, when he got off at the stop on the street next to his. He remembered to say thank you and good-bye to the driver. The early evening twilight had begun to gild the light clouds over the Bethlehem hills. And suddenly Fima realized sharply, with pain, that another day was gone forever. There was not a living soul to be seen in his street apart from a swarthy child of ten who pointed a wooden submachine gun at him and made him raise his arms in surrender.

  Thinking about his own room filled him with disgust: that arid stretch of time from now till tonight, and in fact rill Saturday night, when the group might be getting together at Shula and Tsvi's. Everything he'd meant to do today he hadn't, and now it was too late: shopping, the post office, the telephone, cash from the bank, Annette. And something else that was urgent but he couldn't remember what it was. Added to which, he still had to get ready for the painters. Shift the furniture and cover it. Pack away the books and kitchen things. Take the pictures down, and the map of the country with the compromise borders penciled in. Ask Mr. Pizanti to dismantle the bookcases for him. But first of all, he decided, he must call Tsvi Kropotkin right away. Explain to him tactfully, without offending him this time, without being sarcastic, how his article in the latest issue of Politics was based on a false and simplistic assumption.

  Provided the telephone had recovered in the meantime.

  In front of the entrance to his building, inside a white car with the windows closed, a large man was sitting bent over, his arms resting on the steering wheel and his head buried in his arms, apparently dozing. What if it was really a heart attack? Murder? A terrorist attack? Suicide? Gathering his courage, Fima tapped lightly on the window. Uri Gefen straightened up at once, lowered the window, and said:

  "So there you are. At last."

  Startled, Fima tried to respond with something witty, but Uri cut him short. He said softly:

  "Let's go upstairs. We have to talk."

  Nina has told him everything. That I made love to her. That I didn't. That I humiliated her. But what's he doing here anyway? Isn't he supposed to be in Rome? Or has he got a secret double?

  "Look here, Uri," he said, the blood leaving his face and draining into his liver, "I don't know what Nina's told you, but the fact is that for some time now..."

  "Hold it. We'll talk when we get upstairs."

  "The fact is, I've been meaning for some time..."

  "We'll talk inside, Fima."

  "But when did you get back?"

  "This morning. Half past ten. And your phone's not working."

  "How long have you been waiting for me out here?"

  "Three-quarters of an hour or so."

  "Has something happened?"

  "Just a minute. We'll talk when we get upstairs."

  When they were in the flat, Fima offered to make some coffee. Although the milk seemed to have gone bad. Uri looked so tired and thoughtful that Fima was ashamed to bring up the question of dismantling the bookcases. He said:

  "I'll put the water on first."

  Uri said:

  "Just a moment. Sit down. Listen carefully. I have some bad news." And with these words he laid his big, warm peasant hand, which was rough like the bark of an olive tree, on the back of Fima's neck. As always, the touch of this hand made Fima shudder pleasurably. He closed his eyes like a stroked cat. And Uri said:

  "We've been looking for you since lunchtime. Tsvi's been here twice and left a note on your door. Because your clinic's closed on Fridays, Teddy and Shula have been rushing around for two hours trying to locate your doctors. We didn't know where you'd got to after you left Yael's. And I just dropped my luggage off and came straight here to catch you as soon as you got back."

  Fima opened his eyes. He looked up at Uri's towering form with an anxious, pleading, childlike expression. He did not feel surprised, because he had always expected it would be something like this. With his lips only, without any voice, he asked:

  "Dimi?"

  "Dimi's fine."

  "Yael?"

  "It's your father."

  "He's not well. I know. For several days now..."

  Uri said:

  "Yes. No. Worse."

  In a strange and wonderful way Fima was infected with Uri's wonted self-possession. Softly he asked:

  "When exactly did it happen?"

  "At midday. Four hours ago."

  "Where?"

  "At home. He was sitting in his armchair drinking Russian tea with a couple of old ladies who had come to ask him for a donation to some charity. The Blind Society or something. They said he was just starting to tell a joke or a story, when he suddenly groaned and passed away. Just like that. Sitting in his armchair. He didn't have time to feel anything. And since the
n we've all been searching for you."

  "I see," said Fima, putting his coat back on. It was strangely sweet to feel his heart filling not with grief or pain but with a surge of adrenaline, of sober, practical energy.

  "Where is he now?"

  "Still at home. In the armchair. The police have been. There's some sort of a delay about moving him—it doesn't matter right now. The woman downstairs, who's a doctor, was there within a couple of minutes, and she checked that it was all over. Apparently she was a close friend of his too, Tsvi and Teddy and Shula are supposed to be waiting for you there. Nina is going there straight from her office as soon as she's finished making all the arrangements and dealing with the formalities."

  "Good," said Fima. "Thank you. Let's go there."

  After a moment he added:

  "What about you, Uri? Straight from the plane? You just dropped your luggage off and came looking for me?"

  "We didn't know where you'd got to."

  Fima said:

  "I ought to make you a cup of coffee at least."

  Uri said:

  "Forget it. Just concentrate for a moment and think carefully if there's anything you need to take with you."

  "Nothing," Fima replied at once in a military tone, with uncharacteristic firmness. "No time to waste. Let's get moving. We'll talk on the way."

  30. AT LEAST AS FAR AS POSSIBLE

  IT WAS A QUARTER PAST FIVE WHEN URI PARKED HIS CAR ON BEN Maimon Avenue. The sun had sunk behind the pines and cypresses, but a strange grayish light full of vague flickers still hovered in the sky, a light that was neither day nor night. Upon the avenue and the stone buildings lay a fine, heart-gnawing Sabbath eve melancholy. As if Jerusalem had stopped being a city and returned to being a bad dream.

  The rain had not resumed. The air was saturated, and Fima's nostrils picked up the tang of rotting leaves. He recalled how once when he was a child, at such a time as this, at the onset of the Sabbath, he was riding his bicycle up and down the dead street. Looking up at this building, he saw his mother and father standing on the balcony. They were stiffly erect, of similar height, both dressed in dark clothes, standing very close to each other but not touching. Like a pair of waxworks. And he had the impression that they were both in mourning for a visitor whose arrival they had long since despaired of and yet whom they continued to expect. For the first time in his life he sensed the depth of the shame concealed in the silence that lay between them, all through his childhood. Without any quarrels or complaints or disagreements. A polite silence. He got off his bicycle and asked shyly if it was time for him to come in.

  Baruch said:

  "As you wish."

  His mother said nothing.

  This memory awoke in Fima a pressing need to clarity something, to ask Uri, to make inquiries. He had the feeling that he had forgotten to check the thing that mattered most. But what it was that mattered most he did not know. Although he sensed that now his ignorance was thinner than usual, like a lace curtain behind which dim shadows moved. Or a threadbare garment that covers the body but no longer warms it. While he knew in his bones how much he longed to continue not knowing.

  As they climbed the stairs to the third floor, Fima put his hand on Uri's shoulder. Uri seemed tired and gloomy. Fima felt a need to encourage, with this touch, his large friend, who had once been a well-known combat pilot and still went around with his head thrust aggressively forward, a sophisticated airman's watch on his wrist, and his eyes sometimes giving the impression that he saw everything from above.

  And yet he was a warm-hearted, honest, devoted friend.

  On the door was fixed a brass plate inscribed, in black letters on gray: NOMBERG FAMILY. Underneath it, on a square piece of card, Baruch had written in his firm handwriting: "Kindly refrain from ringing the bell between the hours of one and five p.m." Unconsciously Fima shot a glance at his watch. But there was no need to ring anyway; the door was ajar.

  Tsvi Kropotkin intercepted them in the hall, like a conscientious staff officer who has been detailed to brief newcomers before admitting them to the operations room. Despite the ambulance drivers' strike, he said, and the approach of the Sabbath, the tireless Nina had managed to arrange on the phone from her office for his father to be moved to the mortuary at Hadassah Hospital. Fima felt a renewed affection for Tsvi's shy embarrassment: he looked less like a famous historian and head of a department than a youth leader whose shoulders have begun to stoop, or a village schoolmaster. Fima also liked the way Tsvi's eyes blinked behind his thick lenses, as though the light was suddenly too bright, and his habit of fingering absent-mindedly everything he came in contact with, dishes, furniture, books, people, as though he always had to wrestle with a secret doubt about the solidity of everything. If it had not been for the Jerusalem mania, and Hitler, and his obsession with Jewish responsibility, this modest scholar might have settled down in Cambridge or Oxford and lived quietly to be a hundred, dividing his time between the golf course and the Crusades, or between tennis and Tennyson.

  Fima said:

  "You were right to move him. What would he have done here all weekend?"

  In the salon he was surrounded by his friends, who reached out from every side and touched him gently on his shoulder, his cheek, his hair, as though through his father's death he had inherited the role of invalid. As though it was their duty to check carefully to sec if he was too hot or too cold or shivering, or planning secretly to leave them without warning. Shula thrust a cup of lemon tea with honey into his hand. And Teddy sat him down gently at one end of the brocade-covered sofa on which embroidered cushions were scattered. They all seemed to be waiting expectantly for him to say something. Fima responded:

  "You're all wonderful. I'm sorry to spoil your Friday night like this."

  His father's armchair was standing exactly facing him: deep, wide, covered with red leather and with a red leather headrest, looking as though it were made of raw flesh. The footstool seemed to have been pushed slightly to one side. Like a royal scepter, the cane with its silver band rested against the right-hand side of the chair.

  Shula said:

  "At any rate, one thing's certain: he didn't suffer at all. It was over in a moment. It's what they used to call death by a kiss: only the righteous are granted it, so they used to say."

  Fima smiled:

  "Righteous or not, kisses were always an important part of his repertoire." As he said this, he observed something that he had never noticed before: Shula, whom he dated more than thirty years ago, before the billy-goat year, and who at that time had a fragile girlish beauty, had aged and gone quite gray. Her thighs had grown so fat that she looked like an ultrapious woman worn out by childbearing but who accepts her decrepitude with total resignation.

  A dense, close smell of thick-pile carpets and antique furniture that have been breathing their own air for many years hung in the room, and Fima had to remind himself that it had always been here and was not the smell of Frau Professor Kropotkin's advancing age. At the same time his nostrils caught a whiff of smoke. Looking around, he noticed a cigarette on the edge of an ashtray; it had been stubbed out almost as soon as it was lit. He asked who had been smoking here. It turned out that one of the two old ladies, his father's friends, who had been here on a fundraising mission at the time, had put out her cigarette soon after lighting it. Had she done this when she saw that Baruch was wheezing? Or when it was all over? Or at the very moment he groaned and expired? Fima asked for the ashtray to be removed. And he was delighted to see how Teddy jumped to carry out his order. Tsvi asked, feeling the central heating pipes with his long fingers, if he wanted to be taken there. Fima did not understand the question. Tsvi, hardly able to control his embarrassment, explained:

  "There. To Hadassah. To see him. Perhaps..."

  Fima shrugged.

  "What is there to see? I suppose he's as dapper as usual. Why bother him?" And he instructed Shula to make some strong black coffee for Uri, because he had been on the go ever since he g
ot off the plane in the morning. "In fact, you ought to give him something to cat too: he must be starving. I figure he must have left his hotel in Rome at about three this morning, so he really has had a long, hard day of it. Come to think of it, you look pretty tired yourself, Shula; in fact, you look worn out. And where are Yael and Dimi? I want Yacl here. And Dimi too."

  "They're at home," said Ted apologetically. "The boy took it quite hard. You might say he had a special attachment to your father." He went on to say that Dimi had locked himself in the utility room, and they had had to call a friend of theirs, the child psychologist from South Africa, to ask what to do. He told them just to leave the child alone. And, sure enough, after a while Dimi had come out, and then he'd glued himself to the computer. The South African friend had advised them...

  Fima said:

  "Balls."

  And then, quietly and firmly:

  "I want them both here."

  As he spoke, he was surprised at this new assertiveness he had acquired since his father's death. As if it had given him an unexpected promotion, entitling him henceforward to issue orders at will and to command instant obedience.

  Ted said:

  "Sure. We could go and fetch them. But from what the psychologist said, I think it might be better if..."

  Fima nipped this appeal in the bud:

  "If you wouldn't mind."

  Ted hesitated, held a whispered consultation with Tsvi, glanced at his watch, and said: "Okay, Fima, whatever you like. That's fine. I'll pop around and collect Dimi. If Uri wouldn't mind lending me his keys; Yael's got our car."

  "Yael too, please."

  "Right. Shall I call her? See if she can make it?"

  "Of course she can make it. Tell her I insist."

  Ted went out, and at that moment Nina arrived. Small and thin, practical, razor-sharp in her movements, her narrow vixen's face projecting common sense and a survivor's shrewdness, brimming with energy, as though she'd spent the day rescuing casualties under fire rather than making arrangements for a funeral. She wore a light gray pantsuit, her glasses were shining, and she was clutching a stiff black attaché case that she did not put down even when she gave Fima a quick angular hug and a kiss on the forehead. But she found no words.