Fima (15 page)

What have you done with life's treasure? What good have you done? Apart from signing petitions.

And as if that were not enough, you needlessly distressed your father, who feeds you and whose generosity benefits dozens of people every day. When you heard on the radio about the death of the Arab boy from Gaza, whom we shot in the head, what exactly did you do? You got worked up about the style of the announcement. And the way you humiliated Nina, after she took you in off the street all wet and filthy in the middle of the night and gave you light and warmth and even offered you her body. And how you hated that young settler, who, after all, even when you make allowances for the stupidity of the government and the blindness of the masses, has no choice but to carry a gun, because he really does risk his life driving at night between Hebron and Bethlehem. What do you want him to do—stick his neck out to be slaughtered? And what about Annette, you guardian of morality? What did you do today to Annette? Who trusted you from the first glance. Who had faith in your healing powers, like a simple peasant woman prostrating herself at the feet of a holy man in some Orthodox monastery and pouring her heart out to him. The only woman in your whole life ever to call you brother. You will never receive such a gift again, to be called brother by a strange woman. She trusted you without knowing you, so much so that she let you undress her and put her in your bed, and called you an angel, and you cunningly dressed yourself up as a saint to conceal your lust. Not to mention the cat you startled just a moment ago. And that is, more or less, the sum total of your latest exploits, you chief of the Revolutionary Council, you peacemaker, you comforter of deserted wives. To which we might add taking time off from work on false pretenses, and an unconsummated act of self-abuse. Plus the piss that's still sitting in the toilet bowl and the funeral you gave to the first insect in history to have died of filth.

With this, Fima reached the last lamppost and the end of the street, which was also the end of the housing development and the end of Jerusalem. Beyond stretched a muddy wasteland. He felt the urge to keep on walking into the darkness, to cross the wadi, climb the hill, press on as long as his strength endured, fulfilling his allotted task as the night watchman of Jerusalem. But out of the dark came a sound of distant barking and two stray shots separated by an interval of silence. After the second shot a westerly breeze stirred, bringing a strange rustling and a smell of wet earth. Behind him in the narrow street there was an indistinct tapping, as though a blind man were groping his way with a stick. A fine drizzle filled the empty air.

Fima trembled and turned for home. As though by way of self-mortification he finished washing the dishes, including the greasy frying pan; he wiped the surfaces in the kitchen; he flushed the toilet. The only thing he did not do was take the trash downstairs—because it was already a quarter to two in the morning, because he was frightened of the blind man tapping his way through the darkness outside. And why not leave something for tomorrow?

I
N HIS DREAM HE SAW HIS MOTHER
. T
HE PLAGE WAS A GRAY
, neglected garden that extended over several low hills. There were parched lawns overgrown with thistles. And there were a few bare trees and traces of flower beds. Below him on the hillside was a broken bench, and next to it he saw his mother. Death had transformed her into a schoolgirl from a religious boarding school. From behind she looked very young, a pious girl in a modest long-sleeved dress that came down over her ankles. She was walking alongside a rusty irrigation pipe. At fixed intervals she stopped and bent down to turn on a tap. The sprinklers did not revolve, but merely released a thin spray of brownish water. Fima's task was to follow her down the hill and turn off each tap she'd turned on. So he saw her only from behind. Death had made her light and lovely. It had endowed her movements with grace but also with a certain childlike awkwardness. The sort of mixture of agility and clumsiness that is seen in newborn kittens. He called after her, using her Russian name, Lizaveta, her nickname, Liza, and her Hebrew name, Elisheva. To no avail. His mother did not turn around or react. So he began to run. After every seven or eight strides he had to stop, crouch down, and turn off a tap. The taps were made of something soft and slimy to the touch, like a jellyfish, and it was not water that dripped from them but a sticky liquid that felt like jellied fish stock. For all his running, breathlessly, like an overweight child, for all his shouts that echoed dimly in the gray distance, mingled at times with a sharp sound reminiscent of a snapping cord, it was impossible to reduce the fixed distance between him and her. He was overcome by the desperate fear that the pipe would never end. But at the edge of the wood she stopped and turned toward him. Her lovely face was the face of a slain angel. Her forehead glowed in the moonlight. A skeletal pallor covered her sunken cheeks. Her lipless teeth gleamed. Her flaxen plait was made of dry straw. Her eyes were hidden by the dark glasses of the blind. On her religious schoolgirl's uniform he could see dried blood where the wires had pierced her: her knees, her belly, her throat. As though she had been made into a stuffed hedgehog. She shook her head sadly at Fima and said, Look what they've done to you, stupid. She reached up with her dry fingers to remove the dark glasses. Terrified, Fima turned away. And woke up.

W
HEN HE HAD FINISHED WRITING IN HIS NOTEBOOK, HE GOT UP
and stood by the window. He saw a bright, shiny morning. On a bare branch crouched a cat that had climbed closer to hear what the birds were singing. Don't fall, chum, Fima said affectionately. Even the Bethlehem hills looked as though they were within reach. The nearby buildings and gardens were drenched with cold, clear light. Balconies, garden walls, cars, everything was sparkling clean after the rain that had fallen in the night. Even though he had slept less than five hours, he felt fresh and full of energy. He did his exercises in front of the mirror, arguing all the time with the arrogant woman reading die seven o'clock news on the radio and who was able to declare without hesitation what the Syrians were planning to do and could even suggest a simple countermove. More contemptuous than angry, Fima replied: You can't be very bright, lady. And he saw fit to add, But look how lovely it is outside. The sky is singing a song. How would you like to take a little walk with me? We'll stroll down the street, we'll wander through the woods and wadis, and as we go, I'll explain to you the policy we really ought to be adopting toward the Syrians, and where their Achilles' heel is, and where our own blind spot is.

He went on thinking about the life of this newscaster, who had to leave her warm bed at five-thirty on a cruel winter morning to get to the studio in time to read the news at seven. Suppose one morning her alarm failed to ring? Or suppose it rang on time but she gave in to the temptation to snuggle up in bed for another couple of minutes and then fell asleep again? Or suppose her car wouldn't start because of the cold, as happened every morning to the neighbor with the barking starter? Or perhaps this girl—Fima pictured her: shortish, freckled, with bright laughing eyes and curly fair hair—slept at night on a camp bed at the studio. Like the doctors on night duty at the hospital. How did her husband, the insurance salesman, cope with that? Did he spend his lonely nights imagining all kinds of wild scenes between her and the technicians? There's no one worth envying, Fima decided. Except perhaps Yoezer.

It was because of Yoezer that Fima cut himself shaving. He tried without success to stanch the flow of blood with a piece of toilet paper, with cotton wool, finally with a damp handkerchief. Consequently he forgot to shave the folds of skin under his chin. Which he hated shaving anyway, because they put him in mind of the crop of a plump chicken. Pressing the handkerchief against his face as though he were suffering from toothache, he went to get dressed. And came to the conclusion that the positive side of last night's disgrace was that at least there was no fear that he had made Annette pregnant.

While he was looking for the chunky sweater he had inherited from Yael, his eye suddenly caught a glimpse of a small insect gleaming on the scat of the armchair. Was it really possible that some foolish glowworm had forgotten to switch itself off at the end of the night? Actually, he had not seen a glowworm for forty years at least and had no idea what they looked like. With the cunning of a seasoned hunter Fima leaned over and with a lightning movement of the right hand that began like a slap and ended with a clenched fist he managed to capture the creature without hurting it. The rapidity and accuracy of the movement belied his reputation as a clumsy oaf. Opening his fingers to examine what it was he had caught, he wondered whether it was one of Annette's earrings, a buckle of Nina's, a piece of one of Dimi's toys, or one of his father's silver cuff links. After a careful inspection he chose the last of these possibilities. Although some doubt remained.

Going to the kitchen, he opened the fridge and stood pensively holding the door open, fascinated by the mystic light shining behind the milk and the cheeses, reexamining in his mind the expression "the price of morality" in the tide of the article he had written in the night. He found no reason to revise or alter it. There was a price of morality and a price of immorality, and the real question was: What is the price of this price, i.e., what is the point and purpose of life? Everything else derived from that question. Or ought to. Including our behavior in the Occupied Territories.

Closing the fridge, Fima decided to go out for breakfast this morning, to Mrs. Scheinbaum's little café across the road, partly because he did not want to spoil the impeccable tidiness of his newly cleaned kitchen, partly because the bread was stale and the margarine reminded him of the horrible jellylike taps in his dream, and above all because the electric kettle had burned itself out the previous day, and without a kettle there would be no coffee.

At a quarter past eight he left the flat without noticing the bloodstained wad of cotton wool clinging to the cut on his cheek. But he did remember to take the trash down, and he also remembered to slip the envelope containing the article he had written in the night into his pocket, and he did not even forget the mailbox key. At the shopping center three blocks away he bought fresh bread, cheese, tomatoes, jam, eggs, some yogurt, coffee, three light bulbs, to have a reserve, and also a new electric kettle. He instantly regretted not having checked to see if it was made in Germany: he did his best to avoid buying German products. To his relief he discovered that it came from South Korea. Unpacking the shopping, he changed his mind and decided to skip the café and have his breakfast at home after all. Although, on second thought, South Korea was also a notoriously repressive country, famous for smashing the skulls of demonstrating students. While he waited for the water to boil, he reconstructed the Korean War, the era of Truman, MacArthur, and McCarthy, and ended with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The next nuclear holocaust won't start with the superpowers, it'll start with us here, he thought. With our regional conflict. The Syrians will invade the Golan Heights with a thousand tanks, we'll bomb Damascus, they'll fire a salvo of missiles at the coastal towns, and then we'll set off the doomsday mushroom. In a hundred years there won't be a living soul here. No Yoezer, no lizard, no cockroach.

But Fima rejected the word "holocaust" because it could also be associated with natural disasters such as floods, epidemics, and earthquakes. What the Nazis did, by contrast, was an organized, premeditated crime that ought to be called by its proper name: murder. And nuclear war will also be a criminal act. Neither "holocaust" nor "doomsday." Fima also ruled out the word "conflict," which might describe the business of Annette and her husband, or Tsvi Kropotkin and his teaching assistant, but not the bloody war between us and the Arabs. In fact, even the sad case of Annette and Yen could hardly be categorized with such a sterile term as "conflict." As for the expression "bloody war," it was a tired cliché. Even "tired cliché" was a tired cliché. You've worked yourself into a corner, pal.

Suddenly he felt disgusted with his linguistic niceties. Gulping down thick slices of bread and jam, sipping his second coffee, he said to himself: When the whole planet has been destroyed by atom bombs or hydrogen bombs, what difference will it make whether we describe it as a conflict, holocaust, doomsday, or a bloody war? And who will be left to decide which is the most appropriate description? So Baruch was right when he used the expressions "a handful of dust," "a putrid drop," "a fleeting shadow." And the Likud member of parliament was right to recommend playing for time. Even the orgiastic radio announcer was right when she said that there were lessons to be drawn.

But what lessons? What precious light, for heaven's sake?

The snows of yesteryear. The bones of yesteryear.

I'd hang the pair of them.

Look what they've done to you, stupid.

Your problem, pal.

So surely that is the root of all evil, Fima suddenly shouted, alone in his kitchen, as though he had received a dazzling revelation, as though a simple solution to the problem of jet propulsion on land had flashed into his head. That is the original sin. The Other Side is the source of all our misfortunes. Because there is no such thing as your problem, my problem, her problem, his problem, their problem. It's all
our
problem. There, the Korean kettle's boiling again, and if you don't switch it off, it'll go exactly the way of its predecessor. Who asked for coffee anyway? I've had two cups already. Instead of drinking coffee you'd better go back to the shopping center, because although you remembered to put a stamp on the envelope with the article in it and to put it in your pocket, you forgot to take it out of your pocket and mail it when you bought the kettle. What's going to become of you, mister? When arc you going to be a mensch?