Fima (3 page)

Although in fact it might be a healthy and wholly laudable sense of shame that prevented us from announcing simply: a Jewish soldier has shot and killed an Arab teenager. On the other hand, this polluted language was constantly teaching us that die fault lay with the rifle, with the circumstances that were being investigated, with the plastic bullet, as if all evil was the fault of Heaven and everything was predestined.

And in fact, he said to himself, who knows?

After all, there is a sort of secret charm in the words "the fault of Heaven."

But then he was angry with himself. There was no charm and it was not secret. Leave Heaven out of it.

Fima aimed a fork at his forehead, at his temple, at the back of his head, and tried to guess or sense what it must feel like the instant the bullet pierces the skull and explodes: no pain, no noise, perhaps, so he imagined, perhaps just a searing flash of incredulity, like a child prepared for a slap in the face from his father and receiving instead a white-hot poker in his eye. Is there a fraction, an atom of time, in which illumination arrives? The light of the seven heavens? When what has been dim and vague all your life is momentarily opened up before darkness falls? As though all those years you have been looking for a complicated solution to a complicated problem, and in the final moment a simple solution flashes out?

Here Fima croaked angrily to himself, Just stop fucking up your mind. The words "dim and vague" filled him with disgust. He got up and went out, locking the door of his flat behind him and taking particular note of which pocket he put the key in. In the entrance hall of the block of flats he spotted the white of a letter through the slit of his mailbox. But the only key in his pocket was his front-door key. The key to the mailbox was presumably still lying on his desk. Unless it was in the pocket of another pair of trousers. Or on the corner of the kitchen counter. After a moment's hesitation he shrugged; the letter was probably nothing but the water bill or the phone bill, or else just a handbill.

While he lunched on a salami omelette, a salad, and a fruit compote in the café across the road, he was startled to see, through the window, that the light was on in his flat. He thought about this awhile, weighed the faint possibility that he was in both places at once, but preferred to assume that the problem had been repaired and the current had been restored. Glancing at his watch, he decided that if he went up to the flat, switched off the light, found the key to the mailbox, and got the letter, he would be late for work, so he paid for his meal, saying, "Thank you, Mrs. Schoenberg." As usual, she corrected him:

"It's Scheinmann, Dr. Nisan."

"Of course," Fima replied. "I'm sorry. How much do I owe you? I've already paid? Well, all I can say is it can't have been an accident. I must have wanted to pay twice, because your schnitzel—it was schnitzel, wasn't it—was especially tasty. Fm sorry. Thank you. Good-bye. I must run now. Just look at this rain. Aren't you looking a little tired? Or unhappy? It's probably just the weather. It'll brighten up soon. See you tomorrow."

Twenty minutes later, when the bus stopped at the National Auditorium, it occurred to Fima how ridiculous it had been to come out on a day like this without an umbrella. Or to promise the proprietress of the café that the weather would brighten up. On what grounds? Suddenly a fine, burnished sliver of reddish light pierced the clouds and dazzled him by setting fire to a window high up in the Hilton tower. Though dazzled, he could see a towel waving on the railing of a balcony on the tenth or twentieth floor, and he sensed in his nostrils the precise scent of the woman who had just dried herself on it. Look, he said to himself, nothing is ever really wasted, nothing gets written off, and there is scarcely a moment without some minor miracle. Maybe everything is for the best after all.

The two-room flat on the edge of Kiryat Yovel had been bought for Fima when he remarried in 1961, less than a year after receiving his B.A. in history with distinction at the university in Jerusalem. In those
days his father pinned high hopes on him. Others too believed in Fima's future. He was awarded a scholarship, and almost went on to get a master's degree; there were even thoughts of a doctorate and an academic career. But in the summer of 1960 Fima's life underwent a series of mishaps or complications. To this day his friends chuckled with amused affection whenever, in his absence, the conversation turned to "Fima's billy-goat year." In the middle of July, right after the end of his finals, in the garden of the Ratisbonne Convent he fell in love with the French guide of a party of Catholic tourists. He was sitting on a bench waiting for a girlfriend, a student at the nursing college named Shula, who married his friend Tsvi Kropotkin a couple of years later. A sprig of oleander was flowering between his fingers and the birds were arguing overhead. Nicole addressed him from the next bench: Was there any water here? Did he speak French? Fima replied in the affirmative to both questions, even though he did not have the faintest idea where there was any water, and he knew only a smattering of French. From that moment on he dogged her footsteps wherever she went in Jerusalem; he would not leave her alone despite her polite requests; he did not even give her up when her group leader warned him that he would be obliged to lodge a complaint against him. When she went to Mass at the Dormition Abbey, he waited for her outside like a dog for an hour and a half. Every time she came out of the Kings' Hotel, opposite the Terra Sanaa Building, she encountered Fima standing in front of the revolving door, his eyes blazing. When she went to the museum, he was lurking in every room. When she flew back to France, he followed her to Paris and even to her home in Lyons. Late one moonlit night, so the story goes in Jerusalem, her father came out of the house and fired a double-barreled shotgun at him, grazing his leg. During the three days he spent in a Franciscan hospital he made inquiries about what one had to do to become a Christian. Nicole's father, visiting him in the hospital to ask his forgiveness, offered to help him convert. Meanwhile Nicole had had enough of her father too and ran away from both of them, first to her sister in Madrid and then to her sister-in-law in Málaga. Dirty, desperate, and unkempt, he pursued her on dusty buses and trains until his money ran out in Gibraltar and, with the help of the Red Cross, he was returned almost forcibly to Israel on board a Panamanian cargo vessel. On arrival at Haifa he was arrested, and he spent six weeks in a military prison because he had tampered with the date on the form authorizing a soldier on the reserve list to leave the country. They say that at the beginning of this passion Fima weighed one hundred fifty-nine pounds and that in September, in the prison hospital, he weighed less than one hundred thirty-two. He was released from prison after his father interceded for him with a senior official, whose wife, a well-known woman-about-town with a famous collection of etchings, subsequently fell outrageously in love with him; she was ten years younger than her husband and at least eight years older than Fima. In the autumn she became pregnant by him and moved into his lodgings in Musrara. They were the talk of the whole city. In December Fima boarded another cargo boat, a Yugoslav one this time, and turned up in Malta, where he spent three months working on a tropical-fish farm and writing his cycle of poems,
The Death of Augustine and His Resurrection in the Arms of Dulcinea
. In January the woman who owned the cheap hotel where he was staying in Valletta fell for him and moved his luggage into her own apartment. Afraid she might get pregnant too, he decided to marry her—a civil wedding. This marriage lasted less than two months, because meanwhile his father, with the help of friends in Rome, had managed to discover his whereabouts; he informed Fima that his Jerusalem woman had lost the baby, succumbed to depression, and returned to her husband and her etchings. Fima decided that there was no forgiveness for him and made up his mind to leave his landlady at once and give women a wide berth forever. He decided that love leads inexorably to disaster, whereas relations without love cause only humiliation and hurt. He left Malta without a penny, on the deck of a Turkish fishing boat. His plan was to hole up for at least a year in a certain monastery on the island of Samos. On the way he was smitten with panic at the thought that his ex-wife might also be pregnant and wondered if he ought to go back to her, but
at the same time he felt he had acted wisely in leaving her his money but no address that she could trace him by. He disembarked at Thessaloniki and spent a night in a youth hostel, where with sweetness and pain he dreamed of his first love, Nicole, whom he had lost track of in Gibraltar. In the dream her name had changed to Thérèse, and Fima saw his father with a loaded shotgun holding her and the baby prisoner in the cellar of the YMCA in Jerusalem, except that by the end of the dream he himself had become the captive child. The next morning he set off to look for a synagogue, even though he had never been a practicing Jew and was certain that God was not in the least religious and had no use for religion. But, having no other address, Fima decided to try a synagogue. Outside the synagogue he came across three Israeli girls who were backpacking around Greece and turning north, into the mountains, because by now spring had arrived. Fima joined them, and on the way fell head over heels for one of them, Ilia Abravanel, from Haifa, who to him was the image of Mary Magdalene in a painting he had seen somewhere, he could not remember where or who the artist was. Since Ilia did not yield to his advances, he slept a few times with her friend Liat Sirkin, who invited him to share her sleeping bag as they spent the night in some highland valley or sacred grove. Liat Sirkin taught Fima one or two unusual, exquisite pleasures, but he felt, beyond the carnal thrills, faint hints of a more spiritual elation: almost day by day he fell under the spell of a secret mountain joy mingled with a sense of exaltation which endowed him with heightened powers of vision such as he had never experienced before or since. During these days in the mountains of northern Greece he was able, looking at the sunrise over a clump of olive trees, to sec the creation of the world. And to know with absolute certainty, as he passed a flock of sheep in the midday heat, that this was not the first time he had lived. And actually to hear, sitting on the vine-shaded terrace of a village tavern, over wine and cheese and salad, the roar of a snowstorm in the polar wastes. He played tunes to the girls on a pipe he had fashioned from a reed, and was not ashamed to leap and whirl in front of them like a crazy child until he brought them to peals of childlike laughter
and simple happiness. All that time he could see no contradiction between pining for Ilia and sleeping with Liat, but he barely noticed the third girl, who mostly chose to stay silent. Though she was the one who dressed his foot when he cut it on a piece of broken glass. These three girls, with the previous women in his life, including his mother, who had died when he was ten, almost merged into a single woman in his mind. Not because he thought that a woman is only a woman, but because with his inner illumination he sometimes felt that the differences between people, any people—men, women, or children—were of no consequence except perhaps for the outermost layer, the ephemeral surface. Just as water took the form of snow or mist or steam, or a lump of ice, or clouds or hailstones. Or just as the bells of the monasteries and village churches differed only in their pitch and rhythm, all having the same meaning. He shared these thoughts with the girls, two of whom believed, whereas the third called him a simpleton and contented herself with patching his shirt; in this too Fima saw only different expressions of a single statement. This third girl, Yael Levin from Yavne'el, did not refrain from joining in their nude swimming on warm moonlit nights if they found a spring or stream. Once, they watched stealthily, from a distance, a fifteen-year-old shepherd boy satisfying his urges on a nanny goat. And once, they saw a pair of pious old women in widow's weeds with large wooden crosses on their chests sitting silently on a rock in the middle of a field in the noonday heat, motionless, their fingers interlaced. One night they heard sounds of music coming from an empty ruin. And one day a wizened old man walked past them, going the other way, playing on a broken accordion that made no sound. The next morning there was a brief cloudburst, and the air became so clear that they could see the shadows of trees shifting on the red-tiled roofs of little villages in distant valleys, and almost make out the individual needles of the cypress and pine trees on the flanks of the mountains. One of the peaks still wore a cap of snow, which looked silver rather than white against the deep blue of the sky. Flocks of birds were performing a sort of scarf dance overhead. Fima, for no particular reason, suddenly said something that made all the girls laugh:

"This," he said, "is where the dog is buried."

Ilia said: "I feel dreamier than in a dream and more awake than waking. I can't explain it."

Liat said: "It's the light. That's all."

And Yael: "Who's thirsty? Let's go down to the water."

Less than a month after the conclusion of this trip Fima went to Yavne'el to look for the third girl. He discovered that Yael Levin was a graduate of the aeronautical engineering department of Haifa Technion and worked in a top-secret air force installation in the hills west of Jerusalem. After a few meetings he found that her presence made him feel restful, while his presence amused her in her placid way. When he asked her, hesitantly, whether she thought they were suited to each other, she replied, "I quite like the way you talk." He thought this indicated a hint of affection. Which he treasured. Next he sought out Liat Sirkin and sat with her for half an hour in a little seaside café, simply to make certain he had not made her pregnant. But afterward he allowed himself to sleep with her again in a cheap hotel in Bat Yam, so he wasn't certain anymore. In May he invited all three girls to Jerusalem to meet his father. The old man charmed Ilia with his old-style courtesy, entertained Liat with anecdotes and fables with morals, but he preferred Yael, who showed, he thought, "signs of depth." Fima agreed with him, although he was not entirely sure he understood what the signs were. He continued to go out with her, until one day she said to him: "Look at your shirt, half inside your trousers and half outside. Wait. I'll fix it for you."