Fima (31 page)

"No problem," said Pizanti expansively. "We always get up at sixfifteen anyway. If you need to make phone call, just feel free. On the house. If you like, I come down and check your contacts. Maybe something come loose."

"I was thinking," Fima said, appalled at the words he heard coming out of his own mouth, "of calling a lady friend of mine who may have been waiting for me since last night. Two lady friends, actually. But right now I think it wouldn't be such a bad thing to let them wait. It's not urgent. I'm sorry I disturbed you."

As he was on the point of leaving, Mrs. Pizanti said hesitantly:

"It could be something fell down outside from the wind. Some washtub or something. But with us everything is fine."

These words convinced Fima that he was being lied to. But he forgave his neighbors, because he had no reason to expect them to tell him about the fight they must have been having, and also because he himself had not told the truth about calling his girlfriends. When he was back in his flat, he said:

"What a fool you are."

But he forgave himself too, because he had meant well.

He did his exercises in front of the mirror for ten minutes or so, shaved, dressed, combed his hair vaguely, boiled some water in the new electric kettle, made his bed, and for once managed all these activities without mishap. He hit her, he thought, he may even have banged her head against the wall; he might have killed her; who knows, he might well do it one of these days, perhaps this very morning. What Hitler did to us didn't finish in 1945; it still goes on, it seems it always will. Dark things go on behind every door. Acts of cruelty and desperation. Underneath this whole state, hidden insanity is simmering. Three times a week our long arm catches the murderers in their dens. We can't get to sleep before we have inflicted a little pogrom on the Cossacks. Every morning we kidnap Eichmann and every evening we nip Hitler in the bud. In basketball we defeat Chmielnicki and in Eurovision we avenge Kishinev. But what right do I have to interfere? I'd be happy to gallop up on a white charger and rescue that Pizanti woman, or the pair of them, or the whole state, if only I knew how. If only I had some idea where to start. There's Baruch with his Trotsky goatee and his carved walking stick; he does his bit to put the world straight by handing out donations and grants, whereas all I ever do is sign petitions. Maybe I should have persuaded that policeman last night to let me in to see Shamir? For a heart-to-heart chat. Or introduced Shamir to my taxi driver?

It occurred to him that he ought to sit down and compose a short but heartfelt appeal to the hawkish right. To suggest to them, in
Ha'arets
, the broad outline of a partial national consensus. A sort of new deal between the moderates and the nonmessianic hawkish element, which might be willing despite everything to swallow a return of some of the Territories were it not for what it sees as the left's tendency to uncontrolled appeasement. The taxi driver was right: Our worst mistake over the past twenty years has been not to take seriously the sensibilities of Pizanti and his wife and hundreds of thousands of other Israelis like them, in whom the Arabs stir genuine feelings of anger, fear, and suspicion. Such feelings surely deserve not contempt but a gradual rational effort to allay them by means of intelligent argument. Instead of reasoning with them, we emptied a chamberpot full of patronizing ridicule on them. It would make sense therefore to try to draw up an agreement that would define the precise limits of our, the moderates', willingness to make concessions to the Arabs. So that they don't imagine, like Baruch, that we arc, so to speak, advertising a going-out-of-business sale. So that they know what we, the left, are even prepared to go to war for again, if it turns out that the Arab side is reneging or taking us for a ride. In that way, we may be able to mollify some of the hawks and bring about a thaw.

The word "thaw" reminded him that he had forgotten to light the heater. Bending down, he was relieved to discover that there was enough kerosene left. After lighting the heater, he felt the need to consult Tsvi Kropotkin before he sat down to compose his appeal. In his enthusiasm he did not care if he disturbed Tsvi in the middle of shaving again, because he felt his new idea was potentially fruitful and beneficial and indeed very urgent. But once again the telephone was silent. Fima thought the silence was, if anything, less deep than last night. A sort of intermittent rumbling sound, like the grinding of teeth, was almost audible. A moaning from the depths. Fima diagnosed faint signs of life, a first indication of recovery. He felt sure the instrument was not dead but merely in a very deep coma, and that now, even if it had not recovered consciousness, it was beginning to make a feeble response, a faint groan of pain, a slight pulse giving grounds for hope. Even taking into account the fact that the fridge had just started rumbling in the kitchen. It was therefore possible that the hope was not premature.

Even the expression "hawkish element" suddenly struck him as repugnant: it was wrong to characterize human beings as "elements." Besides which, he thought it was ridiculous to put the right-wing thinkers on the psychiatrist's couch: it was not as if our camp was the embodiment of sanity. We too are troubled by despair, frustration, and rage. We too are caught in an emotional tangle, no less than our opponents. No less than the Arabs. Besides which, the expression "our camp" is utterly ridiculous. What does "our camp" mean? The whole country is a front line, the whole nation an army. Everything is divided into camps. The forces of peace. The battalion of moderation. The shock troops of coexistence. The sentries of disarmament. The commando of the brotherhood of nations. The spearhead of reconciliation.

Instead of writing the appeal, Fima went and stood at the window to put his ideas in order. He watched the winter light spread like a noble material over the hilltops and slopes. He knew and loved the idea of "noble metals," although he had no idea which they were. Once, in his father's flat in Rehavia, Baruch and Dimi tried to inflict an elementary chemistry lesson on him. Fima, like a stubborn child, defended himself with wisecracks and wordplay until Dimi said, "Forget it, Granpa; it's not for him." And the two of them embarked without him into the realm of acid and alkali, which Fima loathed on account of his heartburn.

The light kissed the ridges, overflowed into the valleys, awakening in each tree and rock its dormant radiant quality that had been buried all these days under layers of gray, inanimate routine. As if here in Jerusalem thousands of years ago the earth had lost its power to renew itself from within. As if only the gracious touch of this enchanted light could restore to things, however ephemerally, the primordiality that had been eclipsed in days of old. Will Your Worship condescend to favor me with a slight nod of the head if I go down on my knees and offer my humble prayers of gratitude? Is there something that Your Worship wishes me to do? Is Your Worship interested in us at all? Why did you put us here? Why did you choose us? Why did you choose Jerusalem? Is Your Worship still listening? Is Your Worship smiling?

The ancient Aramaic phrases, such as "the days of old," "not of this world," "the concealed side," filled Fima with a sense of mystery and awe. For a moment he asked himself if it was not possible after all that the light and the mud, the glowworms in the almond tree and the radiant sky, the arid land extending eastward from here to Mesopotamia and southward to Bab el-Mandeb at the tip of the Arabian Peninsula, and indeed his shabby flat and his aging body and even his broken telephone, were all nothing but different expressions of the same being, a being condemned to be broken into countless flawed, perishable embodiments, even though in itself it was whole and eternal and one. Only on a winter morning like this, under the nuptial veil of limpid light, which is perhaps what is meant by the ancient Aramaic phrase "supernal radiance," does the earth along with your watching eyes recover the thrill of that primordial touch. And everything returns to its state of original innocence. As on the day of creation. And for an instant the constant murky cloak of dreariness and deceit is removed.

And so Fima's thoughts arrived at the hackneyed concept of "the heavenly Jerusalem," to which he gave his private interpretation, valid solely for what he felt at that particular moment. He mused that there were times when the state of sleeping seemed less tainted with falsehood than the state of waking, and times when it was the other way around, and that ultimate wakefulness was the most longed-for ideal. He now reached the thought that it might be a matter of three states and not two: sleeping, waking, and this light that had been flooding him both from without and within ever since the start of this morning. For want of a suitable name he described the light to himself as the Third State. And he felt that it was not only a matter of the pure light on the hills but of the light truly flowing out of the hills and out of himself too, and that it was in the commingling of these rays of light that the Third State came into being, equidistant from complete waking and from the deepest slumber and yet distinct from both.

There is no more tragic loss in the whole world, he thought, than missing the Third State. It happens because of the news on the radio, because of business, because of hollow desires and the pursuit of vanities and trivia. All suffering, Fima said to himself, everything that is ridiculous or obscene, is purely the consequence of missing the Third State, or of that vague nagging feeling that reminds us from time to time that there is, outside and inside, almost within reach, something fundamental that you always seem on the way to yet you always lose your way to. You are called, and you forget to go. You are spoken to, and you don't hear. A door is opened, and you leave too late because you choose to satisfy some craving or other. "The sea of silence casts up secrets," but you were preoccupied with trivial arrangements. You preferred to try to make an impression on someone, who himself missed it because he wanted to make an impression on someone else, who also ... and so on, and so forth. Unto dust. Again and again you rejected what exists in favor of what does not, never did, and cannot. Gad Eitan was right when he said that wastefulness runs riot here. His wife was right to get away while she could. The order of priorities, Fima said to himself sadly and half aloud, is all wrong. What a pity, for instance, that Tsvi Kropotkin, such a hard-working man, should have spent three years chasing after the details of the Catholic church's attitude to the voyages of Magellan and Columbus, like someone sorting out the buttons of clothes that have long since become rags. Or Uri Gefen, running from one affair to the next, wide awake but with his heart asleep.

With that, Fima decided to stop standing idly at the window and to start getting the place ready for the painters, who were coming after the weekend. The pictures would have to come down off the walls. Also the map of Israel on which he had once penciled reasonable compromise borders. All the furniture would have to be moved into the middle of the room and covered with plastic sheeting. The books would have to be put away. So would all the dishes and the pots and pans. Why not take advantage of the opportunity to get rid of the piles of old newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, and newsletters? The bookcases would have to be dismantled, and that would mean enlisting Uri's help. Is it tonight he's coming back? Or tomorrow? Or the day after? And then Nina could deliver her detailed report of how she tried not once but twice to give me my regular service and how she found the tap blocked. Perhaps Shula Kropotkin could be brought in as reinforcement to help with putting all the kitchen things away. Possibly Annette Tadmor would be glad to lend a hand. And the Pizantis also expressed a readiness to help, provided they didn't murder each other first. And Teddy would willingly come to take down the curtains and the wall lights. Maybe he'd bring Dimi with him. The old man was quite right: it's well over twenty years since this den was last spruced up. The ceiling's filthy, grubby from the kerosene heater. There are cobwebs in the corners. There's mold in the bathroom. The ceramic dies are cracked. The plaster is peeling. There are patches of mildew. There's a dank, sweaty smell here the whole year, an old bachelor's smell. It's not only the bottle of worms on the balcony that smells bad. You've grown so used to it that you don't even care.

Surely habit is the root of all evil. It's precisely what Pascal was thinking of when he wrote about the death of the soul.

In a comer of his desk Fima found a green advertisement announcing huge discounts at the local supermarket. On a comer of this notice he scribbled the words:

Habit is the beginning of death. Habits are a fifth column.

And underneath:

Routine = lies.

Habituation—deterioration—dilapidation.

His intention was to remind himself to improve and develop these thoughts over the weekend. And since he had remembered that tomorrow was Saturday, he deduced that today was Friday, from which he inferred that he ought to do some shopping. But Friday was his free day, the clinic was closed, so why should he hurry? Why start pushing furniture around at seven in the morning? Best wait for the reinforcements to arrive. There was no urgency. Even though when he glanced at his watch, he saw that it was not seven o'clock but twenty past eight. Time to have a word or two with Tsvika, who would have finished his shaving ritual by now.

Had there been any further improvement in the condition of the telephone? Fima tried again. He could hear a faint sound, but it had not yet rallied to the point of being a dial tone. Despite which, he dialed Yael's number. And concluded that he ought to wait for the patient to make a full recovery, because his impatient attempts might delay the process. Or was Yael's phone also out of order? Was the whole city cut off? Could it be a strike? Sabotage? Sanctions? Had the exchange been blown up in the night? Had a right-wing terrorist group seized all the means of communication and the other centers of power? Had there been a Syrian missile attack? Unless Ted Tobias was leaning on the phone again and preventing Yael from picking it up. Fima felt disgusted, not with Ted but with his own word games. He twisted up the supermarket advertisement and threw it at the wastepaper basket. He missed, but could not be bothered to crawl under the desk to look for it. No point. The whole place was going to be turned upside down to prepare for the painters.