Fima (33 page)

With her back to him, folding dish towels and putting them away one by one in a drawer, Yael replied quietly:

"Effy, once and for all: You're not Dimi's father. Now drink up and go. I have an appointment at the hairdresser's. The child which you could have had twenty-five years ago I killed because you didn't want it. So don't start now. I sometimes feel as if I've never quite waked up from that anesthetic. And now you come here to torment me. I'm telling you, if Teddy wasn't such a tolerant man, such a walking box as you call him, you'd have been thrown out of this flat a long time ago. There's nothing for you here. Especially after what you did the other night. It's hard enough here even without you. You're a difficult man, Efraim. Difficult and also boring. And I'm still not convinced you're not one of the main causes of Dimi's confusion. Slowly but surely you're driving that child mad."

After a moment she added:

"And it's hard to know if it's some ruse of yours or just idle chatter. You keep talking, talking all the time: maybe you talk so much, you've really convinced yourself that you have feelings. That you're in love. That you're partly Dimi's father. All sorts of half-baked delusions like that. Why am I talking to you about feelings, about love? You don't even know what the words mean. Once, when you read books instead of newspapers, you must have read something about love and unhappiness, and ever since then you've been all around Jerusalem preaching on the subject. I nearly said just now that you love only yourself, but even that isn't true. You don't even love yourself. You don't love anything. Except maybe winning arguments. Never mind. Get your coat on. I'm late because of you."

"Will you let me wait for you here? I'll wait patiently. Till this evening if necessary."

"Hoping that Teddy will get back before me? And find you asleep on our bed again, under my blanket?"

"I promise," Fima whispered, "that this time I'll behave myself."

And as though to prove it, he jumped up and poured his coffee into the sink. He had not touched it, although he had absent-mindedly eaten all the butter biscuits. Noticing that the sink was full of dirty dishes and pans, he rolled up one of his sleeves and turned on the tap. Eagerly he waited for the water to run hot. Even when Yael said, "You're crazy, Efraim, leave it, we'll put it all in the machine after lunch," he took no notice but started washing enthusiastically and laying the soapy dishes out on the marble drainboard. "It relaxes me," he said. "I'll be finished in a few minutes, once the water finally makes up its mind to get hot. I'll be glad to spare you the need to run the dishwasher; and the dishes will come out much cleaner; and meanwhile we can go on talking a little longer. Which is the cold water and which is the hot? Where are we supposed to be, America? Everything's topsy-turvy here. But if you've really got to go, that's fine with me. You just go, Yacl, and come back later. I'll promise to restrict myself to the kitchen. I won't wander around the flat, I won't even use the toilet. Shall I polish the silver for you? Or clean out the fridge? I'll stay right here and wait, no matter how long you're gone. Like a male Solveig. I've got this book about whale hunters in Alaska, and it talks about this custom ... Never mind. Don't worry about me, Yael, I don't mind waiting all day. Instead of worrying about me, you ought to worry about Dimi. To use Ted's amusing expression, you could say that Dimi is down. To my mind, the first thing we ought to do is find a totally different social setting for him. Maybe a boarding school for gifted children? Or the other way around, tame one or two of the neighbors' kids..."

Suddenly, as though translating her revulsion into fury, Yael snatched the soapy sponge and the frying pan he was holding.

"That's it. I've had enough of this farce. I'm fed up with the lot of you. Coming in here, washing the dishes, trying to make me feel sorry for you all the time. I can't feel sorry for you. I don't want to be a mother to you all. That child, he's always scheming for something, though I really don't know what he's missing in life, what we haven't bought him, a video, an Atari, a compact disc player, a trip to America every year, and next week he's even getting his own private TV in his room. You'd think we're bringing up a prince here. And then you come around all the time, driving him crazy and making me feel guilty, asking what sort of parents we are, and filling Dimi's head with the same sick birds that are fluttering inside yours. I've had it up to here. Don't come here anymore, Fima. You pretend you're living alone, but you're always clinging to other people. And I'm just the opposite; everybody
clings to me, when the only thing I want really is to be alone. Go away now, Efraim. I have nothing to give to you or to anyone. And I wouldn't even if I did. Why should I? I don't owe anyone anything. And I have no claims on anyone. Teddy is always a hundred percent okay. Never just ninety-nine. He's like a year-planner that tells you what you have to do, and when you've done it, you wipe it out and write more things to do. This morning he offered to rewire the flat to a three-phase system as a birthday present for me. Have you ever heard of a husband giving his wife a three-phase system for her birthday? And Dimi waters the houseplants morning and evening, morning and evening till they die, and Teddy buys new ones, and they get drowned too. Dimi can even handle the vacuum cleaner; once Teddy showed him how. He vacuums everything, even the pictures and mirrors. Even our feet. There's no stopping him. You remember my father, dear devoted comrade Naftali Tsvi Levin, founding member of the historic settlement of Yavne'el? He's an old pioneer now, he's eighty-three and completely gaga. He sits in the old people's home in Afula staring at the wall all day, and if ever you ask him a question, like how are you feeling, what's new, what do you need, who are you, who am I, where does it hurt, he invariably replies with the same three-word question: 'In what sense?' He says it with a Yiddish lilt. Those three words are all he has left from the Bible, the Talmud, the Midrash, the Hasidic tales, the Haskalah, Bialik, and Buber, and all the other Jewish sources he knew by heart once. I'm telling you, Efraim, soon I too will have only three words left. Not 'In what sense?' but 'Leave me alone.' Leave me alone, Efraim. I'm not your mother. 1 have a project that's been dragging on for years now because a whole bunch of toddlers have been tugging at my sleeves to wipe their noses. Once, when I was little, my father the pioneer told me to remember that men are really the weaker sex. It was a joke of his. Well, shall I tell you something, now that I've missed my hairdresser's appointment because of you? If I knew then what I know now, I'd have joined a nunnery. Or married a jet engine. I'd have passed on the weaker sex, with great pleasure. Give them a finger, they want your whole hand. Give them your whole hand, they won't even want the finger anymore. Just sit quietly over there, make the coffee, and don't interrupt. Don't draw attention to yourself. Do the washing and the ironing, provide sex, and shut up. Give them a rest from you, and after a week they're crawling back on all fours. What exactly did you want from me today, Efraim? A little early-morning screw in memory of the good old days? The fact is you don't even want
that
, any of you. Ten percent lust and ninety percent playacting. You turn up here when you imagine Teddy's out, loaded with flowers and fine phrases, an expert at comforting orphans and widows, hoping that this time I'll finally take pity on you and go to bed with you for a quarter of an hour. As a bribe to make you go away. I slept with you for five years, and all you ever wanted, ninety percent of the time, was to get it over with, empty yourself, wipe up, turn on the light, and continue reading your newspaper. Go now, Efraim. I'm a woman of forty-nine, and you're no spring chicken yourself. That story's over. There's no replay. I got a child by you and you didn't want it. So, like a good girl, I murdered it so as not to mess up your poetic destiny. Why do you keep coming back to mess me up, and everyone else too? What more do you want from me? Is it my fault you squandered everything you had, and everything you might have had, and what you found in Greece? Is it my fault that life goes by and time gnaws at everything? Is it my fault that we all die a little every day? What more do you want from me?"

Fima stood up, chastened and humble, muttered an apology, started to look for his coat, and suddenly said shyly:

"It's February, Yael: it'll be your birthday soon. I've forgotten. Perhaps you've already had it? I don't remember the date. I don't even have a three-phase system to give you."

"It's Friday, February 16, 1989. The time is 11:10
A.M.
So what?"

"You said we all want something from you and you have nothing more to give."

"Surprise, surprise: so you've managed to take in half a sentence after all."

"But the fact is, I don't want anything from you, Yael. On the contrary, I want to find something that will give you a little pleasure."

"You have nothing to give. Your hands are empty. In any case, don't you worry about my pleasure. It so happens I have a real feast every day, or nearly every day. At work, at my drawing board, or in the wind tunnel. That's my life. That's the only place where I really exist a little. Maybe you ought to start doing something, Efraim. That's the whole of your problem: you don't do anything. You just read the papers and get worked up. Why don't you give private lessons, volunteer for civil defense, do some translating, give lectures to soldiers about the meaning of Jewish ethics."

"Somebody, I think it was Schopenhauer, wrote that the intellect divides everything up, whereas intuition restores the oneness that was lost. But I'm telling you, Yael, that our farce doesn't divide into two but, as Rabin always says, into three. Schopenhauer and the rest of them ignore the Third State. Wait, don't interrupt. Just give me two minutes to explain it to you."

But then he fell silent, even though this time Yael had not interrupted him.

He said:

"I'll give you everything I have. I know it's not much."

"You have nothing, Effy. Just the scraps you shnorr from the rest of us."

"Will you come back to me? You and Dimi? We can go to Greece."

"And live on nectar and ambrosia?"

"I'll get a job. I'll work as a salesman for my father's firm. A night watchman. A waiter even."

"Sure, a waiter. You'll drop everything."

"Or else we could go and live in Yavne'el, the three of us. On your parents' old farm. We can grow flowers in hothouses, like your sister and her husband. And we'll get the fruit orchard going again. Baruch will give us some money, and little by little we'll bring the ruins back to life. We'll have a model farm. During the day Dimi and I will look after the livestock. We'll build a study for you with computers, a drawing board. And a wind tunnel, if you'll explain what that is. In the evening, toward sunset, we'll go and see to the orchard together. The three of us. As it begins to get dark, we'll collect honey from the beehives. If you really want to take Teddy with you, I won't object. We'll have a little commune. We'll live without lies, and without the faintest shadow of spite. You'll see: Dimi will develop and really start to flourish. And you and I..."

"Yes, of course, you'll get up at half past four every morning, with your boots and your mattock and your hoe, a song in your heart and a plant in your hand, to drain the swamps and conquer the wasteland single-handed."

"Don't poke fun, Yael. I admit I have to learn from scratch how to love you. So okay, little by little I'll learn. You'll see."

"Of course you will. You'll take a correspondence course. Or study at the Open University."

"You'll teach me."

With sudden, timid courage he added:

"You know very well that what you said earlier isn't the whole truth. You didn't want the baby cither. You didn't even want Dimi. I'm sorry I said that. I didn't mean it. It just slipped out. But I want Dimi. I love him more than my own life."

She stood over Fima as he slumped on his bench, stood in her worn corduroy trousers and threadbare red sweater, as though she was straining with all her might not to hit his plump face. Her eyes were dry and flashing, and her face was wrinkled and old, as if it were not Yael but her mother who was bending over him, smelling of black bread and olives and plain toilet soap. And she said with wonder, with a strange taut smile, speaking not to him and not to herself but into space:

"It was also in the winter. It was February then too. Two days after my birthday. In 1963. When you and Uri were completely absorbed in the Lavon affair. The almond tree behind our kitchen in Kiryat Yovel had started to flower. And the sky was just like today, perfectly clear and blue. That morning there was a program of Shoshana Damari songs on the radio. And I went in a rattling old taxi to that Russian
gynecologist in the Street of the Prophets, who said I reminded him of Giulietta Masina. Two and a half hours later I went home, as fate would have it in the same taxi with the little photograph of Princess Grace of Monaco over the driver's head, and that was that. I remember I closed the shutters and drew the curtains and lay down in bed listening to a Schubert impromptu on the radio, followed by a lecture about Tibet and the Dalai Lama, and I didn't get up till evening, and by then it had started raining again. You had gone off early in the morning with Tsvi to a one-day history conference at Tel Aviv University. It's true you offered to skip it and come with me. And it's true I said, For Heaven's sake, it's no worse than having a wisdom tooth out. And in the evening you came home all glowing with excitement, because you had managed to catch Professor Talmon out in some minor contradiction. We murdered it, and we said nothing. To this day I don't want to know what they do with them. Smaller than a day-old chick. Do they flush them down the toilet? We both murdered it. Only you didn't want to hear when or where or how. All you wanted to hear from me was that it was all over and done with. But what you really wanted to tell me was about how you'd made the great Talmon stand there on the dais in confusion like a first-year student flunking an oral. And that same evening you rushed to Tsvika's, because the two of you hadn't had time on the bus back to Jerusalem to finish your argument about the implications of the Lavon affair. He could have been a boy of twenty-six by now. He could have been a father himself, with a child or two of his own. The eldest about Dimi's age. And you and I would go into town to buy an aquarium and some tropical fish for the grandchildren. Where do you think the drains of Jerusalem empty out? Into the Mediterranean, via Nahal Shorek? And the sea reaches Greece, and there the king of Ithaca's daughter might have picked him out of the waves. Now he's a curly-haired youth sitting and playing the lyre in the moonlight on the water's edge in Ithaca. I believe Talmon died a few years ago. Or was that Prawer? And didn't Giulietta Masina also die? I'll make some more coffee. I've missed the hairdresser now. It wouldn't do you any harm to have a haircut. Not that it would do you much good either. Do you still remember Shoshana Damari, at least? A star shines in the sky, / And in the wadi jackals cry? She's completely forgotten now, too."