Fima (35 page)

"That's enough. Drop it."

Like someone scratching at a sore, unable to stop even though he knew he should.

In Rabbenu Gershom Street he passed three short, plump women who looked so alike that Fima supposed they were sisters, or perhaps a mother with her daughters. He eyed them with an intrigued gaze. They were lush, generously fleshed women, as curvaceous as slave girls in a painting of an Oriental seraglio. His imagination pictured their expansive, abundant nakedness, then their submissive, obedient surrender, like waitresses dishing out warm helpings to a queue of starving men without taking the trouble to distinguish the recipients one from another, bestowing the gift of their bodies indifferently, out of habit, and with a touch of boredom. The boredom and indifference seemed far more sexual and provocative to Fima at that moment than all the sensual excitement in the world. A moment later came a wave of shame that extinguished his desire. Why had he forgone Yacl's body that morning? If he had only invested a little more cunning and patience, if he had only persevered, surely she would have given in. Without desire, but so what? Was it a question of desire?

But, then, what was it a question of?

The three women disappeared around the corner, but Fima stayed rooted to the spot, staring blankly, excited and ashamed. Surely the truth was that this morning he had not craved Yael's emaciated body. Rather, he had longed vaguely for a different kind of union, not a carnal union, nor the union of child and mother, perhaps no union at all, something that Fima could not even name, but nevertheless he felt that this thing, elusive as it was and too fine to be defined, if he could only be blessed with it once, just once, might change his life for the better.

On second thought, the words "change his life for the better" seemed to suit a muddled, acne-ridden adolescent rather than a man who was capable of leading a nation out of crisis and onto the road to peace.

Later, Fima lingered outside a tiny shoeshop which was also a cobbler's, to inhale the smell of caoutchouc, the intoxicating cobbler's glue. And meanwhile he caught a snatch of conversation between a middle-aged religious man, who looked like the bursar of a charitable foundation or a minor synagogue functionary, and an overweight, shabby, unshaven reservist in ill-fitting fatigues.

The soldier said:

"The thing with them is, the boy always looks after the granny. He doesn't budge from her side all day long. Every thirty seconds he checks to make sure she hasn't walked off again, Heaven forbid! Her head's gone to pieces, but she's still got the use of her legs, and take it from me, she's as quick as a cat on them."

The older man, the bursar, remarked sadly:

"The mind inside the head looks like a piece of cheese. Sort of yellowy-white, with wrinkles. They showed it on the TV. And when your memory goes, the scientists have discovered that it's because of the dirt. It's little worms that get inside and nibble at the cheese. Till it's all rotten. You can even get a whiff of it sometimes."

The soldier corrected him knowledgeably:

"It's not worms, its bactaria. The size of a grain of sand. You can hardly see them even with a magnifying glass, and there are hundreds of them born every hour."

Fima went on his way, thinking over what he had heard. For a moment his nostrils could almost catch the smell of rotting cheese. Then he lingered in the doorway of a greengrocer's. Crates of aubergines, onions, lettuces, tangerines, and oranges were laid out on the pavement. Around them hovered flies and one or two wasps. It would be good to go for a walk down these lanes with Dimi someday. He could feel the warmth of the boy's fingers in his empty hand. And he tried to imagine what sort of intelligent remarks he would hear from the pensive Challenger when they strolled here together, in what new light he would be made to see all these sights. Dimi would certainly notice aspects that were hidden from him, because he lacked the boy's powers of observation. Who did Dimi get them from? Teddy and Yael were always concentrating on the tasks in front of them, whereas Baruch was absorbed in his anecdotes and morals. Maybe the best plan of action would be to move in with them. He could begin, for instance, with a temporary invasion, a bridgehead, using the painters as an excuse, assuring the family at first that it was only for a day or two, a week at the most, he wouldn't be a nuisance, he'd gladly sleep on a mattress in the utility room off the kitchen balcony. As soon as he arrived, he'd start cooking for them, washing up, ironing, looking after Dimi while they were out, helping him with his homework, washing Yael's underwear, cleaning Teddy's pipe for him; alter all, they were out of the house a good deal, whereas he was a man of leisure. After a few days they'd get used to the arrangement. They would appreciate its advantages. They would come to be dependent on Fima's domestic services. They wouldn't be able to manage without him. It might well be Ted, a broad-minded, unprejudiced individual, a clear-thinking scientist, who would see the all-around benefits. Dimi would no longer be left to roam alone outside all day, relying on the kindness of the neighbors, at the mercy of their bullying children, or condemned to solitary confinement in front of the computer screen. Ted himself would be relieved of the burden of living constantly tête-à-tête with Yael, and so he also would be liberated a bit. As for Yael, it was hard to predict: She might accept the new arrangement with an indifferent shrug of the shoulders, she might just give one of her occasional silent laughs, or she might walk out and go back to Pasadena, leaving Dimi to Ted and me. This last possibility bathed Fima's mind in a supernal glow of light. It seemed really exciting: a commune, an urban kibbutz, three male friends devoted to one another, full of consideration, tied to each other by bonds of affection and mutual attentiveness.

The whole neighborhood was pullulating with feverish preparations for the Sabbath. Housewives carried overflowing shopping baskets, traders hoarsely cried their wares, a battered pickup with one rear light shattered like a black eye maneuvered backward and forward four or five times until miraculously it managed to squeeze into a parking spot on the pavement between two equally battered trucks. Fima rejoiced at this success, as though it held a hint of an opportunity that lay in store for him too.

A pale East European with sloping shoulders and protruding eyes, who looked as though he suffered from ulcers if not a terminal illness, panted heavily as he pushed a squeaking baby carriage laden with provisions in paper or plastic bags and a whole platoon of soft drinks up the hill. On top of the pile was an evening paper whose pages fluttered in the breeze. Fima squinted at the headlines as he reached out and carefully tucked the paper in among the bottles, so it wouldn't blow away.

The old man merely said, in Yiddish:

"Nu.
Shoin
."

A tawny dog sidled up obsequiously with its tail between its legs, timidly sniffed the trouser cuffs of an apprehensive Fima, found nothing special, and moved away with lowered snout. Was it possible, Fima mused, that this dog was a son of a son of a daughter of a daughter of the notorious Balak, who went mad here eighty years ago and terrorized these very streets before dying in agony?

In a front yard he saw the remains of a castle built by children out of crates and broken packing boxes. Then, on the wall of a synagogue named Redemption of Zion, Lesser Sanctuary of the Meshed Community were several graffiti that Fima stopped to inspect. "Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy." Fima thought he detected a minor mistake in the Hebrew, although he was chagrined to find he was not entirely certain. "Kahana's the master—Labur's a disaster." "For slanderers be there no hope." Be there? May there be? Let there be? Again, he was not certain, and decided to check later, when he got home. "Shulamit Allony scrues with Arafat." "Remember thou art but dust." Fima agreed with this last motto and even nodded his head. "Rachel Babaioff is a whore." To the left of this inscription Fima was pained to read: "Peace Now—pay later." But, then, he had always known that it was essential to plow deep. And: "An eye for an eye for an," which made Fima smile and wonder what the poet had meant. A different hand had written: "Traitor Malmilian—souled his mother!" Fima, while realizing that the author had meant to write "sold," nonetheless found the error charming. As though a poetic inspiration had guided the writer's hand to produce something he could not have been aware of.

Across the street from the Redemption of Zion stood a small shop, hardly more than a hole in the wall, selling stationery. The shop window was dotted with dead flies and still marked with the traces of crisscrossed tape put up against explosions, a souvenir of one of our vainly won wars. In the small window were displayed various types of dusty notebooks, exercise books whose covers were curling with age, a faded photograph of Moshe Dayan in lieutenant general's uniform in front of the Wailing Wall, which had also not been spared by the flies, plus compasses, rulers, and cheap plastic pencil cases, some of which bore pictures of wrinkled Ashkenazi rabbis or Sephardi Torah sages in ornate robes. In the midst of all this Fima's eye fell on a thick exercise book in a gray cardboard binding, containing several hundred pages, the sort that writers and thinkers of earlier generations must have used. He felt a sudden longing for his own desk, and a profound resentment toward the painters who were threatening his routine.

In three or four hours from now the siren would be wailing here to herald the advent of the Sabbath. The bustle of the streets would subside. A beautiful, gentle stillness, the silence of pines and stones and iron shutters, would spill down from the slopes of the hills surrounding the city and settle on the whole of Jerusalem. Men and boys in seemly festive attire, carrying embroidered tallith bags, would walk calmly to evening prayers at the innumerable little synagogues dotted around these narrow streets. The housewives would light candles, and fathers would chant the blessings in a pleasant Oriental melody. Families would gather together around the dinner table: poor, hard-working people who placed their trust in the observance of the Commandments and did not delve into things too deep for them, people who hoped for the best, who knew what they must do, and who were ever-confident that the powers that be also knew what to do and would act wisely. Greengrocers, shopkeepers, hawkers and peddlers, apprentices, lowly clerks in the municipality and the civil service, petty traders, post office workers, salesmen, craftsmen. Fima tried to picture the weekday routine of a district like this and the enchantment of Sabbaths and festivals. Even though he did not forget that the residents here no doubt earned their meager crusts with the sweat of their brow and were burdened with debts, worries about making ends meet, and mortgages, nevertheless he felt that they lived decent, truthful, restful lives, with a quiet joy that he had never known and never would, to his dying day. He suddenly longed to be sitting in his own room, or rather perhaps in the elegant salon in his father's flat in Rehavia, surrounded by the lacquered furniture, the oriental rugs, the Central European candelabra, and books and fine china and glass, concentrating at last on what really mattered. But what was it that really mattered? In God's name, what was it?

Perhaps it was this: to sweep away at a single stroke, starting today, from the onset of this Sabbath, the empty talk, the wastefulness, the lies that buried his life. He was ready to accept his misery humbly, to reconcile himself finally to the solitude he had brought on himself, to the very end, with no right of appeal. From now on he would live in silence, he would cut himself off, he would sever his repugnant links with all the do-gooding women who flocked around him in his flat, in his life, and he would stop pestering Tsvi and Uri and the rest of the group with casuistic sophistry. He would love Yael from a distance, without being a nuisance. He might not even bother to have his telephone repaired: from now on let it too be silent. Let it stop boasting and lying.

And what about Dimi?

He would dedicate his book to him. Because, starting next week, he would spend five or six hours before work in the reading room of the National Library. He would systematically recheck all the extant sources, including the most obscure and esoteric ones, and in a few years' time he would be in a position to write an objective and dispassionate history of the Rise and Fall of the Zionist Dream. Or perhaps he would write instead a sort of whimsical, half-crazy novel about the life, death, and resurrection of Judas Iscariot, based on himself.

But better not to write. Better to say good-bye now and forevermore to the papers, the radio, the television. At most he would listen to classical music programs. Every morning, summer and winter alike, he would get up at daybreak and walk for an hour in the olive grove in the wadi below his flat. Then he would have a leisurely breakfast: vegetables, fruit, and a single slice of black bread with no jam. He would shave—no, why should he shave; he'd grow a shaggy beard—and sit and read and think. After work every evening he would devote another hour or two to strolling around the city. He would get to know Jerusalem systematically. He would gradually uncover its hidden treasures. He would explore every alley, every back yard, every recess; he would find out what was hiding behind every stone wall. He would not accept another penny from his demented father. And in the evening he would stand alone at the window listening to his inner voice which up to now he had always tried to silence with inanities and buffoonery. He would learn a lesson from Yael's senile father, the veteran pioneer Naftali Tsvi Levin, who sat staring at the wall for whole days, answering every remark with the question "In what sense?" Not a bad question, in fact. Although on second thought even this question could be dispensed with, the term "sense" being itself devoid of meaning.

The snows of yesteryear.

Azoy
.

Fima remembered with disgust how the previous Friday, exactly a week ago, at Shula and Tsvi Kropotkin's the conversation had turned after midnight to the Russian component, which had had such a strong influence on various currents of Zionism. Tsvika made ironic fun of the naive Tolstoyism of A. D. Gordon and his disciples, and Uri Gefen recalled how once the country had been full of fans of Stalin and songs about Budyonny's cavalry. Whereupon Fima stood up, stooped slightly, and had the whole room doubled up with laughter when he began declaiming in liquid, orotund tones a typical passage from an early translation of Russian literature: