Fima (39 page)

Fima, as though delivering the final verdict on a dispute that was not of his making, declared:

"And so he did. He wasn't exactly cut off in his prime, after all."

Nina said:

"It was a sheer miracle that we managed to complete the arrangements. Everything's fixed for Sunday. Believe me, it was a mad race against the clock, to get it all done before the Sabbath. This Jerusalem of ours is getting worse than Teheran. You're not angry we didn't wait for you, Fima? You'd simply vanished; that's why I took the liberty of dealing with the formalities. To spare you the headache. I put announcements in Sunday's
Ha'arets
and
Ma'ariv
. Maybe I should have put it in some other papers, but there simply wasn't time. We've arranged the funeral for the day after tomorrow, Sunday, at three o'clock in the afternoon. It turns out that he'd fixed himself up with a plot, not in Sanhedriya, next to your mother, but on the Mount of Olives. Incidentally, he purchased an adjacent plot for you. Right next to him. And he left detailed and precise instructions in his will about the funeral arrangements. He even chose the cantor, a landsman of his. It was a sheer miracle I managed to locate him and catch him on the phone a minute and a half before the Sabbath came in. He even left his own wording for the tombstone. Something with a rhyme. But that can wait till the end of the first month, if not till the anniversary. If a quarter of the people who benefited from his philanthropy come to the funeral, we'll have to allow for at least half a million. Including the mayor and all sorts of rabbis and politicians, not to mention all the brokenhearted widows and divorcées."

Fima waited until she had finished. Only then did he ask quietly:

"You opened the will by yourself?"

"At the office. In the presence of witnesses. We simply thought..."

"Who gave you permission to do that?"

"Quite frankly..."

"Where is it, the will?"

"Here, in my attaché case."

"Give it to me."

"Right now?"

Fima stood up and took the black attaché case out of her hand. He opened it and drew out a brown envelope. Silently he went out and stood alone on the balcony, at the very spot where his parents had stood that Friday evening a thousand years before, looking like a pair of shipwrecked survivors on a desert island. The last light had long since faded. Stillness wafted up from the avenue. The streetlights flickered with an oscillating yellow radiance mixed with drifting patches of mist. The stone buildings stood silent, all shuttered. No sound came from them. As if the present moment had been transformed into a distant memory. A passing gust of wind brought the sound of barking from the Valley of the Cross. The Third State is a grace that can only be achieved by renouncing all desires, by standing under the night sky sans age, sans sex, sans time, sans race, sans everything.

But who is capable of standing thus?

Once, in his childhood, there lived here in Rehavia tiny, exquisitely mannered scholars, like porcelain figurines, puzzled and gentle. It was their custom to greet one another in the street by raising their hats. As though to erase Hitler. As though to conjure up a Germany that had never existed. And since they would rather be thought absent-minded or ridiculous than impolite, they raised their hats even when they were not certain if the person coming toward them was really a friend or acquaintance or merely looked like one.

One day, when Fima was nine, a short time before his mother's death, he was walking down Alfasi Street with his father. Baruch stopped and began a lengthy conversation, in German or perhaps in Czech, with a portly, dapper old man in an old-fashioned suit and a dark bow tie. Eventually the child's patience ran out and he stamped his foot and started tugging at his father's arm. His father hit him and bellowed "
Ty durak, ty smarkatch
." Later he explained to Fima that the other man was a professor, a world-famous scholar. He explained what "world fame" meant and how it was acquired. Fima never forgot that explanation. The expression still afforded him a mixture of awe and contempt. And once, seven or eight years later, at half past six in the morning, he was walking with his father again, in Rashbam Street, when they saw coming toward them, with short, vigorous strides, the prime minister, Ben Gurion, who lived at that time on the comer of Ben Maimon and Ussishkin and liked to start his day with a brisk early-morning walk. Baruch Nomberg raised his hat and said:

"Would you be good enough to spare me a moment of your time, sir?"

Ben Gurion stopped and exclaimed:

"Lupatin! What arc you doing in Jerusalem? Who is guarding Galilee?"

Baruch replied calmly:

"I am not Lupatin, and you, sir, are not the Messiah. Despite what your purblind disciples no doubt whisper in your ear. I advise you not to believe them."

The prime minister said:

"What, you're not Grisha Lupatin? Arc you sure you're not mistaken? You look very like him. So, a case of mistaken identity. In that case, who are you?"

Baruch said:

"I happen to belong to the opposite camp."

"To Lupatin?"

"No, sir, to you. And if I may allow myself the liberty of saying so..."

But Ben Gurion had already begun to stride ahead, and all he said as he went was:

"So, oppose, oppose. But don't be so busy opposing that you fail to raise this charming boy to be a faithful lover of Israel and a defender of his people and his land. All the rest is irrelevant." And so saying, he marched on, followed by the good-looking man whose function was apparently to protect him from being pestered.

Baruch said:

"Genghis Khan!"

And he added:

"Sec for yourself, Efraim, whom Providence has selected to save Israel: the bramble from the parable of Jotham."

Fima, who had been sixteen at the time, smiled in the dark as he recalled how astonished he had been to discover that Ben Gurion was shorter than he was and potbellied, with a huge red face and a dwarf's legs, and a voice as loud and raucous as a fishwife's. What had his father been trying to say to the prime minister? What would he himself say to him now, with hindsight? And who was that Lupatin or Lupatkin who neglected the defense of Galilee?

Was it not possible that the child Yael had not wanted might have grown up to be world famous?

And what about Dimi?

Suddenly Fima had a brainstorm: he realized that it was actually Yael, with her research on jet-propelled vehicles, who was likelier than any of us to achieve what Baruch had never given up dreaming of for him. And he asked himself if he was not himself the bramble from the parable of Jotham. Tsvika, Uri, Teddy, Nina, Yael—they are all fruiting trees, and only you, Mr. Eugene Onegin of Kiryat Yovel, go through life generating foolishness and falsehood. Driveling on and pestering everybody. Arguing with cockroaches and lizards.

Why should he not decide to devote the remainder of his days, starting today, or tomorrow, to smoothing their paths for them? He would shoulder the burden of bringing up the child. He would learn how to cook and do the washing. Every morning he would sharpen all the colored pencils on the drawing board. Every so often he would change the ribbon on the computer. If computers have ribbons. And so, humbly, as the unknown soldier, he would make his own modest contribution to the development of jet propulsion and the acquisition of world fame.

In his childhood, on warm summer evenings in Rehavia, solitary sounds of a piano could be heard through closed shutters. Even the stifling air seemed to mock these sounds. Now they were gone and forgotten. Ben Gurion and Lupatin were dead. The refugee scholars with their Homburgs and bow ties were dead. And between them and Yoezer, we lie and fornicate and murder. What is left? Pine trees and silence. And some battered German tomes with the gold lettering on their spines already fading.

Suddenly Fima had to fight back tears of longing. Not longing for the dead, or for what once existed here and no longer did, but for what might have been and was not, and never would be. There came into his head the words "his place does not know him." But however hard he tried, he could not remember whom he had heard pronounce this terrifying phrase within the past two or three days.

It struck him now as precise and penetrating.

The minarets on the hilltops surrounding Jerusalem, the ruins and the stone walls enclosing secretive convents, topped with sharp broken glass, the heavy iron gates, the wrought-iron grilles, the cellars, the gloomy basements, a brooding, resentful Jerusalem, sunk up to its neck in nightmares of prophets stoned and saviors crucified and redeemers hacked to pieces, surrounded by a string of barren rock-strewn hills, the emptiness of slopes pockmarked with caves and gullies, apostate olive trees that had almost ceased to be trees and joined the realm of the inanimate, solitary stone cottages in the folds of incised valleys, and beyond them the great deserts extending southward to Bab el-Mandeb and eastward to Mesopotamia and northward to Hama and Palmyra, the lands of asp and viper, expanses of chalk and salt, haunt of nomads with herds of black goats and with vengeful knives in the folds of their robes, dark desert tents, and in the midst of all this, Rehavia with its melancholy piano music in tiny rooms at dusk, its frail old scholars, its shelves of German tomes, its good manners, its raised Homburgs, silence between the hours of one and five, crystal chandeliers, exiled lacquered furniture, brocade and leather upholstery, china dinner services, sideboards, the Russian excitability of his father, and Ben Gurion and Lupatin, the monkish halo of light around the desks of dour scholars gathering footnotes on their way to acquiring world fame, and we, following in their footsteps with helpless, hopeless perplexity, Tsvika with Columbus and the church, Ted and Yael and their jet-propelled vehicles, Nina orchestrating the liquidation of her ultrapious sex boutique, Wahrhaftig struggling to defend a civilized enclave in his abortion inferno, Uri roaming the world conquering women and mocking his conquests with his wry humor, Annette and Tamar, the unwanted, and you yourself with your Heart of Christendom and your lizards and your late-night letters to Yitzhak Rabin and the price of violence in a time of moral decline. And Dimi with his slaughtered dog. Where was it all leading? Where did that Chili get lost on her way to the Aryan side?

As though this were not a district of a city but a remote camp of whale hunters who had settled at the world's end, on a godforsaken coast in Alaska, throwing up a few shaky structures and a rickety fence in the boundless waste, among bloodthirsty nomadic tribes, and then they all set off together far out on the gray water in search of a nonexistent whale. And God has forgotten them, as the proprietress of the café across the road said yesterday.

Fima had a vivid image of himself standing guard, alone in the dark, over the abandoned whalers' camp. A faint lantern sways in the wind at the top of a pole, flickering, guttering in the black expanse, and there is no other light in all the length and breadth of the Pacific wastes extending northward to the Pole and southward to the tip of Tierra del Fuego. A solitary glowworm. Absurd. Its place does not know it. And yet, this precious radiance. Which it is your duty to keep alive as long as possible. It must not stop glimmering in the depth of the frozen expanse at the foot of the snow-covered glaciers. It is your duty to prevent it from being blown out by the wind. At least as long as you are here and until Yoezer arrives. Never mind who you are and what you arc and what you have to do with whalers who never existed, you with your myopia, your flabby muscles, your floppy breasts, your ridiculous, clumsy body. The responsibility is yours.

But in what sense?

He put his hand in his pocket to look for a heartburn tablet, but instead of the little tin his fingers dredged up the silver earring, which sparkled for an instant as though bewitched in the light that came from the room behind him. As he hurled it into the deep darkness, he seemed to hear Yael's sardonic voice:

"Your problem, pal."

And with his face to the night, in a low, decisive voice, he answered:

"Correct. It
is
my problem. And I am going to solve it."

And he smiled again. But this time it was not his habitual, sad smile of self-deprecation, but the astonished curled lip of a man who for a long time has been seeking a complex answer to a complex question and suddenly discovers a simple one.

He turned and went inside. At once he saw Yael, who was deep in conversation with Uri on the sofa, their knees touching. Fima had the impression that laughter had frozen on their lips as he entered. But he felt no envy. On the contrary, a secret joy welled up inside him at the thought that he had slept with every woman in this room, Shula, Nina, and Yael. And yesterday with Annette Tadmor. And tomorrow was another day.

At that moment he caught sight of Dimi kneeling on the carpet in a corner, a quaint, philosophical child, slowly revolving with his finger Baruch's huge terrestrial globe, which was illuminated from within. The electric light painted the oceans blue and the land masses gold. The child seemed absorbed, detached, concentrating entirely on what he was doing. And Fima remarked to himself, like a man making a mental note of the whereabouts of a suitcase or an electric switch, that he loved this child more than he had ever loved any living soul. Including women. Including the boy's mother. Including his own mother.

Yael got up and approached him, uncertain whether to shake his hand or just rest a hand on his sleeve. Fima did not wait for her to make up her mind, but hugged her hard and pressed her head to his shoulder, as though it were she, not he, who needed and deserved consolation. As though he were making her a present of his new orphanhood. Yael mumbled into his chest something that Fima did not catch and did not even want to hear, because he was enjoying the discovery that Yael, like Prime Minister Ben Gurion, was shorter than he by almost a head. Even though he was not a tall man.

Then Yael broke away from his clasp and hurried, or escaped, to the kitchen, to help Shula and Teddy, who were making open sandwiches for everybody. It occurred to Fima to ask Uri or Tsvi to call the two gynecologists on his behalf, and also Tamar, and why not Annette Tadmor too? He had a sudden urge to gather together all the people who had some bearing on his new life. As though something inside him was planning, without his knowledge, a ceremony. To preach to them. To tell them something new. To announce that henceforth ... But perhaps he was confusing mourning with a farewell party. Farewell to what? What sort of sermon could he preach? What news did a man like him have to give? Be holy and pure, all of you, in préparation for the Third State?