Fima

by Amos Oz

  Fima excitedly pushed Ted out of the way and started to help him unbidden, as though bent on proving him wrong. He pulled a large handful of knives, forks, and spoons out of the dishwasher and ran around the kitchen with them, flinging doors open, pulling out drawers, looking for somewhere to unload his booty, and not interrupting for a moment his lecture on the difference between Vietnam and Gaza and between the Nixon syndrome and the Shamir syndrome. A few stray items of cutlery slipped through his fingers and lay scattered on the kitchen floor. Ted bent down to pick them up, and expressed his unfamiliarity with the Hebrew word for ‘syndrome’: was it a newly invented word?

  ‘Syndrome: like the Vietnam syndrome that you went through in the States.’

  ‘Didn’t you say a moment ago that the comparison with Vietnam was a mistake?’

  ‘Yes. No. In a certain sense yes. That is, perhaps we need to distinguish between a syndrome and a symptom.’

  ‘Here,’ said Ted, ‘just put them here in the middle drawer.’

  But Fima had already abandoned the struggle, and left his bundle of cutlery on top of the microwave. Pulling his handkerchief out of his pocket, he wiped his nose again and then absent-mindedly set about wiping the kitchen table too, while Ted was still sorting plates according to type and size and putting each pile away in its proper place in the cupboard over the sink.

  ‘Fima, why don’t you give that to the newspapers. You should publish it so that more people can read it. Your language is so rich. And it’ll do your soul good too: anyone can see you’re suffering. You take politics so personally. You take the situation too much to heart. Yael will be back with Dimi in another three-quarters of an hour. Now I’ve got to do some work. How do you say “deadline” in Hebrew again? Maybe the best thing would be if you took your coffee with you into the living room and I’ll put the TV on for you; you can still catch about half the news. OK?’

  Fima immediately assented: he had never intended to intrude for the whole evening. But instead of picking up his coffee and heading for the living room, he forgot the mug on the draining board in the kitchen and insisted on pursuing Ted all the way down the hallway until Ted excused himself and locked himself in the lavatory. Fima concluded his sentence through the locked door:

  ‘It’s all right for you; you’ve got American passports, you can always get out of here by jet propulsion. But what’ll happen to the rest of us? OK. I’ll go and watch the news. I won’t pester you any more. The only trouble is, I don’t know how to switch your television on.’

  Instead of going to the living room, he turned into the boy’s bedroom. Instantly he was overcome by great tiredness. Unable to find the light switch, he lay down in the dark on the little bed surrounded by shadows of robots and aeroplanes and time machines, while overhead a gigantic phosphorescent spaceship hovered, suspended from the ceiling by an invisible thread, its nose pointing straight at him, revolving slowly, menacingly at the slightest draught like an accusing finger. Until Fima closed his eyes and said to himself suddenly:

  ‘What’s the point of all this talking? The die is cast, and what is done cannot be undone.’

  Then sleep overtook him. Just as he was dropping off, he was vaguely aware of Ted covering him with a soft woollen blanket. Indistinctly he mumbled:

  ‘The truth, Teddy? Just between the two of us? The Arabs have evidently realised that they can’t throw us in the sea. The sad thing is, it’s hard for Jews to live without someone wanting to throw them in the sea.’

  Ted whispered:

  ‘No. The situation really isn’t looking too good.’ And he went out.

  Fima curled up inside the blanket. He meant to ask to be woken up the moment Yael got home. He was so tired that what came out was:

  ‘Don’t wake Yael.’

  He slept for about twenty minutes, and when the phone rang in the next room, he reached out and knocked over one of Dimi’s Lego towers. He tried to fold the blanket, but gave up because he was in a hurry to find Ted. He still had to explain what it was that had brought him here this evening. Instead of going to the study, he strayed into the bedroom, which was lit by a warm red night-light. He saw that the wide bed was ready for the night: two identical pillows, two dark-blue blankets encased in silky sheets, two bedside tables, each with an open book lying face down on it, and he buried his face and his whole head in Yael’s nightdress. At once he pulled himself together and rushed out to look for his coat. He searched every room in the flat with a sleepwalker’s thoroughness, but he found neither Ted nor his coat, even though he doggedly checked every lighted place. Finally he sank down onto a stool in the kitchen and looked around for the knives that he hadn’t been able to find a place for earlier.

  Ted Tobias emerged from the darkness with a slide rule in his hand, and announced slowly and emphatically, like a soldier transmitting a message by shortwave radio:

  ‘You fell asleep for a while. Shows you were tired. I can warm your coffee in the microwave.’

  ‘No need, thanks,’ said Fima. ‘I’ve got to run; I’m late.’

  ‘Oh. Late. What for?’

  ‘A date,’ said Fima, to his own surprise, in a man-to-man voice. ‘I completely forgot I have a date tonight.’ And he went to the front door and started wrestling with the latch until Ted took pity on him and handed him his overcoat, opened the door, and said softly and, Fima thought, rather wistfully:

  ‘Look, Fima, it’s none of my business, but I think you could do with a break. You’re looking a little run down. What’ll I tell Yael?’

  Fima inserted his left arm into the torn lining of his coat sleeve and wondered why the sleeve had turned into a cul-de-sac. He lost his temper, as though Ted was responsible for upsetting the insides of his coat.

  ‘Don’t say anything to Yael,’ he hissed. ‘There’s nothing to say. I didn’t come to see her, anyway. I came to talk to you, Teddy, but you’re such a numbskull.’

  Ted Tobias did not take offence. It is likely he didn’t understand the last word. He answered carefully, in English:

  ‘Wouldn’t it be better if I called you a taxi?’

  Fima immediately felt profound shame and regret.

  ‘Thanks, Teddy,’ he said. ‘No. I’m sorry I flew off the handle. I had a bad dream last night, and today just hasn’t been my day. All I’ve done is kept you from working. Tell Yael I’m free to look after the kid any evening you need me. I can tell you the Hebrew word for “commitment” but I can’t think of the one for “deadline”. Maybe you can translate it literally, a dead line. By the way, what do we need jet-propelled vehicles for? Don’t we rush around enough as it is? Why don’t you invent something that’ll make us just sit quietly? Sorry. Bye, Teddy. You shouldn’t have given me that brandy. I talk enough nonsense as it is.’

  As he stepped out of the lift he bumped into Yael in the dark. She was carrying Dimi, fast asleep, wrapped in her bomber jacket. Yael let out a little cry of alarm, and almost dropped the child. Then, recognising Fima, she said in a tired voice: ‘What an ass you are.’

  Instead of apologising, Fima embraced them roughly with his free arm and his crippled sleeve, and covered the drowsy Challenger’s head with frantic pecks, like a starving chicken. He kissed Yael too, whatever he could lay hold of in the dark: not finding her face, he bent over and kissed her wet back, wildly, from shoulder to shoulder. Then he rushed outside to look for the bus stop in the dark in the pouring rain. Because in the meantime his prophecy had come true, when he said to Ted, ‘Raining? A deluge, more like.’ And at once he was soaked to the skin.

  6

  As if she were his sister

  AND in fact he did end up having a kind of date that evening. Soon after half past ten, frozen and drenched, with his shoes oozing water, he rang the bell at the Gefens’ garden gate. They lived in a secretive, thick-walled stone house in the German Colony, surrounded by old pines, set deep inside a large plot protected by a stone wall.

  ‘I was just passing and I saw a light on,’ he explained hes
itantly to Nina, ‘so I decided to bother you for a minute or two. Just long enough to collect that book about Leibowitz from Uri and to tell him that on second thoughts we were both right about the Iran-Iraq War. Should I come back another time?’

  Nina chuckled, grabbed his arm, and tugged him indoors.

  ‘But Uri’s in Rome,’ she said. ‘You phoned yourself on Saturday night to say good-bye to him, and you gave him a whole lecture on the telephone about why it would be better for us if Iraq defeated Iran. Just look at you: what a sight! And am I really supposed to believe that you just happened to be strolling down our road at eleven o’clock at night? Whatever will become of you, Fima?’

  ‘I had a date,’ he muttered, struggling to disentangle himself from his dripping overcoat. He explained:

  ‘The sleeve’s stuck.’

  Nina said:

  ‘Sit yourself down here by the heater. You’ve got to get dry. I don’t suppose you’ve eaten anything either. I was thinking about you today.’

  ‘I was thinking about you too. I wanted to try to tempt you into coming to a film with me, to see a comedy with Jean Gabin at the Orion. I called you but there was no answer.’

  ‘I thought you had a date. I got held up at the office till nine. An importer of sex aids has gone broke and I’m liquidating him. The creditors are a pair of ultra-pious brothers-in-law. You can imagine how funny that is. I hardly need Jean Gabin. Never mind. Come on, get those clothes off; you look like a drowned cat. Wait! Have a shot of Scotch first. It’s a pity you can’t see yourself. Then I’ll get you something to eat.’

  ‘What was it that made you think of me today?’

  ‘Your article in Friday’s paper. It was OK. Possibly a touch too hysterical. I don’t know if I’m supposed to tell you this, but Tsvi Kropotkin is secretly scheming to get a search party to break into your flat, ransack your drawers, and publish the poems he’s convinced you’re still writing. So you won’t be completely forgotten. Who did you have a date with, a mermaid? Even your underwear’s soaked.’

  Fima, who had stripped down to his long johns and a yellowing winter undershirt, laughed.

  ‘As far as I’m concerned, they can forget me. I’ve already forgotten myself. What, take the underwear off too? Why, are you still liquidating your sex boutique? Are you planning to hand me over to your ultra creditors?’

  Nina was a lawyer, a friend and contemporary of Yael, a chain-smoker of Nelson cigarettes, and her glasses gave her a bitter look. Her thin, greying hair was severely cropped. She was small and skinny, like an underfed vixen. And her triangular face reminded Fima of a cornered vixen. But her breasts were full and appealing, and she had beautifully shaped hands, like those of a young girl from the Far East. She handed him a bundle of Uri’s clothes, freshly ironed and clean-smelling.

  ‘Put these on,’ she ordered. ‘And drink this. And come and sit by the fire. Try not to talk for a few minutes. Iraq is winning the war without your help. I’ll make you an omelette and a salad. Or shall I warm you some soup?’

  ‘Don’t make me anything,’ Fima said, ‘I’m leaving in five minutes.’

  ‘Got another date, have you?’

  ‘I left the lights on in my flat this morning. And anyway …’

  ‘I’ll run you home,’ Nina said. ‘After you’ve dried out and warmed up and had something to eat.’

  ‘Yael called,’ she added. ‘She told me you haven’t eaten. She said you’ve been pestering Teddy. You’re the Eugene Onegin of Kiryat Yovel. Quiet now. Don’t say anything.’

  Uri Gefen, Nina’s husband, was once a famous combat pilot, and later became a pilot with El Al. In 1971 he went into private business, starting a complex network of importers. He had a reputation in Jerusalem as a hunter of married women. The whole city knew that Nina had reconciled herself to his adventures, and that for several years their marriage had been purely platonic. Sometimes Uri’s lovers ended up as Nina’s friends. Uri and Nina had no children, but their charming home had become the regular Friday-evening rendezvous of a group of lawyers, army officers, civil servants, artists, and university lecturers. Fima was fond of them both, because both of them, in their different ways, had taken him under their wings. He was indiscriminately fond of anyone who could put up with him, and he had an unbounded affection for that circle of dear friends who still continued to have faith in him and endeavoured to spur him on, lamenting how he frittered away his talents.

  On the sideboard, the mantelpiece, and the bookshelves stood photographs of Uri in or out of uniform. He was a large, stocky, rumbustious man, who exuded a rough physical affection that gave women and children and even men a cuddly feeling about him. Facially he bore a faint resemblance to Anthony Quinn. His manner was always coarsely hearty. He had a habit of touching people he was talking to, men and women alike, prodding you in the stomach, putting an arm around your shoulder, or resting a large freckled hand on your knee. When the spirit moved him, he could reduce a roomful of people to tears of laughter by mimicking the intonation of a stallholder in the central market, impersonating Abba Eban addressing an audience of immigrants in a transit camp, or casually analysing the impact of an article of Fima’s about Albert Camus. Sometimes he would offer frank revelations, in the company of friends and in his wife’s presence, about his own conquests. He spoke cheerfully, tastefully, without making fun of his lovers or revealing their identities, never boasting, recounting the progress of a romance with wistful good humour, like someone who has long since learned how intimately love and ridicule are interwoven; how both seducer and his victim are guided by fixed rituals; how absurdly childlike was his own indefatigable urge to conquer, in which carnal needs played only a minute part; how lies, mannerisms, and pretences are woven into the very fabric even of true love; and how the passing years deprive us all of the power of thrilling and the power of longing alike, as everything wears out and fades. He himself figured in this Friday-night Decameron in a faintly ludicrous light, as though Uri Gefen the narrator were examining Uri Gefen the lover under a microscope, dispassionately isolating the comic element. Sometimes he would say, By the time you begin to make sense of something, your term of office is over. Or, There’s a Bulgarian proverb: The main thing an old cat remembers is how to meow.

  It was in Uri’s presence, rather than in Nina’s arms, that Fima always felt a dizzying sensual exhilaration. Uri aroused in him an overwhelming urge to impress or even shock this magnificent male. To get the better of him in an argument. To experience that powerful hand grasping his elbow. But Fima did not always manage to get the better of him, because Uri too was endowed with a penetrating intellect, no less penetrating than Fima’s own. And they had in common the tendency to switch easily, almost offhand, from ridicule to tragic empathy and back again, and to demolish with a couple of sentences an argument they had taken a quarter of an hour to build up.

  During those Friday nights at Uri and Nina’s, Fima was at his best. Whenever he got going, he could enthrall and entertain into the early hours of the morning with a series of motley paradoxes, amaze with his political analysis, and produce laughter or excitement.

  ‘There’s only one Fima,’ Uri would say with paternal affection.

  And Fima for his part would finish the sentence for him.

  ‘… and that’s one too many.’

  Nina would say:

  ‘Just look at the pair of them. Romeo and Julius. Or, rather, Laurel and Hardy.’

  Fima didn’t doubt that Uri had known for a long time about his occasional sex with Nina. Perhaps he found it entertaining. Or touching. Perhaps right from the word go he had been the author, director, and producer of that little comedy. Sometimes Fima imagined Uri Gefen getting up in the morning, shaving with a classy razor, sitting down to breakfast with a clean white napkin on his lap, glancing at his pocket diary, noticing the little twice-monthly cross, and remarking to Nina as he drank his coffee, hidden behind his newspaper, that it was time to give Fima his regular service, to make sure he didn�
�t dry up completely. This suspicion did not detract from his affection for Uri or from the physical pleasure and euphoria he always experienced in the company of his charismatic friend.

  Every few weeks Nina would appear without warning at ten or eleven in the morning, having parked her dusty Fiat in front of the squat block of flats in Kiryat Yovel. She would be carrying two baskets full of food and cleaning materials bought on her way from the office. She would look like a social worker boldly taking her life in her hands as she entered the front lines of deprivation. After coffee she would stand up and remove her clothes purposefully, almost without a word. They would have sex hurriedly and get up the moment it was finished, like a couple of soldiers in a trench hastily consuming food between bouts of shelling.

  Immediately after the lovemaking Nina would shut herself in the bathroom. After scrubbing her skinny body, she would proceed, as a sort of followthrough, to scrub the lavatory and the wash basin. Only then would they sit down to have another cup of coffee and chat about poetry engagé or the coalition of national unity, with Nina chain-smoking and Fima gulping down one slice of black bread and jam after another. He could never resist the strong warm black bread she brought him from a Georgian bakery.

  Fima’s kitchen always looked as though it had been abandoned in haste. Empty bottles and eggshells under the sink, open jars on the worktop, blotches of congealed jam, half-eaten yogurts, curdled milk, crumbs, and sticky stains on the table. Sometimes Nina, smitten with missionary fervour, rolled up one sleeve, put on rubber gloves, and with a lighted cigarette protruding from the corner of her mouth and seemingly glued to her lower lip, would set upon cupboards, fridge surfaces, and tiles. In half an hour she could transform Calcutta into Zurich. During this combat, Fima would lounge in the doorway, redundant yet willing, debating with Nina and himself the collapse of Communism or the school of thought that rejects Chomsky’s linguistic theories. When she went on her way, he would be overcome with a mixture of shame, affection, longing, and gratitude; he wanted to run after her with tears in his eyes, to say Thank you, my beloved, to say I am not worthy of these favours, but then he would pull himself together and hurriedly throw open the windows to expel the cigarette smoke that polluted his kitchen. He had a vague fantasy of lying ill in bed while Nina tended him, or else of Nina on her deathbed and himself wetting her lips and wiping the perspiration from her brow.