Fima

by Amos Oz

  And when was Uri coming back?

  From the bottom of the shopping basket Nina extracted a small plastic bag.

  ‘Late Friday night, i.e., tomorrow. I expect you can both hardly wait. Well, you can have your honeymoon on Saturday night. Here, I’ve brought you the book about Leibowitz. You ran away and left it on the rug. What’s going to become of you, Fima? Just look at yourself.’

  And indeed Fima had omitted to tuck his shirt-tail in after Annette, and the bottom of his yellowing flannel vest was showing below the chunky sweater.

  Nina emptied the fridge, ruthlessly throwing out ancient vegetables, tuna, mouldy remains of fossilised cheese, an open sardine tin. She attacked the shelves and dividers with a cloth soaked in detergent. Fima meanwhile buttered several thick slices of the fragrant black Georgian bread she had brought with her, spread them generously with jam, and started munching voraciously. All the while he delivered a brief lecture on the lessons to be learned in Israel from the collapse of the left in England, Scandinavia, and in fact all over northern Europe. Suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, he said in a different voice:

  ‘Look, Nina. About the night before last. No, it was the night before that. I burst in looking like a half-drowned dog, I talked nonsense, I jumped on top of you, I upset you, and then I ran away without explaining. Now I’m ashamed. I can’t imagine what you must think of me. I just wouldn’t like you to think that I don’t find you attractive or something. It’s not that, Nina. On the contrary. I do, more than ever. I’d simply had a bad day. This just isn’t my week. I have this feeling that I’m not really living. Just existing. Creeping from day to day. Without sense and without desire. There’s a verse in the Psalms: My soul droops with sorrow. That just about sums it up: drooping. Sometimes I have no idea what I’m doing hanging around here like last year’s snow. Coming and going. Writing and crossing out. Filling in forms at the office. Putting my clothes on and taking them off again. Making phone calls. Bothering everybody and driving you all round the bend. Needling my father on purpose. How come there are still people who can stand me? How come you haven’t sent me to Hell yet? Will you teach me how to make amends?’

  Nina said:

  ‘Be quiet, Fima. Just stop talking.’

  Meanwhile she arranged the new provisions on the shelves of the now gleaming refrigerator. Her frail shoulders were trembling. From behind she looked to Fima like a small animal trapped in a cage, and he felt tenderly towards for her. Still with her back towards him, she continued:

  ‘I don’t understand it either. Look. An hour and a half ago, at the office, I suddenly had a feeling that you were in trouble. That something bad had happened to you. Maybe you were ill, lying here all alone in a fever. I tried to call, but you were always engaged. I thought perhaps you’d forgotten to put the receiver back, yet again. I dashed out in the middle of quite an important meeting about an insurance company that’s gone bust, and came running straight to you. Or, rather, I stopped on the way to do some shopping for you, so you wouldn’t starve to death. It’s almost as though Uri and I have adopted you as our child. Except that Uri seems to get a kick out of the game, whereas all I get is depressed. The whole time. Time and again I get this feeling that something terrible has happened to you, and I drop everything and come running. Such a frightening, agonising feeling, as though you were calling out to me from far away: Nina, come quick. There’s no explanation. Do me a favour, Fima; stop stuffing yourself with bread. Look how podgy you’re getting. And anyway, I haven’t got the strength or the inclination right now for your earth-shattering theories about Mitterrand and the British Labour Party. Save it for Uri, for Saturday night. All I want you to say is what’s wrong. What’s happening to you? Something strange is going on that you’re keeping from me. Even stranger than usual. As if you were slightly drugged.’

  Fima obeyed immediately. He stopped munching the piece of bread he was holding and put it down absent-mindedly in the sink as though it were an empty cup. He began to stammer that the wonderful thing about her was that with her he felt hardly any embarrassment. He wasn’t afraid of appearing ridiculous. He didn’t even care if he was miserable or stupid in her presence, as happened the other night. As if she was his sister. Now he was going to say something trite, but so what? Trite wasn’t necessarily the opposite of true. What he wanted to say was that for him she was a good person. And that she had the loveliest fingers he had ever seen.

  Still with her back to him, bending over the sink, picking out the piece of bread Fima had put there, scrubbing the ceramic tiles and the taps, carefully rinsing her hands, Nina Gefen said sadly:

  ‘You left a sock at my place, Fima.’

  And then:

  ‘It’s ages since we slept together.’

  She stubbed out her cigarette, clutched his arm with her hand that was exquisitely shaped, like that of a young girl from the Far East, and whispered:

  ‘Come now. I’ve got to be back in the office in less than an hour.’

  On their way to the bed Fima was glad that Nina was short-sighted, because there was a momentary glimmer in the ashtray she had stubbed her cigarette out in, and Fima deduced it must be Annette’s lost earring.

  Nina drew the curtains, rolled back the bedspread, straightened the pillows, and removed her glasses. Her movements were plain and sparing, as if she were getting ready to be examined by her doctor. When she began undressing he turned his back to her and hesitated a while before he realised that there was no way out of this, he would have to remove his own clothes too. It never rains but it pours, he said to himself sadistically. And he slipped quickly between the sheets so she wouldn’t notice his slackness. Remembering how he had disappointed her last time, on the rug at her house, he was overcome by shame. He pressed himself tightly against her, but his penis was as limp and unfeeling as a crumpled handkerchief. He buried his head between her heavy, warm breasts as if he were trying to hide from her inside her. They lay motionless, clinging to each other like a pair of soldiers huddling together in a trench under shellfire.

  And she pleaded in a whisper:

  ‘Don’t talk. Don’t say anything. I feel good with you just like this.’

  He had a vivid mental image of the butchered dog writhing and oozing the last of his blood with a whimper under a low stone wall among wet bushes and rubbish. As though in a profound slumber, he murmured between her breasts words she did not hear, ‘Back to Greece, Yael. We’ll find love there. And compassion.’

  Nina glanced at her watch: half past eleven. She kissed him on the forehead, and shaking his shoulder she said affectionately:

  ‘Wake up, lad. Stir yourself. You fell asleep.’

  She dressed jerkily, put on her thick glasses, and lit another cigarette, not blowing the match out but shaking it.

  Before she left, she joined the two parts of the broken radio with a faint click. She turned the knob until the voice of Defence Minister Rabin suddenly filled the room:

  ‘The side that displays the most stamina will win.’

  ‘There, that’s fixed,’ said Nina, ‘and I’ve got to go.’

  Fima said:

  ‘Don’t be angry with me. I’ve had a suffocating feeling for days now. As if something awful is going to happen. I hardly sleep at night. I sit writing articles as if there was somebody listening. Nobody’s listening and everything seems lost. What’s going to become of us all, Nina? Do you know?’

  Nina, who was already in the doorway, turned her bespectacled, vulpine face towards him and said:

  ‘I have a chance of finishing relatively early this evening. Come straight to my office after the clinic, and we’ll go to the concert at the YMCA. Or we’ll go and see that Jean Gabin film. Then we’ll go back to my place. Don’t be gloomy.’

  23

  Fima forgets what he has forgotten

  FIMA returned to the kitchen. He wolfed down another four slices of Nina’s fresh black Georgian bread thickly spread with apricot jam. The defence minister said:
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  ‘I urge ourselves not to resort to all sorts of dubious shortcuts.’

  Slightly mispronouncing the last word. And Fima, with his mouth full of bread and jam, echoed him:

  ‘And ourselves urge you not to report to all sorts of tubeless chalk-huts.’

  He immediately recoiled from this petty wordplay. As he turned off the radio, he apologised to Rabin:

  ‘I must run. I’m late for work.’ And, chewing a heartburn tablet, for some reason he pocketed Annette’s earring, which he found in the ashtray among Nina’s cigarette butts. He put on his coat, taking particular care not to trap his arm in the lining of the sleeve. And because the bread had not assuaged his hunger, and because in any case he counted it as breakfast, he went into the café opposite his flat for a bite of lunch. He could not remember if the name of the proprietress was Mrs Schneidmann or simply Mrs Schneider. He decided to put his money on Schneidermann. As usual, she did not take offence. She beamed at him with a cheery sparkle in her childlike eyes, which reminded him of a rustic Russian icon, and said:

  ‘It’s Scheinmann, Dr Nisan. Never mind. It’s not important at all. The main thing is, God should give good health and prosperity to all Jewish people. And peace should come at last to this dear country of ours. Its hard to take so many deaths all the time. Today the stewed beef for the doctor, or the chicken today?’

  Fima thought about it, and ordered the stew and an omelette, and a mixed salad, and a fruit compote. At another table sat a small, wrinkled man who struck Fima as glum and unwell. He was lazily reading Yediot Aharonot, turning the pages, staring, picking his teeth, and turning the pages again. His hair seemed to be stuck to his forehead with engine grease. For a moment Fima weighed up the chances that it was just himself, glued to that table since yesterday or the day before, and that all the events of the night and the morning had never taken place. Or that they had happened to somebody else, who resembled him in some ways and differed from him in a few trivial and utterly insignificant details. The very distinction between open possibilities and closed accomplished facts was simplistic. Perhaps his father was right after all: There is no such thing as a universal map of reality; it simply cannot exist. Everyone has to find his own way somehow through the forest with the help of unreliable, inaccurate maps that we are born wrapped in or that we pick up here and there along the way. That is why we are all lost, wandering around in circles, bumping into one another unawares, and losing each other in the dark, without so much as a distant glimmer of the supernal radiance.

  Fima was almost tempted to ask the proprietress who the other gentleman was, and how long he had been sitting like that, squandering life’s rich treasure, at the green-and-white-oilcloth-covered table. Eventually he decided to make do with asking her what she thought should be done to bring peace nearer.

  Mrs Scheinmann reacted with suspicion. She glanced all around apprehensively, before replying shyly:

  ‘What do we understand? Let the high-ups decide. The generals in our government. God should only give them good health. And he should give them also plenty good sense.’

  ‘Should we make some concessions to the Arabs?’

  Apparently afraid of spies, or of tripping herself, or simply of words themselves, she glanced towards the door and the curtain to the kitchen before whispering:

  ‘We need to have some pity. That is all we need.’

  Fima persisted:

  ‘Pity for the Arabs or pity for ourselves?’

  She gave him another timid, coquettish smile, like a peasant girl disconcerted by a sudden question about the colour of her underwear or the distance from here to the moon. She replied with graceful shrewdness:

  ‘Pity is pity.’

  The man at the next table, who looked emaciated and tortured, with his greasy hair stuck to his skull, and who Fima imagined to be a petty clerk with haemorrhoids, perhaps a retired sanitation officer, intervened in the conversation with a Romanian accent and a flat intonation, picking his teeth all the time:

  ‘Sir. Excuse. Please. What Arabs? What peace? What state? Who needs it? While we live, we must enjoy. Why you give a damn for the rest of the world? What, the rest of the world give a damn for you? Just enjoy. The most you can do. Just to be fun. All the rest, you waste your time. Excuse for interrupting.’

  Fima did not think the speaker looked much like someone who had a good time; more like someone who made a few pounds now and then by informing on his neighbours to the Income Tax Department. The man’s hands were shaking.

  Fima inquired politely:

  ‘You’re saying we should trust to the government in everything? We should look after our own affairs and not meddle in public matters?’

  The doleful informer said:

  ‘Best is from the government also they go have a good time. And from the government of the Arabs also. And same thing from the goyim. All heppy all the day. Anyway we all dies.’

  Mrs Scheinmann smiled conspiratorially at Fima, ignoring the presence of the sacked clerk. Obsequiously, as though to apologise for what he was obliged to listen to here, she said:

  ‘Pay no attention, Doctor. His little girl is died, his wife is died, his brothers is also died. And also, he has not got a penny. He speaks not from his brains. This is a man which God is forgotten him.’

  Fima scrabbled in his pockets but found only loose change, so he asked the proprietress to put it on his account. Next week, when he was paid … But she interrupted him blithely:

  ‘Never mind. Don’t worry. Everything is fine.’

  And without being asked she brought him a glass of sweet lemon tea and added:

  ‘Anyway, everything come from Heaven.’

  He did not agree with her on this point, but the music of her words touched him like a caress, and he suddenly placed his fingers on her veined hand and thanked her. He praised the food and expressed enthusiastic agreement with what she had said earlier: ‘Pity is pity.’

  Once, when Dimi was eight, Ted and Yael had called him in a panic at ten in the morning to ask him to help search for the child, who had apparently run away from school because the other children had been bullying him. Without a moment’s hesitation Fima called a taxi and hurried to the cosmetics factory in Romema. And indeed he found Baruch and Dimi shut up together in the small laboratory, bent over a bench, silvery mane touching albino curls; they were distilling a bluish liquid in a test tube over a burner. As he entered, the old man and the child both fell silent, like conspirators caught in the act. In those days Dimi was still in the habit of calling both Baruch and Fima ‘Granpa’. The father, with his Trotsky beard curving upwards like a Saracen scimitar, refused to reveal to Fima the nature of their experiment: there was no way of knowing whose side he was on. But Dimi, serious and secretive, said he trusted Fima not to give them away. Granpa and me are developing an antistupidity spray. Wherever stupidity shows up, you can pull out a little canister, give a squirt, and it’s gone. Fima said: You’ll have to manufacture at least a hundred thousand tons of it in the first batch. Baruch said: Maybe we’re wasting our time, Diminka. Clever people don’t need the treatment, and as for fools, tell me, my dears, why should we weary ourselves for fools? Why don’t we have some fun instead? At once he rang for a tray of sweets, nuts, and fruit. With a sigh he took a bundle of little sticks out of a drawer and told the child to lock the door; the three of them spent the rest of the morning absorbed in a spillikins contest. The memory of that illicit morning’s fun shone in Fima’s mind as a patch of happiness such as he had never known even in his own childhood. Then, at midday, he had had to stir himself and return Dimi to his parents. Ted sentenced the child to two hours’ solitary confinement in the bathroom and a further two days of house arrest. Fima also received a reprimand. He was almost sorry they had abandoned work on the antistupidity spray.

  In the bus on the way to work he thought over what Mrs Schoenberg had said about the doleful informer, and said to himself: To be forgotten by God is not necessarily to be doomed. O
n the contrary, it may mean becoming as light and free as a lizard in the desert. He brooded on the similarity between two Hebrew verbs, the one meaning ‘forget’ and the other ‘dwindle’ or ‘die away’. The most wretched fate is not to be forgotten but, precisely, to fade away. Will, longings, memories, carnal desires, curiosity, passion, gladness, generosity – everything gradually fades. As the wind dies in the mountains, so the spirit too expires. Indeed, even pain decreases somewhat with the passage of the years, but then, together with pain, other signs of life also decline. The simple, silent, primal things, those things that every child encounters with excitement and wonderment, such as the succession of the seasons, a kitten scampering in the yard, a door swivelling on its hinges, the life cycle of plants, swelling fruit, whispering pines, a column of ants on the veranda, the play of light on the valleys and the hillsides, the pallor of the moon and its halo, spiders’ webs laden with dewdrops in the early morning, the miracles of breathing, speech, twilight at sunset, water boiling and freezing, the glitter of the midday sun on a tiny sliver of glass, so many primal things that we once had but have lost. Never to return. Or, worse still, they will return rarely, glimmering in the distance, while the original excitement will have vanished forever. And everything is dimmed and dissolved. Life itself is gradually growing dusty and grubby. Who will win in France? What will the Likud central committee decide? Why was the article rejected? How much does a managing director earn? How will the minister respond to the charges that have been levelled at him? Again and again this morning I was told, and again and again said myself: ‘I’m late, I must run along.’ But why? Where? For what? Surely even Minister Rabin must have been excited by those primal things once, as he stood a thousand years ago, a withdrawn, ginger-haired child, a thin, freckled child with no shoes on, in a back yard in Tel Aviv, among the clotheslines, at six o’clock on an autumn morning, when suddenly a flock of cranes flew past overhead, white against the dawn clouds, promising him, like me, a pure world, full of silence and blue-ness, far from words and lies, if only we dare leave everything behind and get up and go. But here we are, this minister of defence just like the rest of us who attack him daily in the newspapers, we’ve all forgotten and we’ve all faded. We are all dead souls. Everywhere we go, we leave behind us a trail of lifeless words, from which it is only a short way to the corpses of Arab children killed daily in the Territories. A short way too to the unpalatable fact that a man like me simply erases from the register of the dead, without thinking, the children of the family of settlers burned alive the day before yesterday by a Molotov cocktail on the road to Alfei Menashe. Why did I erase them? Was their death insufficiently innocent? Unworthy to enter the shrine of suffering of which we have, as it were, made ourselves the guardians? Is it just that the settlers frighten and infuriate me, whereas the Arab children weigh on my conscience? Can a worthless man like me have sunk so low as to make a distinction between the intolerable killing of children and the not-so-intolerable killing of children? Justice itself sounded forth from the mouth of Mrs Schoenberg when she said to me simply: ‘Pity is pity.’ Minister of Defence Rabin is betraying our basic values et cetera, whereas in Rabin’s view I and the likes of me are betraying the fundamental principles and so forth. But in relation to the faraway call of the primal splendour of an autumn morning, in relation to that flight of cranes, surely we are all traitors. No difference between the minister and me. We have even poisoned Dimi and his friends. Therefore I ought to write a few lines to Rabin, to apologise, to try to explain that we are both in the same boat after all. Or perhaps to ask for a meeting?