Fima

by Amos Oz

  These fantasies caressed him deliciously. Ever since his childhood he had loved to feel that there were grown-ups, responsible people, who discussed in his absence how to do the best for him, waiting till he was asleep before talking about the arrangements for his birthday, switching to Russian to discuss what present to surprise him with. If he summoned up the courage at the end of the evening at the restaurant to suggest to Annette and Nina that they come round to his place and spend the night together, there might be some momentary embarrassment but in the end he would not be refused. He had learned from Uri that such combinations hypnotised the female imagination too. And so at last he could look forward to an exciting Greek night. He would be rejuvenated. A new billy-goat year would begin.

  For a few moments he mulled over the details in his mind, casting the characters and directing the scenes. Then he grabbed the receiver and dialled Nina’s office. When the telephone made no sound, he tried Annette. Once again the response was total silence. He called both numbers alternatively five or six times, to no avail. All the systems in this country are breaking down. The lines of communication are congested, the hospitals are paralysed, the electricity supply is unreliable, the universities are going bankrupt, factories are closing down one after another, education and research are sinking to the level of India’s, public services are collapsing, and all because of this obsession with the Territories, which is gradually ruining us. How did the taxi driver put it: ‘Ever since that shit landed on us in ’67, the state’s been going to the dogs.’ Fima waved the telephone in the air, banged it on the table, shook it, rattled it, pleaded with it, swore at it, bashed it, and thumped it, but nothing helped. Then it occurred to him that he had only himself to blame. How many times had he ignored the printed notices he had found in his letter box about the nonpayment of his bill. Now they had got their own back. They had cut him off from the world. Like a cantor on a desert island.

  Cunningly he tried to dial again, very slowly and gently, like a burglar, like a lover. He could not remember if the emergency number for such eventualities was one four, one eight, or simply one hundred. He was ready and willing to settle his debt this very minute, to apologise in person or in writing, to give a lecture to the telephone workers on Christian mysticism, to pay a fine or a bribe, anything so long as they came round at once to bring his telephone back to life. First thing in the morning he would go straight to the bank. Or was it the post office? He would pay his bill and be rescued from the desert island. But tomorrow, Fima remembered, was Friday, and all public offices were closed. Perhaps he should ring his father and ask him to use his connections. Next week his father was turning his painters and plasterers loose on him. Maybe he should run away to Cyprus? Or the Galapagos Islands? Or at least to that guest house in Magdiel?

  Suddenly he changed his mind. He saw the situation in a fresh light. Immediately he felt better. Fate must have intervened to save him from Jean Gabin and the orgy. The words ‘desert island’ filled him with joy. It would be wonderful to spend a quiet evening at home. Outside, the storm could rattle the windows to its heart’s content: he would light the paraffin heater, sit down in the armchair, and try to get a little closer to the other Fima, the real one, instead of wearing himself out with diplomatic efforts to mollify two offended women and then exhausting himself all night to satisfy their appetites. He was particularly delighted that he was relieved, as though by the wave of a magic wand, of the obligation to put his coat and cap on again and go out into the empty, freezing, rain-lashed city. Had he really decided to act like Uri Gefen? To step into his father’s shoes? To start leaping around like a billy-goat again, a shabby, mangy old bear like him? First let’s see you piss once without stuttering.

  Instead of playing the fool, better to sit down now at the desk, switch on the lamp, and compose a devastating reply to Günter Grass’s speech. Or a letter to Yitzhak Rabin. Or write that article on the heart of Christendom. And for once he’d be able to watch the nine o’clock news without interruptions. Or fall asleep in front of the television in the middle of a brainless melodrama. Or, better still, curl up in bed with the book he had borrowed from Ted’s, study the life of the whalers in Alaska, imagine the simplicity of primitive nomads, enjoy the strange sexual habits of the Eskimos. The custom of handing over a ripe widow to the adolescent boys as part of their initiation rites suddenly caused a delicious pulsing in his loins. And tomorrow morning he would explain everything to his lovers, who would surely forgive him: after all, it was more or less a case of force majeure. Besides the sense of relief and the message in his loins, he also felt hungry. He had eaten nothing all evening. So he went to the kitchen, and without even sitting gulped down five thick slices of bread and jam, devoured two tomatoes whole without bothering to slice them, ate a pot of yogurt, swallowed two glasses of tea with honey, and rounded the whole off with a heartburn tablet. To encourage his hesitant bladder he flushed the lavatory in the middle, lost the race, and had to wait for the cistern to refill. But he got bored waiting, and went around the flat turning the lights off, then stood at the window to examine what was new in the empty fields stretching away to Bethlehem: perhaps there was already some sign of a distant radiance. He took pleasure in the rattling of the windowpanes under the onslaught of the sharp black wind.

  Here and there on the dark slopes a pale gleam shimmered: Arab stone cottages scattered among orchards and boulders. The shadows of the hills deluded him, as though they were exchanging elusive caresses that were not of this world. Once upon a time kings and prophets, saviours, world reformers, madmen who heard voices, zealots, ascetics, and dreamers walked around Jerusalem. And one day in the future, in a hundred years or more, new men, totally different from us, would be living here. Earnest, self-contained people. No doubt they would find all our troubles weird, unintelligible, perplexing. Meanwhile, and for the time being, between the past and the future, we have been sent to inhabit Jerusalem. The city has been entrusted to our stewardship. And we fill it with oppression, foolishness, and injustice. We inflict humiliation, frustration, torture on each other, not out of arrogance but merely from laziness and fear. We pursue good and cause evil. We seek to comfort and instead we wound. We aim to increase knowledge, and instead we increase pain.

  ‘Don’t you judge me,’ Fima grumbled aloud to Yoezer. ‘Just be quiet. Anyway, what can a wishy-washy individual like you understand? Who’s talking to you anyway?’

  Large sharp stars glowed before his tired eyes. Fima did not know their names, and he did not care which was Mars or Jupiter or Saturn. But he longed to understand where the vague feeling came from, that this was not the first time. That he had been here before, in days of yore. That he had already seen these glimmering stars on a cold deserted winter’s night. Not from the window of this flat, but maybe from the doorway of one of the low stone cottages among the dark boulders opposite. And he had asked himself then what the stars in the sky wanted from us and what the shadow of the hills in the darkness was saying. Only then there was a simple answer. Which had been forgotten. Wiped away. Although for a moment he had the feeling that that answer was struggling on the threshold of his memory, so close he could reach out and touch it. He hit his forehead against the glass, and shivered with cold. Bialik, for one, claims that the stars have cheated him. They have not kept their promise. They have not kept their appointment, as it were. But surely it is really the other way round: they have not cheated us, we have cheated them. We are the ones who have not kept our promises. They called us, and we forgot to go. They spoke, and we refused to hear. Cranes wheeled – and were gone.

  Say a word. Give me just a little pointer, a hint, a clue, a wink, and I’ll get up and go at once. I won’t even stop to change my shirt. Get up and go. Or prostrate myself at your feet. Falling in a trance with wide-open eyes.

  Outside, the wind blew stronger. Sheets of water broke against his forehead through the windowpane. The hole in the clouds over the Bethlehem hills, through which the stars had been glim
mering, was also dark now. He suddenly fancied he heard a shrill crying far away, as though a baby had been abandoned in a wet blanket on the slope of the wadi. As though he must run immediately and help his mother to find her lost child. But he said to himself that it was probably nothing but a creaking shutter. Or one of the neighbours’ children. Or a cat freezing in the yard. However hard he stared, all he could see was darkness. No sign appeared, either in the hills or in the faint gleams of light in the cottages scattered on the slope, or in the dark sky. Isn’t it unjust, wicked, to call me to go without giving me so much as a tiny clue where? Where the meeting place is. Whether there is or isn’t to be a meeting. Whether I am the one who is being called or if it is actually one of my neighbours. Whether there is or isn’t something inside this darkness.

  And indeed, at that moment Fima sensed the full weight of the darkness lying over Jerusalem. Darkness on steeples and domes, darkness on walls and towers, darkness on stone-walled yards and on the groves of ancient pines, on convents and olive trees, on mosques and caves and sepulchres, on tombs of kings and of true and false prophets, darkness on winding alleys, darkness on government buildings and on ruins and gates and on stony fields and thistle-strewn waste plots, darkness on schemes and desires and lunatic visions, darkness on the hills and on the desert.

  To the south-west, above the heights surrounding the village of Ein Karem, clouds began to move, as though an unseen hand were drawing a curtain. Just as his mother used to go around the flat drawing all the curtains on winter evenings. One night, when he was three or four, she forgot to draw the curtains in his bedroom. He woke and saw a dim shape outside staring motionlessly at him. A long, thin shape surrounded by a circle of pale light. Then it went out. It materialised again, like moon-touched mist, at the other window. Then it went out again. He remembered how he woke in a panic and sat up in bed crying. His mother came in and leaned over him in a nightdress that had an exquisite scent. She looked long and white and moon-touched too. She held him in her arms and promised him that there was nothing there, that the shape was just a dream. Then she drew both the curtains carefully, rearranged his bedclothes, and kissed him on the forehead. Even though he eventually stopped crying and burrowed under his blanket, even though she stayed on his bed until he fell asleep again, Fima knew, even now, with utter and absolute certainty, that it was not a dream, and that his mother knew it too and had lied to him. Even now, half a century later, he was still convinced that there really had been a stranger out there. Not in a dream but outside, on the other side of the window-panes. And that his mother had seen him too. And he knew that that lie was the worst lie he had ever been told. It was that lie that snatched away his infant brother and doomed his mother to disappear in her prime, and himself to be here and yet not here all these years, seeking in vain for something he had not really lost, without the faintest idea what it was or what it looked like, or where to look or how.

  Even if someday he found it, how would he know?

  Maybe he had found it already, and dropped it and moved on, still searching like a blind man?

  Cranes wheel and whirl and are gone.

  The wind subsided in the panes. A frozen quiet reigned. At a quarter to eleven Fima changed his mind, put his cap and coat on, went into the empty street, where the cold was sharp and biting. He went to the public call box in the shopping centre at the other end of the housing estate. But when he lifted the receiver, the public telephone too gave only a deathly silence. Maybe there was a problem in the whole district. Had the public telephone been vandalised? Or was the whole of Jerusalem cut off from itself and from the outside world again? He gave up and gently replaced the receiver. Shrugging his shoulders he said, ‘Well done, pal,’ as he remembered that in any case he did not have a token.

  Tomorrow he would get up early and explain everything to his two lovers.

  Or he would get out of here and go away.

  The whispering of the soggy pines, the biting cold, the emptiness of the streets, all of these suited Fima well. And he carried on wandering towards the slope and the fields. His mother had a strange habit of blowing on her food, even if it had already cooled off, or if it was cold food, such as a salad or fruit compote. When she blew, her lips pursed into a kiss. His heart ached because at that moment, forty-four years after her death, he wanted to kiss her back. He wanted to turn the world upside down to find the blue baby bonnet with the loose pompom and give it back to her.

  When he reached the end of the street, which was also the end of the housing development and the end of the city, Fima became aware of something transparent filling the world. As if thousands of soft silken footsteps were whispering on every side. As if his face were being touched by fingers that were no fingers. When his wonderment passed, he identified tiny snowflakes. Very fine snow was beginning to fall on Jerusalem. Though it melted as soon as it touched anything. It did not have the power to whiten the grey city.

  Fima returned home and began searching in the wastepaper basket under his desk for the telephone bill he had screwed up and thrown away yesterday or the day before. He did not find the bill, but he did pick out a crumpled page of Ha’arets. He smoothed it out and took it to bed with him, and read about present-day false messiahs until his eyes closed and he fell asleep with the newspaper over his face. At two o’clock the light snow stopped. Jerusalem stood frozen and empty in the dark, as though the catastrophe had happened and all the people had been exiled again.

  26

  Chili

  IN his dream Gad Eitan arrived in a military jeep with a machine gun mounted on the bonnet to summon Fima to a meeting with the president. The president’s office turned out to be in a small basement synagogue at the edge of the Russian Compound behind the main police station. A foppish British officer sat behind the desk, with a leather belt aslant his black uniform. He urged Fima to sign a voluntary confession to the murder of the dog, who had been transformed in the dream to a woman whose corpse was lying, wrapped in a sheet soiled with black blood, at the foot of the Holy Ark. Fima requested permission to see the dead woman’s face. The interrogator replied with a smile, What for? Isn’t it a pity to wake her? It’s Chili again; she risked her life for you, she brought you over to the Aryan side, she saved your life repeatedly, and you betrayed her. When Fima plucked up the courage to ask what punishment was in store for him, the defence minister said, Look what a dummy you are. The crime is the punishment.

  27

  Fima refuses to give in

  AT half past six in the morning he woke with a start because a heavy object fell in the flat above, followed by a woman shouting, not for long or particularly loudly, but terribly, desperately, as though she had seen her own death. Fima leaped out of bed and into his trousers, then hurried to the kitchen balcony to hear better. No sound came from the upstairs flat. Only an invisible bird, which kept repeating three gentle syllables, as if it had come to the conclusion that Fima was so slow on the uptake that he would surely not understand. Shouldn’t he go upstairs quickly to find out what had happened? To offer help? Rescue? To call the police or an ambulance? But he remembered that his telephone had been cut off, so he was relieved of the obligation to intervene. Besides which, it was possible that the crash and the scream had happened in his sleep, and his inquiry would cause nothing but embarrassment and derision.

  Instead of going back to bed, he continued standing on the kitchen balcony in his long-sleeved vest, amid the vestiges of cages, jars, and boxes where he and Dimi had once kept their can of worms. Now these exuded the rank smell of decay, of wet sawdust mixed with blackened droppings and remains of rotting food: carrots and cucumber peel and cabbage leaves and lettuce. At the beginning of the winter Dimi had decided to free the tortoises, insects, and snails they had collected in the wadi.

  And where was the snow of last night?

  It was as if it had never been.

  It had gone without trace.

  Meanwhile the barren hills to the south of Jerusalem sto
od purged, flooded in blue radiance, so that it was almost possible to make out silvery flashes on the underside of the leaves of distant olive trees along the ridge of Beit Jalla. It was a cold, sharp light, crystal clear, sent to us perhaps as an advance against the distant days when suffering would end, when Jerusalem would be freed from its torments, and the people who took our place would live their lives calmly, considerately, rationally, and with good taste: then the light of the sky would be like this forever.

  It was bitterly cold, but Fima, in his yellowing winter vest, did not feel it. He stood leaning on the railing, filling his lungs with the winelike air, marvelling at the possibility of suffering in the midst of such beauty. A minor miracle occurred this morning below him in the back yard. An eccentric, impatient almond tree had decided suddenly to flower, as though it had got its dates wrong. It was covered with tiny glow-worms that had forgotten to switch themselves off at the arrival of dawn. Myriad raindrops sparkled on the pink blossoms. The glittering almond tree reminded Fima of a slim, pretty woman who has cried all night and not wiped away her tears. This image caused him childlike joy, and love, and a vague longing for Yael, for all women indiscriminately, with the bold resolve to open a new chapter in his life, starting this morning: to be from now on a rational, straightforward man, a good man, freed from falsehood and all pretence. So he put on a clean shirt and Yael’s sweater. With a determination that surprised him he climbed the stairs and firmly pressed the upstairs neighbours’ bell. After a few moments Mrs Pizanti opened the door in a dressing gown half unbuttoned over her nightdress. Her wide, childlike face struck Fima as distorted, or even somewhat battered. But perhaps that was more or less what anyone woken from sleep looked like. Behind her, in the pale neon light of the entrance hall, her husband’s eyes were glittering. He was a hirsute, athletic-looking individual, much taller than his wife. She asked anxiously if something had happened. Fima said: