by Amos Oz
‘Good,’ said Fima. ‘Thank you. Let’s go there.’
After a moment he added:
‘What about you, Uri? Straight from the plane? You just dropped your luggage off and came looking for me?’
‘We didn’t know where you’d got to.’
Fima said:
‘I ought to make you a cup of coffee at least.’
Uri said:
‘Forget it. Just concentrate for a moment and think carefully if there’s anything you need to take with you.’
‘Nothing,’ Fima replied at once in a military tone, with uncharacteristic firmness. ‘No time to waste. Let’s get moving. We’ll talk on the way.’
30
At least as far as possible
IT was a quarter past five when Uri parked his car on Ben Maimon Avenue. The sun had sunk behind pines and cypresses, but a strange greyish light full of vague flickers still hovered in the sky, a light that was neither day nor night. Upon the avenue and the stone buildings lay a fine, heart-gnawing Sabbath eve melancholy. As if Jerusalem had stopped being a city and returned to being a bad dream.
The rain had not resumed. The air was saturated, and Fima’s nostrils picked up the tang of rotting leaves. He recalled how once when he was a child, at such a time as this, at the onset of the Sabbath, he was riding his bicycle up and down the dead street. Looking up at this building, he saw his mother and father standing on the balcony. They were stiffly erect, of similar height, both dressed in dark clothes, standing very close to each other but not touching. Like a pair of waxworks. And he had the impression that they were both in mourning for a visitor whose arrival they had long since despaired of and yet whom they continued to expect. For the first time in his life he sensed then, vaguely, the depth of the shame concealed in the silence that stretched between them, all through his childhood. Without any quarrels or complaints or disagreements. A polite silence. He got off his bicycle and asked shyly if it was time for him to come in.
Baruch said:
‘As you wish.’
His mother said nothing.
This memory awoke in Fima a pressing need to clarify something, to ask Uri, to make inquiries. He had the feeling that he had forgotten to check the thing that mattered most. But what it was that mattered most he did not know. Although he sensed that at that moment his ignorance was thinner than usual, like a lace curtain behind which dim shadows moved. Or a threadbare garment that covers the body but no longer warms it. While he knew in his bones how much he longed to continue not knowing.
As they climbed the stairs to the second floor, Fima put his hand on Uri’s shoulder. Uri seemed tired and gloomy. Fima felt a need to encourage with this touch his large friend, who had once been a well-known combat pilot and still went around with his head thrust aggressively forward, a sophisticated airman’s watch on his wrist, and his eyes sometimes giving the impression that he saw everything from above.
And yet he was a warm-hearted, honest, devoted friend.
On the door was fixed a brass plate inscribed, in black letters on grey: FAMILY NOMBERG. Underneath it, on a square piece of card, Baruch had written in his firm handwriting: ‘Kindly refrain from ringing the bell between the hours of one and five p.m.’ Unconsciously Fima shot a glance at his watch. But there was no need to ring anyway, as the door was ajar.
Tsvi Kropotkin intercepted them in the hall, like a conscientious staff officer who has been detailed to brief newcomers before admitting them to the operations room. Despite the ambulance drivers’ strike, he said, and the approach of the Sabbath, the tireless Nina had managed to arrange on the phone from her office for him to be moved to the mortuary at Hadassah Hospital. Fima felt a renewed affection for Tsvi’s shy embarrassment: he looked less like a famous historian and head of department than a sort of external youth leader whose shoulders have begun to stoop, or a village schoolmaster. Fima also liked the way Tsvi’s eyes blinked behind his thick lenses, as though the light was suddenly too bright, and his habit of absentmindedly fingering everything he came in contact with, dishes, furniture, books, people, as though he always had to wrestle with secret doubts about the solidity of everything. If it had not been for the Jerusalem mania, and Hitler, and his obsession with Jewish responsibility, this modest scholar might have settled down in Cambridge or Oxford and lived quietly to be a hundred, dividing his time between the golf course and the Crusades, or between tennis and Tennyson.
Fima said:
‘You were right to move him. What would he have done here all weekend?’
In the salon he was surrounded by his friends, who reached out from every side and touched him gently on his shoulder, his cheek, his hair, as though through his father’s death he had inherited the role of invalid. As though it was their duty to check carefully to see if he was too hot or too cold or shivering, or planning secretly to leave them without warning. Shula thrust a cup of lemon tea with honey into his hand. And Teddy sat him down gently at one end of the brocade-covered sofa on which embroidered cushions were scattered. They all seemed to be waiting expectantly for him to say something. Fima responded:
‘You’re all wonderful. I’m sorry to spoil your Friday night like this.’
His father’s armchair was standing exactly facing him: deep, wide, upholstered in red leather and with a red leather headrest, looking as though it were made of raw flesh. The footstool seemed to have been pushed slightly to one side. Like a royal sceptre, the cane with its silver band rested against the right-hand side of the chair.
Shula said:
‘At any rate, one thing’s certain: he didn’t suffer at all. It was over in a moment. It’s what they used to call death by a kiss: only the righteous are granted it, so they used to say.’
Fima smiled:
‘Righteous or not, kisses were always an important part of his repertoire.’ As he said this, he observed something that he had never noticed before: Shula, whom he dated more than thirty years ago, before the billy-goat year, and who at that time had a fragile girlish beauty, had aged and gone quite grey. In fact her thighs had grown so fat that she looked like an ultra-pious woman worn out by childbearing but who accepts her decrepitude with total resignation.
A dense, close smell of thick-pile carpets and antique furniture that have been breathing their own air for many years hung in the room, and Fima had to remind himself that it had always been here and was not the smell of Frau Professor Kropotkin’s advancing age. At the same time his nostrils caught a whiff of smoke. Looking around, he saw a cigarette on the edge of an ashtray; it had been stubbed out almost as soon as it was lit. He asked who had been smoking here. It turned out that one of the two old ladies, his father’s friends, who had been here on a fundraising mission at the time, had put out her cigarette soon after lighting it. Had she done this when she noticed that Baruch was wheezing? Or when it was all over? Or at the very moment he groaned and expired? Fima asked for the ashtray to be removed. And he was delighted to see how Teddy jumped to carry out his order. Tsvi asked, feeling the central heating pipes with his long fingers, if he wanted to be taken there. Fima did not understand the question. Tsvi, hardly able to control his embarrassment, explained:
‘There. To Hadassah. To see him. Perhaps …’
Fima shrugged.
‘What is there to see? I expect he’s as dapper as usual. Why bother him?’ And he instructed Shula to make some strong black coffee for Uri, because he had been on the go ever since he got off the plane in the morning. ‘In fact, you ought to give him something to eat too: he must be starving. I figure he must have left his hotel in Rome at about three this morning, so he really has had a long, hard day of it. Come to think of it, you look pretty tired yourself, Shula; in fact, you look worn out. And where are Yael and Dimi? I want Yael here. And Dimi too.’
‘They’re at home,’ said Ted apologetically. ‘The boy took it quite hard. You might say he had a special attachment to your father.’ He went on to say that Dimi had locked himself in the utility room,
and they had had to ring a friend of theirs, the child psychologist from South Africa, to ask what to do. He told them just to leave the child alone. And, sure enough, after a while Dimi had come out, and then he’d glued himself to the computer. The South African friend had advised them …
Fima said:
‘Balls.’
And then, quietly and firmly:
‘I want them both here.’
As he spoke, he was surprised himself at this new assertiveness he had acquired since his father’s death. As if it had given him an unexpected promotion, entitling him henceforward to issue orders at will and to command instant obedience.
Ted said:
‘Sure. We could go and fetch them. But from what the psychologist said, I think it might be better if …’
Fima nipped this appeal in the bud:
‘If you wouldn’t mind.’
Ted hesitated, held a whispered consultation with Tsvi, glanced at his watch, and said: ‘Okay, Fima, whatever you like. That’s fine. I’ll pop round and collect Dimi. If Uri wouldn’t mind lending me his keys; Yael’s got our car.’
‘Yael too, please.’
‘Right. Shall I call her? See if she can make it?’
‘Of course she can make it. Tell her I insist.’
Ted went out, and at that moment Nina arrived. Small and thin, practical, razor-sharp in her movements, her thin vulpine face projecting common sense and a survivor’s shrewdness, brimming with energy, as though she’d spent the day rescuing casualties under fire rather than making arrangements for a funeral. She wore a light grey trouser-suit, her glasses were shining, and she was clutching a stiff black attaché case that she did not put down even when she gave Fima a quick angular hug and a kiss on the forehead. But she found no words.
Shula said:
‘I’m going to the kitchen to get you all something to drink. Who wants what? Would anyone like an omelette? Or a slice of bread with something?’
Tsvi remarked hesitantly:
‘And he was such a robust man too. So full of energy. With that twinkle in his eyes. And such a zest for life, good food, business, women, politics, the lot. Not long ago he turned up at my office on Mount Scopus and gave me a furious lecture about how Yeshayahu Leibowitz is making demagogic capital out of Maimonides. Neither more nor less. When I tried to disagree, to defend Leibowitz, he launched into some story about a rabbi from Drohovitz who saw Maimonides in a dream. I would say, a deep lust for life. I always thought he’d live to a ripe old age.’
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’ve 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 broken-hearted widows and divorcees.’
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 towards 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 engaged in 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 round the head 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 towards them, with short, vigorous strides, the prime minister, Ben Gurion, who lived at that time on the corner of Ben Maimon and Ussish-kin 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 are 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? Are 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.’ An
d 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:
‘See 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 himself 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 defence 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 brainwave: he realised 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. Drivelling 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 coloured 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.