by Amos Oz
By the time he had finished reading what the television critic had to say about a programme he had forgotten he had meant to watch the previous evening, it was past eight o’clock and he had missed the news again. Angrily he decided that he ought to sit down to work right away. He repeated to himself the words from the dream, Have to separate. Separate what from what? A warm, tender voice that was neither male nor female but held a deep compassion said to him, And where are you, Efraim? A very good question, Fima replied.
He sat at his desk and saw the unanswered letters and the shopping list he had written out on Saturday evening, and remembered he was supposed to phone someone this morning about something that could not wait, but he could not for the life of him recall who it was. So he dialled Tsvika Kropotkin’s number, woke him up, and stammered a long embarrassed apology, but still kept Tsvi on the line for a good twenty minutes about the tactics of the left and the changes that were appearing in the US position and the time bomb of Islamic fundamentalism that was ticking away all around us, until Tsvi interrupted: ‘Fima, I’m sorry, don’t be mad, but I simply have to get dressed. I’m late for a class.’ Fima concluded the conversation as he had begun it, with an excessively long apology, and he still could not remember if he was supposed to call somebody this morning or instead wait for an urgent phonecall, which he might have missed now because of his chat with Tsvi. Which on second thoughts had been less a chat than a monologue. So he dropped his idea of calling Uri Gefen as well, and checked over his computerised bank statement, but he couldn’t work out if six hundred and fifty shekels had been credited to his account and four hundred and fifty debited or the other way around. His head sank on his chest, and inside his closed eyes passed crowds of Muslim fanatics excitedly chanting suras and shouting slogans, smashing and burning everything that stood in their way. Then the square was empty, with only tatters of yellowed paper fluttering in the breeze and blending with the pattering rain that fell all the way from here to the Bethlehem hills swathed in grey mist. Where are you, Efraim? Where is the Aryan side? And if she is chilly, why is she?
Fima woke to the touch of a heavy warm hand. He opened his eyes and saw his father’s brown hand resting like a tortoise on his thigh. It was an old, thick hand with yellowing nails, pitted with hills and valleys, crisscrossed with dark blue blood vessels, dotted with patches of pigment and sparse tufts of hair. For a moment he panicked. Then he realised that the hand was his own. He woke and read over, three times, the headings he had written down on Saturday for an article he had promised to deliver by today’s deadline. But what he had intended to write, what had excited him yesterday to polemical impishness, today seemed totally flat. The very urge to write had been dulled.
A little reflection revealed that all was not lost: it was nothing more than a technical difficulty. Because of the overcast sky and the damp mist there was not enough light in the room. He needed light. That was all. He switched on his desk lamp, hoping by so doing to make a fresh start on his article, his morning, his life. But the lamp was broken. Or perhaps it needed a new light bulb. Angry, he hurried to the cupboard in the hall, where, contrary to his expectation, he actually did find a bulb, and he managed to replace the old one without any setback. But the new bulb must have been a dud, or perhaps it had fallen under its predecessor’s influence. He went back to look for a third one, and on the way it occurred to him to try the light in the hall, and then he had to exonerate both bulbs, because it turned out there was a power cut. To save himself from idleness he decided to call Yael. If her husband answered, he would hang up. If she was there, no doubt the inspiration of the moment would tell him what to say. Like that time, after a flaming row, when he had mollified her with the words: If only we weren’t married, I’d ask you to be my wife. And she, smiling, had answered through her tears, If you weren’t already my husband, I think I might say yes. After ten or twenty hollow rings Fima understood that Yael did not want to speak to him, unless Ted was leaning on the phone to prevent her picking up the receiver.
In any case he felt weary. His long nocturnal prowl through the alleys of Valladolid had ruined his whole morning. At one o’clock he had to be at his post behind the reception desk of the private clinic where he worked in Kiryat Shmuel, and already it was twenty past nine. Fima crumpled up the headings for his article and his electricity bill and his shopping list and his computerised bank statement and tossed them all in the bin, leaving his desk cleared for action at last. He went to the kitchen to make himself a fresh cup of coffee, and while he was waiting for the water to boil he stood in the half-darkness remembering the evening light in Jerusalem some thirty years before, in Agrippa Street outside the Eden cinema a few weeks after his trip to Greece. Yael had said then, Yes, Effy, I do quite love you and I like loving you and I like it when you talk, but what makes you think that if you stop talking for a few minutes you’ll stop existing? And he had shut up like a child scolded by its mother. When after a quarter of an hour the kettle was still not boiling, even though he had remembered twice to plug it in, he finally realised that without electricity he would never have his coffee. So he lay down again fully dressed under the heavy winter blanket, set the alarm for quarter to twelve, hid his dream book under the pile of newspapers and magazines at the foot of his bed, covered himself up to his chin, and concentrated his thoughts on women until he managed to arouse himself. He clasped his erection with all ten fingers, like a burglar climbing a drainpipe or, rather – he chuckled – like a drowning man clutching at a straw. But fatigue was much stronger than desire, and he let go and dropped off. Outside, the rain grew heavier.
3
A can of worms
ON the midday news he heard that an Arab youth had been hit and killed that morning by a plastic bullet fired presumably from a soldier’s rifle in the Jebeliyeh refugee camp in the course of a stone-throwing incident, and that the corpse had been snatched from the hospital in Gaza by masked youths. The circumstances were being investigated. Fima pondered the wording of the announcement. He particularly disliked the expression ‘killed by a plastic bullet’. And the word ‘presumably’ made him seethe. He was angry, too, in a more general way, about the passive verbs that were beginning to take over official statements and seemed to be infecting the language as a whole.
Although in fact it might be a healthy and wholly laudable sense of shame that prevented us from announcing simply: a Jewish soldier has shot and killed an Arab teenager. On the other hand, this polluted language was constantly teaching us that the fault lay with the rifle, with the circumstances that were being investigated, with the plastic bullet, as if all evil was the fault of Heaven and everything was predestined.
And in fact, he said to himself, who knows?
After all, there is a sort of secret charm in the words ‘the fault of Heaven’.
But then he was angry with himself. There was no charm and it was not secret. Leave Heaven out of it.
Fima aimed a fork at his forehead, at his temple, at the back of his head, and tried to guess or sense what it must feel like the instant the bullet pierces the skull and explodes: no pain, no noise, perhaps, so he imagined, perhaps just a searing flash of incredulity, like a child preparing himself for a slap on the face from his father and receiving instead a white-hot poker in his eyeball. Is there a fraction, an atom of time in which, who knows, illumination arrives? The light of the seven heavens? When what has been dim and vague all your life is momentarily opened up before darkness falls? As though all those years you have been looking for a complicated solution to a complicated problem, and in the final moment a simple solution flashes out?
At this point Fima croaked angrily to himself, Just stop fucking up your mind. The words ‘dim and vague’ filled him with disgust. He got up and went out, locking the door of his flat behind him and taking particular note of which pocket he put the key in. In the entrance hall of the block of flats he spotted the white of a letter through the slit of his letter box. But the only key in his pocket w
as his front-door key. The key to the letter box was presumably still lying on his desk. Unless it was in the pocket of another pair of trousers. Or on the corner of the kitchen counter. After a moment’s hesitation he shrugged; the letter was probably nothing but the water bill or the phone bill, or else just a handbill. While he lunched on a salami omelette, a salad, and a fruit compote in the café across the road, he was startled to see, through the window, that the light was on in his flat. He thought about this for a while, weighing up the faint possibility that he was in both places at once, but preferred to assume that the fault had been repaired and the current had been restored. Glancing at his watch, he decided that if he went up to the flat, switched off the light, found the key to the letter box, and retrieved the letter, he would be late for work, so he paid for his meal, saying, ‘Thank you, Mrs Schoenberg.’ As usual, she corrected him:
‘It’s Scheinmann, Dr Nisan.’
‘Of course,’ Fima replied. ‘I’m sorry. How much do I owe you? I’ve already paid? Well, all I can say is it can’t have been an accident. I must have wanted to pay twice, because your schnitzel – it was schnitzel, wasn’t it? – was especially tasty. I’m sorry. Thank you. Good-bye. I must run now. Just look at this rain. Aren’t you looking a little tired? Or unhappy? It’s probably just the weather. It’ll brighten up soon. See you tomorrow.’
Twenty minutes later, when the bus stopped at the National Auditorium, it occurred to Fima how ridiculous it had been to come out on a day like this without an umbrella. Or to promise the proprietress of the café that the weather would brighten up. On what grounds? Suddenly a fine, burnished sliver of reddish light piercing through the clouds dazzled him by setting fire to a window high up in the Hilton tower. Though dazzled, he could see a towel waving on the railing of a balcony on the tenth or twentieth floor, and he sensed in his nostrils the precise scent of the woman who had just dried herself on it. Look, he said to himself, nothing is ever really wasted, nothing gets written off, and there is scarcely a moment without some minor miracle. Maybe everything is for the best after all.
The two-room flat on the edge of Kiryat Yovel had been bought for Fima when he remarried in 1961, less than a year after receiving his BA in history with distinction at the university in Jerusalem. In those days his father pinned high hopes on him. Others too believed in Fima’s future. He was awarded a scholarship, and almost went on to do a master’s degree; there were even thoughts of a doctorate and an academic career. But in the summer of 1960 Fima’s life underwent a series of mishaps or complications. To this day his friends chuckled with amused affection whenever, in his absence, the conversation turned to ‘Fima’s billy-goat year’. The story ran that in the middle of July, straight after the end of his finals, in the garden of the Ratisbonne Convent he fell in love with the French guide of a party of Catholic tourists. He was sitting on a bench waiting for a girlfriend, a student at the nursing college named Shula, who married his friend Tsvi Kropotkin a couple of years later. A sprig of oleander was flowering between his fingers and the birds were arguing overhead. Nicole addressed him from the next bench: Was there any water here? Did he speak French? Fima replied in the affirmative to both questions, even though he did not have the faintest idea where there was any water, and he knew only a smattering of French. From that moment on he dogged her footsteps wherever she went in Jerusalem; he would not leave her alone despite her polite requests; he did not even give her up when her group leader warned him that he would be obliged to lodge a complaint about him. When she went to Mass at the Dormition Abbey, he waited for her outside like a dog for an hour and a half. Every time she came out of the Kings’ Hotel, opposite the Terra Sancta Building, she encountered Fima standing in front of the revolving door, his eyes blazing. When she went to the museum, he was lurking in every room. When she flew back to France, he followed her to Paris and even to her home in Lyons. Late one moonlit night, so the story goes in Jerusalem, her father came out of the house and fired a double-barrelled shotgun at him, grazing his leg. During the three days he spent in a Franciscan hospital he made inquiries about what one had to do to become a Christian. Nicole’s father, visiting him in the hospital to ask his forgiveness, offered to help him convert. Meanwhile Nicole had had enough of her father too and ran away from both of them, first to her sister in Madrid and then to her sister-in-law in Málaga. Dirty, desperate, and unkempt, he pursued her on dusty buses and trains until his money ran out in Gibraltar and, with the help of the Red Cross, he was returned almost forcibly to Israel on board a Panamanian cargo vessel. On arrival at Haifa he was arrested, and he spent six weeks in a military prison because he had tampered with the date on the form authorising a soldier on the reserve list to leave the country. They say that at the beginning of this passion Fima weighed seventy-two kilogrammes and that in September, in the prison hospital, he weighed less than sixty. He was released from prison after his father interceded for him with a senior official, whose wife, a well-known woman-about-town with a famous collection of etchings, subsequently fell outrageously in love with him; she was ten years younger than her husband and at least eight years older than Fima. In the autumn she became pregnant by him and moved into his lodgings in Musrara. They were the talk of the whole city. In December Fima boarded another cargo boat, a Yugoslav one this time, and turned up in Malta, where he spent three months working on a tropical-fish farm and writing his cycle of poems, The Death of Augustine and His Resurrection in the Arms of Dulcinea. In January the woman who owned the cheap hotel where he was staying in Valletta fell for him and moved his luggage into her own apartment. Afraid she might get pregnant’ too, he decided to marry her in a civil ceremony. This marriage lasted less than two months, because meanwhile his father, with the help of friends in Rome, had managed to discover his whereabouts; he informed Fima that his Jerusalem lover had lost the baby, succumbed to depression, and returned to her husband and her etchings. Fima decided that there was no forgiveness for him and made up his mind to leave his landlady at once and give women a wide berth forever. He decided that love leads inexorably to disaster, whereas relations without love cause only humiliation and hurt. He left Malta without a penny, on the deck of a Turkish fishing boat. His plan was to hole up for at least a year in a certain monastery on the island of Samos. On the way he was smitten with panic at the thought that his ex-wife might also be pregnant and wondered if he ought to go back to her, but at the same time he felt he had acted wisely in leaving her his money but no address that she could trace him by. He disembarked at Thessaloniki and spent a night in a youth hostel, where with sweetness and pain he dreamed of his first love, Nicole, whom he had lost track of in Gibraltar. In the dream her name had changed to Thérèse, and Fima saw his father with a loaded shotgun holding her and the baby prisoner in the cellar of the YMCA in Jerusalem, except that by the end of the dream he himself had become the captive child. The next morning he set off to look for a synagogue, even though he had never been a practising Jew and was certain that God was not in the least religious and had no use for religion. But, having no other address, Fima decided to try and see. Outside the synagogue he came across three Israeli girls who were backpacking around Greece and were about to head north, into the mountains, because by now spring had arrived. Fima joined them, and on the way, so they say, fell head over heels for one of them, Ilia Abravanel, from Haifa, who to him was the image of Mary Magdalene in a painting he had seen somewhere, he could not remember where or who the artist was. And as Ilia did not yield to his advances, he slept a few times with her friend Liat Sirkin, who invited him to share her sleeping bag as they spent the night in some highland valley or sacred grove. Liat Sirkin taught Fima one or two unusual, exquisite pleasures, but he felt, beyond the carnal thrills, faint hints of spiritual elation: almost day by day he fell under the spell of a secret mountain joy mingled with a sense of exaltation which endowed him with heightened powers of vision such as he had never experienced before or since. During these days in the mountains of northern
Greece he was able, looking at the sunrise over a clump of olive trees, to see the creation of the world. And to know with absolute certainty, as he passed a flock of sheep in the midday heat, that this was not the first time he had lived. And actually to hear, sitting on the vine-shaded terrace of a village tavern, over wine and cheese and salad, the roar of a snowstorm in the polar wastes. He played tunes to the girls on a pipe he had fashioned from a reed, and was not ashamed to leap and whirl in front of them like a crazy child until he brought them to peals of childlike laughter and simple happiness. All that time he could see no contradiction between pining for Ilia and sleeping with Liat, but he barely noticed the third girl, who mostly chose to stay silent. Though she was the one who dressed his foot when he cut it on a piece of broken glass. These three girls, with the previous women in his life, including his mother, who had died when he was ten, almost merged into a single woman in his mind. Not because he thought that a woman is only a woman, but because with his inner illumination he sometimes felt that the differences between people, any people – men, women, or children – were of no consequence except perhaps for the outermost layer, the ephemeral surface. Just as water took the form of snow or mist or steam or a lump of ice or clouds or hailstones. Or just as the bells of the monasteries and village churches differed only in their pitch and rhythm, all having the same meaning. He shared these thoughts with the girls, two of whom believed, whereas the third called him a simpleton and contented herself with patching his shirt; in this too Fima saw only different expressions of a single statement. This third girl, Yael Levin from Yavne’el, did not refrain from joining in their nude swimming on warm moonlit nights if they found a spring or stream. Once, they watched stealthily, from a distance, a fifteen-year-old shepherd boy satisfying his urges on a nanny goat. And once, they saw a pair of pious old women in widow’s weeds with large wooden crosses on their chests sitting silently on a rock in the middle of a field in the noonday heat, motionless, their fingers interlaced. One night they heard sounds of music coming from an empty ruin. And one day a wizened old man walked past them, going the other way, playing on a broken accordion that made no sound. The next morning there was a brief cloudburst, and the air became so clear that they could see the shadows of trees shifting on the red-tiled roofs of little villages in distant valleys, and almost make out the individual needles of the cypress and pine trees on the flanks of the mountains. One of the peaks still wore a cap of snow, which looked silver rather than white against the deep blue of the sky. Flocks of birds were performing a sort of scarf dance overhead. Fima, for no particular reason, suddenly said something that made all the girls laugh:
