by Amos Oz
Within ten minutes of coming in out of the rain, Fima was sitting in Uri’s ingenious armchair, which Fima described as ‘a cross between a hammock and a lullaby’. Nina served him a bowl of steaming, well-seasoned pea soup, refilled his whisky glass, and gave him a shirt, trousers and red sweater of Uri’s that were too big for him but felt good nevertheless. She encased his feet in a pair of furry slippers that Uri had brought back from Portugal. His own clothes she hung up to dry on a chair in front of the fire. They talked about recent Latin-American literature, about magical realism, which Nina saw as a continuation of the tradition of Kafka, whereas Fima tended to attribute it to a vulgarisation of the heritage of Cervantes and Lope de Vega, and he managed to annoy Nina by stating that, for his money, he would give the whole of this South American circus, with all its fireworks and candy floss for a single page of Chekhov. A Hundred Years of Solitude for just one Lady with the Little Dog.
Nina lit another cigarette and said:
‘Paradoxes. OK. But what’s going to become of you?’
And she added:
‘When are you going to take yourself in hand? When are you going to stop running away?’
Fima said:
‘I’ve noticed at least two signs lately that Shamir is beginning to realise that without the PLO it won’t work.’
And Nina, through her thick lenses and the cigarette haze:
‘Sometimes I think you’re a lost cause.’
To which Fima riposted:
‘Aren’t we all, Nina?’
At that moment he felt as affectionate and tender towards the person sitting opposite him, dressed in a well-worn pair of men’s jeans with a zip fly and a wide-cut man’s shirt, as if she were his sister, his own flesh and blood. Her lack of prettiness and femininity suddenly struck him as painfully feminine and attractive. Her large soft breasts cried out to him to lay his head between them. Her short grey hair drew his fingertips. And he knew precisely how to wipe that hunted vixen look off her face and replace it with the her pampered little girl expression. At this his organ began to stir deep down inside Uri’s trousers. With Fima, kindness, generosity, compassion for a woman always heralded the stirrings of lust. His loins were on fire with a desire that was close to pain: it was two months since he had slept with a woman. The smell of damp wool that he had sniffed on Yael when he kissed her back in the dark entrance to her building was blended now with the smell of his clothes drying in front of the fire. His breathing quickened, and his lips parted and quivered. Like a child’s. Nina noticed, and said:
‘Just a minute, Fima. Let me finish my cigarette. Give me another moment or two.’
But Fima, bashful yet burning with lust and pity, ignored this, knelt in front of her, and tugged at her leg until he succeeded in dragging her down to join him on the rug. A clumsy tussle with his clothes and hers ensued by the table legs. With some difficulty he disposed of her lighted cigarette and spectacles, while he rubbed uninterruptedly against her thigh and smothered her face with kisses as if to distract her attention from the ever more furious friction. Until she managed to push him away and release both of them from their clothes, whispering, ‘Gently, Fima: you’re eating me alive.’ But, heedless, he lay on top of her with all his weight, still kissing her face, still whispering entreaties and stammering excuses. When she finally relented and said, ‘All right, come on then,’ his organ suddenly shrivelled. It withdrew into the recesses of its lair like a startled tortoise.
Even so, he did not stop kissing and hugging and apologising for his tiredness; he had had a bad dream last night, and this evening Ted had thrown him out after making him drink brandy, and now the Scotch. It seemed as though today really wasn’t his day.
Two tears appeared in the corners of Nina’s short-sighted eyes. Without her glasses, she looked frail and dreamy, as though her face were much more naked than her body. They lay for a long while, holding each other tight. Humiliated, and bound together by their humiliation. Until she broke loose, groped for a cigarette, lit it, and tried to say ‘Never mind, child,’ and tried to make him understand that at this moment he was reaching deeper inside her than he could by screwing. Again she called him ‘child’, and said, Come and have a wash, and let’s put you to bed.
Fima, consoled and elegiac, laid his head in the hollow of her shoulder but pushed her glasses away, because he was ashamed of their naked bodies, ashamed of his shrunken member, wanting only to cuddle up to her, not to see and not to be seen. Close and silent, they lay sprawled on the rug in the dying firelight, listening to the raging wind and the rain beating against the windows and the gurgling of the water in the drainpipe, both of them soft and satisfied, as though they had made love tenderly and given each other pleasure. Suddenly Fima saw fit to ask:
‘What do you think, Nina: have Yael and Uri had it off?’
The spell was broken. Nina pulled sharply away from his embrace, grabbed her spectacles, wrapped the tablecloth around herself, abruptly lit another Nelson, and said:
‘Tell me, why is it you can never keep your mouth shut for five minutes on end?’
Then he asked her what it was exactly she had liked about his article in Friday’s paper.
Nina said:
‘Wait.’
He heard a door slam. A moment later came the sound of rushing water as the bath filled. He rummaged in his heap of clothes, searching all the pockets for his heartburn tablets. Self-mockingly he repeated Ted’s words:
‘You’re looking a bit run down.’
And Yael’s:
‘What an ass you are.’
When Nina emerged twenty minutes later, scrubbed and scented, in a brown bathrobe, eager to make up, she found her husband’s clothes scattered on the floor, the fire dying, and the furry slippers Uri bought in Portugal lying like dead kittens by the door. Fima had vanished. But she noticed he had finished his drink and forgotten the book about Leibowitz and also one of his socks, hanging on the back of a chair in front of the fire, which flickered for a moment with its last remaining strength then expired. Nina picked up the clothes and slippers, cleared away the glass, soup bowl, and sock, and straightened a corner of the rug. Her thin, well-shaped fingers, like those of a pretty Chinese child, groped for a cigarette. She was smiling through her tears.
7
With thin fists
AT A quarter past six in the morning he wrote down in his brown dream book what he had seen in the night. A coffee-table book about Jerusalem in Hebrew poetry resting slantwise on his raised knees served as a writing desk. He wrote the date, as always, in words, not in figures.
In the dream, war had broken out. The setting resembled the Golan Heights, only more barren. Like a moonscape. Dressed in military uniform but without belt or gun, he was walking along a deserted dirt track, both sides of which, he knew, were lined with minefields. He particularly remembered that the air was very close and grey, as though a storm were approaching. Far in the distance a bell tolled slowly, with long pauses between strokes, the sound echoing through invisible valleys. There was no other soul. Not so much as a bird. And no sign of human habitation. We had been caught off guard again. An enemy armoured column was steadily approaching a narrow mountain pass, a sort of ravine that Fima could make out farther up the road, where the rugged heights began. He realised that the grey-ness in the air was the dust rising from their tracks. He also began to hear dimly, behind the clanging of the bell, a low rumble of engines. Somehow he knew that his appointed task was to wait for them in the ravine at the point where the road crossed the mountains. To delay them by talking to them until reinforcements could be brought up to block the canyon. He started to run as hard as he could. He was panting heavily. The blood throbbed in his temples. His lungs ached. He had a stitch in his side. Although he was exerting his muscles to the utmost, he was hardly moving at all, he was almost running on the spot, and all the while he was frantically searching for words he could use to delay the enemy. He simply had to find something, a phrase, an idea,
a message, perhaps even something funny, words that would make the armoured column that was advancing towards him stop, make heads emerge from turrets to listen to him. If he could not change their hearts, at least he must gain time. Without which there was no hope. But his strength was failing and his feet were stumbling and his head was empty of ideas. Not a word passed through his mind. The rumble of engines was getting closer, louder; he could already hear the thunder of guns and the barking of machine guns behind a bend in the road. And he could see flashes inside the cloud of smoke or dust that filled the ravine and filled his eyes and made his throat burn. He was too late. He would never make it in time. There were no words in the world that could hold back the mad bull charging towards him. In a moment or two he would be flattened. And the most terrible thing was not the fear; it was the shame of failure, of being at a loss for words. His crazed running slowed and turned to a shambling gait, because a heavy weight had settled on his shoulders. When he managed to turn his head, he discovered that there was a child riding him, pommelling his head with vicious thin fists, and forcing his head between his knees. Until he began to choke.
Fima also noted in his book:
‘My bedclothes smell. I ought to take a bundle of washing to the laundry today. Yet there was something: I was left with a longing for those barren mountains and the weird light, and especially for the tolling of the bell that echoed in the deserted valleys with very long pauses between the strokes, and seemed to be coming to me from an unimaginable distance.’
8
A disagreement on the question of who the Indians really are
AT TEN o’clock in the morning, as he was standing at the window counting the raindrops, he saw Baruch Nomberg taking his leave of the taxi driver. Fima’s father was a dapper old man in a suit and bow tie, with a pointed white beard that curved upward like a Saracen scimitar. At the age of eighty-two he still kept a firm hold of the reins of the cosmetics factory he had set up in the thirties.
His father was bending over the window of the taxi, apparently lecturing the driver, with his white hair waving in the breeze, his hat in his left hand and his carved stick with the silver band in the other. Fima knew that the old man was not haggling about the fare or waiting for his change; he was finishing an anecdote he had started telling on the way. For fifty years now he had been conducting an extended seminar with Jerusalem taxi drivers on Hasidic tales and pious stories. He was a dedicated storyteller. And he had a fixed habit of commenting on every anecdote and pointing up the moral lesson. Whenever he told a joke, he would follow it by explaining what the point was. Sometimes he would carry on and explain both the apparent point and the real point. His commentaries always made his listeners laugh, which encouraged the old man to tell more stories and explain them too. He was convinced that the point of the stories had escaped everybody, and that it was his duty to open their eyes.
As a young man Baruch Nomberg had fled from the Bolsheviks in Kharkov and studied chemistry in Prague, then he had come to Jerusalem and started producing lipsticks and face powders in a small domestic laboratory. From these small beginnings a successful cosmetics factory had developed. He was a flirtatious, garrulous old man. A widower for several decades now, he was always surrounded by female friends and companions. Jerusalem gossip had it that they were attracted to him only for his money. Fima thought otherwise: he considered his father, for all his bluster, a good and generous man. All these years it had been his habit to lend his financial support to any cause he found deserving or moving. He was a member of endless committees, councils, societies, associations, and groups. He was a regular participant in fundraising campaigns for the homeless, for the absorption of immigrants, for people in need of complex surgical operations abroad, for land purchase in the Occupied Territories, for the production of commemorative volumes, for the restoration of historic ruins, for the creation of homes for abandoned children and shelters for battered wives. He volunteered his support for needy artists, for the ending of experiments on laboratory animals, for the purchase of wheelchairs, and for the prevention of pollution. He saw no contradiction in backing traditional values in education while also funding a campaign for the prevention of religious coercion. He dispensed grants to students from minority groups, to victims of violent crime, and also for the rehabilitation of the violent criminals. In each of these initiatives the old man committed modest sums, but together they apparently consumed about half of the total income yielded by the cosmetics factory, as well as the greater part of his time. In addition, he had a passion verging on addiction for anything to do with contracts and small print. Whenever he had to purchase new chemicals or dispose of used equipment, he would engage a veritable battery of lawyers, consultants, and accountants in order to block every conceivable loophole. Legal agreements, notarial ultimatums, copies of initialled memorandums would excite in him a thrill of the game that almost bordered on artistic fulfilment.
He spent his spare time in the company of women. Even now that he was over eighty, he still loved sitting in cafés. Summer and winter alike he wore a formal suit and bow tie, with a triangle of gleaming white silk protruding from his breast pocket like a snowflake in a heat wave, with silver cuff links, a jewelled ring flashing on his little finger, his white beard sticking out in front like a wagging finger, his carved stick with the silver band parked between his knees, and his hat on the table in front of him. A pink old man, scrubbed and polished, he was invariably accompanied by an elegant divorcée or a well-preserved widow, always cultured European women with refined manners in their late fifties or early sixties. He would sometimes sit at his usual table in the café with two or three of them. He would order them espresso and strudel, while he normally had a liqueur and a dish of fresh fruit in front of him.
As the taxi drove off, the old man waved it good-bye with his hat, following his invariable habit. Being a sentimental person, he treated every farewell as final. Fima went out to meet him. He could almost hear him humming a Hasidic folk tune to himself as he climbed the stairs. Whenever he was alone, and even sometimes when he was being spoken to, the old man would be constantly intoning the characteristic ya-ba-bam. Fima sometimes wondered whether he did it in his sleep too: like a musical liquid welling up from some invisible hot spring, overflowing his father’s shrunken body, or seeping out through the tiny cracks caused by old age. Fima could also almost sniff his father’s special smell wafting up the stairs, that smell that he remembered from his infancy and could identify even in a roomful of strangers: the scent of airless rooms, old furniture, steaming fish stew and boiled carrots, feather beds, and sticky liqueur.
As father and son exchanged a perfunctory embrace, this Eastern European aroma aroused in Fima a revulsion mixed with shame at the revulsion, together with the long-standing urge to pick a quarrel with his father, to trample on some sacrosanct principle of his, to disclose the irritating contradictions in his views, to exasperate him a little.
‘Nu,’ the old man began, panting and wheezing from the exertion of his climb, ‘so what does my esteemed professor have to report to me today? Has the Redeemer come unto Zion? Have the Arabs had a change of heart and made up their minds to love us?’
‘Hello, Baruch.’ Fima contained himself.
‘Right. Hello, my dear.’
‘What’s new? Is your back still bothering you?’
‘My back?’ said the old man. ‘Fortunately my back is doomed to be forever behind me. I am here, it is there; it will never overtake me. And if, God forbid, it ever does, why, I’ll simply turn my back on it. But my breath is getting shorter. Like my temper. And here the roles are reversed: It is not chasing me; I am chasing it. So, what is Herr Efraim busying himself with in these awesome days? Still bent upon setting the world to rights in readiness for the Kingdom of God?’
‘There’s nothing new,’ said Fima, and, taking his father’s stick and hat, he saw fit to add:
‘Except that the country’s going to the dogs.’
The
old man shrugged. ‘I’ve been hearing such obituaries for fifty years already – the country this, the country that – and in the meantime the obituarists are all six feet underground and the country is improving every day. For all your protestations: The more they afflict it, the more it flourishes. Don’t interrupt me, Efraim. Let me tell you a charming little story. Once in Kharkov, before Lenin’s revolution, a silly anarchist daubed a slogan on the wall of a church in the middle of the night: GOD IS DEAD SIGNED FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE. He was alluding to the late demented philosopher. Nu. So, the next night someone more clever comes along and writes: FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE IS DEAD SIGNED GOD. Wait a minute – I haven’t finished yet. Kindly permit me to explain to you the point of this little story, and in the meantime why don’t you put on the kettle and pour me a minuscule drop of that Cointreau I gave you last week. By the way, it’s time you had this old ruin of yours redecorated, Fimuchka. Before the evil spirits take it over. Just call in a decorator and send me the bill. Where were we? Yes, tea. Your beloved Nietzsche is a noxious contagion. I wouldn’t touch him with a barge pole. Here, I’ll tell you a true story about Nietzsche and Nachman Krochmal when they met once on the train to Vienna.’
