by Amos Oz
As usual, his father insisted on adding an explanation of the point of the story. Fima laughed: unlike the story, the explanation was amusing. His father, delighted by Fima’s reaction, was encouraged to offer him a further anecdote concerning a train journey, this time about a honeymoon couple who found themselves compelled to seek the assistance of the guard. ‘And you do see, don’t you, Efraim, that the real point is not the bride’s behaviour, but the bridegroom’s gormlessness. He was a real shlemazel.’
Fima recited to himself the words he had heard Dr Eitan say the day before: ‘I’d hang the pair of them.’
‘Do you know the difference between a shlemiel and a shlemazel, Efraim? The shlemiel spills his tea and it always lands on the shlemazel. That’s what they say. But in reality, behind this joke there is something mysterious and quite profound. The shlemiel and the shlemazel are both immortal. Hand in hand they wander from country to country, from century to century, from story to story. Like Cain and Abel. Like Jacob and Esau. Like Raskolnikov and Svidrigailov. Or like Rabin and Peres. Or perhaps even, who knows, like God and Nietzsche. And while we’re on the subject of trains, I’ll tell you a true story. Once upon a time the director of our state railways went to take part in an international meeting of railway chiefs. A kind of Konferenz. Now the Lord opened the mouth of the ass, and our buffoon talked and talked; he simply wouldn’t stop. He wouldn’t get down from the podium. Until the American train chief had had enough. He raised his hand and asked our man, “With all due respect, excuse me, Mr Cohen, but just how many miles of track do you have in your country that you talk so much?” Nu, so our delegate doesn’t lose his presence of mind; with the assistance of the Almighty, Who grants discernment even to the simple rooster, he says: “The length I don’t rightly remember, Mr Smith, but the width is exactly the same as yours.” By the way, I heard this story once told by a foolish fellow who got it wrong and said Russia instead of America. He spoiled the whole point of the story, because the Russian railways have a different gauge from ours; in fact, it’s different from the whole of the rest of the world. No reason; just to be different. Or else so that if Napoleon Bonaparte comes back and tries to invade them again, he won’t be able to take his wagons to Moscow. Where were we? Yes, the honeymoon couple. In fact, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t bestir yourself and wed some lovely lady. If you wish, I’ll be delighted to help by finding the lady et cetera. But do get moving, my dear: after all, you’re not a stripling any more, and as for me, nu, any day now the fateful tocsin will sound and I shall be no more. Baruch Nomberg is dead, signed God. The amusing thing in the story of the honeymoon couple is not the bridegroom having to ask the guard for instructions on how to handle a bride. No, sir. It’s the association with punching tickets. Although, on second thoughts, tell me yourself; what’s so funny about it? Is there really anything to laugh at? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself for chuckling? It is really sad, even heartbreaking. Most jokes are actually based on the improper pleasure that we derive from the misfortunes of others. Now why is that, Fimuchka? Perhaps you can kindly explain to me, since you yourself are a historian, a poet, a thinker, why is it that other people’s misfortunes make us feel good? Make us guffaw? Afford us this curious satisfaction? Man is a paradox, my dear. A very curious creature indeed. Exotic. He laughs when he ought to weep. He weeps when he ought to laugh. He lives without sense and he dies without desire. Frail man, his days are as the grass. Tell me, have you seen anything of Yael lately? No? And your little boy? You must remind me later on to tell you a marvellous story from Rabbi Elimelech of Lizensk, a parable of divorce and longing. He intended it to be a parable about the relationship between the community of Israel and the Divine Presence, but I have my own personal interpretation of it. But first of all tell me about your own life and doings. This is all wrong, Efraim: Here am I prattling on just like our dear railway chief, and you’re saying nothing. Like the story about the cantor on the desert island. I’ll tell you later. Don’t let me forget. There was this cantor who found himself cast away on a desert island during the High Holy Days; it shouldn’t happen to us! But there I go again, chatting away while you are silent. Say something. Tell me about Yael and that melancholy child. Just remind me to tell you afterwards about the cantor: after all, in a way we’re all like cantors on a desert island, and in a sense all days are High Holy Days.’
Fima registered a faint, low, wheezing sound, almost like a cat’s purring, coming from his father’s chest with every breath. As though the old man had put a whistle in his throat as a joke.
‘Drink your tea, Baruch. It’s getting cold.’
The old man said:
‘Did I ask you for tea, Efraim? I asked you to talk. I asked you to tell me about that forlorn child that you insist on pretending to everybody is the son of that American dummkopf. And I asked that you should put a little order in your life. That you should be a mensh. That you should worry about the future for a change instead of worrying night and day about your beloved Arabs.’
‘I’m not,’ Fima corrected him, ‘worried about the Arabs. I’ve explained to you a thousand times. I’m worried about us.’
‘Of course, Efraim, of course. Nobody can impugn the integrity of your motives. The sad thing is, the only people you manage to take in are yourselves. As though your Arabs are just asking nicely and politely if they can have Nablus and Hebron back, and then they’ll go home happily ever after, peace be upon Israel and upon Ishmael. But that’s not what they want from us. It’s Jerusalem they want, Fimuchka, and Jaffa, and Haifa, and Ramla. To slit our throats a little bit, that’s all they want. To wipe us out. If you only took the trouble to listen a little to what they say among themselves. The sad thing is, all you ever listen to is yourselves, yourselves, yourselves.’ Another low, drawn-out whistle escaped from his father’s chest, as though he were bewildered by his son’s naïveté.
‘Actually, they’ve been saying rather different things recently, Dad.’
‘Saying. How very nice. Let them say to their heart’s content. Saying is easy. They’ve simply learned from you the rules of how to speak nicely. Eloquence. Winning words. Superciliousness. It’s not important what they say. What counts is what they really want. As that roughneck Ben Gurion used to say about Jews and gentiles.’ Apparently the old man was about to expatiate on this theme, but he was overcome by breathlessness and let out a wheeze that ended in a cough. As though inside him a loose door on squeaky hinges were being blown by the breeze.
‘They want to find a compromise now, Baruch. And now we’re the intransigent side that refuses to make concessions and won’t even talk to them.’
‘Compromise. Of course. Well spoken. There’s nothing as fine as compromise. All life depends on it. Apropos, there’s a wonderful story they tell about Rabbi Mendel of Kotsk. But who will you compromise with? With our sworn killers who long to destroy us? Now just you call me a taxi, so I won’t be late, and while we’re waiting for it, I’ll tell you a true story about how Jabotinsky once met the antisemitic interior minister of tsarist Russia, Plehve. And d’ye know what Jabotinsky said to him?’
‘It was Herzl, Dad. Not Jabotinsky.’
‘It would be better for you, Mister Wise Guy, if you didn’t take the names of Herzl and Jabotinsky in vain. Take your shoes off when you approach their hallowed ground. They must turn in their graves every time you and your friends open your mouths to pour scorn on Zionism.’
Fima, suddenly beside himself with fury, forgot his vow of self-restraint and almost gave in to the dark urge to pull his father’s goatee or smash his untouched teacup. He exploded in a wounded roar:
‘Baruch, you are blind and deaf. Open your eyes. We’re the Cossacks now, and the Arabs are the victims of the pogroms, yes, every day, every hour.’
‘The Cossacks,’ his father remarked with amused indifference. ‘Nu? What of it? So what’s wrong with us being the Cossacks for a change? Where does it say in Holy Scripture that Jew and gentile are forbidden to sw
ap jobs for a little while? Just once in a millennium or so? If only you yourself, my dear, were more of a Cossack and less of a shlemazel. Your child takes after you: a sheep in sheep’s clothing.’
Having forgotten the beginning of their conversation, he explained all over again, while Fima furiously crushed matchsticks one after another, the difference between a shlemiel and a shlemazel and how they constituted an immortal pair, wandering hand in hand through the world. Then he reminded Fima that the Arabs have forty huge countries, from India to Abyssinia, whereas we have only one tiny country no bigger than a man’s hand. He began telling off the names of the Arab states on his bony fingers. When he enumerated Iran and India among them, Fima could no longer endure in silence. He interrupted his father with a plaintive, self-righteous howl, stamped his foot, and exclaimed petulantly that Iran and India are not Arab states.
‘Nu, so what? What difference does it make to you?’ the old man intoned in a ritualistic singsong, with a sly, good-natured chortle. ‘Have we managed at last to find a satisfactory solution to the tragic question of who is a Jew, that we need to start breaking our heads over the question of who is an Arab?’
Fima, in despair, leaped from his chair and rushed to the bookcase to fetch the encyclopaedia, hoping at last to silence his father forever with a crushing defeat. However, as in a nightmare, he could not for the life of him imagine in which article to start looking for a list of the Arab states. Or even which volume. He was still fuming and frantically pulling out one volume after another, when he suddenly noticed that his father had got to his feet, quietly humming a Hasidic melody, mingled with a slight dry cough, had picked up his hat and stick, and in the midst of taking his leave was furtively slipping a folded banknote into his son’s trouser pocket.
‘It’s just not possible,’ Fima muttered. ‘I simply can’t believe it. This isn’t happening. It’s crazy.’
But he did not attempt to explain what exactly was not happening, because his father, standing in the doorway, added:
‘Nu, never mind. I give up. So forget about the Indians. Let’s call it thirty-nine states and have done with it. Even that is more than enough and far more than they deserve. We must never let the Arabs come between us, Fimuchka. We won’t give them that satisfaction. Love, so to speak, always overcomes discord. My taxi is probably waiting outside, and we mustn’t stand between a man and his work. And we never got onto the real subject. Which is that my heart is weary. Soon, Fimuchka, I shall be going on my way, signed God Almighty. And then what will become of you, my dear? What will become of your tender son? Just think, Efraim. Apply your mind to it. After all, you are a thinker and a poet. Think carefully and tell me, please: Where are we all going? For my sins I have no other children. And you and yours, it seems, have nobody apart from me. The days go by with no purpose, no joy, and no profit. In fifty or a hundred years’ time, there will doubtless be people still unborn in this room, a generation of mighty heroes, and the question of whether you and I once lived here or not, and if we did, what we lived for, and what we did with our lives, whether we were worthy or wicked, happy or miserable, and whether we did any good, will matter to them less than a grain of salt. They won’t spare us a thought. They will simply be here, living their own lives, as if you and I and all the rest of us were no more than last year’s snow. A handful of dust. You haven’t got enough air to breathe here, either. And the air is stale. You don’t just need a decorator, you need a whole army of workmen. Send me the bill. As for the Cossacks, Efraim, leave them be. What does a young man like you know about Cossacks? Instead of worrying your head about Cossacks, better you should stop squandering the rich treasure of life. Like a tamarisk in the wilderness. Farewell.’
Without waiting for Fima, who had intended to see him out, the old man waved his hat as though departing forever, and began to descend the stairs, hitting the banister railings rhythmically with his stick and humming a Hasidic melody under his breath.
9
‘There are so many things we could talk about, compare …’
FIMA still had a couple of hours left before he had to be at work. He thought he would change the sheets, and while he was at it his shirt and underwear and the teatowels and the bathroom towels, and drop the whole lot off at the laundry on his way to the clinic. When he went into the kitchen to take the towel off its hook, he saw that the sink was full of dirty dishes and that there was a frying pan on the draining board with the remains of a fry-up in it, while on the table the jam had congealed in a jar that had lost its lid. A rotting apple was attracting swarms of flies on the windowsill. Fima gingerly picked it up between forefinger and thumb, as though it might be contagious, and threw it in the bin under the overfull sink. But the bin was overfull too. The infected apple rolled off the top of the heap and managed to find itself a hiding place among the old canisters and bottles of cleaning fluid. It could only be reached by getting down on all fours. Fima made up his mind that this time there would be no compromise, he would not give up as usual, he would recapture the fugitive at all costs. If he succeeded, he would take it as a green light, and he would maintain the momentum by taking the bin downstairs to empty it. On the way back he would remember to fish the newspaper and his post out of the letter box at last. He would continue by washing up and tidying the refrigerator, and at the risk of making himself late he would even change the sheets.
But when he prostrated himself and started searching behind the dustbin for the lost apple, he discovered half a roll, a greasy margarine wrapper, and the burned-out light bulb from yesterday’s power cut, which it suddenly dawned on him was probably not burned out after all. Suddenly a cockroach came strolling towards him, looking weary and indifferent. It did not try to escape. At once Fima was fired with the thrill of the chase. Still on his knees, he slipped off a shoe and brandished it, then repented as he recalled that it was just like this, with a hammer blow to the head, that Stalin’s agents murdered the exiled Trotsky. And he was startled to discover the resemblance between Trotsky in his last pictures and his father, who had been here a moment before, begging him to marry. The shoe froze in his hand. He observed with astonishment the creature’s feelers, which were describing slow semicircles. He saw masses of tiny stiff bristles, like a moustache. He studied the spindly legs seemingly full of joints. The delicate formation of the elongated wings. He was filled with awe at the precise, minute artistry of this creature, which no longer seemed abhorrent but wonderfully perfect: a representative of a hated race, persecuted and confined to the drains, excelling in the art of stubborn survival, agile and cunning in the dark; a race that had fallen victim to primeval loathing born of fear, of simple cruelty, of inherited prejudices. Could it be that it was precisely the evasiveness of this race, its humility and plainness, its powerful vitality, that aroused horror in us? Horror at the murderous instinct that its very presence excited in us? Horror because of the mysterious longevity of a creature that could neither sting nor bite and always kept its distance? Fima therefore retreated in respectful silence. He replaced his shoe on his foot, ignoring the rank smell of his sock. And he closed the door of the cupboard under the sink gently, so as not to alarm the creature. Then he straightened up with a grunt and decided to put off the household chores to another morning, because there were so many of them and they seemed unfairly burdensome.
He switched the electric kettle on to make himself a cup of coffee, turned the radio to the music programme, and managed to catch the beginning of Fauré’s Requiem, whose tragic opening notes made him stare out of the window for a while in the direction of the Bethlehem hills. Those still unborn people his father had mentioned, who a hundred years from now would live in this very flat without knowing anything about him or his life, would they really never feel any curiosity about who had lived here at the beginning of 1989? But why should they? Was there anything in his life that might be of use to people whose parents had not even been born yet? Something that might at least provide them with food for thought as
they stood at this window on a winter’s morning in the year 2089? No doubt in a hundred years’ time jet-propelled vehicles would have become so commonplace that the people living here would have no special reason to remember Yael and Teddy, or Nina and Uri and their crowd, or Tamar and the two gynaecologists. Even Tsvi Kropotkin’s historical research would probably be out of date by then. At most all that would remain of it would be a footnote in some obsolete tome. His envy of Tsvi seemed pointless, vain, and ridiculous. That envy that he obstinately denied, even to himself, and whose insidious nibbling he silenced with endless arguments, calling Tsvi up on the phone and slipping in a question, out of the blue, about the exiled king of Albania, entangling them in a bad-tempered argument about Albanian Islam or Balkan history. After all, in the BA exams Fima had had slightly better marks than his friend. And he was the one who had had certain brilliant insights that Tsvi had made use of, insisting despite Fima’s protestations on acknowledging him in footnotes. If only he could overcome his tiredness. He still had it in him to leap ahead, make up the time lost in the billy-goat year, and in a couple of years overtake that spoiled, conventional professor, clad in his sporty blazer and whining out his bland truisms. Not a stone would be left standing of all Kropotkin’s edifices. Fima would smash and flatten the lot like a hurricane. He would cause an earthquake and establish new foundations. But what was the point? At the very most some student at the end of the next century would refer in passing, in a parenthesis, to the outmoded approach of the Nisan-Kropotkin school which enjoyed a short-lived vogue in Jerusalem in the late twentieth century, in the declining phase of the socio-empiric period, which was marred by hyper-emotionalism and the use of clumsy intellectual tools. The student would not even take the trouble to distinguish between them. He would link them together with a hyphen before closing the brackets on the two of them.
