Fima

by Amos Oz

  ‘Don’t you go judging me.’

  Then he added sardonically:

  ‘Anyway, in a hundred years there won’t be anything here. Everything will have been destroyed.’

  And he added:

  ‘Shut up, you. Who was talking to you?’

  At this they both fell silent, Yoezer and he, and his desire also subsided. In its stead came a burst of nocturnal energy, a sharp wide-awake lucidity, a rush of inner force and mental clarity. At this moment he was capable of taking on those three conspirators from the Café Savyon and defeating them with ease; he could write an epic poem, found a political party, or draw up a peace treaty. Words and snippets of sentences formed themselves in his mind, gleaming with cleanness and precision. He threw off his blanket, rushed to his desk, and, instead of convening the Revolutionary Council for a midnight sitting, he wrote in half an hour, without crossing out or changing anything, an article for the weekend paper: a reply to Tsvi Kropotkin on the question of the price of morality versus the price of immorality in times of everyday violence. These days all sorts of wolves and would-be wolves are preaching a primitive Darwinism, howling that in time of war morality, like women and children, should stay at home, and that if only we could shrug off the burden of morality we would be able blithely to smash whoever stood in our way. Tsvi gets bogged down in his effort to counter this with pragmatic arguments: The enlightened world, he says, will punish us if we go on behaving like wolves. But surely the fact is that ultimately all oppressive regimes collapse and vanish, while the societies and nations that survive are precisely those that foster the values of humane morality. From a historical viewpoint, Fima wrote, rather than you defending morality, morality defends you, and without it even the fangs of the most ferocious wolves are doomed to rot and decay.

  Then he put on a clean shirt and trousers, the chunky sweater he inherited from Yael, and his overcoat, this time being agile enough to avoid the trap of the sleeve. He chewed a heartburn tablet and went down into the street, bubbling with a happy feeling of responsibility, taking the steps two at a time.

  Jauntily wide awake, oblivious to the chill of the night air, intoxicated with the silence and emptiness, Fima marched down the road as though to the sound of a military band. There was not a soul in the sodden streets. Jerusalem had been handed over to him, to protect it from itself. The blocks of flats stood heavy and massive in the darkness. The streetlamps were shrouded in a pale yellow haze. At the entrance to each staircase the numbers glimmered with a dim electric glow, which was reflected here and there off the windscreen of a parked car. Automatic living, he thought, a life of comfort and achievement, accumulating possessions, honours, and the routine eating, mating, and financial habits of prosperous people, the soul sinking under folds of flesh, the rituals of social position; that was what the author of the Psalms meant when he wrote, ‘Their heart is gross like fat.’ This was the contented mind that had no dealings with death and whose sole concern was to remain contented. Herein lay the tragedy of Annette and Yeri. It was the crushed spirit that knocked in vain, year after year, tapping on inanimate objects, pleading for the locked door to be reopened. Whistling sarcastically through the gap between its front teeth. Snows of yesteryear. Bones of yesteryear. What have we to do with the Aryan side?

  And how about you, my dear Prime Minister? What have you ever done? What did you do today? Or yesterday?

  Half-unconsciously Fima kicked at a tin can, which went rolling down the street and startled a cat in a dustbin. You made fun of poor Tamar Greenwich simply because, on account of a fluke of pigmentation, she was born with one brown eye and one green one. You detested Eitan and Wahrhaftig, but how exactly are you better than they? You were gratuitously rude to Ted Tobias, an honest, hard-working man who has never harmed you. Another man in his place would not have allowed you so much as to set foot in his home. Not to mention the fact that thanks to him and Yael we may soon have jet-propelled vehicles.

  What have you done with life’s treasure? What good have you done? Apart from signing petitions.

  And as if that were not enough, you needlessly distressed your father, who feeds you and whose generosity benefits dozens of people every day. When you heard on the radio about the death of the Arab boy from Gaza whom we shot in the head, what exactly did you do? You got worked up about the style of the announcement. And the way you humiliated Nina, after she took you in off the street all wet and filthy in the middle of the night and gave you light and warmth and even offered you her body. And how you hated that young settler, who, after all, even when you make allowances for the stupidity of the government and the blindness of the masses, has no choice but to carry a gun, because he really does risk his life driving at night between Hebron and Bethlehem. What do you want him to do – stick his neck out to be slaughtered? And what about Annette, you guardian of morality? What did you do today to Annette? Who trusted you from the first glance. Who had faith in your healing powers, like a simple peasant woman prostrating herself at the feet of a holy man in some Orthodox monastery and pouring her heart out to him. The only woman in your whole life ever to call you brother. You will never receive such a gift again, to be called brother by a strange woman. She trusted you without knowing you, so much so that she let you undress her and put her in your bed, and called you an angel, and you cunningly dressed yourself up as a saint to conceal your lust. Not to mention the cat you startled just a moment ago. And that is, more or less, the sum total of your latest exploits, you chief of the Revolutionary Council, you peacemaker, you comforter of deserted wives. To which we might add taking time off from work on false pretences, and an unconsummated act of self-abuse. Plus the piss that’s still floating in the lavatory bowl and the funeral you gave to the first insect in history to have died of filth.

  With this, Fima reached the last lamppost and the end of the street, which was also the end of the housing development and the end of Jerusalem. Beyond stretched a muddy wasteland. He felt the urge to keep on walking into the darkness, to cross the wadi, climb the hill, press on as long as his strength endured, fulfilling his allotted task as the night watchman of Jerusalem. But out of the dark came a sound of distant barking and two stray shots separated by an interval of silence. After the second shot a westerly breeze stirred, bringing a strange rustling and a smell of wet earth. Behind him in the narrow street there was an indistinct tapping, as though a blind man were groping his way with a stick. A fine drizzle filled the empty air.

  Fima trembled and turned for home. As though by way of self-mortification he finished washing the dishes, including the greasy frying pan; he wiped the surfaces in the kitchen; he flushed the lavatory. The only thing he did not do was take the rubbish downstairs – because it was already a quarter to two in the morning, because he was frightened of the blind man tapping his way through the darkness outside. And why not leave something for tomorrow?

  12

  The fixed distance between him and her

  IN his dream he saw his mother. The place was a grey, neglected garden that extended over several low hills. There were parched lawns overgrown with thistles. And there were a few bare trees and traces of flower beds. Below him on the hillside was a broken bench, and next to it he saw his mother. Death had transformed her into a schoolgirl from a religious boarding school. From behind she looked very young, a pious girl in a modest long-sleeved dress that came down over her ankles. She was walking alongside a rusty irrigation pipe. At fixed intervals she stopped and bent down to turn on a tap. The sprinklers did not revolve, but merely released a thin spray of brownish water. Fima’s task was to follow her down the hill and turn off each tap she’d turned on. So he saw her only from behind. Death had made her light and lovely. It had endowed her movements with grace but also with a certain childlike awkwardness. The sort of mixture of agility and clumsiness that is seen in newborn kittens. He called after her, using her Russian name, Lizaveta, her nickname, Liza, and her Hebrew name, Elisheva. To no avail. His mother did not t
urn around or react. So he began to run. After every seven or eight strides he had to stop, crouch down, and turn off a tap. The taps were made of something soft and slimy to the touch, like a jellyfish, and it was not water that dripped from them but a sticky liquid that felt like jellied fish stock. For all his running, breathlessly, like an overweight child, for all his shouts that echoed dimly in the grey distance, mingled at times with a sharp sound reminiscent of a snapping cord, it was impossible to reduce the fixed distance between him and her. He was overcome by the desperate fear that the pipe would never end. But at the edge of the wood she stopped and turned towards him. Her lovely face was the face of a slain angel. Her forehead glowed in the moonlight. A skeletal pallor covered her sunken cheeks. Her lipless teeth gleamed. Her flaxen plait was made of dry straw. Her eyes were hidden by the dark glasses of the blind. On her religious schoolgirl’s uniform he could see dried blood where the wires had pierced her: her knees, her belly, her throat. As though she had been made into a stuffed hedgehog. She shook her head sadly at Fima and said, Look what they’ve done to you, stupid. She reached up with her dry fingers to remove the dark glasses. Terrified, Fima turned away. And woke up.

  13

  The root of all evil

  WHEN he had finished writing in his notebook, he got up and stood by the window. He saw a bright, shiny morning. On a bare branch crouched a cat that had climbed closer to hear what the birds were singing. Don’t fall, chum, Fima said affectionately. Even the Bethlehem hills looked as though they were within reach. The nearby buildings and gardens were drenched with cold, clear light. Balconies, garden walls, cars, everything was sparkling clean after the rain that had fallen in the night. Even though he had slept less than five hours, he felt fresh and full of energy. He did his exercises in front of the mirror, arguing all the time with the arrogant woman reading the seven o’clock news on the radio and who was able to declare without hesitation what the Syrians were planning to do and could even suggest a simple countermove. More contemptuous than angry, Fima replied: You can’t be very bright, lady. And he saw fit to add, But look how lovely it is outside. The sky is singing a song. How would you like to take a little walk with me? We’ll stroll down the street, we’ll wander through the woods and wadis, and as we go, I’ll explain to you the policy we really ought to be adopting towards the Syrians, and where their Achilles heel is, and where our own blind spot is.

  He went on thinking about the life of this newsreader, who had to leave her warm bed at five-thirty on a cruel winter morning to get to the studio in time to read the news at seven. Suppose one morning her alarm failed to ring? Or suppose it rang on time but she gave in to the temptation to snuggle up in bed for another couple of minutes and then fell asleep again? Or suppose her car wouldn’t start because of the cold, as happened every morning to the neighbour with the barking starter motor? Or perhaps this girl – Fima pictured her: shortish, freckled, with bright laughing eyes and curly fair hair – slept at night on a camp bed at the studio. Like the doctors on night duty at the hospital. How did her husband, the insurance salesman, cope with that? Did he spend his lonely nights imagining all kinds of wild scenes between her and the technicians? There’s no one worth envying, Fima decided. Except perhaps Yoezer.

  It was because of Yoezer that Fima cut himself shaving. He tried without success to stanch the flow of blood with a piece of toilet paper, with cotton wool, finally with a damp handkerchief. Consequently he forgot to shave the folds of skin under his chin. Which he hated shaving anyway, because they put him in mind of the crop of a plump chicken. Pressing the handkerchief against his face as though he were suffering from toothache, he went to get dressed. And came to the conclusion that the positive side of last night’s disgrace was that at least there was no fear that he had made Annette pregnant.

  While he was looking for the chunky sweater he had inherited from Yael, his eye suddenly caught a glimpse of a small insect gleaming on the seat of the armchair. Was it really possible that some foolish glow-worm had forgotten to switch itself off at the end of the night? Actually, he had not seen a glow-worm for forty years at least and had no idea what they looked like. With the cunning of a seasoned hunter Fima leaned over and with a lightning movement of the right hand that began like a slap and ended with a clenched fist he managed to capture the creature without hurting it. The rapidity and accuracy of the movement belied his reputation of a clumsy oaf. Opening his fingers to examine what it was he had caught, he wondered whether it was one of Annette’s earrings, a buckle of Nina’s, a piece of one of Dimi’s toys, or one of his father’s silver cuff links. After a careful inspection he chose the last of these possibilities. Although some doubt remained.

  Going to the kitchen, he opened the fridge and stood pensively holding the door open, fascinated by the mystic light shining behind the milk and the cheeses, re-examining in his mind the expression ‘the price of morality’ in the title of the article he had written in the night. He found no reason to revise or alter it. There was a price of morality and a price of immorality, and the real question was: What is the price of this price, i.e., what is the point and purpose of life? Everything else derived from that question. Or ought to. Including our behaviour in the Occupied Territories.

  Closing the fridge, Fima decided to go out for breakfast this morning, to Mrs Scheinbaum’s little café across the road, partly because he did not want to spoil the impeccable tidiness of his newly cleaned kitchen, partly because the bread was stale and the margarine reminded him of the horrible jellylike taps in his dream, and above all because the electric kettle had burned itself out the previous day, and without a kettle there would be no coffee.

  At a quarter past eight he left the flat without noticing the bloodstained wad of cotton wool clinging to the cut on his cheek. But he did remember to take the rubbish down, and he also remembered to slip the envelope containing the article he had written in the night into his pocket, and he did not even forget the key of the letter box. At the shopping centre three blocks away he bought fresh bread, cheese, tomatoes, jam, eggs, some yogurt, coffee, three light bulbs, so as to have a reserve, and also a new electric kettle. He instantly regretted not having checked to see if it was made in Germany: he did his best to avoid buying German products. To his relief he discovered that it came from South Korea. Unpacking the shopping, he changed his mind and decided to skip the café and have his breakfast at home after all. Although, on second thoughts, South Korea was also a notoriously repressive country, famous for smashing the skulls of demonstrating students. While he waited for the water to boil, he reconstructed the Korean War, the era of Truman, MacArthur, and McCarthy, and ended with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The next nuclear holocaust won’t start with the superpowers, it’ll start with us here, he thought. With our regional conflict. The Syrians will invade the Golan Heights with a thousand tanks, we’ll bomb Damascus, they’ll fire a salvo of missiles at the coastal towns, and then we’ll set off the doomsday mushroom. In a hundred years there won’t be a living soul here. No Yoezer, no lizard, no cockroach.

  But Fima rejected the word ‘holocaust’ because it could also be associated with natural disasters such as floods, epidemics, and earthquakes. What the Nazis did, by contrast, was an organised, premeditated crime that ought to be called by its proper name: murder. And nuclear war will also be a criminal act. Neither ‘holocaust’ nor ‘doomsday’. Fima also ruled out the word ‘conflict’, which might describe the business of Annette and her husband, or Tsvi Kropotkin and his teaching assistant, but not the bloody war between us and the Arabs. In fact, even the sad case of Annette and Yeri could hardly be categorised with such a sterile term as ‘conflict’. As for the expression ‘bloody war’, it was a tired cliché. Even ‘tired cliché’ was a tired cliché. You’ve got yourself into a muddle, pal.

  Suddenly he felt disgusted with his linguistic niceties. Gulping down thick slices of bread and jam, sipping his second coffee, he said to himself: When the whole planet has been de
stroyed by atom bombs or hydrogen bombs, what difference will it make whether we describe it as a conflict, holocaust, doomsday, or a bloody war? And who will be left to decide which is the most appropriate description? So Baruch was right when he used the expressions ‘a handful of dust’, ‘a putrid drop’, ‘a fleeting shadow’. And the Likud member of parliament was right to recommend playing for time. Even the orgiastic radio announcer was right when she said that there were lessons to be drawn.

  But what lessons? What precious light, for heaven’s sake?

  Snows of yesteryear. Bones of yesteryear.

  I’d hang the pair of them.

  Look what they’ve done to you, stupid.

  Your problem, pal.

  So surely that is the root of all evil, Fima suddenly shouted, alone in his kitchen, as though he had received a dazzling revelation, as though a simple solution to the problem of jet propulsion on land had flashed into his head. That is the original sin. The Other Side is the source of all our misfortunes. Because there is no such thing as your problem, my problem, her problem, his problem, their problem. It’s all our problem. There, the Korean kettle’s boiling again, and if you don’t switch it off, it’ll go exactly the way of its predecessor. Who asked for coffee anyway? I’ve had two cups already. Instead of drinking coffee you’d better go back to the shopping centre, because although you remembered to put a stamp on the envelope with the article in it and to put it in your pocket, you forgot to take it out of your pocket and post it when you bought the kettle. What’s going to become of you, mister? When are you going to be a mensh?

  14

  Discovering the identity of a famous Finnish general

  ONE Friday evening the muse descended on Fima, and he entertained the company with the story of how he was called up for reserve duty during the Six Days’ War and dumped on a barren hilltop just outside Arnona with a painter and a couple of university professors. They were given a pair of binoculars and a field telephone and told not to fall asleep. On the next hill some Jordanian soliders were setting up mortars and a machine gun; they were going about it calmly, like boy scouts at a camp. When they had finished all their preparations, they lay down and started firing at Fima and his pals. ‘Can you guess,’ Fima asked, ‘what my first impulse was? No, it wasn’t to run away. It wasn’t to fire back, either. No. It was simply to phone the police and complain that there were some madmen shooting at us. Even though they could see perfectly well that there were people here on this hill. What did they take me for, a friend or acquaintance? Had I seduced their wives? What did they know about me anyway? I had to get the police to come right away and take care of them. That was how I felt.’