Fima

by Amos Oz

  Fima made up his mind to ask the downstairs neighbour. On second thoughts he did not know what he could say to her, and was afraid of again making a fool of himself.

  So he walked back sheepishly to the living room and wheedled:

  ‘Are you angry with me, Dimi? Why are you doing this to me?’

  A ghost of a tired old man’s smile flitted across the child’s mouth. In a factual tone he remarked:

  ‘You’re bugging me.’

  ‘In that case,’ Fima said, fighting back a fresh wave of fury, a mighty urge to give this devious, impertinent creature a small slap across the face, ‘you can be bored all by yourself. Good night. I’ve gone off you.’

  But instead of leaving he feverishly pulled down from the shelf the first book his fingers encountered. It turned out to be an orange-bound tome in English on the history of Alaska in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. Collapsing onto the sofa, he began to leaf through it, straining to take in the pictures at least. He made up his mind to pay no attention to the little enemy. But he had trouble concentrating. Every now and then he peeped at his watch. Whenever he looked, it was always twenty-five past nine, and he was furious not only because time seemed to be standing still but also because he had missed the news. A sense of disaster weighed on his chest like a stone. Something really bad is happening. Something you are going to regret bitterly. Something that will eat away at you for days and years, while you wish in vain that you could turn back the clock to this moment and correct the terrible error. To do the simple, obvious thing that only a blind man or an idiot would not be doing now. But what is that thing? Time and again he stole a glance at Dimi, who was lying inside his den of cushions in the armchair, blinking. Eventually he managed to latch onto the story of the early whale hunters who reached Alaska from New England and set up beach stations that were often attacked by savage nomads who had crossed the Bering Straits from Siberia. And suddenly Dimi said:

  ‘Tell me something. What’s oedema?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly,’ said Fima. ‘It’s the name of an illness. Why?’

  ‘What kind of illness?’

  ‘Show me where it hurts. Fetch the thermometer. I’ll call a doctor.’

  ‘Not me,’ said Dimi. ‘Winston.’

  ‘Who’s Winston?’ It occurred to Fima that the child might be delirious. To his surprise this discovery made him feel easier. Now, how could he get hold of a doctor? Call Tamar and ask her advice. Not our doctors, that’s for sure. Not Annette’s husband, either. And anyway, what was oedema?

  ‘Winston’s a dog. Tslil Weintraub’s dog.’

  ‘Is the dog ill?’

  ‘He was.’

  ‘And you’re afraid you may have caught it?’

  ‘No. We killed him.’

  ‘Killed him? Why did you do that?’

  ‘They said he had oedema.’

  ‘Who killed him?’

  ‘Only he isn’t dead.’

  ‘He’s not alive and he’s not dead.’

  ‘He’s alive and he’s also dead.’

  ‘Will you explain that to me?’

  ‘I can’t explain.’

  Fima stood up and put one hand on Dimi’s forehead and the other on his own. He couldn’t feel any difference. Maybe they were both ill?

  ‘It was murder,’ said Dimi. And suddenly, horrified by what had come out of his mouth, he snatched another cushion and, hiding his face behind it, began to sob. Broken, strangled gasps that sounded like hiccups. Fima tried to pull the cushion away, but Dimi held fast to it and would not let go, so he gave up. And he realised that there was no illness, no fever, but suffering that required patience and silence. He sat down on the rug in front of the armchair and took Dimi’s hand, feeling that he too was close to tears and that he loved this weird child with his thick glasses and paper-white hair, his stubbornness, his knowingness, his perpetual air of solitary, premature old age. Fima’s body ached with the desire to snatch the sobbing creature up from the armchair and squeeze him to his chest with all his strength. A desire to hold him stronger than any he had ever felt for a woman’s body in his life. But he controlled himself and did not stir so long as the gasps continued. Until Dimi stopped. And, oddly, it was just when he fell silent that Fima said gently:

  ‘That’s enough now, Dimi.’

  Suddenly the child slid out of the chair and into his arms. He huddled against Fima so hard, he seemed to be burrowing inside him. And he said:

  ‘I will tell.’

  And he began to talk, clearly, in a soft, steady voice, without any more sobs and without halting for a moment to search for a word, even blinking less than before, about how they had found the dog crouching in the filth among the dustbins. A repulsive sort of dog, with a mangy back, with open wounds and flies on one of his hind legs. Once he had belonged to a friend of theirs, Tslil Weintraub, but ever since the Weintraubs went abroad he belonged to nobody. He just lived on scraps. The dog was lying on his side behind the bins, coughing like someone who smokes too much. They gave him a medical examination, and Yaniv said, ‘He’s going to die soon, he’s got oedema.’ Then they forced his mouth open and made him swallow a spoonful of a medicine invented by Ninja Marmelstein: muddy water from the pond mixed with a little sand and leaves and a little cement powder and some aspirin from Yaniv’s mother. Then they decided to carry him down to the wadi in a blanket and do the sacrifice of Isaac with him like they learned in Bible. It was Ronen’s idea, and he even ran home and got a bread knife. All the way to the wadi this Winston lay quietly in the blanket. Actually he seemed happy, wagging his tail gratefully. Maybe he thought they were taking him to the vet. Anyone who came close to him got a lick on his face or his hands. In the wadi they collected stones and built an altar, and they put the unresisting dog on it. He looked at them all with a kind of curiosity, like a baby, trustingly, as though he was sure he was among loving friends, or as if he understood the game and was glad to be playing. His wounds were revolting, but his face was cute, with brown eyes that showed sense and feeling. There’s this thing sometimes – isn’t that right, Fima? – when you look at an animal and you think it can remember things that human beings have forgotten. Or at least it looks like it. Anyway, he was a dirty, rather irritating dog, covered with fleas and ticks, always fawning on everyone; he loved to put his head on your knees and drool on you.

  Dimi’s idea was to pick some greenery and flowers and decorate the altar. He even arranged a little wreath on Winston’s head, like they do in nursery school when it’s somebody’s birthday. They tied his arms and legs together firmly, and even so he didn’t stop fawning and being glad and wagging his tail all the time, as though he was really happy to be the centre of attention. Anyone who wasn’t careful got a lick. Then they drew lots: Ninja Marmelstein had to chant the prayers, Ronen had to dig the grave, and he, Dimi, got the job of killing him. At first he tried to get out of it – he had the excuse that his sight wasn’t too good – but they made fun of him, and got angry, and said a draw is a draw, stop being such a bleeding heart. So he had no choice. Only it wouldn’t work. The knife was shaking in his hand and the dog kept moving all the time. Instead of cutting the throat, he cut off half an ear. The dog went mad and started to cry like a baby and sort of bit the air. Dimi had to cut again, quickly, to stop the howling. But this time instead of the throat the knife went into something soft near the belly, because Winston wriggled and squealed and bled a lot. Yaniv said, So what? It’s not so terrible; its only a smelly old Arab dog. And Ninja said, And he’s got oedema; he’s going to die anyway. The third time Dimi struck with all his might, but he hit a rock and the knife broke in half. He was left holding just the handle. Ninja and Yaniv grabbed Winston’s head and said, Come on, hurry up, you dummy. Pick up the blade and cut real fast. But there wasn’t enough of the blade left, and it was impossible to saw the throat; it was all slippery with the blood, and each time it cut in the wrong place. In the end everyone was covered with blood, how can it be that a dog has s
o much blood, maybe it was because of the oedema, and Yaniv and Ninja and Ronen started running away and the dog bit through the rope and got free, but only the front legs, the back ones stayed tied, and with shrieks, not dog shrieks, more like a woman shrieking, he dragged himself away on his belly and disappeared into the bushes, and when Dimi realised the others weren’t there, he ran after them in a panic. He found them at last hiding in the garage underneath the block of flats. There was a tap there and they had managed to wash the blood off, but they didn’t let him wash and they blamed him. It was all his fault Winston was not alive and not dead, cruelty to dumb animals, his fault Ronen’s knife from home got broken, and they blamed him because he would tell on them, they knew him, and they started kicking him and they got some more rope, and Ninja said, Now there’s an intifada going on here. Let’s hang Dimi. Only Ronen was relatively fair and said to them, First just let me put his glasses somewhere so they don’t get broken. That was why he didn’t see who tied him up and who, after they beat him, stood and peed on him. So they left him tied up down there in the garage and ran away, shouting that he had it coming to him, why did he kill Winston. He didn’t tell the neighbour who was supposed to be looking after him. He just said he got dirty from the pond. If his parents found out, it would be the end of him.

  ‘Are you going to tell them, Fima?’

  Fima thought about it. All through the confession he had not stopped stroking the albino hair. As in a bad dream he felt that the dog and Dimi and he had become one. In the same psalm where it says, ‘Their mind is gross like fat,’ it also says, ‘My soul droops with sorrow.’ He said earnestly:

  ‘No, Dimi, I’m not going to tell.’

  The boy peered obliquely up at him. His rabbit’s eyes through the thick lenses seemed agonised yet full of trust, as though he was trying to demonstrate what he had described earlier in the eyes of the dog. So this is what love is.

  Fima shuddered as though outside, from the depths of the darkness, wind, and rain, his ears had caught an elusive echo of a howl.

  He stroked the little Challenger’s head and dragged him inside the chunky sweater. As though he were pregnant with him. After a moment Dimi freed himself and asked:

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why did you agree not to tell them?’

  ‘Because it wouldn’t help Winston, and you’ve already suffered enough.’

  ‘You’re OK, Fima.’

  And then:

  ‘Even though you’re a rather funny man. Sometimes they call you a clown behind your back. And you really are a bit of a clown.’

  ‘Now, Dimi, you’re going to have a glass of milk. And tell me where I can find that Valium your mother said you’re to take.’

  ‘I’m a little like a clown too. But I’m not OK. I should have said no. I shouldn’t have let myself be carried away by them.’

  ‘But they made you do it.’

  ‘Still, it was murder.’

  ‘You can’t tell,’ Fima ventured. ‘Maybe he was only wounded.’

  ‘He lost a lot of blood. A whole sea of blood.’

  ‘Sometimes you can bleed a lot even from a scratch. Once, when I was little, I was balancing on a wall and fell off, and I bled a huge amount from a tiny little gash on my head. Granpa Baruch nearly fainted.’

  ‘I hate them.’

  ‘They’re just children, Dimi. Children sometimes do very cruel things, simply because they don’t have enough imagination to know what pain is.’

  Dimi said:

  ‘Not the children. Them. If they could have chosen, they wouldn’t have had me. And I wouldn’t have chosen them either. It’s not fair: you can choose who you marry but you can’t choose who your parents are. And you can’t divorce them either. Fima?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Shall we take a torch and some bandages and iodine and go and look for him down in the wadi?’

  ‘In this darkness and rain there isn’t a hope of finding him.’

  ‘True,’ said Dimi. ‘You’re right. We haven’t got a hope. But let’s go and search anyhow. So at least we’ll know we tried and failed.’ As he said this, he looked to Fima like a pocket-sized edition of his self-possessed, rational father. Even his intonation was a reflection of Ted’s: the quiet voice of a well-balanced, solitary man. Dimi wiped his glasses as he added: ‘Tslil’s family are also to blame. Why did they go abroad and leave their dog behind when he was sick? They could have taken him. They could have made some arrangements for him at least. Why did they throw him out on the rubbish heap like that? The Cherokees have a law that you mustn’t throw anything away. Even a broken pot they keep in the wigwam. Anything you’ve ever used you mustn’t get rid of. It might still need you. They even have a sort of ten commandments, or less than ten, and the first one is, Thou shalt not throw out. I have a chest in the storeroom full of toys from when I was so high. They’re always shouting at me to throw them out, who needs them, they just take up space, they’re just gathering dust, but I don’t agree. “Throwing away is like killing,” said Snow Daughter to Whispering Wind Lake, tightening her delicate fingers round the wolfstone.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s a story about a Cherokee girl. Whispering Wind Lake was the chief of the banished tribe.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I can’t. I can’t think about anything else. That dog keeps howling at me, those brown eyes so obedient, so tame, so happy to be the centre of attention, and wagging his tail, and giving a warm lick to anyone who bent over him. Even when Ronen was tying his legs together, he gave Ronen a lick. And his ear came off and fell on the ground like a slice of bread. I keep hearing him crying all the time in my head, and maybe he really is still alive, dying in a puddle among the rocks in the wadi, crying and waiting for the vet. In the night God will come and kill me for it. The best thing for me is not to go to sleep at all. Or he’ll kill me because I hate them and it’s forbidden to hate your parents. Who told them to have me? I didn’t ask for any favours. There’s nothing to do around here anyway. Whatever you do turns out badly. It’s all just trouble and shouting. Whatever I do, just trouble and shouting. You were married to my mummy once and then you didn’t want her. Or she didn’t want you. Trouble and shouting. Dad says it happened because you’re a bit of a clown. He said it to me in English. They don’t have much use for me either. What they need is to always have peace and quiet in the flat and everything to be tidy and in the right place and not to slam the door. Every time a door slams, she yells at me and Dad. Every time some pen isn’t where it’s supposed to be, he yells at me and Mum. Every time the top of the toothpaste isn’t screwed on properly, they both yell at me. No, they don’t yell; they just point out. Like this: It would be preferable if, in future … Or he says to her in English, Do something so that child doesn’t get under my feet. And she says, It’s your child, sir. When you were little, Fima, didn’t you ever wish deep down that your parents would die? Didn’t you want to be an orphan and free like Huckleberry Finn? Weren’t you a little clown?’

  Fima said:

  ‘Every child seems to have thoughts like that at some time or another. It’s natural. But they don’t really mean it.’

  Dimi said nothing. His albino eyes began to blink again fast, as though the light was hurting them. And he added:

  ‘Say, Fima, you need a child, don’t you? How’d you like it if we went away together? We could go to the Galapagos Islands and build ourselves a cabin out of branches. We could catch fish and clams, and grow vegetables. We could track the thousand-year-old tortoises that you told me about once.’

  Here we go again, Fima thought: more longing for the Aryan side. For Chili. He picked Dimi up in his arms and carried him to his room. He undressed him and put him into his pyjamas. In the Galapagos Islands there is no winter. It’s always springtime. And the thousand-year-old tortoises are nearly as big as this table because they don’t hunt and they don’t dream and they don’t make a sound. As though
everything was straightforward and fine. He picked the boy up again and took him to brush his teeth. Then they stood together at the lavatory and Fima said, ‘Ready, steady,’ and they had a contest to see who would finish first. All the time Fima muttered muddled reassurances, which he hardly heard himself, Never mind little boy the rain will soon stop the winter will soon be over the spring will soon be over we’ll sleep like tortoises and then we’ll get up and plant vegetables and then we’ll be all good and you’ll see how great it’ll be.

  Despite these reassuring words they were both on the verge of tears. They clung to each other as though it was getting colder. Instead of tucking him up in bed, Fima carried the child piggyback in his green flannel pyjamas to his parents’ bedroom and lay down beside him on the double bed, carefully removing his thick glasses, and the two of them huddled together under a single blanket while Fima told him one story after another, about lizards, about the evolutionary abyss, about the failure of the unnecessary Jewish revolt against Rome, about the railwaymen’s conference and the width of the track, about the forests of Sierra Leone in Africa, about whaling in Alaska, about ruined temples in the mountains of northern Greece, about breeding tropical fish in heated pools in Valletta, the capital of Malta, about St Augustine, about the poor cantor who found himself alone on a desert island at the High Holy Days. At a quarter to one, when Ted and Yael returned from Tel Aviv, they found Fima sleeping fully clothed, curled up like a foetus inside a blanket on their double bed, with his head on Yael’s nightie, and Dimi sitting in his green pyjamas at the computer in his father’s study, with a very serious look on his owlish face, intent on defeating a whole gang of pirates single-handed, in a complicated game of strategy.

  16

  Fima comes to the conclusion that there is still a chance

  SOME time after one o’clock, on his way home in the taxi Teddy had called for him, Fima remembered his father’s last visit. Was it two days ago or the previous morning? How the old man had begun with Nietzsche and ended with the Russian railways, which were constructed in such a way that they could be of no use to invaders. What had his father been trying to say to him? Fima now thought that the old man’s conversation had revolved around some point that he could not or dared not express directly. In the midst of all those tales and morals, all those Cossacks and Indians, Fima had failed to notice he had been complaining of a lack of air. Yet his father never talked about ill health, apart from the usual wisecracks about his backache. Now Fima recalled his panting, his coughing, the whistling sound that might have come from his throat or chest. As he was leaving, the old man seemed to be trying to say something, that you didn’t want to listen to. Now, he said to himself: You preferred to quibble about Herzl and about India. What was he trying to hint amid all that jocular wordplay? On the other hand, his leave-taking always has an epic quality. If he goes to the café for half an hour, he wishes you a life replete with meaning. If he goes to buy a paper, he warns you not to squander life’s rich treasure. What was he trying to say this time? You missed it. You were so intent on the thrills of a victory over the Occupied Territories. As usual. You thought that if you could just get the better of him in an argument, the obstacles to peace would be removed and a new era could begin. Like when you were little: an acerbic child with no keener desire than to catch grown-ups out in a mistake or a slip of the tongue. To win an argument with an adult, force him to hoist the white flag. If some visitor or other used the expression ‘most of the majority of people’, you chimed in exultantly to the effect that ‘most of the majority’ actually signified 25.1%, in other words a minority, not a majority. If your father said that Ben Gurion was a blunt speaker, you pointed out that if he was blunt, he could not be very sharp. Yesterday when he was visiting you, there were moments when his cantorial tenor was almost silenced by breathlessness. True, he’s an old chatterbox, a dandy and a bore, a philanderer, on top of which he suffers from political blindness of the most self-righteous and infuriating kind. And yet in his own way he is a generous, good-hearted man. He stuffs money into your pocket while he pokes his nose into your love life and tries to run your whole life for you. And just where would you be now without him?