by Amos Oz
The taxi stopped at the light at the Mount Herzl junction. The driver said:
‘It’s freezing out there. My heater’s broken. The bloody traffic lights aren’t working. This whole country’s fucked up.’
Fima said:
‘Why exaggerate? There may be twenty-five countries in the world that are more decent than ours, but on the other hand there are more than a hundred where you’d be shot for talking like that.’
The driver said:
‘The goyim can go burn, the lot of ’em. They’re all rotten. They hate us.’
Strange lights flickered on the wet road. Wisps of mist drifted around the darkened buildings. Where the nearest wisps caught the orange glare of the streetlights at the junction, there was a kind of ghostly glow. Fima thought: This must be what the mystical writings call ‘the Radiance that is not of this world’. The ancient Aramaic expression suddenly left him feeling dizzy. As if the words themselves came from over there, from other worlds. Not a car went past. There was not a lighted window to be seen. The desolate asphalt, the glare of the streetlights, the shadowy pines that stood shrouded in rain as though all gates had been locked forever, aroused a vague dread in Fima. As if his own life were flickering out, there in the icy mist. As if someone was expiring nearby, behind some damp wall.
The driver said:
‘What a rotten fucking night. And these bloody lights won’t change.’
Fima reassured him:
‘What’s the hurry? So we’ll wait here another minute or two. Don’t worry: I’m paying.’
He was ten years old when his mother died of a cerebral haemorrhage. Baruch Nomberg, in his usual impetuous way, did not wait even a week: the weekend after the funeral he hurled all her belongings into packing cases, all her dresses and shoes and books, and her dressing table with the round Russian mirror, and the bed linen embroidered with her initials, and he hastily donated the lot to the leper hospice in Talbiyeh. He erased every trace of her existence, as though her death had been an act of betrayal. As though she had run away with another man. But he did have her school-leaving photograph enlarged, and hung it over the sideboard, from where she looked down on the two of them all those years with a wistful, sceptical smile and with shyly down-turned eyes, as though she admitted her fault and repented of it. Immediately after the funeral Baruch took his son’s education in hand with absent-minded strictness, with unpredictable emotional gestures, with tyrannical good humour. Every morning he checked the exercise books in Fima’s satchel one by one. Every evening he stood in the bathroom with his arms crossed while Fima brushed his teeth. He inflicted private tutors in maths, English, and even Jewish tradition on the child. Subtly he would bribe one of Fima’s classmates to come home and play with him occasionally so that the child would not be too lonely. Unfortunately he was in the habit of joining in their games himself, and even when for pedagogic reasons he intended to lose, he would be carried away and forget his good intentions, whinnying exultantly when he won. He bought the wide desk that Fima still used. Winter and summer alike he forced the boy into clothes that were too warm. All those years the electric samovar went on steaming till one or two in the morning. Elegant divorcées and cultured widows of a certain age came for visits that lasted five hours. Even in his sleep Fima could hear broad Slavic voices coming from the salon, punctuated occasionally by laughter or weeping or by musical duets. Forcefully, as though tugging him by his hair, his father dragged the idle Fima from one class to the next. He confiscated his reading books in favour of textbooks. He subjected him to early and advanced matriculation exams. He did not hesitate to activate a veritable network of connections to rescue his son from military service in a combat unit and fix him up with a job in charge of cultural activities at the Schneller Barracks in Jerusalem. After his national service Fima became interested in the possibility of joining the merchant navy, at least for a year or two; he was under the spell of the sea. But his father vetoed this and condemned him to study business management, with the aim of involving him in the running of his cosmetics firm. Only after a bitter war of attrition did they compromise on history. As soon as Fima achieved first-class results in his BA, his euphoric father decided to send him to a famous British university to continue his studies. But Fima rebelled, fell in love, fell in love again, the billy-goat year erupted, and the studying was postponed. It was Baruch who rescued him from his successive entanglements, from Gibraltar, from Malta, even from the military prison. He said: ‘Women, yes, definitely, but for pleasure, not for selfdestruction. In some ways, Efraim, women are just like us, but in other ways they are totally different. Which ways are which – this is a question I am still working on.’
It was he who bought the flat in Kiryat Yovel and married him to Yael after examining and failing the other two candidates, Ilia Abravanel from Haifa, who looked like Mary Magdalene in an old painting, and the beautiful Liat Sirkin, who had sweetened Fima’s nights in her sleeping bag in the mountains of northern Greece. And it was he who, when it was all over, arranged the divorce. Even the overcoat with the booby-trapped sleeve had previously been his.
Fima vaguely remembered one of the old man’s favourite anecdotes, about a famous Hasidic saint and a notorious horse thief who exchanged their cloaks and thus in a sense their identities, with tragi-comic consequences. But what was it that his father had seen as the real point of the story, as opposed to the apparent one? As hard as he tried to remember, all he managed was a momentary glimpse of a wayside inn in Ukraine built of rough-hewn wooden beams in the midst of a dark, windswept, snow-covered plain, with wolves howling nearby.
The driver said:
‘What the hell! Are we supposed to sit here all night?’
And he put his foot down, crossed on the red, and, as though compensating himself and Fima for the lost time, careered crazily down the empty streets, cutting the corners with a squeal of brakes. Fima said:
‘What’s this, the Six Minutes’ War?’
And the driver:
‘So be it, amen.’
Tomorrow, Fima decided, first thing in the morning, I’ll take him to the hospital for tests. By force if necessary. This whistling is something new. Unless he’s extending his repertoire again, producing comic imitations of trains to accompany his railway stories. Or unless it’s just a slight chill and I’m losing my sense of proportion. Though how can I lose something I never had? He never did either, for that matter.
I ought to give Tsvi a call first; his brother is a consultant at Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus. Try to fix him up with a private room and all the indispensable little luxuries. That diehard Revisionist is so stubborn, he won’t so much as hear the word ‘hospital’. He’ll erupt like Vesuvius. In fact, why not ask Yael to soften him up first. He has an old weakness for her. What he calls a soft spot. Maybe it’s because he’s decided that Dimi is his grandson. Just as he decided that India is an Arab state and that Krochmal met Nietzsche, and that I’m a sort of Toynbee manqué or a Pushkin who’s gone off the rails. Typical ridiculous mistakes of someone who refuses to face up to reality and look it straight in the eye.
As the words ‘straight in the eye’ flashed through his mind, Fima suddenly remembered the dog that was bleeding to death in the pitch-black wadi. He had a vivid mental image of the last blood oozing from the gaping wounds, and the final spasms of the dying creature. In an instant, illuminated, he realised that this horror too was the result of what was happening in the Occupied Territories.
‘We’ve got to make peace,’ Fima said to the driver. ‘We can’t go on like this. Don’t you think we ought to make the effort and start talking to them? What’s so frightening about talking? You don’t get killed by talking. In any case, we’re a thousand times better at talking than they are.’
The driver said:
‘We ought to kill them while they’re young. Not let them raise their heads. Make them curse the day they were crazy enough to start with us. Is this your building?’
Fim
a suddenly panicked, because he was not certain he had enough money in his pocket for the fare. He decided he would hand his identity card over to the driver and go down to the taxi company next morning to pay. If he could only locate his identity card. But it transpired that Ted Tobias had foreseen this eventuality and paid the fare in advance. Fima thanked the driver, wished him luck, and asked him as he got out:
‘So tell me: how long do you think we should go on murdering each other?’
The driver said:
‘Another hundred years if necessary. That’s how long it was in Bible times. There’s no such thing as peace between Jews and goyim. Either they’re on top of us and we’re underneath, or they’re underneath and we’re sitting on top of them. Maybe when the Messiah comes, he’ll show them their rightful place. Good night, sir. There’s no reason to feel sorry for them. It’ll be better for this country when Jews start feeling sorry for each other. That’s our problem.’
In the entrance hall, near the bottom of the stairs, Fima saw a plump man sitting motionless under the letter boxes, huddled in a heavy cloak. He was so startled that he almost turned tail and ran after the taxi, which was manoeuvring to turn round farther down the street. For a moment he weighed the possibility that this wretched person was none other than himself, sitting and waiting for the dawn to break because he had lost the key to his flat. Then he blamed this thought on his tiredness: it was not a person after all, only a tattered rolled-up mattress that one of his neighbours must have dumped there. Nevertheless he switched the light on and groped frantically in his pockets until he located his key. There was a sheet of paper or a letter showing in his box, but he decided to wait till morning. If he had not been so tired, or so muddled, if it had not been so late, he would not have given up so easily. He should never have let that pass. It was his bounden duty to try to change the driver’s mind with calm, cogent arguments, without losing his temper. Deep down under several poisoned layers of cruelty and fear there must lurk some glimmering of reason. We must endeavour to believe that it is possible to dig down and rescue the goodness buried under the rubble. There is still a chance of changing a few minds and opening a chapter here. At any rate, it is our duty to keep on trying. We must not give in.
17
Nightlife
AND since the taxi driver had used the expression ‘kill them while they’re young’, Fima remembered the mysterious case of the death of Trotsky. Going to the kitchen for a glass of water before retiring to bed, he peered into the rubbish bin under the sink to see if there were any more corpses. Then, noticing the sparkling aluminium of the new Korean kettle, he decided to make some tea. While the water was boiling, he bolted down two or three thick slices of black bread and jam. And immediately had to swallow a heartburn tablet. Standing in front of the open fridge, he brooded on Annette’s misfortune. He felt that he could identify with the cruel injustice she had suffered; he could share her humiliation and despair. But at the same time and without contradiction he could understand the husband, the doctor, the dependable, hard-working man who had held back for decades, whistling occasionally between his front teeth, tapping gently on inanimate objects, until he felt the fear of approaching old age and realised that this was his last chance to stop dancing to his wife’s tiresome tune and start living his own life. Just now he’s sleeping in his young girlfriend’s arms in some Italian hotel, his knee between her knees, a man rejuvenated; but some time soon he will no doubt make the discovery that she too wears a sanitary towel inside her knickers, uses a scented deodorant to suppress the smell of her sweat and other secretions, anoints herself with greasy creams in front of her mirror, and perhaps even goes to sleep next to him with curlers in her hair, just like his wife. And hangs her underwear to dry on the rail of the shower curtain so that it drips on his head. And affects migraines and irritating mannerisms just at the moment his desire begins to stir.
‘Mannerheim!’ Fima suddenly exclaimed aloud with delight: the girlfriend’s mannerisms had reminded him of the name of the Finnish general who stood between Tamar and the solution to her crossword puzzle. He decided to give her a call, even though it was nearly two in the morning. Or should he call Annette? On third thoughts he picked up his by now cold tea, sat down at his desk, and in less than half an hour had written a short piece for the weekend supplement on the close connection between the deteriorating situation in the Territories and the creeping insensitivity that manifested itself, for instance, in the treatment of heart patients, many of whom were condemned to death – literally – on account of the unnecessary queues for operations or because the two sides could not agree on round-the-clock shifts. Or in our indifference to the sufferings of the unemployed, the recent immigrants, the battered wives. Or in the humiliations we inflicted on the homeless elderly, the mentally handicapped, lonely people who had fallen on hard times. But above all our brutalisation manifested itself in the aggressive rudeness that we saw daily in the bureaucracy, in the streets, in bus queues, and most probably also in the privacy of our bedrooms. In Beer Yaakov a man suffering from cancer murdered his wife and children because he could not accept his wife’s turning to religion. Four teenagers from good families in Hod Hasharon held a mentally defective cripple captive in a cellar and raped her continually for three days and nights. A furious father ran amok in a school in Afula, injured six teachers and knocked the headmaster unconscious, all because his daughter had failed her Advanced-level English exam. In Holon the police caught a gang of hoodlums who had been terrorising dozens of old age pensioners and robbing them of their pennies. All that was just in yesterday’s paper. Fima concluded his article with a harsh prediction: Insensitivity, violence, and cruelty flow backwards and forwards from the state to the Territories and from the Territories to the state, gathering disastrous momentum, redoubling in geometric progression, wreaking havoc on both sides of the Green Line. There is no way out of this vicious circle unless we proceed decisively and without delay to a comprehensive solution of the conflict, along the basic lines that were laid down a hundred and one years ago by Micha Josef Berdyczewski in these simple words: ‘Priority to Jews over Judaism, to living people over ancestral heritage.’ There is nothing more to add. He had discovered this quotation several years before in an essay entitled ‘Demolition and Construction,’ in an old journal that he found at Yael’s father’s, and he had copied it out and stuck it on the front of the radio: he was delighted to be able to make use of it at last. On second thoughts he crossed out ‘conflict’ and ‘vicious circle’. Then he angrily deleted ‘geometric progression’ and ‘disastrous momentum’, but he could not decide what to replace them with. He put it off till the next day. Despite the tea and the heartburn tablets, the nausea had not left him. He really ought to do as Dimi had asked, find a powerful torch, go down into the darkness, search for the injured dog, try to save it. If possible.
At half past two he undressed and showered because he felt disgusting. The torrent of water failed to refresh him. The soap and even the water seemed sticky. He stood grumpily in front of the mirror with no clothes on, shivering with cold and recoiling from the unhealthy pallor of his skin with its feeble growth of dark hair and the ring of fat around his waist. Automatically he began squeezing the red pustules on his chest, until he managed to squirt a few white drops out of his flabby breasts. When he was an adolescent, spots like these began to appear on his cheeks and forehead. Baruch forbade him to squeeze them. Once he said to Fima: ‘They will vanish overnight when you have a lady friend. If you don’t manage to find yourself a lady by your seventeenth birthday, and there are reasons for supposing, my dear, that you will not, then I myself shall fix you up with one.’ A rueful sickly grin spread on Fima’s lips as he recalled the night before his seventeenth birthday: how he lay awake hoping that his father would forget his promise and praying that he would not. The old man, typically, had only been making a little joke. And you, as usual, failed to grasp the real point.
