by Amos Oz
‘That’s enough.’ Fima smiled wryly. ‘We have sinned. We have transgressed. That’s enough.’
When he got off the bus, he muttered like a captious old man: ‘Wordplay. Empty wordplay.’ Because suddenly his earlier juggling with the words for ‘forget’ and ‘dwindle’ or ‘die away’ struck him as so cheap that he did not even say thank you or good-bye to the driver as he got off the bus, which he was always very particular about doing, even in moments of absent-mindedness, including yesterday when he inadvertently got off at the wrong stop.
Fima stood in the grey street for a moment or two, among dead leaves and scraps of paper blowing in the wind. He concentrated on the whisper of damp pines behind stone walls and staring at the departing bus. What had he forgotten on board? A book? An umbrella? An envelope? Perhaps a small package? Something belonging to Tamar? Or to Annette Tadmor? ‘Cranes wheel and whirl’: a forgotten line from an old children’s song suddenly came back to him. He consoled himself with the hope that what he had left on the seat was merely the copy of Ma’ariv that he had found there. Thanks to the minister and the cranes he could not even remember what was in the main headline.
24
Shame and guilt
IN the garden, as he walked along the paved path that led round the small block of flats to the clinic, he stopped and stood for a moment, because from the first floor, through closed windows, through the wind and the rustling pine trees, there came the sound of a cello. One of the old women, or perhaps a pupil, was practising the same scale over and over again.
Fima tried vainly to identify the tune, standing and listening like a man who does not know where he has come from or where he must go. If only he could change his consistency at this instant, and become air, or stone, or a crane. A cello was being plucked inside him, answering the cello overhead in its own language, a sound of yearning and self-mockery. He could see a vivid mental image of the lives of those three elderly women musicians, rattling along rain-swept winter roads for hours on end in a taxi to give a recital in some remote kibbutz at the far end of Upper Galilee or at the opening ceremony of a war veterans’ reunion. How do they spend their free evenings in the winter? After washing up and clearing the kitchen, they probably gather, the three of them, in their communal sitting room. Fima conjured up the image of a severely puritanical room containing a pendulum clock with the hours marked in Roman characters, a sideboard, a heavy, thick-legged round dining table and dark straight-backed chairs. A grey woollen poodle crouches on the carpet in a corner of the room. On the closed grand piano, on the table, on the chest of drawers are spread lace mats, like those that covered every available surface in his father’s flat in Rehavia. There is also a heavy, old-fashioned wireless set, and blue dried flowers in a tall vase. The curtains are drawn, the shutters closed tight, and a blue flame glows in the heater, which bubbles faintly from time to time as the paraffin flows from the reservoir to the wick. One of the women, perhaps each in turn, reads softly to the others from an old German novel. Lotte in Weimar, for example. There is no sound the whole evening apart from the reader’s voice and the ticking of the clock and the bubbling of the paraffin. At eleven o’clock precisely they get up and go to their respective bedrooms. Their three doors close behind them until the morning. And in the sitting room, in the deep silence and the darkness, the clock keeps ticking relentlessly, and chiming softly every hour.
At the entrance to the clinic Fima saw the elegant plate inscribed with the words DR WAHRHAFTIG DR EITAN CONSULTANT GYNAECOLOGISTS. As usual, he was irked by the construction that Hebrew does not tolerate.
‘So it doesn’t tolerate it. So what?’
And did Nora, Wahrhaftig’s only daughter, who had been married to Gad Eitan and ran off ten years ago with a visiting Latin-American poet, ever suffer pangs of nostalgia? Of conscience? Of shame and guilt? Her name was never mentioned here. She was never alluded to, even indirectly. As if she had never existed. Only Tamar occasionally whispered something to Fima about a letter that had been returned to sender, or a telephone hung up without a word. Tamar persisted in trying to persuade him that Gad was not really a bad man but was just frightened and hurt. Except when she occasionally maintained the precise opposite: Any woman would have left such a viper.
Fima put on his short white coat, sat down behind his reception desk, and looked at the appointments book. As though he was unconsciously trying to guess which patient was going to materialise in his life as the next Annette Tadmor.
Tamar said:
‘There are two patients inside. The one with Dr Basso Profundo is a bit like Margaret Thatcher; Gad’s one looks like a schoolgirl, quite pretty.’
Fima said:
‘I nearly phoned you in the middle of the night. I managed to find your Finnish general, the one who begins and ends with M. It’s Mannerheim. He was really called von Mannerheim. A German name. He was the one who amazed the whole world by halting Stalin’s invasion in 1938. He led the tiny Finnish army against vastly superior Soviet forces.’
Tamar said:
‘You know everything. You could have been a university professor. Or a cabinet minister.’
Fima considered this, agreed with her in his heart, and replied warmly:
‘You are the ideal woman, Tamar. It’s a disgrace to the male sex that nobody has snatched you away from us yet. Though on second thoughts there isn’t a man alive who’s worthy of you.’
Her stocky, robust body, her soft, fair hair gathered into a small bun at the back, even her one green eye and one brown one suddenly made her look touchingly childlike, and he asked himself why he shouldn’t go up to her, clasp her shoulders, and bury her head in his chest as though she were his daughter. But this urge to console was immediately mixed with another: to boast to her that two women had made the pilgrimage to his flat that morning and offered themselves to him, one after the other. He hesitated, pulled himself together, and said nothing. When had a man’s hand last touched that stout body? How would she react if he suddenly reached out and cupped her breasts in his hands? With shock? Outrage? Guilty surrender? You fool, he said to his penis: now you remember. And as though he could feel her nipples nestling in the soft centre of each palm, he clenched his fists and smiled.
Tamar said:
‘Can I ask you something else?’
Fima could not remember what the last question was, but he replied cheerily, expansively, as though aping his father’s imperious manner:
‘Up to half my kingdom.’
‘Pacific island, also bathing costume.’
‘Pardon?’
‘That’s what it says here. Do you think it’s a misprint? “Pacific island, also bathing costume.” Six letters. It’s almost the last clue left.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Fima. ‘Try Tahiti. I’ve got a child who keeps asking me to take him away to the Pacific. He wants us to build a cabin out of wattles and live on fish and fruit. I don’t mean that he’s my child exactly. Well, he is and he isn’t. Never mind. Try Hawaii. Would you like to come with us, Tamar? To live in a cabin built of wattles and eat nothing but fish and fruit? Far away from cruelty and stupidity? Far away from this rain?’
‘Do you spell Tahiti with an I or a Y? Either way it won’t help, because the second letter has got to be an I and the third’s a K. Do you mean Yael’s little boy, Dimi? Your Challenger? Maybe I shouldn’t meddle, Fima, but you ought to think carefully whether you’re not complicating that child’s life too much by trying to be a spare father to him. I sometimes think …’
‘Bikini,’ said Fima. ‘The swimsuit was named after doomsday. Bikini was a tiny island that was evacuated and blown to bits with atom bombs. It was the testing ground for doomsday. In the South Pacific. We’ll have to look for some other island. Some other ocean, in fact. Anyway, how can I make a cabin out of wattles: I can’t even put up a bookshelf. Uri Gefen assembled my bookcases for me. Please, Tamar, don’t stand at the window like that with your back to me and the room. I’ve told you a tho
usand times I can’t stand it. My problem, I know.’
‘What’s the matter with you, Fima? You’re very funny sometimes. I was only drawing the curtains because I’m fed up with looking at the rain. We don’t need to look for any other island: Bikini is just right. What do you think is the name of the ruling party in Nicaragua?’
Fima had the answer to this question on the tip of his tongue, but at that instant the sound of a woman’s voice suddenly burst out behind Dr Eitan’s closed door. It was a short, piercing scream, full of terror and outrage, the sort of sound that might be wrenched from the throat of a small child who was the victim of searing injustice. Who was being butchered in there? Perhaps someone destined to be Yoezer’s father or grandfather. Fima tensed, straining to block his mind, to fortify himself, not to imagine what those plastic-gloved hands were doing in there, on that couch covered in white oilcloth and a disposable sheet of coarse white paper, with a white trolley nearby carrying a set of sterile scalpels, speculums, different-sized scissors, forceps, syringes, a razor, special needle and thread for sewing human flesh, clamps, oxygen masks, and saline drips. And the femininity exposed to its fullest extent, with no hiding place, flooded with bright light from the powerful lamp behind the doctor’s head; pink and raw like a wound, looking like a toothless old man’s open mouth, oozing dark blood.
While he was still struggling vainly to banish this image, not to see or hear or feel, Tamar said gently:
‘You can relax now. It’s all over.’
But Fima felt ashamed. Somehow, in a way that was not clear to him, he felt that he himself was not free of guilt. That he too was responsible for the agony going on behind the closed door. That there was a connection between his humiliation of Annette and then Nina this morning and the pain and shame on that spotless couch which now was no doubt far from spotless, full of blood and other secretions. His penis shrank and retreated into hiding like a thief. A vague, repulsive pain suddenly throbbed in his testicles. If Tamar had not been there, he would have reached down to ease the pressure of his trousers. Though actually it was better like this. He must abandon his pathetic attempt to convince Tsvi that we are all entitled to discharge ourselves from responsibility for atrocities committed in our name. We have to admit the guilt. We have to accept that everybody’s suffering rests on all our shoulders. The oppression in the Territories, the disgrace of old people poking around in dustbins, the blind man tapping at night in the deserted street, the misery of autistic children in run-down institutions, the killing of the dog with oedema, Dimi’s ordeal, Annette’s and Nina’s humiliation, Teddy’s loneliness, Uri’s constant wanderings, the surgical procedure that had just taken place on the other side of this wall, stainless-steel forceps deep inside the wounded vulva – everything was on all our shoulders. How useless to dream of running away to Moruroa or the Galapagos Islands. Even Bikini, poisoned by a radioactive cloud, was on all our shoulders. For a moment he pondered the curious fact that in Hebrew the word for ‘pity’ appears to be related to ‘womb’, while ‘forceps’ seems to be derived from ‘learning a lesson’. But then he rebuked himself for these verbal games, his poeticisings, which were no less despicable than the Minister of Defence saying ‘cost’ when he meant ‘death’.
‘There’s a stanza in one of Alterman’s poems,’ he said to Tamar, ‘called ‘Songs of the Plagues of Egypt,’ that goes like this: The rabble soon assembled / Bearing the noose of blame, / To hang the King and Council / And free themselves from shame. That is more or less the bottom line of all history, I think. It’s the story of all of us, condensed into a dozen words. Let’s make her a cup of coffee. And one for Gad and Alfred too.’
Tamar said:
‘That’s all right. You’re excused. I’ve put the kettle on. Anyway, it’ll take her a while to come around and stand up. You’re excused from cleaning up too. I’ll do it if you just see to the steriliser and the washing machine. How come you can remember everything by heart? Alterman and Bikini and everything? On the one hand, you’re so absent-minded you can’t even button your shirt up right or shave without cutting yourself; on the other hand you turn the world upside down for a clue in a crossword puzzle. And you organise everyone’s life for them. Just look at your sweater: half in and half out of your trousers. And your shirt collar’s half in and half out too. Like a baby.’
At this she fell silent, though her warm smile continued to haunt her broad, open face as though it had been forgotten there. After being absorbed in thought for a while, she added sadly, without explaining the connection:
‘My father hanged himself in the Metropole Hotel in Alexandria. It was in ’46. They didn’t find any letter. I was five and a half. I hardly remember him. I remember that he smoked cigarettes called Simon Arzt. And I remember his wristwatch: yellow, square, with phosphorescent hands that glowed in the dark like a ghost’s eyes. I’ve got a picture of him in British army uniform, but he doesn’t look much like a soldier. He looks so sloppy. And tired. In the picture he actually looks fair-haired, smiling, with beautiful white teeth and lots of lovely little lines at the corners of his eyes. Not sad, just tired. And he’s holding a cat. I wonder if he suffered from unrequited love too. My mother would never talk to me about him. The only thing she said was: He didn’t think about us either. Then she’d change the subject. She had a lover, a tall Australian captain with a wooden arm and a Russian name, Serafim. They explained to me once that it comes from the Hebrew word ‘seraphim’. Then she had a weepy banker who took her to Canada and dropped her. In the end she wrote to me from Toronto in Polish. I had to have the letter translated; she never managed to learn to write Hebrew. She said she wanted to come back to Nes Tsiyona to start a new life. But she never made it. She died of cancer of the liver. I was brought up in an institution run by the Working Women’s Council. About Alterman: tell me, Fima, is it true what they say – that he has two wives?’
‘He died,’ Fima replied, ‘about twenty years ago.’ He was on the point of launching into a crash course on Alterman when Dr Eitan’s door opened, a pungent hygienic odour wafted out, and the doctor poked his head out and said to Tamar:
‘Hey, Brigitte Bardot. Bring me an ampoule of pethidine chop-chop.’
So Fima was obliged to postpone his lecture. He unplugged the boiling kettle and decided to put a heater on in the recovery room. Then he had two phone calls, one after the other: he booked an appointment for Mrs Bergson for the end of the month and he explained to Gila Maimon that they never gave out the results of tests over the telephone; she’d have to come in and be told the answer by Dr Wahrhaftig. For some reason he addressed them both sheepishly, as though he had done them some wrong. He agreed in his mind with Annette Tadmor when she’d made fun of the clichés of mysterious womanhood, Greta Garbo, Beatrice, Marlene Dietrich, Dulcinea, but she was wrong when she tried to place the cloak of mystery on the shoulders of the male sex. We are all steeped in falsehood. We all pretend. Surely the plain truth is that each and every one of us knows exactly what pity is and when we ought to show it, because each and every one of us aches for a little pity. But come the moment when we should open the gates of compassion, we pretend we know nothing. Or that compassion and mercy are merely a way of patronising others, something too old-fashioned and sentimental. Or that that’s the way it is and what can be done about it and why me of all people? That was presumably what Pascal meant by ‘the death of the soul’ and about human agony being that of a dethroned king. All his own efforts not to imagine what was happening on the other side of the wall struck him as cowardly, ignoble, and ugly. As was his attempt to turn his thoughts from the death of Tamar’s father to the gossip about Alterman’s life. Surely it was the duty of all of us at least to look suffering in the eye. If he were prime minister, he would make each member of the Cabinet stay for a week with a reserve unit in Gaza or Hebron, spend some time inside the perimeter of one of the detention camps in the Negev, live a couple of days in a run-down psycho-geriatric ward, lie in the mud and rain
for a whole winter’s night from sundown to dawn by the electronic fence on the Lebanese border, or join Eitan and Wahrhaftig without any intervening barrier in this abortion inferno, which was now once more pervaded with the sounds of piano and cello from upstairs.
