Fima

by Amos Oz

  A moment later he was disgusted by these reflections, because on second thoughts they struck him as the embodiment of nineteenth-century Russian kitsch. The very term ‘abortion inferno’ was an injustice: after all, there were times when life was actually created here. Fima recalled a patient by the name of Sarah Matalon who had been advised by leading specialists to give up and adopt a child, and only Gad Eitan persevered single-mindedly for four years, until he finally opened her womb. The whole staff of the clinic was invited to the circumcision of her son. The father suddenly announced that the child would be called Gad, and Fima noticed Dr Eitan biting hard on his leather watch strap; indeed for a moment his own eyes filled too. They had to make do with Dr Wahrhaftig, who held the baby enthusiastically.

  Fima leaped forward to assist Tamar, who was helping a dazed girl of about seventeen, pale as a sheet and thin as a matchstick, walk falteringly towards the recovery room. As though to atone for the sins of the whole male sex, Fima bustled hither and thither, hurrying to fetch a soft blanket, a cold glass of mineral water with a slice of lemon in it, paper tissues, aspirins. Later he called a taxi for her.

  At four-thirty there was a coffee break. Dr Wahrhaftig came and leaned on the reception desk, wafting a smell of medicine and disinfectant into Fima’s face. His massive chest, blown up like that of a tsarist governor-general, and his broad round hips did give his heavy body the look of a basso profundo. His cheeks were crisscrossed by a network of unhealthy bluish, red, and pink blood vessels that were so close to the surface, you could almost take his pulse by their throbbing.

  Lithe and silent, with velvety movements like a cat on hot tin, Dr Eitan arrived. He was chewing gum slowly, impassively, with his mouth closed. His lips were thin and pursed. Wahrhaftig said:

  ‘That was a very odd Scbnitz. Just as well you stitched her up nice and tight.’

  Eitan said:

  ‘We pulled her through. It didn’t look too good.’

  Wahrhaftig said:

  ‘About the transfusion: you were absolutely right.’

  Eitan said:

  ‘Big deal. It was obvious from the start.’

  And Wahrhaftig said:

  ‘God has given you clever fingers, Gad.’

  Fima interrupted gently:

  ‘Drink your coffee. It’s getting cold.’

  ‘Herr Exzellenz von Nisan!’ roared Wahrhaftig. ‘And where has His Highness been hiding all these days? Has he been writing a new Faust for us? Or a Kohlhaas? We had almost forgotten what your face looks like!’ He went on to recount a ‘well-known joke’ about three layabouts. But he could not restrain himself from bursting into guffaws before he had even reached the third layabout.

  Gad Eitan, lost in thought, suddenly remarked:

  ‘Even so, we shouldn’t have done it here, under a local. It should have been done in a hospital, with a general anaesthetic. We nearly made a mess of it. We ought to think about it, Alfred.

  Wahrhaftig, in an altered voice, said:

  ‘What? Are you worried?’

  Gad Eitan took his time. After a pause he said:

  ‘No. I’m perfectly confident now.’

  Tamar hesitated, her mouth opened and closed twice, and finally she said warily:

  ‘You look nice in that white polo neck, Gad. Would you rather have lemon tea instead of coffee?’

  Gad Eitan said:

  ‘Yes, but no tail-wagging, please.’

  Wahrhaftig, a clumsy peacemaker, hastily turned the conversation to current affairs:

  ‘So, what do you say about that Polish antisemite? They’ve learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Did you hear on the radio what that cardinal in Warsaw said about the Auschwitz convent? It’s a straight replay of their old tunes: Why are the Jews so pushy, why are the Jews making such a fuss, why are the Jews inciting the whole world against poor Poland, why are the Jews trying to make capital out of their dead again? After all, millions of Poles were killed too. And our cute little government, with old-fashioned Jewish obsequiousness, turns a blind eye to the whole thing. In any civilised country we’d have sent their chargé d’affaires home with a good kick up the you-know-where.’

  Gad Eitan declared:

  ‘Don’t you worry, Alfred. We won’t take it lying down. One of these nights we’ll drop airborne commandos on them. A lightning raid. An Auschwitz Entebbe. We’ll blow that convent sky high, and all our forces will return safely to base. Surprise will be total. The world will hold its breath like the good old days. Then Mister Sharon and Mister Shamir will gabble on about the long arm of the IDF and the renewal of Israel’s deterrent force. They can christen it Operation Peace for the Crematoria.’

  Fima was instantly ignited. If I were prime minister, he thought, but before he could complete the thought, he had burst out furiously:

  ‘Who the hell needs all this? We’ve gone out of our minds. We’ve gone right off our rockers. What are we doing squabbling with the Poles about who owns Auschwitz? It’s already beginning to sound like an extension of our usual story about “ancestral rights” and “ancestral heritage” and “we shall never hand back territory that we have liberated”. Any moment now our dashing pioneers will be out there planting a new settlement among the gas chambers. Establishing facts in disputed territory. What makes Auschwitz a Jewish site anyway? It’s a Nazi site. A German site. As a matter of fact, it really ought to become a Christian site, for Christendom in general and Polish Catholicism in particular. Let them cover the whole death camp with convents and crosses and bells. Wall to wall. With a Jesus on every chimney. There’s no more fitting place in the world for Christendom to commune with itself. Them, not us. Let them go on pilgrimages there, whether to beat their breasts or to celebrate the greatest theological victory in their history. For all I care, they can baptise their Auschwitz convent ‘The Sweet Revenge of Jesus’. What are we doing scurrying in there with protesters and placards? Are we out of our minds? It’s quite right that a Jew who goes there to commune with the memory of the victims should see a forest of crosses all around him and hear nothing but the ringing of church bells. That way he’ll understand that he’s in the true heart of Poland. The heart of hearts of Christian Europe. As far as I’m concerned, it would be an excellent thing if they’d move the Vatican there. Why not? Let the pope sit there from now to the Resurrection on a golden throne among the chimneys. And for another thing –’

  ‘And for another thing, come out of your trance,’ hissed Eitan, holding his elegant fingers up to the light and inspecting them sternly, as though suddenly anxious that they might have undergone some mutation. He did not trouble to specify whether he was of a different opinion.

  ‘In any civilised country,’ said Wahrhaftig, trying to get the conversation back on the rails, ‘you two would not be permitted to say such macabre things about this tragic subject. There are certain things one must not joke about even in a private conversation behind closed doors. But our Fima is addicted to paradox, while you, Gad, are only happy when you have a chance to poke fun at the government, Auschwitz, the Entebbe raid, the Six Million, anything to be provocative. You’re dead inside. You’d hang the lot of them. The Hangman from Alfasi Street. It’s because you both hate the state, instead of getting up every morning and thanking God on bended knee for everything we have here, including the Asianness and the Bolshevism. You can’t see the cheese for the holes.’ And suddenly, swelling with sham fury, as though he had made up his mind to impersonate a fearsome tyrant, the old doctor turned crimson, his toper’s face trembled, his crisscrossed blood vessels looked as though they were about to burst, and he roared politely:

  ‘Cut the cackle now! Everyone back to work, quick march! My clinic is not a parliament!’

  Barely opening the crack of his lips, Gad Eitan hissed under his blond moustache:

  ‘But that’s just what it is. A senile parliament. Alfred, step into my room. And I need you too, you sex-starved Miss World, with Mrs Bergman’s notes.’

  ‘What have
I done to you?’ Tamar whispered tearfully. ‘Why do you torment me all the time?’ And with a flicker of timorous courage she added:

  ‘One of these days I’ll hit you.’

  ‘Great.’ Eitan grinned. ‘I’m at your service. I’ll even turn the other cheek, if that’ll help to calm your hormones down a bit. Then Saint Augustine here can comfort you, and me, together with all those who mourn for Zion and Jerusalem, amen.’ So saying, he wheeled around with military precision and stalked lithely away, smoothing his white polo neck sweater and leaving silence behind him.

  The two doctors disappeared into Dr Eitan’s room. Fima rooted in his pocket and managed to produce a crumpled, none too clean handkerchief, which he was about to hand to Tamar, whose eyes were brimming. But, unnoticed by him, a small object fell out of the folds of the handkerchief and landed on the floor. Tamar bent over, picked it up, and returned it to him, smiling through her tears. It was Annette’s earring. Then she wiped her eyes, the brown one and the green one, on her sleeve, pulled out the requisite files, and hurried after the doctors. In the doorway she turned her harassed face towards Fima and said with desperate pathos, as though swearing by all that was most dear to her:

  ‘One of these days I’ll grab a pair of scissors and murder him. Then I’ll kill myself.’

  Fima did not believe her, but nevertheless he picked up the paperknife and concealed it in the drawer of the desk. The handkerchief and the earring he tucked carefully back in his pocket. Then he tore off a sheet of paper and placed it in front of him, thinking to jot down his thought about the heart of Christendom. It might develop into an article for the weekend supplement.

  But his mind was elsewhere. He had slept for less than three hours, and in the morning he had been worn out by his indefatigable lovers. What did they see in him exactly? A helpless child who stirred their maternal instincts, a child to swaddle and suckle? A brother to wipe away their tears? An eclipsed poet they longed to play muse to? And what got women worked up about a cruel hussar like Gad? Or a garrulous dandy like his father? Fima marvelled, smiling. Perhaps Annette was wrong after all, and there is a mysterious side? The enigma of what women prefer? Or perhaps she didn’t make a mistake but was deliberately keeping a secret from the enemy. Cunningly dissimulating its very existence. No doubt she did not really desire me this morning; she was just sorry for me and decided to give herself, so she did. Whereas I, half an hour later, didn’t desire Nina but I was sorry for her and tried to give myself to her, but nature itself denied me what it makes possible for them without any difficulty.

  And he muttered:

  ‘But that’s not fair.’

  And then, self-mockingly:

  ‘So, why not sign a petition?’

  His tired hand was doodling on the paper in front of him, drawing circles and triangles, crosses, six-pointed stars, missiles, and big breasts. Among these doodles he unconsciously inscribed the line that had come into his head earlier: ‘Cranes wheel and whirl.’ Underneath he wrote: ‘Wains heel and curl.’ Then he crossed it all out. Crumpling the page into a ball, he tossed it at the wastepaper basket. And missed.

  Then he thought of making use of the spare time by composing two letters, one an open letter, a reply to Günter Grass about guilt and responsibility, and one private, a belated reply to Yael’s farewell letter of twenty-four years ago. It was particularly important for him to explain to Yael and to himself why he had been so rude to the two air force colonels who had come to their home that Saturday evening specially to convince him that Yael’s going to work in Seattle or Pasadena for a year or two was of national importance. He still remained unshaken in his conviction that the words ‘national interest’ generally served as a cover for all sorts of monstrosities. But now, half a lifetime later, he no longer saw himself as entitled to preach. By what right? What have you accomplished with your life? Will it be of any use to Yoezer and his friends, living here a hundred years from now, that once in Jerusalem there lived a troublesome layabout who got on everybody’s nerves with his petty linguistic corrections? Who fornicated with married women? Who reviled and insulted cabinet ministers? Who argued with lizards and cockroaches? While even vile men like Gad Eitan healed sick women and opened barren wombs?

  When the phone rang, instead of his usual greeting, ‘Clinic, good evening,’ there slipped out of his mouth the words ‘Clinic, good dreaming.’ He immediately apologised, stammered, tried to cover up his slip with a feeble joke, made a mess of it, corrected himself, tried to explain the correction, and booked an urgent appointment for Rachel Pinto for the following week when she had only asked for a routine checkup.

  Who knew? Maybe her husband had also left her. Or found a younger mistress. Or been killed on reserve duty in the Territories, and she had no one to comfort her.

  25

  Fingers that were no fingers

  AT seven o’clock they lowered the blinds and locked the clinic. The rain and the wind had stopped. A clear, glassy cold had descended on Jerusalem. Stars glowed with a sharp wintry radiance. And from the east, Christian bells tolled loudly and forlornly, as though the Crucifixion were happening at Golgotha that very moment.

  Dr Wahrhaftig went home in a taxi, taking Tamar with him, since he had offered as usual to drop her off opposite the Rehavia High School. Gad Eitan sneaked through the darkness to the side street where he had parked his sports car. While Fima, in his heavy overcoat, with the collar turned up, with his battered, greasy cloth cap on his head, stood for ten minutes or so at the deserted bus stop waiting for a miracle. He had an urge to go to Tsvi and Shula Kropotkin’s flat just down the Gaza Road, accept the Napoleon brandy Tsvi had promised him, put his feet up near the radiator, and expound his theory about the rift between Jews and Christians being all the deeper for being, as it were, in the family. Our quarrel with Islam, by contrast, is merely an ephemeral dispute over land, which will be forgotten within thirty or forty years. But the Christians in a thousand years’ time will still see us as deicides and as an accursed elder brother. This last phrase pierced his heart all of a sudden, reminding him of the baby his mother had borne half a century ago, when he was four. Apparently this baby died after only three weeks, of some congenital defect which Fima knew nothing about: it was never discussed in his presence. He had no memory of the baby or of the mourning, but he had a vivid mental image of a tiny light-blue knitted bonnet laid out on his mother’s little bedside table. When his father threw out all his wife’s belongings at her death, the blue knitted bonnet vanished too. Had Baruch given it to the leper hospital in Talbiyeh along with all her clothes? Fima despaired of the bus and started walking towards Rehavia. Vainly he tried to remember whether he had promised Nina to pick her up from her office after work and take her to see the Jean Gabin film, or whether they had arranged to meet at the cinema. After a while he was not certain that it was not Annette Tadmor that he had arranged to see. Was it possible that in a fit of absent-mindedness he had inadvertently asked them both out? He could not find a telephone token in any of his pockets, so he went on walking the empty streets, which were lit here and there by a yellow streetlight swathed in flickering mist, oblivious to the biting cold, thinking about his mother, who had also been fond of the cold and loathed the summer. And he asked himself what his good friend Uri Gefen was doing at this moment in Rome. He was probably sitting in a crowded café in some piazza surrounded by witty men and pretty, provocative women, roaring in his peasant voice and fascinating his audience with stories of air battles in which he had taken part, or amorous adventures in the Far East, letting fall as usual some wry generalisations about the capriciousness of desire, describing in well-chosen words the inevitable shadow of ridicule that accompanies every action and inevitably conceals one’s true motives, and concluding with some indulgent commonplace that would finally spread a sort of veil of conciliatory irony over his whole story, over loves and lies as such and over the generalisation he himself had enunciated only a moment earlier.

  Fima ach
ed to feel the touch of Uri’s broad, gnarled hand on the back of his neck. He longed for his parodies, his smell, his thick breath, and his warm laughter. At the same time and without any contradiction, he was a little sorry that his friend was returning from abroad in a couple of days’ time. He was ashamed of his affair with Nina, even though he suspected that Uri had known for a long time about this sexual welfare work and might even have initiated it himself, out of benevolence and affection for the two of them, Fima and Nina, and perhaps also with a sense of detached amusement or regal irony. Was it possible that he asked for and received from Nina a detailed report after each session? Did they sit and rerun the film in slow motion, chuckling together indulgently? A couple of nights ago he had let Nina down, on the rug at her home, and this morning, thanks to Annette, he had let her down again in his own bed. His heart shrank as he remembered how she had stroked his forehead with her wonderfully shaped fingers and whispered to him that like this, with his limp cock, he was penetrating her more deeply than during intercourse. How rare, almost mystical, those words seemed now; they seemed to glow with a precious radiance as he recalled them, and he craved to mend what he had spoiled, to give her and Annette and also Tamar and Yael and every woman in the world, including the plain and unwanted ones, a proper carnal love, and a fatherly and brotherly love, and a spiritual love too.

  From a dark garden an unseen dog barked furiously. Fima, startled, replied:

  ‘What’s wrong? What have I done?’

  And then he added indignantly:

  ‘I’m sorry: I don’t believe we’ve met.’

  He imagined the domestic winter life behind these façades, behind shutters, windows, and curtains. A man is sitting cosily in his armchair, in his slippers, reading a book about the history of dams. There is a small glass of brandy on the arm of his chair. His wife comes out of the shower with wet hair, pink and fragrant, wrapped in a blue flannel dressing gown. On the rug a small child is silently playing dominoes. A delicate flower of flame blossoms in the grate. Soon they will have their supper in front of the television, watching a family comedy. After that they will put the child to bed with a story and a good-night kiss, then sit side by side on the living-room sofa, with their stockinged feet propped up on the coffee table, whispering to each other and gradually settling into silence, perhaps holding hands. The moan of an ambulance will sound outside, then only thunder and wind. The man will get up to make sure the kitchen window is fastened properly. He will return carrying a tray with two glasses of lemon tea and a plate of peeled oranges. A small wall light will cast a reddish-brown domestic glow on the two of them.