Fima

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 die midst of all those tales and morals, all those Cossacks and Indians, Fima had failed to notice that there had been complaints 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 came from his throat or chest. As he was leaving, the old man seemed to be trying to say something, which Fima hadn't wanted to listen to. Now, he said to himself: You preferred to quibble about Herzl and about India. What was he hinting at 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. As when you were little: an acerbic child with no keener desire than to catch grownups 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, goodhearted 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?

The taxi stopped at the light at the Mount Herzl junction. The driver said:

"It's freezing out there. My heater's broken. The damn 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 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 damn 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 hemorrhage. Baruch Nomberg, in his usual impetuous way, did not wait even a week: the weekend after the funeral he hurled all her belongings into boxes and crates, all her dresses and shoes and books, and her dressing table with the round Russian mirror, and the bed linen embroidered with her initials. 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 graduation photograph enlarged, and hung it over the sideboard, from where she looked down on the two of them all those years with a wistful, skeptical 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 humor. Every morning he checked the exercise books in Fima's satchel one by one. Every evening he stood in die bathroom with his arms crossed while Fima brushed his teeth. He inflicted on the child private tutors in math, English, and even Jewish tradition. 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 favor of textbooks. He subjected him to early and advanced matriculation exams. He did not hesitate to use 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 B.A., 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, and 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 self-destruction. 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-trap sleeve had previously been his.

Fima vaguely remembered one of the old man's favorite anecdotes, about a famous Hasidic saint and a notorious horse thief who exchanged their cloaks and thus in a sense their identities, with tragicomic 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 in 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 die-hard Revisionist is so stubborn, 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 a man who refuses to face 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 picture of the last blood oozing from the gaping wounds, and the final spasms of the dying creature. In an instant illumination he realized 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 terrible 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 when they're young. Not permit them to raise their heads. Let them curse the day they were crazy enough to start with us. Is this your building?"

Fima 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. You shouldn't 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 mailboxes, huddled in a heavy cloak. He was so startled that he almost turned and ran after the taxi, which was maneuvering to turn around 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 fatigue: it was not a person after all, only a tattered rolled-up mattress that one of his neighbors must have abandoned 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 had to lurk some glimmering of reason. We must endeavor 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.