Fima

17. NIGHTLIFE

AND SINCE THE TAXI DRIVER HAD USED THE EXPRESSION "KILL THEM when 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 trash can under the sink to see if there were any more corpses. Then, noticing the sparkling aluminum 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 realized 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 make the discovery that she too wears a sanitary napkin inside her underpants, uses a scented deodorant to cover the smell of her sweat and other secretions, anoints herself with greasy creams in front of her mirror, and perhaps even goes to sleep beside him with curlers in her hair, just like his wife. And hangs her underwear to dry on the shower-curtain rod 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 die 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 thought 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 of management-employee disagreement on round-the-clock hospital shifts. Or it manifested itself in our indifference to the sufferings of the unemployed, recent immigrants, 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 brutalization 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 terrorizing 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 backward and forward 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 ago 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, and was delighted to be able to make use of it at last. On second thought 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 flashlight, 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.

And what now, dear premier? Is a second adolescence about to begin? Or perhaps the first one is not over yet? In a single day you have had two women in your arms and you managed to lose both of them and inflict embarrassment or, worse, humiliation on them both. Clearly you'll have to go on waiting for your father to remember his promise at long last. Look what they've done to you, stupid, his mother had said to him in the dream. And now, belatedly, standing naked and shivering in front of the bathroom minor, he answered her peevishly, That's enough. Leave me alone.

As he said this, he had an image of Yael's face twisted with shock and disgust when she turned the light on in her bedroom a couple of hours previously and found him sleeping fully dressed under her blanket, clutching her nightie. She had raised her voice in exasperation, Quick, Teddy, come and see this. As if some insect, some kind of Gregor Samsa, had crept into her bed. He must have looked utterly stupid, if not demented, when he woke in a daze, stretched, and sat up, ail rumpled from sleep, and hopelessly tried to explain to them what had happened. As if hoping that if he could explain himself, they would take pity on him and let him curl up and go back to sleep. But he only succeeded in becoming more and more embroiled in his explanation, claiming at first that Dimi had not been feeling very well, then weakening and changing his line of defense, presenting a contrary version of events: Dimi had been fine but he himself had felt unwell.

Tobias, as usual, maintained his self-control. He pronounced a single frosty sentence:

"This time, Fima, I think you've gone a bit too far."

And while Yael put Dimi to bed, Ted phoned for a taxi and even helped Fima to get his arm into the tricky sleeve, fetched his shabby cap, accompanied him downstairs, and personally gave the driver Fima's address, as though to make certain beyond all doubt that he would not change his mind and come knocking on their door again.

And in fact, why not?

He owed them a full explanation.

At that moment, standing naked and sticky in his bathroom, he made up his mind to get dressed at once, call for a taxi, march back in there, wake them up, and talk to them earnestly, till dawn if necessary. It was his duty to alert them to the child's misery. To misery in general. To activate them. Confront them with the full urgency of the danger. With all due respect to jet-propelled vehicles, our first responsibility is to the child. This time he would not give in, he would also open the taxi driver's eyes on the way there, shattering all stubbornness and heartlessness: he would counteract all that brainwashing and force everyone to recognize at long last how close disaster was.

But when there was no answer from the taxi company, he changed his mind and called Annette Tadmor. After two rings he gave up. At three o'clock he got into bed with the history of Alaska in English, which he had absent-mindedly carried away with him from Ted and Yael's without asking their permission. He leafed through it until his eyes tracked down a curious section about the sexual habits of the native Eskimos: every spring they took a mature woman who had been widowed during the winter and handed her over to the adolescent boys as part of their initiation rites.

After ten minutes he switched the light off, curled up, and commanded his cock to calm down and himself to go to sleep. But again he had the impression that a blind man was wandering around outside in the empty street, tapping with his stick on the pavement and the low walls. Fima got out of bed, determined to get dressed and go outside to see what really went on in Jerusalem when no one was looking. He sensed with a kind of nocturnal lucidity that he had to render an account of everything that happened in Jerusalem. The hackneyed expression "nightlife" suddenly stepped out of its literal meaning. Severed in Fima's mind from thronged cafés, brightly lit boulevards, theaters, squares, cabarets, "night life" took on a different, sharp, ice-cold meaning that brooked no frivolity. The ancient Aramaic expression sitra de-itkasia, the concealed or covered side, passed through Fima's body like a single note on the cello out of the heart of darkness. A shudder of fear ran through him.

So he turned the light on, got out of bed, and sat down in his yellowing long underwear on the floor in front of the brown wardrobe. He had to use force to dislodge the jammed bottom drawer. For twenty minutes or so he rummaged through old notebooks, pamphlets, drafts, photographs, jottings, and newspaper clippings, until he came upon a shabby cardboard folder with the words "Ministry of the Interior: Department of Local Government" stamped on it.

Fima extracted from this folder a bundle of old letters in their original envelopes. He systematically scrutinized each envelope in turn, determined for once not to be defeated or sidetracked. Eventually he found Yael's farewell letter. The pages were numbered 2, 3, 4. So apparently the first page was lost. Or perhaps it had merely strayed into another envelope. He noticed that the end of the letter was also missing. Lying on the floor in his underwear, he started to read what Yael had written to him when she went off without him to Seatde in 1965. Her handwriting was tiny, pearl-like, neither feminine nor masculine, but rounded and fluent. Perhaps this was the sort of calligraphy that was taught in respectable schools in the last century. In his mind Fima compared this chaste handwriting to his own scrawl, which resembled a mob of panic-stricken soldiers jostling each other out of the way as they fled during a rout.