Fima

24. SHAME AND GUILT

IN THE GARDEN, AS HE WALKED ALONG THE PAVED PATH THAT LED around the small block of flats to the clinic, he stopped and stood for a moment, because from the second floor, through closed windows, wind, and rustling pine trees, there came the sound of a cello. One of the old women, or perhaps a pupil, was practicing the same scales 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 material state 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 had a mental image of the lives of those three elderly women musicians, who ratded along rain-swept winter roads for hours 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 did they spend their free evenings in the winter? After washing the dishes and clearing up the kitchen, they probably gathered, the three of them, in their communal 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 gray woollen poodle crouched on the carpet in a corner of the room. On the closed grand piano, on the table, and on the chest of drawers were spread lace mats, like those that covered every available surface in his father's flat in Rehavia. There was also a heavy, old-fashioned radio set, and blue dried flowers in a tall vase. The curtains were drawn, the shutters closed tight, and a blue flame glowed in the heater, which bubbled faintly from time to time as the kerosene flowed from the reservoir to the wick. One of the women, perhaps each in turn, read softly to the others from an old German novel. Lotte in Weimar, for example. There was no sound the whole evening apart from the reader's voice and the ticking of the clock and the bubbling of the heater. At eleven o'clock precisely they got up and went to their respective bedrooms. Their three doors closed behind them until the morning. And in the main room, in the deep silence and the darkness, the clock kept 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 GYNECOLOGISTS. As usual, he was irked by the construction that Hebrew did not tolerate.

"So let it not tolerate it. So what?"

And did Nora, Wahrhaftig's only daughter, who had been married to Gad Eitan and had run 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 said the exact 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 trying to guess which patient was going to materialize in his life as the next Annette Tadmor.

Tamar said:

"There arc two patients inside. The one with Dr. Basso Profundo is a little like Margaret Thatcher; Gad's 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 thought 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 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 center 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 lordly 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.' Sue 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 thousand 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 Pm 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 Or. 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 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 dosed 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 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 trash cans, 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 edema, Dimi's ordeal, Annette's and Nina's humiliation, Teddy's loneliness, Uri's endless 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" appears to be derived from "learning a lesson." But then he rebuked himself for these verbal games, his poeticizings, which were no less despicable than the minister of defense's 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 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 sterilizer 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 right; on the other hand you turn the world upside down for a clue in a crossword puzzle. And you organize 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 'forty-six. They didn't find any letter. I was five and a half. I hardly remember him. I remember that he smoked cigarettes called Simon Am. And I remember his wristwatch: yellow, square, with phosphorescent hands that glowed in the dark like a ghost's eyes. I have 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 odor wafted out, and the doctor poked his head out and said to Tamar:

"Hey, Brigitte Bardot. Bring me an ampule 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 Maimón 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 patronizing 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 die soul" and about human agony being that of a dethroned king. His 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 psychogeriatric 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 filled with the sounds of piano and cello from upstairs.

A moment later he was disgusted by these reflections, because on second thought 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 help Tamar, who was helping a dazed girl of about seventeen, pale as a sheet and thin as a matchstick, walk falteringly toward the recovery room. As though to atone for the sins of the whole male sex, Fima bustled here and there, 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 Schnitz. 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 anesthetic. We nearly made a mess of it. We ought to think about it, Alfred."

Wahrhaftig, in an altered voice, said:

"What? Are you worried?"

Eitan took his time. After a pause he said:

"No. Not now."

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

"You look good in that white turtleneck, Gad. Would you rather have lemon tea instead of coffee?"

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 anti-Semite? They've learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Did you hear on the radio what the 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 arc 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 civilized country we'd have sent their chargé d'affaires home with a good kick in the you-know-where."

Eitan said:

"Don't you worry, Alfred. We won't take it lying down. One night 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 Mr. Sharon and Mr. 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 baptize their Auschwitz convent The Sweet Revenge of Jesus.' What arc 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 civilized country," said Wahrhaftig, trying to get the conversation back on the rails, "you two would not be permitted to say such macabre words 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 drunkard'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, Eitan hissed under his blond mustache:

"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 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 toward 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 sec 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 marveled, 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 just 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 apologized, 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 asked for only 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.