Fima

25. FINGERS THAT WERE NO FINGERS

AT SEVEN O'CLOCK THEY DREW THE BLINDS AND LOCKED THE CLINIC. The rain and the wind had stopped. A clear, glassy cold had descended on Jerusalem. The 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. 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 because it was, so to speak, 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. The 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 picture of a tiny light-blue knit 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 knit 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 toward 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. Or was it Annette Tadmor that he had arranged to see? Was it possible that in a fit of absent-mindedness he had 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 occasionally by a yellow streetlight swathed in flickering mist. He walked, oblivious to the biting cold, and thought about his mother, who had also been fond of the cold and loathed the summer. And he wondered what his good friend Uri Gefen was doing at this moment in Rome. Uri 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 pan, or amorous adventures in the Far East, letting fall as usual some wry generalization 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, the loves, lies, and generalizations he had enunciated before.

Fima ached 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 sorry that his friend was returning from abroad in a couple of days. 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 suggested 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 couch, with their stocking 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.

In the dark Fima felt a pang. These images not only aroused longing for Yael, but also gave him a strange feeling of nostalgia for himself. As though one of these lighted windows concealed another Fima, the real Fima, not overweight, not a nuisance, not losing his hair, not in yellowing long underwear, but a hard-working, straightforward Fima, living his life in a rational way without shame or falsehood. A calm, punctilious Fima. Even though he had understood for a long time that the truth was not within his reach, he still felt a longing, deep inside, to get away from the falsehood that seeps through like fine dust into every corner of his life, even the most intimate parts.

The other, the real Fima was sitting at this moment in a cosy study, surrounded by bookcases punctuated by prints of Jerusalem as seen by travelers and pilgrims of earlier centuries. His head floated in a pool of light from a desk lamp. His left hand rested on the knee of his wife, who sat close to him on the edge of his desk, her legs dangling, as they exchanged ideas on some new theory about the immune system or quantum physics. Not that Fima had the slightest understanding of the immune system or quantum physics, but he imagined to himself that the real Fima and his wife, there in the warm, cosy study, were both experts in one or both of these subjects, working together on developing some new idea that would reduce the amount of suffering in the world. Was this study what Chili, or his mother, meant in the dream when she called him to come over to the Aryan side?

On the corner of Smolenskin Street in front of Prime Minister Shamir's official residence, Fima noticed a little girl on top of a bundle of blankets near the trash cans. Was she on a hunger strike? Had she fainted? Had she been killed? Had some grieving mother from Bethlehem deposited here the corpse of her daughter, killed by us? Alarmed, he bent over the tot, but it turned out to be nothing more than a damp heap of garden clippings wrapped in a sack. Fima lingered beside it. The idea of lying down here and mounting his own hunger strike suddenly appealed to him: it seemed both attractive and relevant. Looking up, he saw a single yellow light behind a drawn curtain in the last room on the upper floor. He imagined Yitzhak Shamir pacing up and down between the window and the door, his hands behind his back, worrying over a telegram that lay before him on the windowsill, not knowing what to reply, perhaps feeling the winter pains of old age in his shoulders and back. After all, he was not a young man. He too had had his revolutionary years in the underground. It might be a good thing to set aside animosity for a while, go in there and cheer him up, ease his loneliness, talk to him all night, man to man, not with petty contentiousness or sermonizing or accusations, but as one good friend to another gently trying to open the eyes of one who has been involved by bad people in a rotten business from which apparently there is no way out, but which actually has a rational and indeed straightforward and affordable solution that can be driven home even to the most stubborn mind with a few hours of talking, of calm, soothing conversation. Provided the friend who is in trouble does not shut himself up and take refuge behind a barricade of lies and rhetoric, but opens his mind, listens to you with humility, and contemplates a range of possibilities that he has so far ruled out, not from arrogance but because of prejudices, ossified habits of thought, and deeply rooted fears. And what is so wrong with compromise, Mr. Shamir? Each side receives only a part of what it believes it deserves, but the nightmare is ended. The wounds begin to heal. And didn't you yourself achieve your present position as a sort of compromise candidate? Surely you must have compromised now and again with your colleagues? Or with your wife? Haven't you?

And, indeed, why not knock on the door? He would be received with a glass of hot tea; he would take off his coat and explain once and for all what reason dictates and which way history is pointing. Or, on the contrary, he would persuade the prime minister to put his own coat on and join him in a night stroll and a prolonged heart-to-heart discussion in the empty rain-swept streets lit here and there by a wet streetlight wrapped in mist and gloom. A stern, ascetic city, Jerusalem, on a winter's night. But nothing is lost yet, sir. There is still hope of opening a new chapter. The bloodstained introduction has occupied a hundred years here, and now let's make a compromise and move on to the main story. Let the Jewish people start living as a nation that has found rest in its own land and reveals at long last the innate powers of creativity and renewal that have been buried under murky layers of fear and resentment, pogroms, persecutions, annihilation. Shall we give it a try, sir? Cautiously? By small, well-thought-out steps?

The policeman sitting in the sentry box in front of the residence poked his head out and asked:

"Hey, you: arc you looking for something?"

Fima replied:

"Yes. Fm looking for tomorrow."

The policeman politely suggested:

"Well, go and look for it somewhere else, sir. Move along please. You can't wait here."

Fima decided to take this advice. To move along. Keep going. Not give up. Go on struggling as long as he had the strength to fit one word to another and to discriminate between ideas. The question was, where could he move along to? What should he be doing? Wasn't the truth that he hadn't even begun? But begun what? And where? And how? At that moment he heard a calm, reasonable, prosaic voice somewhere nearby calling his name: "Fima, where are you?"

He stopped and replied at once, with devotion:

"Yes. Here I am. Fm listening."

But the only sound was of cats in heat behind the damp stone walls. Followed, like a sponge that wipes everything clean, by the soughing of the wind in the pines in the dark empty gardens.

Sitra de-itkasia: the concealed side.

He continued walking slowly. The Terra Sanaa Building stood in total darkness. In Paris Square he stood for a few minutes waiting for the traffic lights to change, then shuffled down King George Street toward the center of town. He paid no attention to the cold that pierced him through his overcoat, nor to the waterlogged old cap on his head, nor to the few passersby, all walking fast, some perhaps eyeing askance this strange, muffled figure plodding wearily and apparently absorbed in a violent argument with himself, accompanied by gesticulations and mouthings.

It was very bad that he had forgotten to take precautions that morning. What if he got Annette Tadmor pregnant? He'd have to jump aboard a tramp steamer again and run away. To Greece. To Nineveh. To Alaska. Or to the Galapagos Islands. In the dimness of Annette's womb, in a dark labyrinth of moist tunnels, his blind seed was now forcing its way with ridiculous tail-movements, jerking to and fro in the warm liquid, a sort of round, bald Fima-head, possibly wearing a microscopic wet cloth cap, ageless, brainless, sightless, and yearning out of the depths for the hidden source of warmth, nothing but a head and a tail and the urge to thrust and nestle, to ram the crust of the ovum, in every respect resembling its father, who longed to cocoon himself once and for all deep in the feminine slime and there snuggle up cosily and fall asleep. Fima was filled with worry but also a strange jealousy of his own seed. Under a yellow streetlight in front of the Yeshurun Synagogue he stopped and peered at his watch. He could still catch the second showing at the Orion. Jean Gabin certainly wouldn't let him down. But where exactly was he supposed to pick Annette up? Or was it Nina? Or where were they supposed to pick him up? It looked as if this evening he was doomed to let Jean Gabin down. A boy and girl, young and noisy, passed him as he shuffled slowly past Beit Hama'alot, near the old parliament building. The boy said:

"All right, so let's both give in."

And the girl:

"It's too late now. It won't make any difference."

Fima quickened his pace, hoping to steal some more snatches of their conversation. For some reason he needed to know what sort of concessions they were talking about and what it was that would make no difference now. Had they also forgotten to take precautions this evening? But suddenly the boy wheeled around furiously, leaped to the curb, and waved his arm. At once a taxi stopped, and the boy bent over and started to get in without so much as a glance at his partner. Fima realized immediately that in another moment or two this girl would be left abandoned in the middle of the wet street, and he already had some opening words ready on the tip of his tongue, cautiously encouraging words that would not alarm her, a sad, wise sentence that would make her smile through her tears. But he did not get the chance.

The girl called out:

"Come back, Yoav. I give in."

And the boy, not even troubling to close the door of the taxi behind him, rushed back and threw his arms around her waist, whispering something that made them both laugh. The driver hurled an oath after him, and Fima, without asking himself why, decided on the spot that his duty was to set matters to rights for the driver. So he got into the taxi, closed the door, and said:

"Sorry about the mix-up. Kiryat Yovel, please."

The driver, a thickset man with greasy silver hair, small eyes, and a trim Latin mustache, grumbled irritably:

"What's going on here? First you hail a cab, then you can't make up your mind? Don't you people know what you want?"

Fima realized that the driver took him to be with the couple. He muttered apologetically:

"What's the problem. It took us half a minute to decide. We had a difference of opinion. There's nothing for you to get excited about."

He resolved to initiate another political discussion, only this time he would not put up in silence with bloodthirsty savagery, but employ clear, straightforward arguments and irresistible logic. He was all ready to resume the sermon he had begun to deliver earlier to the prime minister, but when he began to feel his way cautiously, like a dentist probing to find the source of a pain, to see what the driver felt about the question of the Territories and peace, the man interrupted amicably:

"Just drop it, will you, sir? Me, my views just get people worked up. They start listening to me and they head straight for a breakdown. That's the reason I stopped having discussions long ago. So hang onto your temper. If I was in charge of this country, I'd have it back on its feet in three months. But the Israeli people have given up thinking with their brains. They think only with their bellies. And their balls. So why should I waste my health for nothing? Every time I get in a discussion, it just burns up the nerves. It's hopeless. It's mob rule here. Worse than the Arabs."

Fima said:

"What if I promise not to get worked up, and not to get you worked up? We can always agree to differ."

"Okay then," said the driver, "only just remember you asked for it. Well, for me it's like this: For a real peace, so called, with assurances and guarantees and safeguards, for a peace like that I'd personally give them all the Territories except the Western Wall, and I'd even say thank you to them for taking Ramallah and Gaza off my back. Ever since that shit landed on us in 'sixty-seven, the state's been going to the dogs. They've made a right mess of us. Well, how about it? Am I getting on your nerves? Are you going to start farting the Bible at me?"

Fima had difficulty containing his feelings:

"And how, may I ask, did you arrive at this conclusion?"

"In the end," said the driver wearily, "everybody will. Maybe only after we lose another few thousand lives. There's no other way, sir. The Arab is not going to evaporate, and neither are we, and we're about as capable of living together as a cat and a mouse. That's real life, and it's also just. It's written in the Torah: if two customers arc holding onto a tallith and they're both shouting that it's theirs, then you take a pair of scissors and you cut it in half. That's what Moses himself decided, and he was no idiot. Better to cut the tallith than to keep cutting babies. Which street did you say?"

Fima said:

"Well done!"

And the driver:

"What do you mean, well done? What do you mean by that? What do you take me for, a cat that's learned to fly? If you happened to be of the same opinion, I wouldn't say well done to you just for that. What I will say to you, and listen hard, is there's only one man in this country who's strong enough to cut the tallith in half without getting cut in half himself, and that's Arik Sharon. Nobody else can do it. They'll take it from him."

"Despite the fact that he has blood on his hands?"

"Not despite: because. First of all, he's not the one with the bloody hands; it's the whole state. You and me too. Don't go pinning it all on him. Besides which, I don't have a weeping conscience over the bloodshed. Sorrow, yes, but not shame. That's for the Arabs, not us. It's not as if we wanted to shed blood. The Arabs forced us to. From the word go. On our side we never wanted to start the violence. Even Menahem Begin, a proud patriot if ever there was one. The moment Sadat came along to the Knesset to say sorry, he gave him what he wanted, just so long as the bloodshed stopped. If Arafat came along to the Knesset to say sorry, he'd get something too. So? Let Arik go and strike a deal, gangster to gangster. What do you think, that some bleeding heart Yossi Sarid or other is going to do business with that scum Arafat? Yossi Sarid, the Arabs would make mincemeat out of him, and then someone from our side would give him a bellyful of lead, and that would be the end of that. Best let Arik do the cutting. Any time you've got to do business with a ravenous beast, hire a hunter to do the job, not a belly dancer. Is this your block?"

When Fima saw that he didn't have enough money to pay the fare, he offered to hand over his identity card or to borrow a few shekels from a neighbor, if the driver didn't mind waking a few minutes. But the other said:

"Forget it. It's not the end of the world. Tomorrow or the day after come and leave eight shekels at Eliyahu Taxis. Just say it's for Tsiyon. You're not from the Bible League, by any chance, are you? Or something like that?"

"No," said Fima. "Why?"

"I had a feeling I've seen you on TV. Must be someone who looks like you. Spoke nice, too. Just a minute, sir: you left your hat behind. Where did you win that thing? What is it, a leftover from the Holocaust?"

Fima walked past his mailbox without stopping, even though he could see there was something in it. He made a detour around the rolled-up mattress. When he reached the light of the staircase and pulled out his key, a ten-shekel note folded into a small square fell out too. He ran back, hoping to catch the taxi driver before he finished turning around at the end of the road. The driver grinned in the dark.

"So what's the hurry? Afraid I'm leaving the country? That I'll be gone tomorrow morning? Let the scum leave; I'm staying to the end of the show. I want to see how it finishes. Good night, sir. Don't eat your heart out."

Fima decided to have that man in his cabinet. He would relieve Tsvi of the Information portfolio and give it to the driver. And because the driver had said "the end of the show," he suddenly remembered that Annette was probably waiting for him to call her at home. Unless she was waiting outside the cinema. Or unless it was Nina waiting. But hadn't he promised Nina he'd pick her up at the office? Or was that with Tamar? Fima was disgusted at the thought that he was going to have to get bogged down in lies and excuses yet again. He ought to call and explain. Tactfully untie the knot. Apologize to Nina and hurry out to meet Annette. Or vice versa.

But what if it turned out he had only made a date with one of them after all, and when he started to lie his way out of it on the phone, he got deeper and deeper in the mud, and only succeeded in making a fool of himself? And what if at this very moment they were both standing in the foyer of the cinema waiting for him, not recognizing each other, little dreaming that it was the same idiot who had let them both down?

To hell with lies. From now on he would start a new chapter. From now on he would live his life in the open, rationally and honestly. How had the taxi driver put it: no "weeping conscience." There was no reason whatever to hide his lovers from one another. If they're both fond of me, why shouldn't they be fond of each other? They'll almost certainly make friends at once, they can cheer each other up. They have so many things in common, after all. They are both compassionate, goodhearted, generous human beings. They both seem to relish my helplessness. By coincidence, if it really is a coincidence, both their husbands arc living it up in Italy at this moment. Who knows? Perhaps the husbands have met. Perhaps at this very minute Yeri Tadmor and Uri Gefen are sitting in a lively group of Israelis and foreigners in the same café in Rome, swapping juicy stories about love and despair. Or discussing the future of the Middle East, with Uri using arguments he's borrowed from me. Whereas my role in this situational farce that comes straight out of Stefan Zweig or Somerset Maugham is to bring together the two abandoned wives, who are about to come together this evening in friendship, solidarity, even a measure of intimacy, because they both wish me well.

In his mind's eye he saw himself sitting in the darkness of the cinema, with Jean Gabin becoming embroiled with a gang of ruthless killers while he himself had his left arm around Annette and slid the fingers of his right hand down over Nina's breasts. Giving a plausible imitation of a discount Uri Gefen. After the film he would invite them both to the little restaurant behind Zion Square. Sparkling and relaxed, he would regale them with spicy anecdotes and intellectual fireworks, shedding dazzling new light on old questions. When he excused himself for a moment to go to the lavatory, the two women would converse together in animated whispers. Comparing notes about his living conditions. Dividing up the tasks, establishing a kind of work schedule for the Fimacare service.

These fantasies caressed him deliciously. Ever since his childhood he had loved to feel that there were grownups, responsible people, who discussed in his absence how to do the best for him, waiting till he was asleep before talking about the arrangements for his birthday, switching to Russian to discuss what present to surprise him with. If he summoned up the courage at the end of the evening at the restaurant to suggest to Annette and Nina that they come to his place and spend the night together, there might be some momentary embarrassment but in the end he would not be refused. He had learned from Uri that such combinations hypnotized the female imagination too. And so at last he could look forward to an exciting Greek night. He would be rejuvenated. A new billy-goat year would begin.

For a few moments he mulled over the details in his mind, casting the characters and directing die scenes. Then he grabbed the receiver and dialed Nina's office. When the telephone made no sound, he tried Annette. Once again the response was total silence. He called both numbers alternately five or six times, to no avail. All the systems in this country are breaking down. The lines of communication are congested, the hospitals are paralyzed, the electricity supply is unreliable, the universities are going bankrupt, factories are closing down one after another, education and research are sinking to the level of India's, public services are collapsing, and all because of this obsession with the Territories, which is gradually ruining us. How did the taxi driver put it: "Ever since that shit landed on us in 'sixty-seven, the state's been going to the dogs." Fima waved the telephone in the air, banged it on the table, shook it, ratded it, pleaded with it, swore at it, bashed it, and thumped it, but nothing helped. Then it occurred to him that he had only himself to blame. How many times had he ignored the printed notices he had found in his mailbox about the nonpayment of his bill. Now they had got their own back. They had cut him off from the world. Like a cantor on a desert island.

Cunningly he tried to dial again, very slowly and gently, like a burglar, like a lover. He could not remember if the emergency number for such eventualities was one four, one eight, or simply one hundred. He was ready and willing to settle his debt this very minute, to apologize in person or in writing, to give a lecture to the telephone workers on Christian mysticism, to pay a fine or a bribe, anything so long as they came at once to bring his telephone back to life. First thing in the morning he would go straight to the bank. Or was it the post office? He would pay his bill and be rescued from the desert island. But tomorrow, Fima remembered, was Friday, and all public offices were closed. Perhaps he should call his father and ask him to use his connections. Next week his father was turning his painters and plasterers loose on him. Maybe he should run away to Cyprus? Or the Galapagos Islands? Or at least to that guest house in Magdiel?

He changed his mind. He saw the situation in a fresh light. Immediately he felt better. Fate must have intervened to save him from Jean Gabin and the orgy. The words "desert island" filled him with joy. It would be wonderful to spend a quiet evening at home. Outside, the storm could ratde the windows to its heart's content: he would light the kerosene heater, sit down in the armchair, and try to get a little closer to the other Fima, the real one, instead of wearing himself out with diplomatic efforts to mollify two offended women and then exhausting himself all night to satisfy their appetites. He was particularly delighted that he was relieved, as though by the wave of a magic wand, of the obligation to put his coat and cap on again and go out into the empty, freezing, rain-lashed city. Had he really decided to act like Uri Gefen? To step into his father's shoes? To start leaping around like a billy-goat again, a shabby, mangy old bear like him? First let's see you piss once without stuttering.

Instead of playing the fool, better to sit down now at the desk, switch on the lamp, and compose a devastating reply to Gunter Grass's speech. Or a letter to Yitzhak Rabin. Or write that article on the heart of Christendom. And for once he'd be able to watch the nine o'clock news without interruption. Or fall asleep in front of the television in the middle of a brainless melodrama. Or, better still, curl up in bed with the book he had borrowed from Ted, study the life of the whalers in Alaska, imagine the simplicity of primitive nomads, enjoy the strange sexual habits of the Eskimos. The custom of handing over a ripe widow to the adolescent boys as part of their initiation rites suddenly caused a delicious pulsing in his loins. And tomorrow morning he would explain everything to his lovers, who would surely forgive him: after all, it was more or less a case of force majeure. Besides the sense of relief and the message in his loins, he also felt hungry. He had eaten nothing all evening. So he went to the kitchen, and without even sitting gulped down five thick slices of bread and jam, devoured two tomatoes whole without bothering to slice them, ate a jar of yogurt, swallowed two glasses of tea with honey, and rounded the whole off with a heartburn tablet. To encourage his hesitant bladder he flushed the toilet in the middle, lost the race, and had to wait for the cistern to refill. But he got bored waiting, and went around the flat turning the lights off, then stood at the window to examine what was new in the empty fields stretching away to Bethlehem: perhaps there was already some sign of a distant radiance. He took pleasure in the rattling of the windowpanes under the onslaught of the sharp black wind.

Here and there on the dark slopes a pale gleam shimmered: Arab stone cottages scattered among orchards and boulders. The shadows of the hills deluded him, as though they were exchanging elusive caresses that were not of this world. Once upon a time kings and prophets, saviors, world reformers, madmen who heard voices, zealots, ascetics, and dreamers walked around Jerusalem. And one day in the future, in a hundred years or more, new men, totally different from us, would be living here. Earnest, self-contained people. No doubt they would find all our troubles weird, unintelligible, perplexing. Meanwhile, and for the time being, between the past and the future, we have been sent to inhabit Jerusalem. The city has been entrusted to our stewardship. And we fill it with oppression, foolishness, and injustice. We inflict humiliation, frustration, torture on each other, not out of arrogance but merely from laziness and fear. We pursue good and cause evil. We seek to comfort and instead we wound. We aim to increase knowledge, and instead we increase pain.

"Don't you judge me," Fima grumbled aloud to Yoezer. "Just be quiet. Anyway, what can a wishy-washy individual like you understand? Who's talking to you anyway?"

Large sharp stars shone before his tired eyes. Fima did not know their names, and he did not care which was Mars or Jupiter or Saturn. But he longed to understand where the vague feeling came from, that this was not the first time. That he had been here before, long ago. That he had already seen these glimmering stars on a cold deserted winter's night. Not from the window of this flat, but maybe from the doorway of one of the low stone cottages among the dark boulders opposite. And he had asked himself then what the stars in the sky wanted from us and what the shadow of the hills in the darkness was saying. And there was a simple answer. Which had been forgotten. Wiped away. Although for a moment he had the feeling that that answer was struggling on the threshold of his memory, so close he could reach out and touch it. He hit his forehead against the glass, and shivered with cold. Bialik, for one, claimed that the stars cheated him. They had not kept their promise. Their appointment, as it were. But surely it is the other way around: they have not cheated us, we have cheated them. We are the ones who have not kept our promise. They called us, and we forgot to go. They spoke, and we refused to hear. Cranes wheeled — and were gone.

Say a word. Give me just a little pointer, a hint, a clue, a wink, and I'll get up and go at once. I won't even stop to change my shirt. I'll go right away. Or prostrate myself at your feet. Falling in a trance with wide-open eyes.

Outside, the wind blew stronger. Sheets of water broke against his forehead through the windowpane. The hole in the clouds over the Bethlehem hills, through which the stars had been glimmering, was also dark now. He suddenly fancied he heard a shrill crying far away, as though a baby had been abandoned in a wet blanket on the slope of the wadi. As though he must run immediately and help his mother find her lost child. But he said to himself that it was probably nothing but a creaking shutter. Or one of the neighbors' children. Or a cat freezing in the yard. However hard he stared, all he could see was darkness. No sign appeared, either in the hills or in the faint gleams of light in the cottages scattered on the opposite slope, or in the dark sky. Isn't it unjust, wicked, to call me to go without giving me so much as a tiny clue where? Where the meeting place is. Whether there is or isn't to be a meeting. Whether I am the one who is being called or if it is actually one of my neighbors. Whether there is or isn't something inside this darkness.

And indeed, at that moment Fima sensed the full weight of the darkness lying over Jerusalem. Darkness on steeples and domes, darkness on walls and towers, darkness on stone-walled yards and the groves of ancient pines, on convents and olive trees, on mosques and caves and sepulchers, on tombs of kings and of true and false prophets, darkness on winding alleys, darkness on government buildings and on ruins and gates and on stony fields and thistle-strewn waste plots, darkness on schemes and desires and lunatic visions, darkness on the hills and on the desert.

To the southwest, above the heights surrounding the village of Ein Karem, clouds began to move, as though an unseen hand were drawing a curtain. Just as his mother used to go around the flat drawing all the curtains on winter evenings. One night, when he was three or four, she forgot to draw the curtains in his bedroom. He woke and saw a dim shape outside staring motionlessly at him. A long, thin shape surrounded by a circle of pale light. Then it went out. It materialized again, like moon-touched mist, at the other window. Then it went out again. He remembered how he woke in a panic and sat up in bed crying. His mother came in and leaned over him in a nightdress that had an exquisite scent. She looked long and white and moon-touched too. She held him in her arms and promised him that there was nothing there, that the shape was just a dream. Then she drew both the curtains carefully, rearranged his bedclothes, and kissed him on the forehead. Even though he eventually stopped crying and burrowed under his blanket, even though she stayed on his bed until he fell asleep again, Fima knew, even now, with utter and absolute certainty, that it was not a dream, and that his mother knew it too and had lied to him. Even now, half a century later, he was still convinced that there had been a stranger out there. Not in a dream but outside, on the other side of the windowpanes. And that his mother had seen him too. And he knew that that lie was the worst lie he had ever been told. It was that lie that snatched away his infant brother and doomed his mother to disappear in her prime, and himself to be here and yet not here all these years, seeking in vain what he had not really lost and without the faintest idea what it was or what it looked like, or where to look, or how.

Even if someday he found it, how would he know?

Maybe he had found it already, and dropped it and moved on, still searching like a blind man?

Cranes wheel and whirl and are gone.

The wind subsided. A frozen quiet reigned. At a quarter to eleven Fima changed his mind, put his cap and coat on, went into the empty street, where the cold was sharp and biting. He went to the public call box in the shopping center at the other end of the houses. But when he lifted the receiver, the public telephone too gave only a deathly silence. Maybe there was a problem in the whole district. Had the public telephone been vandalized? Or was the whole of Jerusalem cut off from itself and from the outside world again? He gave up and gently replaced the receiver. Shrugging his shoulders he said, "Well done, pal," as he remembered that in any case he did not have a token.

Tomorrow he would get up early and explain everything to his two lovers.

Or he would get out of here and go away.

The whispering of the drenched pines, the raw cold, the emptiness of the streets, all this suited Fima well. He wandered toward the slope and the fields. His mother had a strange habit of blowing on her food, even if it had already cooled, or if it was cold, such as a salad or fruit compote. When she blew, her lips pursed into a kiss. His heart ached because at that moment, forty-five years after her death, he wanted to kiss her back. He wanted to turn the world upside down to find the blue baby bonnet with the loose pompom and give it back to her.

When he reached the end of the street, which was also the end of the housing development and the end of the city, Fima became aware of something transparent filling the whole universe. As if thousands of soft silken footsteps were whispering on every side. As if his face were being touched by fingers that were no fingers. When his wonderment passed, he managed to identify tiny snowflakes. Very fine snow was beginning to fall on Jerusalem. Though it melted as soon as it touched anything. It did not have the power to whiten the gray city.

Fima returned home and began searching in the wastepaper basket under his desk for the telephone bill he had screwed up and thrown away yesterday or the day before. He did not find the bill, but he did pick out a crumpled page of Ha'arets. He smoothed it out and took it to bed with him, and read about present-day false messiahs until his eyes closed and he fell asleep with the newspaper over his face. At two o'clock the light snow stopped. Jerusalem stood frozen and empty in the dark, as though the catastrophe had happened and all the people had been exiled again.