Fima

3. A CAN OF WORMS

ON THE MIDDAY NEWS HE HEARD THAT AN ARAB YOUTH HAD BEEN hit and killed that morning by a plastic bullet fired presumably from a soldier's rifle in the Jebeliyeh refugee camp in the course of a stone-throwing incident, and that the corpse had been snatched from the hospital in Gaza by masked youths. The circumstances were being investigated. Fima considered the wording of the announcement. He particularly disliked the expression "killed by a plastic bullet." And the word "presumably" made him seethe. He was angry, too, in a more general way, about the passive verbs that were beginning to take over official statements and seemed to be infecting the language as a whole.

Although in fact it might be a healthy and wholly laudable sense of shame that prevented us from announcing simply: a Jewish soldier has shot and killed an Arab teenager. On the other hand, this polluted language was constantly teaching us that die fault lay with the rifle, with the circumstances that were being investigated, with the plastic bullet, as if all evil was the fault of Heaven and everything was predestined.

And in fact, he said to himself, who knows?

After all, there is a sort of secret charm in the words "the fault of Heaven."

But then he was angry with himself. There was no charm and it was not secret. Leave Heaven out of it.

Fima aimed a fork at his forehead, at his temple, at the back of his head, and tried to guess or sense what it must feel like the instant the bullet pierces the skull and explodes: no pain, no noise, perhaps, so he imagined, perhaps just a searing flash of incredulity, like a child prepared for a slap in the face from his father and receiving instead a white-hot poker in his eye. Is there a fraction, an atom of time, in which illumination arrives? The light of the seven heavens? When what has been dim and vague all your life is momentarily opened up before darkness falls? As though all those years you have been looking for a complicated solution to a complicated problem, and in the final moment a simple solution flashes out?

Here Fima croaked angrily to himself, Just stop fucking up your mind. The words "dim and vague" filled him with disgust. He got up and went out, locking the door of his flat behind him and taking particular note of which pocket he put the key in. In the entrance hall of the block of flats he spotted the white of a letter through the slit of his mailbox. But the only key in his pocket was his front-door key. The key to the mailbox was presumably still lying on his desk. Unless it was in the pocket of another pair of trousers. Or on the corner of the kitchen counter. After a moment's hesitation he shrugged; the letter was probably nothing but the water bill or the phone bill, or else just a handbill.

While he lunched on a salami omelette, a salad, and a fruit compote in the café across the road, he was startled to see, through the window, that the light was on in his flat. He thought about this awhile, weighed the faint possibility that he was in both places at once, but preferred to assume that the problem had been repaired and the current had been restored. Glancing at his watch, he decided that if he went up to the flat, switched off the light, found the key to the mailbox, and got the letter, he would be late for work, so he paid for his meal, saying, "Thank you, Mrs. Schoenberg." As usual, she corrected him:

"It's Scheinmann, Dr. Nisan."

"Of course," Fima replied. "I'm sorry. How much do I owe you? I've already paid? Well, all I can say is it can't have been an accident. I must have wanted to pay twice, because your schnitzel — it was schnitzel, wasn't it — was especially tasty. Fm sorry. Thank you. Good-bye. I must run now. Just look at this rain. Aren't you looking a little tired? Or unhappy? It's probably just the weather. It'll brighten up soon. See you tomorrow."

Twenty minutes later, when the bus stopped at the National Auditorium, it occurred to Fima how ridiculous it had been to come out on a day like this without an umbrella. Or to promise the proprietress of the café that the weather would brighten up. On what grounds? Suddenly a fine, burnished sliver of reddish light pierced the clouds and dazzled him by setting fire to a window high up in the Hilton tower. Though dazzled, he could see a towel waving on the railing of a balcony on the tenth or twentieth floor, and he sensed in his nostrils the precise scent of the woman who had just dried herself on it. Look, he said to himself, nothing is ever really wasted, nothing gets written off, and there is scarcely a moment without some minor miracle. Maybe everything is for the best after all.

The two-room flat on the edge of Kiryat Yovel had been bought for Fima when he remarried in 1961, less than a year after receiving his B.A. in history with distinction at the university in Jerusalem. In those days his father pinned high hopes on him. Others too believed in Fima's future. He was awarded a scholarship, and almost went on to get a master's degree; there were even thoughts of a doctorate and an academic career. But in the summer of 1960 Fima's life underwent a series of mishaps or complications. To this day his friends chuckled with amused affection whenever, in his absence, the conversation turned to "Fima's billy-goat year." In the middle of July, right after the end of his finals, in the garden of the Ratisbonne Convent he fell in love with the French guide of a party of Catholic tourists. He was sitting on a bench waiting for a girlfriend, a student at the nursing college named Shula, who married his friend Tsvi Kropotkin a couple of years later. A sprig of oleander was flowering between his fingers and the birds were arguing overhead. Nicole addressed him from the next bench: Was there any water here? Did he speak French? Fima replied in the affirmative to both questions, even though he did not have the faintest idea where there was any water, and he knew only a smattering of French. From that moment on he dogged her footsteps wherever she went in Jerusalem; he would not leave her alone despite her polite requests; he did not even give her up when her group leader warned him that he would be obliged to lodge a complaint against him. When she went to Mass at the Dormition Abbey, he waited for her outside like a dog for an hour and a half. Every time she came out of the Kings' Hotel, opposite the Terra Sanaa Building, she encountered Fima standing in front of the revolving door, his eyes blazing. When she went to the museum, he was lurking in every room. When she flew back to France, he followed her to Paris and even to her home in Lyons. Late one moonlit night, so the story goes in Jerusalem, her father came out of the house and fired a double-barreled shotgun at him, grazing his leg. During the three days he spent in a Franciscan hospital he made inquiries about what one had to do to become a Christian. Nicole's father, visiting him in the hospital to ask his forgiveness, offered to help him convert. Meanwhile Nicole had had enough of her father too and ran away from both of them, first to her sister in Madrid and then to her sister-in-law in Málaga. Dirty, desperate, and unkempt, he pursued her on dusty buses and trains until his money ran out in Gibraltar and, with the help of the Red Cross, he was returned almost forcibly to Israel on board a Panamanian cargo vessel. On arrival at Haifa he was arrested, and he spent six weeks in a military prison because he had tampered with the date on the form authorizing a soldier on the reserve list to leave the country. They say that at the beginning of this passion Fima weighed one hundred fifty-nine pounds and that in September, in the prison hospital, he weighed less than one hundred thirty-two. He was released from prison after his father interceded for him with a senior official, whose wife, a well-known woman-about-town with a famous collection of etchings, subsequently fell outrageously in love with him; she was ten years younger than her husband and at least eight years older than Fima. In the autumn she became pregnant by him and moved into his lodgings in Musrara. They were the talk of the whole city. In December Fima boarded another cargo boat, a Yugoslav one this time, and turned up in Malta, where he spent three months working on a tropical-fish farm and writing his cycle of poems, The Death of Augustine and His Resurrection in the Arms of Dulcinea. In January the woman who owned the cheap hotel where he was staying in Valletta fell for him and moved his luggage into her own apartment. Afraid she might get pregnant too, he decided to marry her — a civil wedding. This marriage lasted less than two months, because meanwhile his father, with the help of friends in Rome, had managed to discover his whereabouts; he informed Fima that his Jerusalem woman had lost the baby, succumbed to depression, and returned to her husband and her etchings. Fima decided that there was no forgiveness for him and made up his mind to leave his landlady at once and give women a wide berth forever. He decided that love leads inexorably to disaster, whereas relations without love cause only humiliation and hurt. He left Malta without a penny, on the deck of a Turkish fishing boat. His plan was to hole up for at least a year in a certain monastery on the island of Samos. On the way he was smitten with panic at the thought that his ex-wife might also be pregnant and wondered if he ought to go back to her, but at the same time he felt he had acted wisely in leaving her his money but no address that she could trace him by. He disembarked at Thessaloniki and spent a night in a youth hostel, where with sweetness and pain he dreamed of his first love, Nicole, whom he had lost track of in Gibraltar. In the dream her name had changed to Thérèse, and Fima saw his father with a loaded shotgun holding her and the baby prisoner in the cellar of the YMCA in Jerusalem, except that by the end of the dream he himself had become the captive child. The next morning he set off to look for a synagogue, even though he had never been a practicing Jew and was certain that God was not in the least religious and had no use for religion. But, having no other address, Fima decided to try a synagogue. Outside the synagogue he came across three Israeli girls who were backpacking around Greece and turning north, into the mountains, because by now spring had arrived. Fima joined them, and on the way fell head over heels for one of them, Ilia Abravanel, from Haifa, who to him was the image of Mary Magdalene in a painting he had seen somewhere, he could not remember where or who the artist was. Since Ilia did not yield to his advances, he slept a few times with her friend Liat Sirkin, who invited him to share her sleeping bag as they spent the night in some highland valley or sacred grove. Liat Sirkin taught Fima one or two unusual, exquisite pleasures, but he felt, beyond the carnal thrills, faint hints of a more spiritual elation: almost day by day he fell under the spell of a secret mountain joy mingled with a sense of exaltation which endowed him with heightened powers of vision such as he had never experienced before or since. During these days in the mountains of northern Greece he was able, looking at the sunrise over a clump of olive trees, to sec the creation of the world. And to know with absolute certainty, as he passed a flock of sheep in the midday heat, that this was not the first time he had lived. And actually to hear, sitting on the vine-shaded terrace of a village tavern, over wine and cheese and salad, the roar of a snowstorm in the polar wastes. He played tunes to the girls on a pipe he had fashioned from a reed, and was not ashamed to leap and whirl in front of them like a crazy child until he brought them to peals of childlike laughter and simple happiness. All that time he could see no contradiction between pining for Ilia and sleeping with Liat, but he barely noticed the third girl, who mostly chose to stay silent. Though she was the one who dressed his foot when he cut it on a piece of broken glass. These three girls, with the previous women in his life, including his mother, who had died when he was ten, almost merged into a single woman in his mind. Not because he thought that a woman is only a woman, but because with his inner illumination he sometimes felt that the differences between people, any people — men, women, or children — were of no consequence except perhaps for the outermost layer, the ephemeral surface. Just as water took the form of snow or mist or steam, or a lump of ice, or clouds or hailstones. Or just as the bells of the monasteries and village churches differed only in their pitch and rhythm, all having the same meaning. He shared these thoughts with the girls, two of whom believed, whereas the third called him a simpleton and contented herself with patching his shirt; in this too Fima saw only different expressions of a single statement. This third girl, Yael Levin from Yavne'el, did not refrain from joining in their nude swimming on warm moonlit nights if they found a spring or stream. Once, they watched stealthily, from a distance, a fifteen-year-old shepherd boy satisfying his urges on a nanny goat. And once, they saw a pair of pious old women in widow's weeds with large wooden crosses on their chests sitting silently on a rock in the middle of a field in the noonday heat, motionless, their fingers interlaced. One night they heard sounds of music coming from an empty ruin. And one day a wizened old man walked past them, going the other way, playing on a broken accordion that made no sound. The next morning there was a brief cloudburst, and the air became so clear that they could see the shadows of trees shifting on the red-tiled roofs of little villages in distant valleys, and almost make out the individual needles of the cypress and pine trees on the flanks of the mountains. One of the peaks still wore a cap of snow, which looked silver rather than white against the deep blue of the sky. Flocks of birds were performing a sort of scarf dance overhead. Fima, for no particular reason, suddenly said something that made all the girls laugh:

"This," he said, "is where the dog is buried."

Ilia said: "I feel dreamier than in a dream and more awake than waking. I can't explain it."

Liat said: "It's the light. That's all."

And Yael: "Who's thirsty? Let's go down to the water."

Less than a month after the conclusion of this trip Fima went to Yavne'el to look for the third girl. He discovered that Yael Levin was a graduate of the aeronautical engineering department of Haifa Technion and worked in a top-secret air force installation in the hills west of Jerusalem. After a few meetings he found that her presence made him feel restful, while his presence amused her in her placid way. When he asked her, hesitantly, whether she thought they were suited to each other, she replied, "I quite like the way you talk." He thought this indicated a hint of affection. Which he treasured. Next he sought out Liat Sirkin and sat with her for half an hour in a little seaside café, simply to make certain he had not made her pregnant. But afterward he allowed himself to sleep with her again in a cheap hotel in Bat Yam, so he wasn't certain anymore. In May he invited all three girls to Jerusalem to meet his father. The old man charmed Ilia with his old-style courtesy, entertained Liat with anecdotes and fables with morals, but he preferred Yael, who showed, he thought, "signs of depth." Fima agreed with him, although he was not entirely sure he understood what the signs were. He continued to go out with her, until one day she said to him: "Look at your shirt, half inside your trousers and half outside. Wait. I'll fix it for you."

And in August 1961 Yael and Efraim Nisan were married in the small flat his father had bought him on the edge of Kiryat Yovel on the edge of Jerusalem, after Fima had given in and signed in the presence of a notary an agreement drawn up by his father, containing a solemn undertaking to refrain henceforth from any act that his father might define as an "adventure." He also undertook to begin, at the end of the wasted year, studying for a master's degree. The father, for his part, agreed to finance his son's studies as well as the final stage of Yael's training, and even granted them a modest monthly allowance for the first five years of their marriage. From then on Fima's name was no longer mentioned in Jerusalem gossip. The adventures had come to an end. The billy-goat year had finished, and the tortoise years began. But he did not go back to the university, except perhaps with one or two ideas that he gave to his friend Tsvi Kropotkin, who had meanwhile proceeded without a pause from M.A. to doctorate and was already laying the foundation for a great tower of historical articles and books.

In 1962, at the urging of his friends and thanks to special efforts on the part of Tsvika, Fima published the cycle of poems he had written during his short-lived marriage in Malta: The Death of Augustine and His Resurrection in the Arms of Dulcinea. For a year or two there were some critics and readers who saw in Efraim Nisan a promise waiting to be fulfilled. But after a time even the promise faded, because Fima's muse fell silent. He wrote no more poems.

Every morning Yael was picked up by a military vehicle and taken to work at a base whose location Fima did not know, where she was engaged in some technological development that he neither understood nor wanted to. He would spend the entire morning prowling around the flat, listening to every news broadcast, raiding the fridge and eating standing up, arguing aloud with himself and with the newscasters, furiously making the bed that Yael had not managed to make before she went out, in fact couldn't, because he was still asleep in it. Then he would finish reading the morning paper, go out to buy one or two things at the grocer's, come back with two afternoon papers, immerse himself in them until the evening and leave their pages scattered all over the flat. Between reading the papers and listening to the news, he made himself sit down at his desk. For a while he was occupied by a Christian book, the Pugio Fidei of Father Raymond Martini, published in Paris in 1651 to refute once and for all the faith of the "Moors and the Jews." Fima was contemplating a fresh study of the Christian origins of anti-Semitism. But his work was interrupted by an interest in the idea of the Hidden God. He plunged himself into the biography of the hermit Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus, who learned Hebrew from a Jewish teacher, settled in Bethlehem in 386, translated both Testaments into Latin, and may have deliberately deepened the rift between Jews and Christians. But this study did not quench Fima's thirst. Lassitude got the better of him, and he sank into idleness. He would leaf through the encyclopedia, forget what he was looking for, and waste a couple of hours reading through the entries in alphabetical order. Almost every evening he would pull on his battered cap and go out to visit his friends, chatting till the early hours about the Lavon affair, the Eichmann trial, the Cuban missile crisis, the German scientists in Egypt, the significance of the Pope's visit to the Holy Land. When Yael got home from work in the evening and asked if he had eaten, Fima would reply irritably, Why? Where does it say I've got to eat? And then, while she was in the shower, he would explain to her through the closed door who was really behind the assassination of President Kennedy. Later, when she asked if he was going out to debate again with Uri or Tsvika, he would answer, No, I'm going to an orgy. And he would ask himself how he had allowed his father to attach him to this woman. But there were other times when he suddenly fell in love all over again with her strong fingers as they rubbed her small ankles at the end of the day, or with her habit of stroking her eyelashes, lost in thought, and he would court her like a shy, passionate youth until she allowed him to give pleasure to her body, and then he would thrill her eagerly and precisely, with a sort of profound attentiveness. Sometimes he would say to her, as some petty quarrel brewed, Just wait, Yael, it'll pass. It won't be long before our proper life starts. Sometimes they would go for a walk together in the deserted lanes of north Jerusalem on a Friday evening, and he would talk to her with barely suppressed excitement about the union of body and light according to the ancient mystics. This made her feel so joyful and tender that she snuggled against him and forgave him for putting on weight, for forgetting to change his shirt again for the weekend, for his habit of correcting her Hebrew. Then they would go home and make love as if they were beyond despair.

In 1965 Yael went to work, on special contract, at the Boeing research center in Seattle. Fima declined to join her, arguing that a period of separation might do them both good. He stayed behind in the two-room flat in Kiryat Yovel. He had a modest post as receptionist in a private gynecological clinic in Kiryat Shmuel. He kept his distance from academic life, unless Tsvi Kropotkin dragged him to a one-day conference on the importance of personality in history, or on the notion of the historian as eyewitness. On weekends he would turn up at Nina and Uri Gefen's or at other friends', and was easily caught up in their political discussions; he would occasionally astound all those present with some mordant summation or paradoxical prediction, but he never knew how to stop when he was winning; he would persist like a compulsive gambler, arguing volubly on subjects he knew nothing about, even over trivial details, until he wore out even his most loyal friends.

Sometimes he would arrive with a few books and keep an eye on his friends' children while they went out for the evening. Or cheerfully offer to help them with an article, by proofreading, copyediting, or preparing an abstract. Sometimes he would undertake shuttle diplomacy on a mission of mediation for a feuding couple. Every now and again he would publish a short trenchant article in Ha'arets on some aspect of the current political scene. Once in a while he would take a few days' holiday alone in a private guesthouse in one of the older settlements in the northern Sharon. Every summer he attempted with renewed enthusiasm to learn to drive, and every autumn he failed the driving test. Now and again a woman he had met at the clinic or through friends found her way to his untidy bachelor flat and into his bed, whose sheets needed changing. She would soon discover that Fima was more interested in her pleasure than his own. Some women found this wonderful and moving; others found it unsettling and hastened to disengage themselves. He could spend an hour or two inflicting endless varied exquisite sensations full of playful inventiveness and physical humor, before casually snatching his own satisfaction, and then, almost before his partner noticed that he had exacted his modest commission, he would be devoting himself to her again. Any woman who tried to obtain a measure of continuity or permanence in her relationship with Fima, who succeeded in extracting a key from him, caused him to take refuge after a week or two in a run-down guesthouse in Pardés Hanna or Magdiel and not come home until she had given him up. But such episodes had become rare in the past five or six years.

When Yael wrote to him from Seatde early in 1966 to say there was another man in her life, Fima laughed at the trite expression. The love affairs of his billy-goat year, his marriage to Yael, Yael herself, now seemed as trite, as overacted, as childish as the underground revolutionary cell he had tried to set up when he was in high school. He decided to write her a line or two simply to send his best wishes to her and the other man in her life. He sat down at his desk that afternoon, and did not stop writing until midday the following day: in a feverish missive of thirty-four pages he confessed the depth of his love for her. After reading it through, he rejected it, tore it up, and flushed it down the toilet. You cannot describe love in words, and if you can, that's a sign the love no longer exists. Or is on the way out. Finally he tore a page of graph paper from a notebook and scrawled on it: "I can't stop loving you because it's not up to me, but of course you're a free agent. How blind I've been. If there's anything you need from the flat, let me know and I'll send it. Meanwhile I'm sending you a parcel with three of your nighties and your furry slippers and the photos. But if you don't mind, I'd like to keep the picture of the two of us at Bethlehem in Galilee." Yael took this letter to mean that Fima would not place any obstacles in the way of a divorce. But when she came back to Jerusalem and introduced a colorless, inexpressive man with a jaw that was too broad and thick eyebrows like a pair of bushy mustaches, saying, Efraim Nisan, Ted Tobias, let's all be friends, Fima changed his mind and adamantly refused to grant a divorce. So Ted and Yael flew back to Seattle. They lost contact, apart from a few aerograms and postcards about practical matters.

Early in 1982 Ted and Yacl turned up at Fima's flat one winter afternoon with their three-year-old son, a slightly cross-eyed albino child-philosopher with thick glasses, dressed in an American astronaut's space suit bearing a shiny metal badge inscribed with the word CHALLENGER. The little fellow soon revealed an ability to compose complicated conditional sentences and to duck awkward questions. Fima instantly fell for little Dimi Tobias. Regretting his earlier opposition, he offered Yael and Ted a divorce, his assistance, and his friendship. Yael, however, no longer attached any importance to the religious divorce and saw no point in friendship. In the intervening years she had managed to leave Ted twice and have affairs with other men before making up her mind to go back to him and to have Dimi at what was almost the last moment as far as she was concerned. Fima won the heart of the thoughtful little Challenger with a story about a wild wolf who decided to give up being wild and tried to join a colony of rabbits. When the story was over, Dimi offered his own ending, which Fima found logical, sensitive, and not unfunny.

Thanks to the intervention of Fima's father, the divorce was arranged discreetly. Ted and Yael settled in the suburb of Beit Hakerem, found jobs together in a research institute, and divided their year into three: the summer in Seattle, the fall in Pasadena, the winter and spring in Jerusalem. Sometimes they invited Fima on Friday evening, when the Kropotkins and the Gefens and the rest of the group were there. Sometimes they left Dimi with Fima in Kiryat Yovel and went off to Elat or Upper Galilee for a couple of days. Fima became their unpaid baby sitter, because he was available and because a friendship had grown up between him and Dimi. By some odd logic Dimi called him Granpa. He called Fima's father Granpa too. Fima taught himself to make houses, palaces, and castles with loopholes out of matchsticks, matchboxes, and glue. This was totally at odds with the image of Fima shared by his friends, by Yael, and by Fima himself, namely, a clumsy oaf who was born with two left hands and could never get the hang of replacing a faucet's washer or sewing on a button.

Apart from Dimi and his parents, there was the group: pleasant, respectable people, some of whom had known Fima from student days and had been indirectly involved in the ordeals of the billy-goat year, and some of whom still hoped that one day the fellow would wake up, get his act together, and one way or another take Jerusalem by the ears. True, they said, he sometimes gets on your nerves, he overdoes it, he has no sense of proportion, but on the other hand when he's brilliant he's really brilliant. One day he's really going to get somewhere. He's worth investing in. Last Friday, for example, early in the evening, before he started making a fool of himself with his imitations of politicians, the way he snatched the word "ritual" out of Tsvi's mouth and held us all spellbound like little kids when he suddenly said, "Everything is ritual," and fired his theory at us straight from the hip. We haven't stopped talking about it all week. Or that amazing comparison he threw out, of Kafka and Gogol, and of the two of them with Hasidic folk tales.

Over the years some of them grew fond of Fima's unique combination of wit and absent-mindedness, of melancholy and enthusiasm, of sensitivity and helplessness, of profundity and buffoonery. Moreover, he was always available to be roped in to do some proofreading or to discuss a draft of an article. Behind his back they said, not unkindly, True, he's a — how to put it? — he's an original, and he's goodhearted. The trouble is, he's bone idle. He has no ambition. He simply doesn't think about tomorrow. And he's not getting any younger.

Despite which, there was something in his pudgy form, his shuffling, abstracted way of walking, his fine, high brow, his weary shoulders, his thinning fair hair, and his kindly eyes that always seemed lost and looking cither inward or out beyond the mountains and the desert, something in his appearance that filled them with affection and joy and made them smile broadly even when they caught sight of him from a distance, on the other side of the street, wandering around the city center as though he did not know who had brought him there or how he was going to get out again. And they said: Look, there's Fima over there, waving his arms. He must be having an argument with himself, and presumably he's winning it.

In the course of time a certain uneasy friendliness, filled with anger and contradictions, developed between Fima and his father, the well-known cosmetics manufacturer Baruch Nomberg, who was a veteran member of the right-wing Herut party. Even now, when Fima was fifty-four and his father eighty-two, the father would slip a couple of ten-shekel notes, or a single twenty-shekel note, into his son's pocket at the end of every visit. Meanwhile Fima's little secret was that he deposited eighty shekels each month in a savings account in the name of Ted and Yael's son, who was ten now but still looked like a seven-year-old, dreamy and trustful. Strangers on buses sometimes noticed a vague resemblance between Fima and the child, in the shape of the chin or the forehead, or in the walk. The previous spring Dimi had asked to keep a pair of tortoises and some silkworms in a little storage space that Fima and Ted cleared for him on the balcony of the messy kitchen of the flat in Kiryat Yovel. And even though Fima was considered by others and even by himself as incorrigibly idle and absent-minded, all through the summer there was not a single day when he forgot to attend to what he took to calling "our can of worms." Now, in the winter, the silkworms were dead, and the tortoises had been set free in the wadi, at the point where Jerusalem abruptly ends and a rocky wilderness begins.