Fima

30. AT LEAST AS FAR AS POSSIBLE

IT WAS A QUARTER PAST FIVE WHEN URI PARKED HIS CAR ON BEN Maimon Avenue. The sun had sunk behind the pines and cypresses, but a strange grayish light full of vague flickers still hovered in the sky, a light that was neither day nor night. Upon the avenue and the stone buildings lay a fine, heart-gnawing Sabbath eve melancholy. As if Jerusalem had stopped being a city and returned to being a bad dream.

The rain had not resumed. The air was saturated, and Fima's nostrils picked up the tang of rotting leaves. He recalled how once when he was a child, at such a time as this, at the onset of the Sabbath, he was riding his bicycle up and down the dead street. Looking up at this building, he saw his mother and father standing on the balcony. They were stiffly erect, of similar height, both dressed in dark clothes, standing very close to each other but not touching. Like a pair of waxworks. And he had the impression that they were both in mourning for a visitor whose arrival they had long since despaired of and yet whom they continued to expect. For the first time in his life he sensed the depth of the shame concealed in the silence that lay between them, all through his childhood. Without any quarrels or complaints or disagreements. A polite silence. He got off his bicycle and asked shyly if it was time for him to come in.

Baruch said:

"As you wish."

His mother said nothing.

This memory awoke in Fima a pressing need to clarity something, to ask Uri, to make inquiries. He had the feeling that he had forgotten to check the thing that mattered most. But what it was that mattered most he did not know. Although he sensed that now his ignorance was thinner than usual, like a lace curtain behind which dim shadows moved. Or a threadbare garment that covers the body but no longer warms it. While he knew in his bones how much he longed to continue not knowing.

As they climbed the stairs to the third floor, Fima put his hand on Uri's shoulder. Uri seemed tired and gloomy. Fima felt a need to encourage, with this touch, his large friend, who had once been a well-known combat pilot and still went around with his head thrust aggressively forward, a sophisticated airman's watch on his wrist, and his eyes sometimes giving the impression that he saw everything from above.

And yet he was a warm-hearted, honest, devoted friend.

On the door was fixed a brass plate inscribed, in black letters on gray: NOMBERG FAMILY. Underneath it, on a square piece of card, Baruch had written in his firm handwriting: "Kindly refrain from ringing the bell between the hours of one and five p.m." Unconsciously Fima shot a glance at his watch. But there was no need to ring anyway; the door was ajar.

Tsvi Kropotkin intercepted them in the hall, like a conscientious staff officer who has been detailed to brief newcomers before admitting them to the operations room. Despite the ambulance drivers' strike, he said, and the approach of the Sabbath, the tireless Nina had managed to arrange on the phone from her office for his father to be moved to the mortuary at Hadassah Hospital. Fima felt a renewed affection for Tsvi's shy embarrassment: he looked less like a famous historian and head of a department than a youth leader whose shoulders have begun to stoop, or a village schoolmaster. Fima also liked the way Tsvi's eyes blinked behind his thick lenses, as though the light was suddenly too bright, and his habit of fingering absent-mindedly everything he came in contact with, dishes, furniture, books, people, as though he always had to wrestle with a secret doubt about the solidity of everything. If it had not been for the Jerusalem mania, and Hitler, and his obsession with Jewish responsibility, this modest scholar might have settled down in Cambridge or Oxford and lived quietly to be a hundred, dividing his time between the golf course and the Crusades, or between tennis and Tennyson.

Fima said:

"You were right to move him. What would he have done here all weekend?"

In the salon he was surrounded by his friends, who reached out from every side and touched him gently on his shoulder, his cheek, his hair, as though through his father's death he had inherited the role of invalid. As though it was their duty to check carefully to sec if he was too hot or too cold or shivering, or planning secretly to leave them without warning. Shula thrust a cup of lemon tea with honey into his hand. And Teddy sat him down gently at one end of the brocade-covered sofa on which embroidered cushions were scattered. They all seemed to be waiting expectantly for him to say something. Fima responded:

"You're all wonderful. I'm sorry to spoil your Friday night like this."

His father's armchair was standing exactly facing him: deep, wide, covered with red leather and with a red leather headrest, looking as though it were made of raw flesh. The footstool seemed to have been pushed slightly to one side. Like a royal scepter, the cane with its silver band rested against the right-hand side of the chair.

Shula said:

"At any rate, one thing's certain: he didn't suffer at all. It was over in a moment. It's what they used to call death by a kiss: only the righteous are granted it, so they used to say."

Fima smiled:

"Righteous or not, kisses were always an important part of his repertoire." As he said this, he observed something that he had never noticed before: Shula, whom he dated more than thirty years ago, before the billy-goat year, and who at that time had a fragile girlish beauty, had aged and gone quite gray. Her thighs had grown so fat that she looked like an ultrapious woman worn out by childbearing but who accepts her decrepitude with total resignation.

A dense, close smell of thick-pile carpets and antique furniture that have been breathing their own air for many years hung in the room, and Fima had to remind himself that it had always been here and was not the smell of Frau Professor Kropotkin's advancing age. At the same time his nostrils caught a whiff of smoke. Looking around, he noticed a cigarette on the edge of an ashtray; it had been stubbed out almost as soon as it was lit. He asked who had been smoking here. It turned out that one of the two old ladies, his father's friends, who had been here on a fundraising mission at the time, had put out her cigarette soon after lighting it. Had she done this when she saw that Baruch was wheezing? Or when it was all over? Or at the very moment he groaned and expired? Fima asked for the ashtray to be removed. And he was delighted to see how Teddy jumped to carry out his order. Tsvi asked, feeling the central heating pipes with his long fingers, if he wanted to be taken there. Fima did not understand the question. Tsvi, hardly able to control his embarrassment, explained:

"There. To Hadassah. To see him. Perhaps…"

Fima shrugged.

"What is there to see? I suppose he's as dapper as usual. Why bother him?" And he instructed Shula to make some strong black coffee for Uri, because he had been on the go ever since he got off the plane in the morning. "In fact, you ought to give him something to cat too: he must be starving. I figure he must have left his hotel in Rome at about three this morning, so he really has had a long, hard day of it. Come to think of it, you look pretty tired yourself, Shula; in fact, you look worn out. And where are Yael and Dimi? I want Yacl here. And Dimi too."

"They're at home," said Ted apologetically. "The boy took it quite hard. You might say he had a special attachment to your father." He went on to say that Dimi had locked himself in the utility room, and they had had to call a friend of theirs, the child psychologist from South Africa, to ask what to do. He told them just to leave the child alone. And, sure enough, after a while Dimi had come out, and then he'd glued himself to the computer. The South African friend had advised them…

Fima said:

"Balls."

And then, quietly and firmly:

"I want them both here."

As he spoke, he was surprised at this new assertiveness he had acquired since his father's death. As if it had given him an unexpected promotion, entitling him henceforward to issue orders at will and to command instant obedience.

Ted said:

"Sure. We could go and fetch them. But from what the psychologist said, I think it might be better if…"

Fima nipped this appeal in the bud:

"If you wouldn't mind."

Ted hesitated, held a whispered consultation with Tsvi, glanced at his watch, and said: "Okay, Fima, whatever you like. That's fine. I'll pop around and collect Dimi. If Uri wouldn't mind lending me his keys; Yael's got our car."

"Yael too, please."

"Right. Shall I call her? See if she can make it?"

"Of course she can make it. Tell her I insist."

Ted went out, and at that moment Nina arrived. Small and thin, practical, razor-sharp in her movements, her narrow vixen's face projecting common sense and a survivor's shrewdness, brimming with energy, as though she'd spent the day rescuing casualties under fire rather than making arrangements for a funeral. She wore a light gray pantsuit, her glasses were shining, and she was clutching a stiff black attaché case that she did not put down even when she gave Fima a quick angular hug and a kiss on the forehead. But she found no words.

Shula said:

"I'm going to the kitchen to get you all something to drink. Who wants what? Would anyone like an omelette? Or a slice of bread with something?"

Tsvi remarked hesitantly:

"And he was such a robust man too. So full of energy. With that twinkle in his eyes. And such a zest for life, for good food, business, women, politics, the lot. Not long ago he turned up at my office on Mount Scopus and gave me a furious lecture about how Yeshayahu Leibowitz is making demagogic capital out of Maimonides. Neither more nor less. When I tried to disagree, to defend Leibowitz, he launched into some story about a rabbi from Drohovitz who saw Maimonides in a dream. I would say, a deep lust for life. I always thought he'd live to a ripe old age."

Fima, as though delivering the final verdict on a dispute that was not of his making, declared:

"And so he did. He wasn't exactly cut off in his prime, after all."

Nina said:

"It was a sheer miracle that we managed to complete the arrangements. Everything's fixed for Sunday. Believe me, it was a mad race against the clock, to get it all done before the Sabbath. This Jerusalem of ours is getting worse than Teheran. You're not angry we didn't wait for you, Fima? You'd simply vanished; that's why I took the liberty of dealing with the formalities. To spare you the headache. I put announcements in Sunday's Ha'arets and Ma'ariv. Maybe I should have put it in some other papers, but there simply wasn't time. We've arranged the funeral for the day after tomorrow, Sunday, at three o'clock in the afternoon. It turns out that he'd fixed himself up with a plot, not in Sanhedriya, next to your mother, but on the Mount of Olives. Incidentally, he purchased an adjacent plot for you. Right next to him. And he left detailed and precise instructions in his will about the funeral arrangements. He even chose the cantor, a landsman of his. It was a sheer miracle I managed to locate him and catch him on the phone a minute and a half before the Sabbath came in. He even left his own wording for the tombstone. Something with a rhyme. But that can wait till the end of the first month, if not till the anniversary. If a quarter of the people who benefited from his philanthropy come to the funeral, we'll have to allow for at least half a million. Including the mayor and all sorts of rabbis and politicians, not to mention all the brokenhearted widows and divorcées."

Fima waited until she had finished. Only then did he ask quietly:

"You opened the will by yourself?"

"At the office. In the presence of witnesses. We simply thought…"

"Who gave you permission to do that?"

"Quite frankly…"

"Where is it, the will?"

"Here, in my attaché case."

"Give it to me."

"Right now?"

Fima stood up and took the black attaché case out of her hand. He opened it and drew out a brown envelope. Silently he went out and stood alone on the balcony, at the very spot where his parents had stood that Friday evening a thousand years before, looking like a pair of shipwrecked survivors on a desert island. The last light had long since faded. Stillness wafted up from the avenue. The streetlights flickered with an oscillating yellow radiance mixed with drifting patches of mist. The stone buildings stood silent, all shuttered. No sound came from them. As if the present moment had been transformed into a distant memory. A passing gust of wind brought the sound of barking from the Valley of the Cross. The Third State is a grace that can only be achieved by renouncing all desires, by standing under the night sky sans age, sans sex, sans time, sans race, sans everything.

But who is capable of standing thus?

Once, in his childhood, there lived here in Rehavia tiny, exquisitely mannered scholars, like porcelain figurines, puzzled and gentle. It was their custom to greet one another in the street by raising their hats. As though to erase Hitler. As though to conjure up a Germany that had never existed. And since they would rather be thought absent-minded or ridiculous than impolite, they raised their hats even when they were not certain if the person coming toward them was really a friend or acquaintance or merely looked like one.

One day, when Fima was nine, a short time before his mother's death, he was walking down Alfasi Street with his father. Baruch stopped and began a lengthy conversation, in German or perhaps in Czech, with a portly, dapper old man in an old-fashioned suit and a dark bow tie. Eventually the child's patience ran out and he stamped his foot and started tugging at his father's arm. His father hit him and bellowed "Ty durak, ty smarkatch." Later he explained to Fima that the other man was a professor, a world-famous scholar. He explained what "world fame" meant and how it was acquired. Fima never forgot that explanation. The expression still afforded him a mixture of awe and contempt. And once, seven or eight years later, at half past six in the morning, he was walking with his father again, in Rashbam Street, when they saw coming toward them, with short, vigorous strides, the prime minister, Ben Gurion, who lived at that time on the comer of Ben Maimon and Ussishkin and liked to start his day with a brisk early-morning walk. Baruch Nomberg raised his hat and said:

"Would you be good enough to spare me a moment of your time, sir?"

Ben Gurion stopped and exclaimed:

"Lupatin! What arc you doing in Jerusalem? Who is guarding Galilee?"

Baruch replied calmly:

"I am not Lupatin, and you, sir, are not the Messiah. Despite what your purblind disciples no doubt whisper in your ear. I advise you not to believe them."

The prime minister said:

"What, you're not Grisha Lupatin? Arc you sure you're not mistaken? You look very like him. So, a case of mistaken identity. In that case, who are you?"

Baruch said:

"I happen to belong to the opposite camp."

"To Lupatin?"

"No, sir, to you. And if I may allow myself the liberty of saying so…"

But Ben Gurion had already begun to stride ahead, and all he said as he went was:

"So, oppose, oppose. But don't be so busy opposing that you fail to raise this charming boy to be a faithful lover of Israel and a defender of his people and his land. All the rest is irrelevant." And so saying, he marched on, followed by the good-looking man whose function was apparently to protect him from being pestered.

Baruch said:

"Genghis Khan!"

And he added:

"Sec for yourself, Efraim, whom Providence has selected to save Israel: the bramble from the parable of Jotham."

Fima, who had been sixteen at the time, smiled in the dark as he recalled how astonished he had been to discover that Ben Gurion was shorter than he was and potbellied, with a huge red face and a dwarf's legs, and a voice as loud and raucous as a fishwife's. What had his father been trying to say to the prime minister? What would he himself say to him now, with hindsight? And who was that Lupatin or Lupatkin who neglected the defense of Galilee?

Was it not possible that the child Yael had not wanted might have grown up to be world famous?

And what about Dimi?

Suddenly Fima had a brainstorm: he realized that it was actually Yael, with her research on jet-propelled vehicles, who was likelier than any of us to achieve what Baruch had never given up dreaming of for him. And he asked himself if he was not himself the bramble from the parable of Jotham. Tsvika, Uri, Teddy, Nina, Yael — they are all fruiting trees, and only you, Mr. Eugene Onegin of Kiryat Yovel, go through life generating foolishness and falsehood. Driveling on and pestering everybody. Arguing with cockroaches and lizards.

Why should he not decide to devote the remainder of his days, starting today, or tomorrow, to smoothing their paths for them? He would shoulder the burden of bringing up the child. He would learn how to cook and do the washing. Every morning he would sharpen all the colored pencils on the drawing board. Every so often he would change the ribbon on the computer. If computers have ribbons. And so, humbly, as the unknown soldier, he would make his own modest contribution to the development of jet propulsion and the acquisition of world fame.

In his childhood, on warm summer evenings in Rehavia, solitary sounds of a piano could be heard through closed shutters. Even the stifling air seemed to mock these sounds. Now they were gone and forgotten. Ben Gurion and Lupatin were dead. The refugee scholars with their Homburgs and bow ties were dead. And between them and Yoezer, we lie and fornicate and murder. What is left? Pine trees and silence. And some battered German tomes with the gold lettering on their spines already fading.

Suddenly Fima had to fight back tears of longing. Not longing for the dead, or for what once existed here and no longer did, but for what might have been and was not, and never would be. There came into his head the words "his place does not know him." But however hard he tried, he could not remember whom he had heard pronounce this terrifying phrase within the past two or three days.

It struck him now as precise and penetrating.

The minarets on the hilltops surrounding Jerusalem, the ruins and the stone walls enclosing secretive convents, topped with sharp broken glass, the heavy iron gates, the wrought-iron grilles, the cellars, the gloomy basements, a brooding, resentful Jerusalem, sunk up to its neck in nightmares of prophets stoned and saviors crucified and redeemers hacked to pieces, surrounded by a string of barren rock-strewn hills, the emptiness of slopes pockmarked with caves and gullies, apostate olive trees that had almost ceased to be trees and joined the realm of the inanimate, solitary stone cottages in the folds of incised valleys, and beyond them the great deserts extending southward to Bab el-Mandeb and eastward to Mesopotamia and northward to Hama and Palmyra, the lands of asp and viper, expanses of chalk and salt, haunt of nomads with herds of black goats and with vengeful knives in the folds of their robes, dark desert tents, and in the midst of all this, Rehavia with its melancholy piano music in tiny rooms at dusk, its frail old scholars, its shelves of German tomes, its good manners, its raised Homburgs, silence between the hours of one and five, crystal chandeliers, exiled lacquered furniture, brocade and leather upholstery, china dinner services, sideboards, the Russian excitability of his father, and Ben Gurion and Lupatin, the monkish halo of light around the desks of dour scholars gathering footnotes on their way to acquiring world fame, and we, following in their footsteps with helpless, hopeless perplexity, Tsvika with Columbus and the church, Ted and Yael and their jet-propelled vehicles, Nina orchestrating the liquidation of her ultrapious sex boutique, Wahrhaftig struggling to defend a civilized enclave in his abortion inferno, Uri roaming the world conquering women and mocking his conquests with his wry humor, Annette and Tamar, the unwanted, and you yourself with your Heart of Christendom and your lizards and your late-night letters to Yitzhak Rabin and the price of violence in a time of moral decline. And Dimi with his slaughtered dog. Where was it all leading? Where did that Chili get lost on her way to the Aryan side?

As though this were not a district of a city but a remote camp of whale hunters who had settled at the world's end, on a godforsaken coast in Alaska, throwing up a few shaky structures and a rickety fence in the boundless waste, among bloodthirsty nomadic tribes, and then they all set off together far out on the gray water in search of a nonexistent whale. And God has forgotten them, as the proprietress of the café across the road said yesterday.

Fima had a vivid image of himself standing guard, alone in the dark, over the abandoned whalers' camp. A faint lantern sways in the wind at the top of a pole, flickering, guttering in the black expanse, and there is no other light in all the length and breadth of the Pacific wastes extending northward to the Pole and southward to the tip of Tierra del Fuego. A solitary glowworm. Absurd. Its place does not know it. And yet, this precious radiance. Which it is your duty to keep alive as long as possible. It must not stop glimmering in the depth of the frozen expanse at the foot of the snow-covered glaciers. It is your duty to prevent it from being blown out by the wind. At least as long as you are here and until Yoezer arrives. Never mind who you are and what you arc and what you have to do with whalers who never existed, you with your myopia, your flabby muscles, your floppy breasts, your ridiculous, clumsy body. The responsibility is yours.

But in what sense?

He put his hand in his pocket to look for a heartburn tablet, but instead of the little tin his fingers dredged up the silver earring, which sparkled for an instant as though bewitched in the light that came from the room behind him. As he hurled it into the deep darkness, he seemed to hear Yael's sardonic voice:

"Your problem, pal."

And with his face to the night, in a low, decisive voice, he answered:

"Correct. It is my problem. And I am going to solve it."

And he smiled again. But this time it was not his habitual, sad smile of self-deprecation, but the astonished curled lip of a man who for a long time has been seeking a complex answer to a complex question and suddenly discovers a simple one.

He turned and went inside. At once he saw Yael, who was deep in conversation with Uri on the sofa, their knees touching. Fima had the impression that laughter had frozen on their lips as he entered. But he felt no envy. On the contrary, a secret joy welled up inside him at the thought that he had slept with every woman in this room, Shula, Nina, and Yael. And yesterday with Annette Tadmor. And tomorrow was another day.

At that moment he caught sight of Dimi kneeling on the carpet in a corner, a quaint, philosophical child, slowly revolving with his finger Baruch's huge terrestrial globe, which was illuminated from within. The electric light painted the oceans blue and the land masses gold. The child seemed absorbed, detached, concentrating entirely on what he was doing. And Fima remarked to himself, like a man making a mental note of the whereabouts of a suitcase or an electric switch, that he loved this child more than he had ever loved any living soul. Including women. Including the boy's mother. Including his own mother.

Yael got up and approached him, uncertain whether to shake his hand or just rest a hand on his sleeve. Fima did not wait for her to make up her mind, but hugged her hard and pressed her head to his shoulder, as though it were she, not he, who needed and deserved consolation. As though he were making her a present of his new orphanhood. Yael mumbled into his chest something that Fima did not catch and did not even want to hear, because he was enjoying the discovery that Yael, like Prime Minister Ben Gurion, was shorter than he by almost a head. Even though he was not a tall man.

Then Yael broke away from his clasp and hurried, or escaped, to the kitchen, to help Shula and Teddy, who were making open sandwiches for everybody. It occurred to Fima to ask Uri or Tsvi to call the two gynecologists on his behalf, and also Tamar, and why not Annette Tadmor too? He had a sudden urge to gather together all the people who had some bearing on his new life. As though something inside him was planning, without his knowledge, a ceremony. To preach to them. To tell them something new. To announce that henceforth… But perhaps he was confusing mourning with a farewell party. Farewell to what? What sort of sermon could he preach? What news did a man like him have to give? Be holy and pure, all of you, in préparation for the Third State?

He changed his mind, and abandoned the idea of a gathering.

He suddenly chose not to sit in the place vacated by Yael next to Uri on the sofa, but in his father's armchair. He stretched his legs comfortably on the upholstered footstool. He relished the soft seat that took his body as though it had been made to measure for him. Without thinking, he banged twice on the floor with the silver-headed cane. But when they all stopped talking and looked at him attentively, ready to do his bidding, to offer him affection and condolence, Fima smiled benignly and exclaimed:

"Why this silence? Carry on."

Tsvi, Nina, and Uri tried to draw him into a conversation to distract him, a light exchange about subjects dear to his heart, the situation in the Territories, the way it was presented on Italian television, which Uri had been watching in Rome, the significance of the American overtures. Fima refused to be drawn. He contented himself with keeping the absent-minded smile on his face. For a moment he thought of Baruch lying in a refrigerated compartment in the basement of Hadassah Hospital, in a sort of honeycomb of freezer drawers, populated, in part or in whole, by the fresh Jerusalem dead. He tried to feel in his own bones the frost, the darkness of the drawer, the dark northern ocean bed below the whaling station. But he could find no pain in his heart. Or fear. No. His heart was light, and he almost began to see the humor in the metallic mortuary honeycomb with its drawers of corpses. He recalled his father's anecdote about the argument between the Israeli and the American railway boss, and the story of the famous rabbi and the highwayman who exchanged their cloaks. He knew he would have to say something. But he had no idea what he could tell his friends. However, his ignorance was growing thinner and thinner. Like a veil that only half hides the face. He got up and went to the bathroom and rediscovered that here at his father's the toilet was flushed by a tap that could be turned on or off at will, with no race, no defeat, no constant humiliation. So that was one less thing to worry about.

Returning, he joined Dimi on the carpet, got down on his knees, and asked:

"Do you know the legend of Atlantis?"

Dimi said:

"Sure I do. There was a program about it once on educational TV. It's not exactly a legend."

"What is it then? Fact?"

"Of course not."

"So, if it's not a legend and it's not fact?"

"It's a myth. A myth is not the same thing as a legend. It's more like a nucleus."

"Where was this Atlantis, roughly?"

Dimi turned the illuminated globe a little and gently placed a pale hand on the ocean that glowed from the depths in the radiance of the electric light between Africa and South America, and the boy's fingers were also illuminated with a ghostly glow.

"Roughly here. But it makes no difference. It's more in the mind."

"Tell me something, Dimi. Do you think there's anything after we die?"

"Why not?"

"Do you believe Granpa can hear us right now?"

"There isn't that much to hear."

"But can he?"

"Why not?"

"And can we hear him?"

"In our minds, yes."

"Are you sad?"

"Yes. Both of us. But it's not good-bye. You can go on loving."

"So — we shouldn't be afraid of dying?"

"No, that isn't possible."

"Tell me something, Dimi. Have you had any supper tonight?"

"I'm not hungry."

"Then give me your hand."

"What for?"

"Nothing. Just to feel."

"Feel what?"

"Nothing special."

"Stop it, Fima. Go back to your friends."

At this point their conversation was interrupted, because Dr. Wahrhaftig burst into the room, red-faced, panting, and ranting, as if he had come to put a stop to some scandal rather than offer his condolences. Fima was unable to conceal his smile when he noticed for the first time a resemblance between Wahrhaftig and the Ben Gurion who bellowed at his father in Rashbam Street forty years before. Tamar Greenwich arrived with the doctor, nervous, rather weepy, full of good intentions. Fima turned toward them, patiently accepted the handshake and the hug, but did not catch what they were saying to him. For some reason his lips muttered vacantly:

"Never mind. No harm done. These things happen."

Apparently they too failed to catch what was said. They were quickly given a glass of tea.

At half past eight, seated again in his father's armchair, with his legs comfortably crossed, Fima pushed away the yogurt and the roll with pickled herring that Teddy had placed in front of him. He removed the arm that Uri put around his shoulder. And he declined Shula's offer of a blanket for his lap. He suddenly handed back to Nina the brown envelope he had removed from her attaché case earlier and told her to start reading the will aloud.

"Now?"

"Now."

"Even though usually…"

"Even though usually."

"But Fima…"

"Now, please."

After a hesitation and an exchange of rapid glances with Tsvi and Yael and Uri, Nina decided to comply. She drew two closely typed sheets of paper from the envelope. In the silence that had fallen she started to read, at first with some embarrassment and then in her professional voice, which was calm and detached.

First came detailed, punctilious instructions concerning the conduct of the funeral and the memorial service and the tombstone. Then came the substance. Boris Baruch Nomberg bequeathed two hundred and forty thousand United States dollars to be divided in unequal parts among the sixteen foundations, organizations, associations, and committees that were listed in alphabetical order, each name accompanied by the relevant sum of money. At the head of the list came the Association for the Promotion of Religious Pluralism and at the bottom the Zeal for Torah Orthodox School. After this last item and the signatures of the deceased, the notary, and the witnesses, came the following lines:

"With the exception of the property in Reines Street, Tel Aviv, mentioned in the annex, I hereby bequeath and leave all my belongings to my only son, Efraim Nomberg Nisan, who is adept at distinguishing good from evil, with the hope that henceforth he will not be content merely to distinguish but will devote his strength and excellent talents to doing what is good and refraining so far as possible from evil."

Above the signatures came another line in a bold hand: "Signed, sealed, and delivered, the testator being of sound mind, here in Jerusalem capital of Israel, in the month of Marheshvan 5749 corresponding to 1988 of the civil era, the fortieth year of the uncompleted renewal of the sovereignty of Israel."

From the annex it emerged that the property in Reines Street, Tel Aviv, which Fima had never heard of before, was a modest block of flats. The old man left it "to my beloved grandchild, the delight of my soul, Israel Dimitri, son of Theodore and Yael Tobias, to be held in trust for him until he reaches his eighteenth birthday by my dear daughter-in-law Mrs. Yael Nomberg Nisan Tobias née Levin, who shall enjoy the usufruct thereof, the capital to be reserved for my grandson."

It further transpired from the annex that henceforward Fima would be the sole proprietor of a medium-sized but solid and profitable cosmetics factory. He would also own the flat in which he had been born and brought up and in which both his parents had passed away at an interval of more than forty years. It was a large third-floor flat with five spacious rooms and deep-silled windows, in a quiet, prosperous neighborhood, lavishly furnished in a solid, old-fashioned Central European style. He also received various stocks and bonds, a building plot in Talpiyot, declared and concealed bank accounts in several banks in Israel and Belgium, a safe-deposit box containing cash and valuables, including his mother's jewelry of gold and silver set with precious stones. He also inherited a library of several thousand volumes, including a set of the Talmud and other sacred texts bound in morocco, a collection of Midrashic works, some of which were rare, besides hundreds of novels in Russian, Czech, German, and Hebrew, and two shelves of chemistry books in the same languages, and the poems of Uri Zvi Greenberg, including some very rare editions, biblical studies by Dr. Israel Eldad, the works of Graetz, Dubnow, Klausner, Kaufman, and Urbach, and a cabinet of old erotica in German and Czech which Fima could not read. Furthermore he was henceforth the owner of collections of stamps and old coins, nine winter suits and six summer ones, some twenty-five ties of a conservative, rather old-fashioned style, and an attractive walking stick with a silver band.

Fima did not ask himself what he would do with all these things, but he pondered on what someone like himself understood of the manufacture and sale of cosmetics. And since the Hebrew language does not tolerate such constructions, he corrected himself mentally: the manufacture of cosmetics and their sale.

And suddenly he said to himself:

"It doesn't tolerate? So let it not tolerate!"

At ten o'clock, after he had conducted Dimi to a bedroom and told him a short adventure story about the Argonauts and the Golden Fleece, he sent all his friends home. He dismissed all their entreaties and protests. No, thank you very much, there was no need for anyone to stay the night. No, thank you very much, he did not want to be driven to his flat in Kiryat Yovel either. Nor did he have any desire to stay with any of them. He would spend the night here. He wanted to be alone. Yes. Absolutely. Thank you. No. Absolutely. No need. Kind of you to offer anyway. You're all wonderful people.

When he was left alone, he was tempted to open a window to let in some fresh air. On second thought he decided not to, but instead to close his eyes for a while and try to discover the precise composition of the strange smell of this flat. A smell of doom. Although there was no apparent connection between the smell and the sad event that had taken place here earlier in the day. The flat had always been kept spotlessly clean and tidy. At least outwardly. Both before and after his mother's death. Twice a week a home helper came to polish everything, the candlesticks, the brass lamps, the silver goblets that were used for religious rituals. His father had taken a cold shower every morning, summer and winter. And the flat had been redecorated regularly every five years.

So what was the source of the smell?

Since he had stopped living here after his military service, his nostrils had recoiled from it every time he came back to visit the old man. It was a faint whiff of something malodorous, half hidden always behind other scents. Was it a trash can that needed emptying? Dirty laundry lingering too long in the basket in the bathroom? Some defect in the plumbing? Mothballs in the wardrobes? Faint cooking odors of thick, oversweet Eastern European food? Fruit that had sat too long in the fruit bowl? Water in vases that had not been changed although the flowers were changed regularly twice a week? Behind the elegance and tidiness there was always a sourness hovering, minimal and latent admittedly, but persistent, like mold. Was it an uneradicable relic of the opaque, glassy politeness that had spread and frozen here between his father and his mother, and not ceased even with her death? Was there any chance that now it would evaporate?

One would think, Fima mused ironically, that in your own flat in Kiryat Yovel the air is perfumed with myrrh and frankincense, you with your Trotskyite kitchen and your bottle of worms on the balcony and your decrepit lavatory.

He stood up and opened a window. After a moment he closed it again. Not because of the cold but because he felt sorry to lose this doom-laden smell, which he would probably never be able to recall once he allowed it to disperse. Let it stay a few more days. The future was just beginning. Yet it would have been nice to sit in the kitchen now, over a glass of steaming Russian tea, and argue with the old man late into the night. Without mockery or levity. Like a pair of intimate adversaries. Far from Hasidic tales and all the casuistry, the witticisms, the anecdotes, the clever wordplay. Not provoking the old man, not annoying him with impieties. No, with real affection. Like a pair of surveyors representing two countries in a dispute but themselves working together with amicable professionalism on the precise demarcation of the border. As one man to another. Sorting out at last what has been from what is from what is over and done with, and what might still be possible here if we only devote ourselves to it with all our strength.

But what is it that he must sort out with his father? What is the border that needs demarcation? What does he need to prove to the old man? Or to Yael? Or to Dimi? What docs he need to say that is not a quotation, or a paradox, or a refutation, or a clever wisecrack?

The inheritance neither weighed him down nor lifted him up. True, he knew nothing about cosmetics, but the fact was he had no real understanding of anything. There might even be a certain advantage in that, although Fima could not be bothered at this moment to try to think what it as. Moreover, he had no needs. Apart from the most simple, basic needs: food, warmth, and shelter. He had no desires, either, except perhaps a vague desire to appease everybody, to heal disputes, to sow some peace here and there. How could he do that? How docs one bring about a change of heart? Soon he would have to meet the employees of the business, find out about their working conditions, sec what could be improved.

The upshot was that he needed to learn. And learning was one thing he did know about. So he would learn. Gradually.

He would make a start tomorrow. Although in fact tomorrow was already here: it was past midnight.

He pondered whether to get into his father's bed and sleep there, fully dressed. After a moment he decided that it was a pity to waste this unique night. He ought to explore the flat. Discover its secrets. Start to acquire a preliminary orientation in the ways of the new realm.

Fima prowled until three o'clock in the morning, opening wardrobes, exploring the recesses of the heavy black highboy, peering into every drawer, prying under mattresses and among pillows and in the heap of his father's white shirts waiting to be ironed. Stroking the brocade upholstery. Fingering and weighing the silver candlesticks and goblets. Running his hand over the polished surface of the old-fashioned furniture. Comparing tea trays. Finding under a muslin cover a silent Singer sewing machine and extracting a single hollow note from the gleaming Bechstein piano. Selecting a cut-glass goblet and pouring himself some French Cognac, raising his glass toward the six vases of tali gladioli. Undressing with a rustle of cellophane a magnificent box of Swiss chocolates and tasting the exquisite contents. Tickling the crystal chandeliers with a peacock's feather he found on the desk. Very cautiously extracting delicate little ringing sounds from the fine Rosenthal china. Riffling through the piles of embroidered napkins, faintly scented handkerchiefs, lace and woollen shawls, the array of kid gloves, and the selection of umbrellas, among which he discovered an ancient blue silk parasol, and combing through the records of Italian opera that his father had enjoyed playing for himself at full volume on the old gramophone, joining the singers with his cantorial tenor, sometimes in the company of one or two of his lady friends, who all threw him rapturous glances while sipping their tea with the little finger hooked. He drew snowy table napkins out of their gilded rings engraved with stars of David and the word "Zion" in Hebrew and Roman characters. He examined the paintings on the walls of the salon, one of which featured a handsome Gypsy with a dancing bear that seemed to be smiling. He patted the bronze busts of Herzl and Vladimir Jabotinsky and asked them politely how they were feeling this evening, then poured himself another Cognac and helped himself to another chocolate and discovered in an out-of-the-way drawer a collection of silver snuffboxes studded with pearls and semiprecious stones, and among them he caught sight of the tortoiseshell comb that his mother used to put in her blond hair at the nape of her neck. But the blue knit baby's bonnet with the woolly bobble was nowhere to be found. The bathtub stood on brass lion's paws, and on the ledge behind it he found foreign packages of bath salts and oils, beauty creams, medicines, and mysterious ointments. He was surprised to find, hanging up, a pair of antiquated silk stockings with a seam at the back, the sight of which stirred a faint pulse in his loins. In the kitchen he made a mental note of the contents of the refrigerator and the breadbox. Then he returned to the bedroom, where he sniffed at the silk underwear meticulously folded away on the shelves. Fima saw himself for a moment as a relentlessly systematic detective studying the scene of the crime inch by inch in search of the one and only clue, which was minute but crucial. But what clue? What crime? He did not bother to ponder this, because his spirits were rising by the minute. All these years he had ached to find a place where he could feel at home and he had never managed to, either in his own flat, at the gynecology clinic, at his friends', in his city, his country, or his time. Maybe because it was a self-defeating wish from the start. Beyond his reach. Beyond everybody's reach. Tonight too, among all these exciting objects that insisted on concealing from him the thing that really mattered, this wish still seemed beyond his reach, and he said to himself:

"Right. Exile."

And he added:

"So what?"

Shakespeare's King Richard vainly offered his kingdom for a horse. Whereas Efraim Nisan, close to three in the morning, was ready to exchange the whole of his legacy for one day, one hour of total inner freedom and of feeling at home. Although he had a suspicion that there was a tension and perhaps even a contradiction between the two, which could not be resolved even by Yoezer and his happy friends who would be living here in a hundred years.

At five in the morning he fell asleep fully dressed, and he slept till eleven. Even then he did not wake of his own accord: his friends had returned to sit with him and cushion his grief. The women had brought pots of stew, and they and the men tried their best to surround the orphaned Fima with love and kindness, warmth and affection. Again and again they tried to draw him into political discussions which Fima did not wish to join, but he condescended to contribute an occasional smile or a nod of the head. On the other hand, he called Dimi and was delighted to learn that Dimi was interested in the collections of stamps and coins, provided he could be partners with Fima. Fima said nothing about the hundreds of tin soldiers from his childhood, which he had found in a drawer. They would be a surprise for his Challenger.

On Saturday evening, at the end of the Sabbath, Fima suddenly put on his father's winter overcoat and, leaving his friends to keep up the mourning, went out to get some air, promising to be back in a quarter of an hour.

Next morning at eight he intended to visit the offices of the cosmetics factory in the Romema Industrial Zone. The funeral was set for three P.M., and in this way he could put himself in the picture beforehand. Put this evening he could surely be allowed to take one last aimless stroll.

The sky was dark and clear, and the stars went out of their way to attract his attention. As if the Third State was self-evident. Intoxicated by the Jerusalem night air, Fima forgot his promise. Instead of returning to his friends after his stroll, he chose to ignore the protocol of mourning and take a short break. Why not go, at long last, alone, to see the early showing of that comedy film with Jean Gabin, about which he had heard only good reports? He queued patiently for twenty minutes, bought a ticket, and, entering the cinema shortly after the beginning of the film, sat down in one of the back rows, which were almost empty. But after a few moments' confusion he realized that the Jean Gabin film had ended its run and a new film was showing, starting this evening. So he decided to leave the cinema and check what was new in the pretty, old lanes of Nahalat Shiva, which he had loved since he was a child and which he had walked with Chili a few nights previously. Because he was tired, and perhaps also because his heart was light and clear, he continued sitting in the cinema, huddled in his father's overcoat, staring at the screen and asking himself why on earth the characters in the film kept inflicting all sorts of agonies and indignities on each other. What was it that kept them from taking pity on each other occasionally? It would not be difficult for him to explain to the heroes, if they would only listen for a moment, that if they wanted to feel at home, they ought to leave each other alone, and themselves too. And try to be good. At least as far as possible. At least as long as eyes can see and ears can hear, even in the face of mounting tiredness.

Be good, but in what sense?

The question seemed like sophistry. Because everything was really so simple. Effortlessly he followed the story. Until his eyes closed and he fell asleep in his seat.