Fima

5. FIMA GETS SOAKED IN THE DARK IN THE POURING RAIN

AFTER LOCKING UP THE CLINIC, HE TOOK A BUS INTO THE CENTER of town and found a cheap eating place in a side street not far from Zion Square, where he had a mushroom pizza washed down with Coca-Cola and chewed a heartburn tablet. Because he did not have enough cash with him, he asked if he could pay by check, but was told he could not. He offered to leave his identity card and come back the next morning to pay. However, he could not find the document in question in any of his pockets: he had bought a new electric kettle on Sunday, or before the weekend, to replace the one he had burned out, and, not having enough cash, had left his identity card in the shop as security. Or was it at Steimatsk/s Bookshop? Finally, when he was beyond hope, a crumpled fifty-shekel note dropped out of his back pocket: his father must have put it there a couple of weeks ago.

During this search a telephone token came to light in one of his pockets, and Fima located a public call box outside the Sansur Building in Zion Square and phoned Nina Gefen; he vaguely remembered that her husband, Uri, was leaving or had already left for Rome. Maybe he could inveigle her into going to the Orion with him to see the French comedy with Jean Gabin that Tamar had told him about during the coffee break. He couldn't remember the name of the film.

But the voice that came on the line was the wooden voice of Ted Tobias, who asked dryly, with a heavy American accent, "What's up this time, Fima?" Fima mumbled, "Nothing. It's the rain," because he couldn't make out what Ted was doing at Nina Gefen's. Then he realized he had absent-mindedly dialed Yael's number instead of Nina's. Why had he lied and said it was raining? It hadn't rained a drop since the afternoon. Eventually he recovered his presence of mind and asked Ted how Dimi was and how they were getting on with enclosing their balcony. Ted reminded him that they had finished that job by the beginning of the winter. Yacl had taken Dimi to a children's play and wouldn't be back much before ten. Did he want to leave a message? Fima peered at his watch, guessed that it was not yet eight, and suddenly, without meaning to, asked Ted if he could invade him, in quotation marks, of course; there was something he wanted to discuss with him. He hurriedly said that he had already eaten, and that whatever happened he wouldn't stay more than half an hour.

"Okay," said Ted. "Fine. Come right on up. Just bear in mind that we're a bit busy this evening."

Fima took this as a hint that he shouldn't come, and that whatever happened he shouldn't stay till past midnight as he usually did. He was not offended; he even gallantly offered to come some other time. But Ted firmly and politely stood his ground.

"Half an hour will be fine."

Fima was particularly glad it was not raining, since he had no umbrella, and he did not want to visit the woman he loved looking like a drowned dog. He also noticed that it was getting colder, and decided that it might snow. This made him even happier. Through the window of the bus, somewhere near Mahane Yehuda Market, by the light of a street lamp, he saw a black slogan scrawled on a wall: ARABS OUT! Translating into German and substituting Jews for Arabs, he felt an upsurge of rage. On the spot, he appointed himself president and decided on a dramatic step. He would make an official visit to the Arab village of Deir Yassin on the anniversary of the massacre there and deliver a simple, trenchant statement amid the ruins of the village: Without going into the details of which side is more to blame, we Israeli Jews understand the depth of the suffering that the Palestinian Arabs have undergone during these past forty years, and to put an end to it we are willing to do anything that is reasonable, short of committing suicide. Such a speech would immediately echo through every Arab hovel; it would fire the imagination and might help to start the ball rolling. For a moment Fima hesitated between "start the ball rolling" and "achieve a breakthrough." Which would make a better heading for the short article he intended to write next morning for the weekend paper? Then he rejected them both and dropped the idea of the article.

In the elevator, on the way up to the sixth-floor flat in Beit Hakerem, he made up his mind to be calm and cordial this time, to try to talk to Ted as equal to equal, even on political topics, though normally he was very quickly irritated by the other's way of talking, his slow, balanced speech, his American accent and sort of desiccated logicality, his way of buttoning and unbuttoning his expensive knit jacket, like an official spokesman from the State Department.

Fima stood at the door for a couple of minutes without pressing the bell. He rubbed his soles on the doormat so he wouldn't bring any mud into the flat. While he was in the middle of this ball-less game of soccer, the door opened, and Ted helped him out of his overcoat, which had been turned into a snare by the rip in the lining.

"What foul weather," Fima said.

Ted asked if it was raining outside.

Even though it had stopped before he left the clinic, Fima replied pathetically: "Raining? A deluge, more like."

Without waiting to be asked, he advanced straight into Ted's study, leaving a trail of damp footprints across the hall. He proceeded steadily between piles of books, diagrams, sketches, and printouts on the floor until his progress was blocked by the massive desk on which stood Ted's word processor. He peered without permission at a mysterious green-and-black graph that was flickering on the screen. Joking about his hopelessness with computers, he began to urge Ted politely, as if he himself were the host and the other the guest: "Sit down, Teddy, sit down; make yourself at home." And without hesitating he grabbed the office chair in front of the computer screen.

Ted asked what he would like to drink. Fima answered:

"Anything. A glass of water. Don't waste any time. Or some brandy. Or else something hot. It really doesn't matter. I've only dropped in for a moment anyway."

With his broad, slow accent, with the dryness of a telephone operator, without a question mark at the end of any of his sentences, Ted stated:

"Okay. I'll get you a brandy. And you're sure, positive, you've had some supper."

Fima had a sudden urge to lie, to say no, though actually he was dying of hunger. But he chose to restrain himself.

Ted, in the rocking chair, swathed himself in silence and tobacco smoke. Despite himself, Fima enjoyed the smell of the fine pipe tobacco. And he noticed that Ted was observing him calmly, with a faintly anthropological curiosity. He looked as though he would not raise an eyebrow if his guest suddenly burst out singing. Or crying. Instead of doing either, Fima remarked:

"So Yael's out and so is Dimi. I forgot to bring some chocolate for him."

"Right," said Ted, stifling a yawn. And he exhaled another cloud of pleasant blue smoke.

Fima fixed his eyes on the pile of computerized plans, flicked through them as though they were his own, and made a special point of comparing pages six and nine, as though he had just made the decision to qualify, instantly, as an aeronautical engineer himself.

"And what are you concocting for us here? A spacecraft that fires rubber bullets? Or a flying gravel gun?"

"It's a paper we're writing for a British journal. Something quite experimental, actually: jet-propelled vehicles. As you probably know, Yael and I have been working on that for quite a few years now. You've asked me several times to explain it to you, but after a couple of minutes you always beg me to stop. I'm committed to finishing this paper by the weekend. There's a deadline. Can't you teach me the Hebrew for 'committed' and 'deadline,' by the way? You must know, being a poet. Don't you?"

Fima, straining his brain, almost managed to remember the Hebrew equivalents of the two English words Ted had used. They seemed to be sniggering at him from the threshold of his memory, slipping between his fingers like playful kittens just when he had almost caught them. Then he remembered, and opened his mouth to reply, but they escaped from under his tongue and vanished again into the darkness. Embarrassed, he said:

"Can I do anything to help?"

"Thanks, Fima," Ted replied. "I don't think there's any need. But surely you'd be more comfortable waiting in the living room til) they get back? You can watch the news."

"Let me have Dimi's Lego," said Fima. "I'll make him David's Tower. Or Rachel's Tomb. Or whatever. I won't disturb you while you do your work."

"No problem," said Ted.

"What do you mean, no problem! I came here to see you!"

"So, talk," said Ted. "Has anything happened?"

"It's like this," Fima began, without the faintest idea how he was going to continue. To his astonishment he heard himself saying: "You know that the situation in the Territories is intolerable."

"That's the way it looks," Ted said calmly, and at that moment Fima had a devastatingly vivid and precise mental image of this colorless bushy-eyebrowed jackass stroking Yael's naked body with his heavy hands, crouching on top of her, rubbing his penis between her small, firm breasts with a laborious, unvarying rhythm, like someone sawing a plank. Until Yael's eyes filled with tears and suddenly Fima's did too, and he hastily buried his nose in a grubby handkerchief, which, as he extracted it from his pocket, dislodged yet another note, a twenty-shekel one this time, presumably either the change from the restaurant near Zion Square or a previous offering from his father.

Ted picked up the note and handed it to Fima. Then he tamped down his pipe and relit it, spreading a fine screen that Fima wanted to hate but found himself enjoying.

"So," said Ted, "you were talking about the situation in the Territories. It sure is complicated."

"What the hell do you mean, the situation in the Territories," Fima exploded. "That's just another brand of self-delusion. I wasn't talking about the situation in the Territories; I was talking about the situation right here in Israel. Inside the Green Line. Inside Israeli society. The Territories are nothing but the dark side of ourselves. What happens there every day is just a concretization of the process of degeneration we have been undergoing since the Six Days' War. If not before. If not from the beginning. Yes, every morning we read our papers, ail day long we listen to the news, every evening we watch What's New, we sigh, we tell each other it simply can't go on, we sign petitions now and then, but in fact we do nothing. Zero. Zilch."

"Right," said Ted, and after consideration, after tamping and re-lighting again, slowly and intently, he added mildly: "Yael does voluntary work twice a week at the Council for the Advancement of Tolerance. But they say there's going to be a split in the Council." And he added, uncertain of the meaning of the Hebrew word, "What do you mean by 'petition'?"

"Petition?" Fima replied. "A scrap of paper. Masturbation." He was so enraged that he thumped the keyboard of the word processor accidentally with his fist.

"Hey, watch out," Ted said. "If you break my computer, that won't help the Arabs."

"Who the hell's talking about helping the Arabs?" Fima erupted in an injured roar. "I'm talking about helping ourselves…. It's just them, the nuts, the right, who say we're helping the Arabs!"

"I don't get it," said Ted, scratching his tousled hair in a kind of overacted portrayal of someone who is slow on the uptake. "Do you mean that we're not trying to improve the Arabs' living conditions?"

So Fima started from square one, suppressing his anger with difficulty. He explained in simple Hebrew his view of the tactical and psychological factors that made the moderate left appear to the masses to be identifying itself with the enemy. He fumed at himself again for using that wretched expression "the masses." In the course of his lecture he noticed that Ted was stealing sideways glances at the diagrams scattered on the rug, while his hairy finger kept tamping down the tobacco in his pipe. His wedding ring glinted on his finger.

Fima strove in vain to dispel the mental picture of that same finger prodding with the selfsame motion at Yael's labia. He instantly fell prey to a suspicion that he was being lied to and deceived, that Yael was hiding from him in the bedroom, weeping silently, with shaking shoulders, stifling her tears in the pillow, as she sometimes wept in the middle of sex and as Dimi sometimes wept soundlessly when he became aware of injustice perpetrated against him or against one of his parents or Fima.

"In any civilized country," Fima continued, unconsciously borrowing Dr. Wahrhaftig's pet phrase, "there would be a campaign of civil disobedience by now. A common front of workers and students would have forced the government to end the horror at once."

"Let me get you another brandy, Fima. It'll calm you down."

Fima feverishly downed the brandy in one gulp, tipping his head back the way Russians drink vodka in the movies. He could see a detailed image of this log with steel-wool eyebrows bringing Yael a glass of orange juice in bed on Saturday morning, and of her, drowsily, luxuriantly, with her eyes still half-closed, reaching out and stroking the opening of his pajamas, which were doubtless made of real silk. The image aroused in Fima not jealousy or rage or fury but, to his astonishment, profound pity for this diligent, upright man, who made one think of a beast of burden, working day and night at his computer, searching for a way to perfect the jet propulsion of vehicles, and with barely a single friend in the whole of Jerusalem.

"The saddest thing," Fima said, "is the way the left is paralyzed."

Ted said: "True. You're quite right. It was much the same with us at the time of Vietnam. Coffee?"

Fima followed him to the kitchen and continued heatedly:

"The comparison with Vietnam, that's our biggest mistake, Teddy. This is not Vietnam and we're not the flower people. The second mistake is to expect the Americans to do the job for us and get us out of the Territories. What do they care if we're going to the devil?"

"True," said Ted, in the tone he used for praising Dimi for getting his sums right. "Too right. Nobody docs anybody else any favors. Everyone looks after himself. And they don't always even have enough sense for that." He put the kettle on and started emptying the dishwasher.

Fima excitedly pushed Ted out of the way and started to help him unbidden, as though bent on proving him wrong. He pulled a large handful of knives, forks, and spoons out of the dishwasher and ran around the kitchen with them, flinging doors open, pulling out drawers, looking for somewhere to unload his booty, and not interrupting for a moment his lecture on the difference between Vietnam and Gaza and between the Nixon syndrome and the Shamir syndrome. A few stray items of cutlery slipped through his fingers and lay scattered on the kitchen floor. Ted bent down to pick them up, and expressed his unfamiliarity with the Hebrew word for "syndrome": was it a newly invented word?

"Syndrome: like the Vietnam syndrome that you went through in the States."

"Didn't you say a moment ago that the comparison with Vietnam was a mistake?"

"Yes. No. In a certain sense yes. That is, perhaps we need to distinguish between a syndrome and a symptom."

"Here," said Ted, "just put them here in the middle drawer."

But Fima had already abandoned the struggle, and left his bundle of cutlery on top of the microwave. Pulling his handkerchief out of his pocket, he wiped his nose again and then absent-mindedly set about wiping the kitchen table too, while Ted was still sorting plates according to type and size and putting each pile away in its proper place in the cupboard over the sink.

"Fima, why don't you give that to the newspapers. You should publish it so that more people can read it. Your language is so rich. And it'll do your soul good too: anyone can sec you're suffering. You take politics so personally. You take the situation too much to heart. Yael will be back with Dimi in another three-quarters of an hour. Now I've got to do some work. How do you say 'deadline' in Hebrew again? Maybe the best thing would be if you took your coffee with you into the living room and I'll put the TV on for you; you can still catch about half the news. Okay?"

Fima immediately assented: he had never intended to intrude for the whole evening. But instead of picking up his coffee and heading for the living room, he forgot the mug on the drainboard in the kitchen and insisted on pursuing Ted all the way down the hallway until Ted excused himself and locked himself in the bathroom. Fima concluded his sentence through the locked door:

"It's all right for you people; you've got U.S. passports, you can always get out of here by jet propulsion. But what'll happen to the rest of us? Okay, I'll go and watch the news. I won't pester you anymore. The only trouble is, I have no idea how to switch your television on."

Instead of going to the living room, he turned in to the boy's bedroom. Instantly he was overcome by great tiredness. Unable to find the light switch, he lay down in the dark on the little bed surrounded by shadows of robots and airplanes and time machines, while overhead a gigantic phosphorescent spaceship hovered, suspended from the ceiling by an invisible thread, its nose pointing straight at him, revolving slowly, menacingly at the slightest draft like an accusing finger. Until Fima closed his eyes and said to himself suddenly:

"What's the point of all this talking? The die is cast, and what is done cannot be undone."

Then sleep overtook him. Just as he was dropping off, he was vaguely aware of Ted covering him with a soft woollen blanket. Indistinctly he mumbled:

"The truth, Teddy? Just between the two of us? The Arabs have evidently realized that they can't throw us in the sea. The sad thing is, it's hard for Jews to live without someone wanting to throw them in the sea."

Ted whispered:

"No. The situation really isn't looking too good." And he went out.

Fima curled up inside the blanket. He meant to ask to be waked up the moment Yael got home. He was so tired that what came out was:

"Don't wake Yael."

He slept for about twenty minutes, and when the phone rang in the next room, he reached out and knocked over one of Dimi's Lego towers. He tried to fold the blanket, but gave up because he was in a hurry to find Ted. He still had to explain what it was that had brought him here this evening. Instead of going to the study, he strayed into the bedroom, which was lit by a warm red night-light. He saw that the wide bed was ready for the night: two identical pillows, two dark-blue blankets encased in silky sheets, two bedside tables, each with an open book lying face down on it, and he buried his face and his whole head in Yael's nightdress. At once he pulled himself together and rushed out to look for his coat. He searched every room in the flat with a sleepwalker's thoroughness, but he found neither Ted nor his coat, even though he doggedly checked every lighted place. Finally he sank down onto a stool in the kitchen and looked around for the knives that he hadn't been able to find a place for earlier.

Ted Tobias emerged from the darkness with a slide rule in his hand, and announced slowly and emphatically, like a soldier transmitting a message by shortwave radio:

"You fell asleep for a while. Shows you were tired. I can warm your coffee in the microwave."

"No need, thanks," said Fima. "I've got to run; I'm late."

"Oh. Late. What for?"

"A date," said Fima, to his own surprise, in a man-to-man voice. "I completely forgot I have a date tonight." And he went to the front door and started wrestling with the latch until Ted took pity on him and handed him his overcoat, opened the door, and said softly and, Fima thought, rather wistfully:

"Look, Fima, it's none of my business, but I think you could do with a break. You're looking a little run down. What'll I tell Yael?"

Fima inserted his left arm into the torn lining of his coat sleeve and wondered why the sleeve had turned into a cul-de-sac. He lost his temper, as though Ted was responsible for upsetting the insides of his coat.

"Don't say anything to Yael," he hissed. "There's nothing to say. I didn't come to see her, anyway. I came to talk to you, Teddy, but you're such a numbskull."

Ted Tobias did not take offense. It is likely he didn't understand the last word. He answered carefully, in English:

"Wouldn't it be better if I called you a taxi?"

Fima immediately felt profound shame and regret.

"Thanks, Teddy," he said, "No. I'm sorry I flew off the handle. I had a bad dream last night, and today just hasn't been my day. All I've done is kept you from working. Tell Yael I'm free to look after the kid any evening you need me. I can tell you the Hebrew word for 'commitment' but I can't think of the one for 'deadline.' Maybe you can translate it literally, a dead line. By the way, what do we need jet-propelled vehicles for? Don't we rush around enough as it is? Why don't you invent something that'll make us just sit quietly? Sorry. Bye, Teddy. You shouldn't have given me that brandy. I talk enough nonsense as it is."

As he stepped out of the elevator, he bumped into Yael in the dark. She was carrying Dimi, fast asleep, wrapped in her bomber jacket. Yael let out a little cry of alarm, and almost dropped the child. Then, recognizing Fima, she said in a tired voice, "What an ass you are."

Instead of apologizing, Fima embraced them roughly with his free arm and his crippled sleeve, and covered the drowsy Challenger's head with frantic pecks, like a starving chicken. He kissed Yael too, whatever he could lay hold of in the dark: not finding her face, he bent over and kissed her wet back, wildly, from shoulder to shoulder. Then he rushed outside to look for the bus stop in the dark in the pouring rain. Because in the meantime his prophecy had come true, when he said to Ted, "Raining? A deluge, more like." And at once he was soaked to the skin.