"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."