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.
6. AS IF SHE WERE HIS SISTER
AND IN FACT HE DID END UP HAVING A KIND OF DATE THAT EVENING. Soon after half past ten, frozen and drenched, with his shoes oozing water, he rang the bell at the Gefens' garden gate. They lived in a secretive, thick-walled stone house in the German Colony, surrounded by old pines, set deep inside a large plot protected by a stone wall.
"I was just passing and I saw a light on," he explained hesitantly to Nina, "so I decided to bother you for a minute or two. Just long enough to collect that book about Leibowitz from Uri and to tell him that on second thought we were both right about the Iran-Iraq War. Should I come back another time?"
Nina chuckled, grabbed his arm, and rugged him indoors.
"But Uri's in Rome," she said. "You phoned yourself on Saturday night to say good-bye to him, and you gave him a whole lecture on the telephone about why it would be better for us if Iraq defeated Iran. Just look at you: what a sight! And am I really supposed to believe that you just happened to be strolling down our road at eleven o'clock at night? Whatever will become of you, Fima?"
"I had a date," he muttered, struggling to disentangle himself from his dripping overcoat. He explained:
"The sleeve's stuck."
Nina said:
"Sit yourself down here by the heater. You've got to get dry. I don't suppose you've eaten anything cither. I was thinking about you today."
"I was thinking about you too. I wanted to try to tempt you into coming to a film with me, to see a comedy with Jean Gabin at the Orion. I called you but there was no answer."
"I thought you had a date. I got held up at the office till nine. An importer of sex aids has gone broke and I'm liquidating him. The creditors are a pair of ultrapious brothers-in-law. You can imagine how funny that is. I hardly need Jean Gabin. Never mind. Come on, get those clothes off; you look like a drowned cat. Wait! Have a shot of Scotch first. It's a pity you can't see yourself. Then I'll get you something to eat."
"What was it that made you think of me today?"
"Your article in Friday's paper. It was okay. Possibly a touch too hysterical. I don't know if I'm supposed to tell you this, but Tsvi Kropotkin is secretly scheming to get a search party to break into your flat, ransack your drawers, and publish the poems he's convinced you're still writing. So you won't be completely forgotten. Who did you have a date with, a mermaid? Even your underwear's soaked."
Fima, who had stripped down to his long johns and a yellowing winter undershirt, laughed.
"As far as I'm concerned, they can forget me. I've already forgotten myself. What, take the underwear off too? Why, are you still liquidating your sex boutique? Are you planning to hand me over to your ultra creditors?"
Nina was a lawyer, a friend and contemporary of Yael, a chain-smoker of Nelson cigarettes, and her glasses gave her a bitter look. Her thin, graying hair was severely cropped. She was small and skinny, like an underfed vixen. And her triangular face reminded Fima of a cornered vixen. But her breasts were full and appealing, and she had beautifully shaped hands, like those of a young girl from die Far East. She handed him a bundle of Uri's clothes, freshly ironed and clean-smelling.
"Put these on," she ordered. "And drink this. And come and sit by the fire. Try not to talk for a few minutes. Iraq is winning the war without your help. I'll make you an omelette and a salad. Or shall I warm you some soup?"
"Don't make me anything," Fima said, "Pm leaving in five minutes."
"Got another date, have you?"
"I left the lights on in my flat this morning. And anyway…"
"I'll run you home," Nina said. "After you've dried out and warmed up and had something to eat."
"Yael called," she added. "She told me you haven't eaten. She said you've been pestering Teddy. You're the Eugene Onegin of Kiryat Yovel. Quiet now. Don't say anything."
Uri Gefen, Nina's husband, was once a famous combat pilot, and later became a pilot with El Al. In 1971 he went into private business, starting a complex network of importers. He had a reputation in Jerusalem as a hunter of married women. The whole city knew that Nina had reconciled herself to his adventures, and that for several years their marriage had been purely platonic. Sometimes Uri's lovers ended up as Nina's friends. Uri and Nina had no children, but their charming home had become the regular Friday-evening rendezvous of a group of lawyers, army officers, civil servants, artists, and university lecturers. Fima was fond of them both, because both of them, in their different ways, had taken him under their wing. He was indiscriminately fond of anyone who could put up with him, and he had an unbounded affection for that circle of dear friends who still continued to have faith in him and endeavored to spur him on, lamenting how he frittered away his talents.
On the sideboard, mantelpiece, and bookshelves stood photographs of Uri in or out of uniform. He was a large, stocky, rumbustious man, who exuded a rough physical affection that gave women and children and even men a cuddly feeling about him. Facially he bore a faint resemblance to Anthony Quinn. His manner was always coarsely hearty. He had a habit of touching people he was talking to, men and women alike, prodding you in the stomach, putting an arm around your shoulder, or resting a large freckled hand on your knee. When the spirit moved him, he could reduce a roomful of people to tears of laughter by mimicking the intonation of a stall holder in the central market, impersonating Abba Eban addressing an audience of immigrants in a transit camp, or casually analyzing the impact of an article of Fima's about Albert Camus. Sometimes he would offer frank revelations, in the company of friends and in his wife's presence, about his own conquests. He spoke cheerfully, tastefully, without making fun of his lovers or revealing their identities, never boasting, recounting the progress of a romance with wistful good humor, like someone who has long since learned how intimately love and ridicule are interwoven; how both seducer and seduced are guided by fixed rituals; how absurdly childlike was his own indefatigable urge to conquer, in which carnal needs played only a small part; how lies, mannerisms, and pretenses are woven into the very fabric even of true love; and how the passing years deprive us all of the power of thrilling and the power of longing alike, as everything wears out and fades. He himself appeared in this Friday-night Decameron in a somewhat ludicrous light, as though Uri Gefen the narrator were examining Uri Gefen the lover under a microscope, dispassionately isolating the comic element. Sometimes he would say, By the time you begin to make sense of something, your term of office is over. Or, There's a Bulgarian proverb: The main thing an old cat remembers is how to meow.