It was in Uri's presence, rather than in Nina's arms, that Fima always felt a dizzying sensual exhilaration. Uri aroused in him an overwhelming urge to impress or even shock this magnificent male. To get the better of him in an argument. To experience that powerful hand grasping his elbow. But Fima did not always manage to get the better of him, because Uri too was endowed with a penetrating intellect, no less penetrating than Fima's own. And they had in common the tendency to switch easily, almost offhand, from ridicule to tragic empathy and back again, and to demolish with a couple of sentences an argument they had taken a quarter of an hour to build up.
During those Friday nights at Uri and Nina's, Fima was at his best. Whenever he got going, he could enthrall and entertain into the early hours of the morning with a series of motley paradoxes, amaze with his political analysis, and produce laughter or excitement.
"There's only one Fima," Uri would say with paternal affection.
And Fima for his part would finish the sentence for him:
"…and that's one too many."
Nina would say:
"Just look at the pair of them. Romeo and Julius. Or, rather, Laurel and Hardy."
Fima didn't doubt that Uri had known for a long time about his occasional sex with Nina. Perhaps he found it entertaining. Or touching. Perhaps right from the word go he had been the author, director, and producer of that little comedy. Sometimes Fima imagined Uri Gefen getting up in the morning, shaving with a classy razor, sitting down to breakfast with a clean white napkin on his lap, glancing at his pocket diary, noticing the little twice-monthly cross, and remarking to Nina as he drank his coffee, hidden behind his newspaper, that it was time to give Fima his regular service, to make sure he didn't dry up completely. This suspicion did not detract from his affection for Uri or from the physical pleasure and euphoria he always experienced in the company of his charismatic friend.
Every few weeks Nina would appear without warning at ten or eleven in the morning, having parked her dusty Fiat in front of the squat block of fiats in Kiryat Yovel. She would be carrying two baskets full of food and cleaning materials bought on her way from the office. She would look like a social worker boldly taking her life in her hands as she entered the front lines of deprivation. After coffee she would stand up and remove her clothes purposefully, almost without a word. They would have sex hurriedly and get up the moment it was finished, like a couple of soldiers in a trench hastily consuming food between bouts of shelling.
Immediately after the lovemaking Nina would shut herself in the bathroom. After scrubbing her skinny body, she would proceed, as a sort of followthrough, to scrub the toilet and the sink. Only then would they sit down to have another cup of coffee and chat about poetry engagé or the coalition of national unity, with Nina chain-smoking and Fima gulping down one slice of black bread and jam after another. He could never resist the strong warm black bread she brought him from a Georgian bakery.
Fima's kitchen always looked as though it had been abandoned in haste. Empty bottles and eggshells under the sink, open jars on the countertop, blotches of congealed jam, half-eaten yogurts, curdled milk, crumbs, and sticky stains on the table. Sometimes Nina, smitten with missionary fervor, rolled up one sleeve, put on rubber gloves, and with a lighted cigarette protruding from the comer of her mouth and seemingly glued to her lower lip, would set upon cupboards, refrigerator, surfaces, and tiles. In half an hour she could transform Calcutta into Zurich. During this combat, Fima would lounge in the doorway, redundant yet willing, debating with Nina and himself the collapse of Communism or the school of thought that rejects Chomsky's linguistic theories. When she went on her way, he would be overcome with a mixture of shame, affection, longing, and gratitude; he wanted to run after her with tears in his eyes, to say Thank you, my beloved, to say I am not worthy of these favors, but then he would pull himself together and hurriedly throw open the windows to expel the cigarette smoke that polluted his kitchen. He had a vague fantasy of lying ill in bed while Nina tended him, or else of Nina on her deathbed and himself wetting her lips and wiping the perspiration from her brow.
Within ten minutes of coming in out of the rain, Fima, in Uri's shirt, trousers, and red sweater, which were too big but felt good, was sitting in Uri's ingenious armchair, which Fima described as "a cross between a hammock and a lullaby." Nina served him a bowl of steaming, well-seasoned pea soup and refilled his whisky glass. She had encased his feet in a pair of furry slippers that Uri had brought back from Portugal. His own clothes were hung up to dry on a chair in front of the fire. They talked about recent Latin-American literature, about magical realism, which Nina saw as a continuation of the tradition of Kafka, whereas Fima tended to attribute it to a vulgarization of the heritage of Cervantes and Lope de Vega, and he managed to annoy Nina by stating that, for his money, he would give the whole of this South American circus, with all its fireworks and cotton candy, for a single page of Chekhov. A Hundred Tears of Solitude for just one Lady with the Little Dog.
Nina lit another cigarette and said:
"Paradoxes. Okay. But what's going to become of you?"
And she added:
"When arc you going to take yourself in hand? When arc you going to stop running away?"
Fima said:
"I've noticed at least two signs lately that Shamir is beginning to realize that without the PLO it won't work."
And Nina, through her thick lenses and the cigarette haze:
"Sometimes I think you're a lost cause."
To which Fima riposted:
"Aren't we all, Nina?"
At that moment he felt as affectionate and tender toward the person sitting opposite him, dressed in a well-worn pair of men's jeans with a zipper fly and a wide-cut man's shirt, as he would if she were his own sister. Her lack of prettiness and femininity suddenly struck him as painfully feminine and attractive. Her large soft breasts cried out to him to lay his head between them. Her short gray hair drew his fingertips. And he knew precisely how to wipe that hunted vixen look off her face and replace it with the her pampered little girl expression. At this his organ began to stir. With Fima, kindness, generosity, compassion for a woman always heralded the stirrings of lust. His loins were on fire with a desire that was close to pain: it was two months since he had slept with a woman. The smell of damp wool that he had sniffed on Yael when he kissed her back in the dark entrance to her building was blended now with the smell of his clothes drying in front of the fire. His breathing quickened, and his lips parted and quivered. Like a child's. Nina noticed, and said:
"Just a minute, Fima. Let me finish my cigarette. Give me another moment or two."
But Fima, bashful yet burning with lust and pity, ignored this, knelt in front of her, and tugged at her leg until he succeeded in dragging her down to join him on the rug. A clumsy tussle with his clothes and hers ensued by the table legs. With some difficulty he disposed of her lighted cigarette and spectacles, while he rubbed uninterruptedly against her thigh and smothered her face with kisses as if to distract her attention from the ever more furious friction. Until she managed to push him away and release both of them from their clothes, whispering, "Gently, Fima: you're eating me alive." But, heedless, he lay on top of her with all his weight, still kissing her face, still whispering entreaties and stammering excuses. When she finally relented and said, "All right, come on then," his organ suddenly shriveled. It withdrew into the recesses of its lair like a startled tortoise.
Even so, he did not stop kissing and hugging and apologizing for his tiredness; he had had a bad dream last night, and this evening Ted had thrown him out after making him drink brandy, and now the Scotch. It seemed as though today really wasn't his day.