Two tears appeared in the corners of Nina's nearsighted eyes. Without her glasses, she looked frail and dreamy, as though her face were much more naked than her body. They lay for a long while, holding each other tight without moving, like soldiers in a trench under shelling. Humiliated, and bound together by their humiliation. Until she broke loose, groped for a cigarette, lit it, and tried to say "Never mind, child," and tried to make him understand that at this moment he was reaching deeper inside her than he could by screwing. Again she called him "child," and said, Come and have a wash, and let's put you to bed.
Fima, consoled and elegiac, laid his head in the hollow of her shoulder but pushed her glasses away, because he was ashamed of their naked bodies, ashamed of his shrunken member, wanting only to cuddle up to her, not to see and not to be seen. Close and silent, they lay sprawled on the rug in the dying firelight, listening to the raging wind and the rain beating against the windows and the gurgling of the water in the drainpipe, both of them soft and satisfied, as though they had made love tenderly and given each other pleasure. Suddenly Fima saw fit to ask:
"What do you think, Nina: have Yacl and Uri made love together?"
The spell was broken. Nina pulled sharply away from his embrace, grabbed her spectacles, wrapped the tablecloth around herself, abruptly lit another Nelson, and said:
"Tell me. Why is it you can never keep your mouth shut for five minutes on end?"
Then he asked her what it was exactly she had liked about his article in Friday's paper.
Nina said:
"Wait."
He heard a door slam. A moment later came the sound of rushing water as the bathtub filled. He rummaged in his heap of clothes, searching all the pockets for his heartburn tablets. Self- mockingly he repeated Ted's words:
"You're looking a little run down."
And Yael's:
"What an ass you are."
When Nina emerged twenty minutes later, scrubbed and scented, in a brown bathrobe, eager to make up, she found her husband's clothes scattered on the floor, die fire dying, and the furry slippers Uri bought in Portugal lying like dead kittens by the door. Fima had vanished. But she noticed he had finished his drink and forgotten the book about Leibowitz and also one of his socks, hanging on the back of a chair in front of the fire, which flickered for a moment with its last remaining strength then expired. Nina picked up the clothes and slippers, cleared away the glass, soup bowl, and sock, and straightened a corner of the rug. Her thin, well-shaped fingers, like those of a pretty Chinese child, groped for a cigarette. Through her tears she was smiling.
7. WITH THIN FISTS
AT A QUARTER PAST SIX IN THE MORNING HE WROTE DOWN IN HIS brown dream book what he had seen in the night. A coffee-table book about Jerusalem in Hebrew poetry resting slantwise on his raised knees served as a writing desk. He wrote the date, as always, in words, not in figures.
In the dream, war had broken out. The setting resembled the Golan Heights, only more barren. Like a moonscape. Dressed in military uniform but without belt or gun, he was walking along a deserted dirt track, both sides of which, he knew, were lined with minefields. He particularly remembered that the air was very close and gray, as though a storm were approaching. Far in the distance a bell tolled slowly, with long pauses between strokes, the sound echoing through invisible valleys. There was no other soul. Not so much as a bird. And no sign of human habitation. We had been caught off guard again. An enemy armored column was steadily approaching a narrow mountain pass, a sort of ravine that Fima could make out farther up the road, where the rugged heights began. He realized that the grayness in the air was the dust rising from their tracks. He also began to hear dimly, behind the clanging of the bell, a low rumble of engines. Somehow he knew that his appointed task was to wait for them in the ravine at the point where the road crossed the mountains. To delay them by talking to them until reinforcements could be brought up to block the canyon. He started to run as hard as he could. He was panting heavily. The blood throbbed in his temples. His lungs ached. He had a stitch in his side. Although he was exerting his muscles to the utmost, he was hardly moving at all, he was almost running in place, and all the while he was frantically searching for words he could use to delay the enemy. He simply had to find something, a phrase, an idea, a message, perhaps even something funny, words that would make the armored column that was advancing toward him stop, make heads emerge from turrets to listen to him. If he could not change their hearts, at least he must gain time. Without which there was no hope. But his strength was failing and his feet were stumbling and his head was empty of ideas. Not a word passed through his mind. The rumble of engines was getting closer, louder; he could already hear the thunder of guns and the barking of machine guns behind a bend in the road. And he could see flashes inside the cloud of smoke or dust that filled the ravine and filled his eyes and made his throat burn. He was too late. He would never make it in time. There were no words in the world that could hold back the mad bull charging toward him. In a moment or two he would be flattened. And the most terrible thing was not the fear; it was the shame of failure, of being at a loss for words. His crazed running slowed and turned to a shambling gait, because a heavy weight had settled on his shoulders. When he managed to turn his head, he discovered that there was a child riding him, pommeling his head with vicious thin fists, and forcing his head between his knees. Until he began to choke.
Fima also noted in his book:
"My bedclothes smell. I ought to take a bundle of washing to the laundry today. Yet there was something: I was left with a longing for those barren mountains and the weird light, and especially for the tolling of the bell that echoed in the deserted valleys with very long pauses between the strokes, and seemed to be coming to me from an unimaginable distance."
8. A DISAGREEMENT ON THE QUESTION OF WHO THE INDIANS REALLY ARE
AT TEN O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING, AS HE WAS STANDING AT THE window counting the raindrops, he saw Baruch Nomberg taking his leave of the taxi driver. Fima's father was a dapper old man in a suit and bow tic, with a pointed white beard that curved upward like a Saracen scimitar. At the age of eighty-two he still kept a firm hold of the reins of the cosmetics factory he had set up in the 'thirties.
His father was bending over the window of the taxi, apparently lecturing the driver, with his white hair waving in the breeze, his hat in his left hand and his carved stick with the silver band in the other. Fima knew that the old man was not haggling about the fare or waiting for his change; he was finishing an anecdote he had started telling on the way. For fifty years now he had been conducting an extended seminar with Jerusalem taxi drivers on Hasidic tales and pious stories. He was a dedicated storyteller. And he had a fixed habit of commenting on every anecdote and pointing up the moral lesson. Whenever he told a joke, he would follow it by explaining what the point was. Sometimes he would also explain both the apparent point and the real point. His commentaries always made his listeners laugh, which encouraged the old man to tell more stories and explain them too. He was convinced that the point of the stories had escaped everybody, and that it was his duty to open their eyes.
As a young man Baruch Nomberg had fled from the Bolsheviks in Kharkov and studied chemistry in Prague, then he had come to Jerusalem and started producing lipsticks and face powders in a small domestic laboratory. From these small beginnings a successful cosmetics factory had developed. He was a flirtatious, garrulous old man. A widower for several decades now, he was always surrounded by female friends and companions. Jerusalem gossip had it that they were attracted to him only for his money. Fima thought otherwise: he considered his father, for all his bluster, a good and generous man. All these years it had been his habit to lend his financial support to any cause he found deserving or moving. He was a member of endless committees, councils, societies, associations, and groups. He was a regular participant in fundraising campaigns for the homeless, for the absorption of immigrants, for people in need of complex surgical operations abroad, for land purchase in the Occupied Territories, for the production of commemorative volumes, for the restoration of historic ruins, for the creation of homes for abandoned children and shelters for battered wives. He volunteered his support for needy artists, for the ending of experiments on laboratory animals, for the purchase of wheelchairs, and for the prevention of environmental pollution. He saw no inherent contradiction in backing traditional values in education while also funding a campaign for the prevention of religious coercion. He dispensed grants to students from minority groups, to victims of violent crime, and also for the rehabilitation of the violent criminals. In each of these initiatives the old man committed modest sums, but together they apparently consumed about half of the total income yielded by the cosmetics factory, as well as the greater part of his time. In addition, he had a passion verging on addiction for anything to do with contracts and small print. Whenever he had to purchase new chemicals or dispose of used equipment, he would engage a veritable battery of lawyers, consultants, and accountants in order to close up every conceivable loophole. Legal agreements, notarial ultimatums, copies of initialed memorandums would excite in him a thrill of the game that almost bordered on artistic fulfillment.