Fima heard a faint, low, wheezing sound, almost like a cat's purr, coming from his father's chest with every breath. As though the old man had put a whistle in his throat as a joke.
"Drink your tea, Baruch. It's getting cold."
The old man said:
"Did I ask you for tea, Efraim? I asked you to talk. I asked you to tell me about that forlorn child that you insist on pretending to everybody is the son of that American dummkopf. And I asked that you should put a little order in your life. That you should be a mensch. That you should worry about the future for a change instead of worrying night and day about your beloved Arabs."
"I'm not," Fima corrected him, "worried about the Arabs. I've explained to you a thousand times. I'm worried about us."
"Of course, Efraim, of course. Nobody can impugn the integrity of your motives. The sad thing is, the only people you manage to take in are yourselves. As though your Arabs are just asking nicely and politely if they can have Nablus and Hebron back, and then they'll go home happily ever after, peace be upon Israel and upon Ishmael. But that's not what they want from us. It's Jerusalem they want, Fimuchka, and Jaffa, and Haifa, and Ramla. To slit our throats a little bit, that's all they want. To wipe us out. If you only took the trouble to listen a little to what they say among themselves. The sad thing is, all you ever listen to is yourselves, yourselves, yourselves." Another low, drawn-out whistle escaped from his father's chest, as though he were bewildered by his son's naïveté.
"Actually, they've been saying rather different things recently, Dad."
"Saying. How very nice. Let them say to their heart's content. Saying is easy. They've simply learned from you the rules of how to speak nicely. Eloquence. Winning words. Superciliousness. It's not important what they say. What counts is what they really want. As that roughneck Ben Gurion used to say about Jews and gentiles." Apparently the old man was about to expatiate on this theme, but he was overcome by breathlessness and let out a wheeze that ended in a cough. As though inside him a loose door on squeaky hinges were being blown by the breeze.
"They want to find a compromise now, Baruch. And now we're the intransigent side that refuses to make concessions and won't even talk to them."
"Compromise. Of course. Well spoken. There's nothing as fine as compromise. All life depends on it. Apropos, there's a wonderful story they tell about Rabbi Mendel of Kotsk. But who will you compromise with? With our sworn killers who long to destroy us? Now just you call me a taxi, so I won't be late, and while we're waiting for it, I'll tell you a true story about how Jabotinsky once met the anti-Semitic interior minister of tsarist Russia, Plehve. And d'ye know what Jabotinsky said to him?"
"It was Herzl, Dad. Not Jabotinsky."
"It would be better for you, Mister Wise Guy, if you didn't take the names of Herzl and Jabotinsky in vain. Take your shoes off when you approach their hallowed ground. They must turn in their graves every time you and your friends open your mouths to pour scorn on Zionism."
Fima, suddenly beside himself with fury, forgot his vow of self-restraint and almost gave in to the dark urge to pull his father's goatee or smash his untouched teacup. He exploded in a wounded roar:
"Baruch, you are blind and deaf. We're the Cossacks now, and the Arabs are the victims of the pogroms, yes, every day, every hour."
"The Cossacks," his father remarked with amused indifference. "Nu? What of it? So what's wrong with us being the Cossacks for a change? Where does it say in Holy Scripture that Jew and gentile are forbidden to swap jobs for a little while? Just once in a millennium or so? If only you yourself, my dear, were more of a Cossack and less of a shlemazel. Your child takes after you: a sheep in sheep's clothing."
Having forgotten the beginning of their conversation, he explained all over again, while Fima furiously crushed matchsticks one after another, the difference between a shlemiel and a shlemazel and how they constituted an immortal pair, wandering hand in hand through the world. Then he reminded Fima that the Arabs have forty huge countries, from India to Abyssinia, whereas we have only one tiny country no bigger than a man's hand. He began telling off the names of the Arab states on his bony fingers. When he enumerated Iran and India among them, Fima could no longer endure in silence. He interrupted his father with a plaintive, self-righteous howl, stamped his foot, and exclaimed petulantly that Iran and India are not Arab states.
"Nu, so what? What difference docs it make to you?" the old man intoned in a ritualistic singsong, with a sly, good-natured chortle. "Have we managed at last to find a satisfactory solution to the tragic question of who is a Jew, that we need to start breaking our heads over the question of who is an Arab?"
Fima, in despair, leaped from his chair and rushed to the bookcase to fetch the encyclopedia, hoping at last to silence his father forever with a crushing defeat. However, as in a nightmare, he could not for the life of him imagine in which article to start looking for a list of the Arab states. Or even which volume. He was still fuming and frantically pulling out one volume after another, when he suddenly noticed that his father had got to his feet, quietly humming a Hasidic melody, mingled with a slight dry cough, and had picked up his hat and stick, and in the midst of taking his leave was furtively slipping folded money into his son's trouser pocket.