Tobias, as usual, maintained his self-control. He pronounced a single frosty sentence:
"This time, Fima, I think you've gone a bit too far."
And while Yael put Dimi to bed, Ted phoned for a taxi and even helped Fima to get his arm into the tricky sleeve, fetched his shabby cap, accompanied him downstairs, and personally gave the driver Fima's address, as though to make certain beyond all doubt that he would not change his mind and come knocking on their door again.
And in fact, why not?
He owed them a full explanation.
At that moment, standing naked and sticky in his bathroom, he made up his mind to get dressed at once, call for a taxi, march back in there, wake them up, and talk to them earnestly, till dawn if necessary. It was his duty to alert them to the child's misery. To misery in general. To activate them. Confront them with the full urgency of the danger. With all due respect to jet-propelled vehicles, our first responsibility is to the child. This time he would not give in, he would also open the taxi driver's eyes on the way there, shattering all stubbornness and heartlessness: he would counteract all that brainwashing and force everyone to recognize at long last how close disaster was.
But when there was no answer from the taxi company, he changed his mind and called Annette Tadmor. After two rings he gave up. At three o'clock he got into bed with the history of Alaska in English, which he had absent-mindedly carried away with him from Ted and Yael's without asking their permission. He leafed through it until his eyes tracked down a curious section about the sexual habits of the native Eskimos: every spring they took a mature woman who had been widowed during the winter and handed her over to the adolescent boys as part of their initiation rites.
After ten minutes he switched the light off, curled up, and commanded his cock to calm down and himself to go to sleep. But again he had the impression that a blind man was wandering around outside in the empty street, tapping with his stick on the pavement and the low walls. Fima got out of bed, determined to get dressed and go outside to see what really went on in Jerusalem when no one was looking. He sensed with a kind of nocturnal lucidity that he had to render an account of everything that happened in Jerusalem. The hackneyed expression "nightlife" suddenly stepped out of its literal meaning. Severed in Fima's mind from thronged cafés, brightly lit boulevards, theaters, squares, cabarets, "night life" took on a different, sharp, ice-cold meaning that brooked no frivolity. The ancient Aramaic expression sitra de-itkasia, the concealed or covered side, passed through Fima's body like a single note on the cello out of the heart of darkness. A shudder of fear ran through him.
So he turned the light on, got out of bed, and sat down in his yellowing long underwear on the floor in front of the brown wardrobe. He had to use force to dislodge the jammed bottom drawer. For twenty minutes or so he rummaged through old notebooks, pamphlets, drafts, photographs, jottings, and newspaper clippings, until he came upon a shabby cardboard folder with the words "Ministry of the Interior: Department of Local Government" stamped on it.
Fima extracted from this folder a bundle of old letters in their original envelopes. He systematically scrutinized each envelope in turn, determined for once not to be defeated or sidetracked. Eventually he found Yael's farewell letter. The pages were numbered 2, 3, 4. So apparently the first page was lost. Or perhaps it had merely strayed into another envelope. He noticed that the end of the letter was also missing. Lying on the floor in his underwear, he started to read what Yael had written to him when she went off without him to Seatde in 1965. Her handwriting was tiny, pearl-like, neither feminine nor masculine, but rounded and fluent. Perhaps this was the sort of calligraphy that was taught in respectable schools in the last century. In his mind Fima compared this chaste handwriting to his own scrawl, which resembled a mob of panic-stricken soldiers jostling each other out of the way as they fled during a rout.
18. "YOU'VE FORGOTTEN YOURSELF"
"…TERRIBLE IN YOU, BUT I SIMPLY DIDN'T UNDERSTAND IT. I STILL don't. There's no resemblance between the soulful, dreamy young man who inspired and entertained three girls in the mountains of northern Greece and the lazy, gossipy receptionist who moons around at home all morning, arguing with himself, listening to the news every hour, reading three newspapers and scattering them all over the flat, opening cupboard doors and forgetting to shut them, poking around in the fridge and complaining there isn't any this and there isn't any that. And scurrying off to your friends every evening, barging in without waiting to be invited, with a grubby shirt collar, a cap left over from the 'forties, picking quarrels about politics with everybody into the early hours of the morning until they arc literally praying for you to leave. Even your outward appearance has a secondhand look. You've put on weight, Effy. Maybe it wasn't your fault. Those eyes that were alert and dreamy started to fade and now they've gone dull. In Greece you could hold Liat, me, and Ilia spellbound from moonrise to sunrise with stories about the Eleusinian mysteries, the cult of Dionysos, the Erinyes, goddesses of fate, and the Moirai, goddesses of furious vengeance, Persephone in the underworld, and fabled rivers with names like Styx and Lethe. I haven't forgotten a thing, Effy: I'm a good pupil. Though I sometimes wonder if you yourself can remember anything. You've forgotten yourself.
"We lay on the ground near a spring and you played on a pipe. We found you amazing, enchanting, but also a little frightening. I remember one evening Ilia and Liat made a wreath of oak leaves and arranged it on your head. At that moment I wouldn't have minded if you'd slept with one of them in front of my eyes. Or even with both of them at once. In Greece, in that springtime four years ago, you were a poet even though you didn't write a single word. Now you sit and cover pages every night, but the poet isn't there anymore.
"What charmed us all was your helplessness. On the one hand you were so enigmatic, and on the other hand you were a little clown. A sort of child. One could be a hundred percent certain that if there was a single sliver of glass in the valley, you would tread on it with your bare foot; that if there was just one loose stone in the whole of Greece, it would fall on your head; that if there was a single wasp in the Balkans, it would sting you. When you played your pipe outside some peasant's hut or at the mouth of a cave, there was sometimes a feeling that your body was not a body but a thought. And vice versa: every time you talked to us at night about thoughts, we felt we could almost touch them. All three of us loved you, but instead of getting jealous, with each day that passed we loved each other more. It was something miraculous. Liat slept with you at night on behalf of all three of us, as it were: through Liat you were sleeping with me and with Ilia too. I can't explain it and I don't need an explanation. You could have had any or all of us. But the moment you made your choice, even though the winner turned out to be me, the spell was broken. When you invited us to Jerusalem to meet your father, the magic was not there anymore. Then, when the preparations for the wedding began, you became tired, absent-minded. Once, you forgot me at the bank. Once, you called me Ilia. When you signed that lunatic contract with your father, in the presence of the notary, you suddenly said: 'Goethe ought to be here to see the Devil selling his soul for a mess of pottage.' Your father laughed and I fought back my tears. Your father and I took care of all the arrangements, and you grumbled that your life was foundering in candlesticks and frying pans. Once you lost your temper and shouted at me that you couldn't stand a bedroom without curtains: even in a brothel there were curtains. You stamped your foot like a spoiled brat. Not that I cared: I had no objection to curtains. But that moment was the end of Greece. Your pettiness had begun. One time you made a scene on account of my wasting your father's money, another time on account of your father's money not arriving on time, and several times on account of my overusing 'on account of.' You corrected my grammar every other sentence.