"I don't understand it either. Look. An hour and a half ago, at the office, I suddenly had a feeling that you were in trouble. That something bad had happened to you. Maybe you were ill, lying here alone in a fever. I tried to call, but your phone was always busy. I thought perhaps you'd forgotten to put the receiver back, once again. I dashed out in the middle of quite an import ant meeting about an insurance company that's gone broke, and came running straight to you. Or, rather, I stopped on the way to do some shopping for you, so you wouldn't starve to death. It's almost as though Uri and I have adopted you as our child. Except that Uri seems to get a kick out of the game, whereas all I get is depressed. The whole time. Again and again I get this feeling that something terrible has happened to you, and I drop everything and come running. Such an awful feeling, as though you were calling out to me from far away: Nina, come quick. There's no explanation. Do me a favor, Fima; stop stuffing yourself with bread. Look how fat you're getting. And, anyway, I haven't got the strength or the inclination right now for your earth-shattering theories about Mitterrand and the British Labour party. Save it for Uri, for Saturday night. All I want you to say is what's wrong. What's happening to you? Something strange is going on that you're keeping from me. Even stranger than usual. As if you were slightly drugged."
Fima obeyed immediately. He stopped munching the piece of bread he was holding and put it down absent-mindedly in die sink like an empty cup. He began to stammer that the wonderful thing about her was that with her he felt hardly any embarrassment. He wasn't afraid of appearing ridiculous. He didn't even care if he was miserable or stupid in her presence, as happened the other night. As if she were his sister. Now he was going to say something trite, but so what? Trite wasn't necessarily the opposite of true. What he wanted to say was that for him she was a good person. And that she had the loveliest fingers he had ever seen.
Still with her back to him, bending over the sink, picking out the piece of bread Fima had put there, scrubbing the ceramic and die taps, carefully rinsing her hands, Nina said sadly:
"You left a sock at my place, Fima."
And then:
"It's ages since we slept together."
She stubbed out her cigarette, clutched his arm with her exquisitely shaped hand, like that of a young girl from the Far East, and whispered:
"Come now. I have to be back in the office in less than an hour."
On their way to the bed Fima was glad that Nina was nearsighted, because there was a momentary glimmer in the ashtray she had stubbed her cigarette out in, and Fima deduced it must be Annette's lost earring.
Nina drew the curtains, rolled back the bedspread, straightened the pillows, and removed her glasses. Her movements were plain and sparing, as if she were getting ready to be examined by her doctor. When she began undressing, he turned his back to her and hesitated a while before he realized that there was no way out of this, he would have to remove his own clothes too. It never rains but it pours, he said to himself. And he slipped quickly between the sheets so she wouldn't notice his slackness. Remembering how he had disappointed her last time, on the rug at her house, he was overcome by shame. He pressed himself tightly against her, but his penis was as limp and unfeeling as a crumpled handkerchief. He buried his head between her heavy, warm breasts as if he were trying to hide from her inside her. They lay motionless, clinging to each other tightly like a pair of soldiers in a trench under shellfire.
And she pleaded in a whisper:
"Don't talk. Don't say anything. I feel good with you just like this."
He had a clear mental image of the butchered dog writhing and oozing the last of his blood with a whimper under a low stone wall among wet bushes and trash. As though in a profound slumber, he murmured between her breasts words she did not hear: Back to Greece, Yael. We'll find love there. And compassion.
Nina glanced at her watch: half past eleven. She kissed him on the forehead, and shaking his shoulder she said affectionately:
"Wake up, boy. Stir yourself. You fell asleep."
She dressed jerkily, put on her thick glasses, and lit another cigarette, not blowing the match out but shaking it.
Before she left, she joined the two parts of the broken radio with a faint click. She turned the knob until the voice of Defense Minister Rabin suddenly filled the room:
"The side that displays the most stamina will win."
"There, that's fixed," said Nina, "and I've got to go."
Fima said:
"Don't be angry with me. I've had a suffocating feeling for days now. As if something awful is going to happen. I hardly sleep at night. I sit writing articles as if there was somebody listening. Nobody's listening and everything seems lost. What's going to become of us all, Nina? Do you know?"
Nina, who was already in the doorway, turned her bespectacled, vixen's face toward him and said:
"I have a chance of finishing relatively early this evening. Come straight to my office after the clinic, and we'll go to the concert at the YMCA. Or we'll go and see that Jean Gabin film. Then we'll go back to my place. Don't be gloomy."
23. FIMA FORGETS WHAT HE HAS FORGOTTEN
FIMA RETURNED TO THE KITCHEN. HE WOLFED DOWN ANOTHER four slices of Nina's fresh black Georgian bread thickly spread with apricot jam. The defense minister said:
"I urge all of us not to resort to all sorts of dubious shortcuts."
Slightly mispronouncing the last word. And Fima, with his mouth full of bread and jam, echoed him:
"And all of us urge you not to report to all sorts of tubeless chalk-huts."
He immediately recoiled from this petty wordplay. As he turned off the radio, he apologized to Rabin:
"I must run. I'm late for work." And, chewing a heartburn tablet, for some reason he pocketed Annette's earring, which he had found in the ashtray among Nina's cigarette butts. He put on his coat, taking particular care not to trap his arm in the lining of the sleeve. And because the bread had not assuaged his hunger, and because in any case he counted it as breakfast, he went into the café opposite his flat for a bite of lunch. He could not remember if the name of the proprietress was Mrs. Schneidmann or simply Mrs. Schneider. He decided it was Schneidermann. As usual, she did not take offense. She beamed at him with a cheery sparkle in her childlike eyes, which reminded him of a rustic Russian icon, and said:
"It's Scheinmann, Dr. Nisan. Never mind. It's not important at all. The main thing is, God should give good health and prosperity to all Jewish people. And peace should come at last to this dear country of ours. It's hard to take so many deaths all the time. Today the stewed beef for the doctor, or the chicken today?"
Fima thought about it, and ordered the stew and an omelette, and a mixed salad, and a fruit compote. At another table sat a small, wrinkled man who struck Fima as glum and unwell. He was lazily reading Yediot Aharonot, turning the pages, staring, picking his teeth, and turning the pages again. His hair seemed to be stuck to his forehead with engine grease. Fima weighed for a moment the chances that it was just he himself, glued to that table since yesterday or the day before, and that all the events of the night and the morning had never taken place. Or that they had happened to somebody else, who resembled him in some ways and differed from him in a few details that didn't matter.
The whole distinction between open possibilities and closed accomplished facts was simplistic. Perhaps his father was right after alclass="underline" There is no such thing as a universal map of reality; it simply cannot exist. Everyone has to find his own way somehow through the forest with the help of unreliable, inaccurate maps that we arc born wrapped in or that we pick up here and there along the way. That is why we are all lost, wandering in circles, bumping into one another unawares, and losing one another in the dark, without so much as a distant glimmer of the supernal radiance.