Fima

Fima was almost tempted to ask the proprietress who the other gentleman was, and how long he had been sitting like that, squandering life's rich treasure at the green-and-white-oilcloth-covered table. Eventually he decided to make do with asking her what she thought should be done to bring peace nearer.

Mrs. Scheinmann reacted with suspicion. She glanced all around apprehensively, before replying shyly:

"What do we understand? Let the higher-ups decide. The generals in our government. God should only give them good health. And he should give them also plenty good sense."

"Should we make some concessions to the Arabs?"

Apparently afraid of spies, or of tripping herself, or simply of words themselves, she glanced toward the door and the curtain to the kitchen before whispering:

"We need to have some pity. That is all we need."

Fima persisted:

"Pity for the Arabs or pity for ourselves?"

She gave him another timid, coquettish smile, like a peasant girl disconcerted by a sudden question about the color of her underwear or the distance from here to the moon. She replied with graceful shrewdness:

"Pity is pity."

The man at the next table, who looked emaciated and tortured, with his greasy hair stuck to his skull, and who Fima imagined to be a petty clerk with hemorrhoids, perhaps a retired sanitation officer, intervened in the conversation with a Romanian accent and a flat intonation, picking his teeth all the time:

"Sir. Excuse. Please. What Arabs? What peace? What state? Who needs it? While we live, we must enjoy. Why you give a damn for the rest of the world? What, the rest of the world give a damn for you? Just enjoy. The most you can do. Just have good time. All the rest, you waste your time. Excuse for interrupting."

Fima did not think the speaker looked much like someone who had a good time; more like someone who made a few pounds now and then by informing on his neighbors to the Income Tax Department. The man's hands shook.

Fima inquired politely:

"You're saying we should trust to the government in everything? We should look after our own affairs and not meddle in public matters?"

The doleful informer said:

"Best is from the government also they go have a good time. And from the government of the Arabs also. And same thing from the goyim. All happy all the day. Anyway we all dies."

Mrs. Scheinmann smiled conspiratorially at Fima, ignoring the dismissed clerk. Obsequiously, as though to apologize for what he was obliged to listen to here, she said:

"Pay no attention, Doctor. His little girl is died, his wife is died, his brothers is also died. And also, he has not got a penny. He speaks not from his brains. This is a man which God is forgotten."

Fima scrabbled in his pockets but found only loose change, so he asked the proprietress to put it on his account. Next week, when he was paid… But she interrupted him blithely:

"Never mind. Don't worry. Everything is fine."

And without being asked she brought him a glass of sweet lemon tea and added:

"Anyway, everything come from Heaven."

He did not agree with her on this point, but the music of her words touched him like a caress, and he suddenly placed his fingers on her veined hand and thanked her. He praised the food and expressed enthusiastic agreement with what she had said earlier: "Pity is pity."

Once, when Dimi was eight, Ted and Yael had called him in a panic at ten in the morning to ask him to help search for the child, who apparently ran away from school because the other children had been bullying him. Without a moment's hesitation Fima called a taxi and hurried to the cosmetics factory in Romema. And indeed he found Baruch and Dimi shut up together in the small laboratory, bent over a bench, silvery mane touching albino curls; they were distilling a bluish liquid in a test tube over a burner. As he entered, the old man and the child both fell silent, like conspirators caught in the act. In those days Dimi was still in the habit of calling both Baruch and Fima "Granpa." The father, with his Trotsky beard curving upward like a Saracen scimitar, refused to reveal to Fima the nature of their experiment: there was no way of knowing whose side he was on. But Dimi, serious and secretive, said he trusted Fima not to give them away. Granpa and me arc developing an antistupidity spray. Wherever stupidity shows up, you can pull out a little canister, give a squirt, and it's gone. Fima said: You'll have to manufacture at least a hundred thousand tons of it in the first batch. Baruch said: Maybe we're wasting our time, Diminka. Clever people don't need the treatment, and as for fools, tell me, my dears, why should we weary ourselves for fools? Why don't we have some fun instead? At once he rang for a tray of candy, nuts, and fruit. With a sigh he took a bundle of little sticks out of a drawer and told the child to lock the door; the three of them spent the rest of the morning absorbed in a spillikins contest. The memory of that illicit morning's fun shone in Fima's mind as a patch of happiness such as he had never known even in his own childhood. Then, at midday, he had had to stir himself and return Dimi to his parents. Ted sentenced the child to two hours' solitary confinement in the bathroom and a further two days of house arrest. Fima also received a reprimand. He was almost sorry they had abandoned work on the antistupidity spray.

In the bus on the way to work he thought over what Mrs. Schoenberg had said about the doleful informer, and said to himself: To be forgotten by God is not necessarily to be doomed. On the contrary, it may mean becoming as light and free as a lizard in the desert. He brooded on the similarity between two Hebrew verbs, the one meaning "forget" and the other "dwindle" or "die away." The most wretched fate was not to be forgotten but, precisely, to fade away. Will, longings, memories, carnal desires, curiosity, passion, gladness, generosity — everything gradually faded. As the wind died in the mountains, so the spirit too expired. Indeed, even pain decreased somewhat with the passage of the years, but then, together with pain, other signs of life also declined. The simple, silent, primal things, those things that every child greeted with excitement and wonderment, such as die succession of the seasons, a kitten scampering in the yard, a door swiveling on its hinges, the life cycle of plants, swelling fruit, whispering pines, a column of ants on the veranda, the play of light on the valleys and the hillsides, the pallor of the moon and its halo, spiders' webs laden with dewdrops in the early morning, the miracles of breathing, speech, twilight, water boiling and water freezing, the glitter of the midday sun on a any sliver of glass, so many primal things that we once had but have lost. Things never to return. Or, worse, they will return rarely, glimmering in the distance, while the original excitement will have vanished forever. And everything is dimmed and dissolved. Life itself is gradually growing dusty and grubby. Who will win in France? What will the Likud central committee decide? Why was the article rejected? How much docs a managing director earn? How will the minister respond to the charges that have been leveled at him?

This morning I was told, and said myself: "I'm late, I must run." But why? Run where? For what? Surely even Minister Rabin must have been excited by those primal things once, as he stood a thousand years ago, a withdrawn, ginger-haired child, a thin, freckled child with no shoes on, in a back yard in Tel Aviv, among the clotheslines, at six o'clock on an autumn morning, when suddenly a flock of cranes flew past overhead, white against the dawn clouds, promising him, like me, a pure world, hill of silence and blueness, far from words and lies, if only we dare leave everything behind and get up and go. But here we are, this minister of defense just like the rest of us who attack him daily in the newspapers, we've all forgotten and we've all faded. We are all dead souls. Everywhere we go, we leave behind us a trail of lifeless words, from which it is only a short way to the corpses of Arab children killed daily in the Territories. A short way to the fact that a man like me erases from the register of the dead, without thinking, the children of the family of settlers burned alive the day before yesterday by a Molotov cocktail on the road to Alfei Menashe. How could I have forgotten? Was their death insufficiendy innocent? Unworthy to enter the shrine of suffering of which we have, as it were, made ourselves the guardians? Is it just that the settlers frighten and infuriate me, whereas the Arab children weigh on my conscience? Can a worthless man like me have sunk so low as to make a distinction between the intolerable killing of children and the not-so-intolerable killing of children? Justice itself sounded forth from the mouth of Mrs. Schoenberg when she said to me simply: "Pity is pity." Minister of Defense Rabin is betraying our basic values ct cetera, whereas in Rabin's view I and my ilk are betraying the fundamental principles et cetera. But in relation to the distant call of the primal splendor of an autumn morning, in relation to that flight of cranes, surely we are all traitors. No difference between the minister and me. We have even poisoned Dimi and his friends. Therefore I ought to write a few lines to Rabin, to apologize, to try to explain that we are in the same boat after all. Or perhaps to ask for a meeting?