"That's enough." Fima smiled wryly. "We have sinned. We have transgressed. That's enough."
When he got off the bus, he muttered like a captious old man: "Wordplay. Empty wordplay." Because suddenly his earlier juggling with the words for "forget" and "dwindle" or "die away" struck him as so cheap that he did not even say thank you or good-bye to the driver as he got off the bus, which he was always very particular about doing, even in moments of absent-mindedness, including yesterday when he inadvertently got off at the wrong stop.
Fima stood in the gray street for a moment or two, among dead leaves and scraps of paper blowing in the wind. He concentrated on the whisper of damp pines behind the stone walls, and he stared at the departing bus. What had he left on the bus? A book? An umbrella? An envelope? Perhaps a small package? Something belonging to Tamar? Or to Annette Tadmor? "Cranes wheel and whirl": a forgotten line from an old children's song suddenly came back to him. He consoled himself with the hope that what he had forgotten on the seat was merely the copy of Ma'ariv that he found there. Thanks to the minister and the cranes, he could not even remember the headlines.
24. SHAME AND GUILT
IN THE GARDEN, AS HE WALKED ALONG THE PAVED PATH THAT LED around the small block of flats to the clinic, he stopped and stood for a moment, because from the second floor, through closed windows, wind, and rustling pine trees, there came the sound of a cello. One of the old women, or perhaps a pupil, was practicing the same scales over and over again.
Fima tried vainly to identify the tune, standing and listening like a man who does not know where he has come from or where he must go. If only he could change his material state at this instant, and become air, or stone, or a crane. A cello was being plucked inside him, answering the cello overhead in its own language, a sound of yearning and self-mockery. He had a mental image of the lives of those three elderly women musicians, who ratded along rain-swept winter roads for hours in a taxi to give a recital in some remote kibbutz at the far end of Upper Galilee or at the opening ceremony of a war veterans' reunion. How did they spend their free evenings in the winter? After washing the dishes and clearing up the kitchen, they probably gathered, the three of them, in their communal room. Fima conjured up the image of a severely puritanical room containing a pendulum clock with the hours marked in Roman characters, a sideboard, a heavy, thick-legged round dining table, and dark straight-backed chairs. A gray woollen poodle crouched on the carpet in a corner of the room. On the closed grand piano, on the table, and on the chest of drawers were spread lace mats, like those that covered every available surface in his father's flat in Rehavia. There was also a heavy, old-fashioned radio set, and blue dried flowers in a tall vase. The curtains were drawn, the shutters closed tight, and a blue flame glowed in the heater, which bubbled faintly from time to time as the kerosene flowed from the reservoir to the wick. One of the women, perhaps each in turn, read softly to the others from an old German novel. Lotte in Weimar, for example. There was no sound the whole evening apart from the reader's voice and the ticking of the clock and the bubbling of the heater. At eleven o'clock precisely they got up and went to their respective bedrooms. Their three doors closed behind them until the morning. And in the main room, in the deep silence and the darkness, the clock kept ticking relentlessly, and chiming softly every hour.
At the entrance to the clinic Fima saw the elegant plate inscribed with the words DR. WAHRHAFTIG DR. EITAN CONSULTANT GYNECOLOGISTS. As usual, he was irked by the construction that Hebrew did not tolerate.
"So let it not tolerate it. So what?"
And did Nora, Wahrhaftig's only daughter, who had been married to Gad Eitan and had run off ten years ago with a visiting Latin-American poet, ever suffer pangs of nostalgia? Of conscience? Of shame and guilt? Her name was never mentioned here. She was never alluded to, even indirectly. As if she had never existed. Only Tamar occasionally whispered something to Fima about a letter that had been returned to sender, or a telephone hung up without a word. Tamar persisted in trying to persuade him that Gad was not really a bad man but was just frightened and hurt. Except when she occasionally said the exact opposite: Any woman would have left such a viper.
Fima put on his short white coat, sat down behind his reception desk, and looked at the appointments book. As though he was trying to guess which patient was going to materialize in his life as the next Annette Tadmor.
Tamar said:
"There arc two patients inside. The one with Dr. Basso Profundo is a little like Margaret Thatcher; Gad's looks like a schoolgirl, quite pretty."
Fima said:
"I nearly phoned you in the middle of the night. I managed to find your Finnish general, the one who begins and ends with M. It's Mannerheim. He was really called von Mannerheim. A German name. He was the one who amazed the whole world by halting Stalin's invasion in 1938. He led the tiny Finnish army against vastly superior Soviet forces."
Tamar said:
"You know everything. You could have been a university professor. Or a Cabinet minister."
Fima considered this, agreed with her in his heart, and replied warmly:
"You are the ideal woman, Tamar. It's a disgrace to the male sex that nobody has snatched you away from us yet. Though on second thought there isn't a man alive who's worthy of you."
Her stocky, robust body, her soft, fair hair gathered into a small bun at the back, even her one green eye and one brown one suddenly made her look touchingly childlike, and he asked himself why he shouldn't go up to her, clasp her shoulders, and bury her head in his chest as though she were his daughter. But this urge to console was mixed with another: to boast to her that two women had made the pilgrimage to his flat that morning and offered themselves to him, one after the other. He hesitated, pulled himself together, and said nothing. When had a man's hand last touched that stout body? How would she react if he suddenly reached out and cupped her breasts in his hands? With shock? Outrage? Guilty surrender? You fool, he said to his penis: now you remember. And as though he could feel her nipples nestling in the soft center of each palm, he clenched his fists and smiled.