Fima despaired of the bus and started walking toward Rehavia. Vainly he tried to remember whether he had promised Nina to pick her up from her office after work and take her to see the Jean Gabin film, or whether they had arranged to meet at the cinema. Or was it Annette Tadmor that he had arranged to see? Was it possible that in a fit of absent-mindedness he had asked them both out? He could not find a telephone token in any of his pockets, so he went on walking the empty streets, which were lit occasionally by a yellow streetlight swathed in flickering mist. He walked, oblivious to the biting cold, and thought about his mother, who had also been fond of the cold and loathed the summer. And he wondered what his good friend Uri Gefen was doing at this moment in Rome. Uri was probably sitting in a crowded café in some piazza surrounded by witty men and pretty, provocative women, roaring in his peasant voice and fascinating his audience with stories of air battles in which he had taken pan, or amorous adventures in the Far East, letting fall as usual some wry generalization about the capriciousness of desire, describing in well-chosen words the inevitable shadow of ridicule that accompanies every action and inevitably conceals one's true motives, and concluding with some indulgent commonplace that would finally spread a sort of veil of conciliatory irony over his whole story, the loves, lies, and generalizations he had enunciated before.
Fima ached to feel the touch of Uri's broad, gnarled hand on the back of his neck. He longed for his parodies, his smell, his thick breath, and his warm laughter. At the same time and without any contradiction, he was sorry that his friend was returning from abroad in a couple of days. He was ashamed of his affair with Nina, even though he suspected that Uri had known for a long time about this sexual welfare work and might even have suggested it himself, out of benevolence and affection for the two of them, Fima and Nina, and perhaps also with a sense of detached amusement or regal irony. Was it possible that he asked for and received from Nina a detailed report after each session? Did they sit and rerun the film in slow motion, chuckling together indulgently? A couple of nights ago he had let Nina down, on the rug at her home, and this morning, thanks to Annette, he had let her down again in his own bed. His heart shrank as he remembered how she had stroked his forehead with her wonderfully shaped fingers and whispered to him that like this, with his limp cock, he was penetrating her more deeply than during intercourse. How rare, almost mystical, those words seemed now; they seemed to glow with a precious radiance as he recalled them, and he craved to mend what he had spoiled, to give her and Annette and also Tamar and Yael and every woman in the world, including the plain and unwanted ones, a proper carnal love, and a fatherly and brotherly love, and a spiritual love too.
From a dark garden an unseen dog barked furiously. Fima, startled, replied:
"What's wrong? What have I done?"
And then he added indignantly:
"I'm sorry: I don't believe we've met."
He imagined the domestic winter life behind these façades, behind shutters, windows, and curtains. A man is sitting cosily in his armchair, in his slippers, reading a book about the history of dams. There is a small glass of brandy on the arm of his chair. His wife comes out of the shower with wet hair, pink and fragrant, wrapped in a blue flannel dressing gown. On the rug a small child is silently playing dominoes. A delicate flower of flame blossoms in the grate. Soon they will have their supper in front of the television, watching a family comedy. After that they will put the child to bed with a story and a good-night kiss, then sit side by side on the living-room couch, with their stocking feet propped up on the coffee table, whispering to each other and gradually settling into silence, perhaps holding hands. The moan of an ambulance will sound outside, then only thunder and wind. The man will get up to make sure the kitchen window is fastened properly. He will return carrying a tray with two glasses of lemon tea and a plate of peeled oranges. A small wall light will cast a reddish-brown domestic glow on the two of them.
In the dark Fima felt a pang. These images not only aroused longing for Yael, but also gave him a strange feeling of nostalgia for himself. As though one of these lighted windows concealed another Fima, the real Fima, not overweight, not a nuisance, not losing his hair, not in yellowing long underwear, but a hard-working, straightforward Fima, living his life in a rational way without shame or falsehood. A calm, punctilious Fima. Even though he had understood for a long time that the truth was not within his reach, he still felt a longing, deep inside, to get away from the falsehood that seeps through like fine dust into every corner of his life, even the most intimate parts.
The other, the real Fima was sitting at this moment in a cosy study, surrounded by bookcases punctuated by prints of Jerusalem as seen by travelers and pilgrims of earlier centuries. His head floated in a pool of light from a desk lamp. His left hand rested on the knee of his wife, who sat close to him on the edge of his desk, her legs dangling, as they exchanged ideas on some new theory about the immune system or quantum physics. Not that Fima had the slightest understanding of the immune system or quantum physics, but he imagined to himself that the real Fima and his wife, there in the warm, cosy study, were both experts in one or both of these subjects, working together on developing some new idea that would reduce the amount of suffering in the world. Was this study what Chili, or his mother, meant in the dream when she called him to come over to the Aryan side?
On the corner of Smolenskin Street in front of Prime Minister Shamir's official residence, Fima noticed a little girl on top of a bundle of blankets near the trash cans. Was she on a hunger strike? Had she fainted? Had she been killed? Had some grieving mother from Bethlehem deposited here the corpse of her daughter, killed by us? Alarmed, he bent over the tot, but it turned out to be nothing more than a damp heap of garden clippings wrapped in a sack. Fima lingered beside it. The idea of lying down here and mounting his own hunger strike suddenly appealed to him: it seemed both attractive and relevant. Looking up, he saw a single yellow light behind a drawn curtain in the last room on the upper floor. He imagined Yitzhak Shamir pacing up and down between the window and the door, his hands behind his back, worrying over a telegram that lay before him on the windowsill, not knowing what to reply, perhaps feeling the winter pains of old age in his shoulders and back. After all, he was not a young man. He too had had his revolutionary years in the underground. It might be a good thing to set aside animosity for a while, go in there and cheer him up, ease his loneliness, talk to him all night, man to man, not with petty contentiousness or sermonizing or accusations, but as one good friend to another gently trying to open the eyes of one who has been involved by bad people in a rotten business from which apparently there is no way out, but which actually has a rational and indeed straightforward and affordable solution that can be driven home even to the most stubborn mind with a few hours of talking, of calm, soothing conversation. Provided the friend who is in trouble does not shut himself up and take refuge behind a barricade of lies and rhetoric, but opens his mind, listens to you with humility, and contemplates a range of possibilities that he has so far ruled out, not from arrogance but because of prejudices, ossified habits of thought, and deeply rooted fears. And what is so wrong with compromise, Mr. Shamir? Each side receives only a part of what it believes it deserves, but the nightmare is ended. The wounds begin to heal. And didn't you yourself achieve your present position as a sort of compromise candidate? Surely you must have compromised now and again with your colleagues? Or with your wife? Haven't you?