For a few moments he mulled over the details in his mind, casting the characters and directing die scenes. Then he grabbed the receiver and dialed Nina's office. When the telephone made no sound, he tried Annette. Once again the response was total silence. He called both numbers alternately five or six times, to no avail. All the systems in this country are breaking down. The lines of communication are congested, the hospitals are paralyzed, the electricity supply is unreliable, the universities are going bankrupt, factories are closing down one after another, education and research are sinking to the level of India's, public services are collapsing, and all because of this obsession with the Territories, which is gradually ruining us. How did the taxi driver put it: "Ever since that shit landed on us in 'sixty-seven, the state's been going to the dogs." Fima waved the telephone in the air, banged it on the table, shook it, ratded it, pleaded with it, swore at it, bashed it, and thumped it, but nothing helped. Then it occurred to him that he had only himself to blame. How many times had he ignored the printed notices he had found in his mailbox about the nonpayment of his bill. Now they had got their own back. They had cut him off from the world. Like a cantor on a desert island.
Cunningly he tried to dial again, very slowly and gently, like a burglar, like a lover. He could not remember if the emergency number for such eventualities was one four, one eight, or simply one hundred. He was ready and willing to settle his debt this very minute, to apologize in person or in writing, to give a lecture to the telephone workers on Christian mysticism, to pay a fine or a bribe, anything so long as they came at once to bring his telephone back to life. First thing in the morning he would go straight to the bank. Or was it the post office? He would pay his bill and be rescued from the desert island. But tomorrow, Fima remembered, was Friday, and all public offices were closed. Perhaps he should call his father and ask him to use his connections. Next week his father was turning his painters and plasterers loose on him. Maybe he should run away to Cyprus? Or the Galapagos Islands? Or at least to that guest house in Magdiel?
He changed his mind. He saw the situation in a fresh light. Immediately he felt better. Fate must have intervened to save him from Jean Gabin and the orgy. The words "desert island" filled him with joy. It would be wonderful to spend a quiet evening at home. Outside, the storm could ratde the windows to its heart's content: he would light the kerosene heater, sit down in the armchair, and try to get a little closer to the other Fima, the real one, instead of wearing himself out with diplomatic efforts to mollify two offended women and then exhausting himself all night to satisfy their appetites. He was particularly delighted that he was relieved, as though by the wave of a magic wand, of the obligation to put his coat and cap on again and go out into the empty, freezing, rain-lashed city. Had he really decided to act like Uri Gefen? To step into his father's shoes? To start leaping around like a billy-goat again, a shabby, mangy old bear like him? First let's see you piss once without stuttering.
Instead of playing the fool, better to sit down now at the desk, switch on the lamp, and compose a devastating reply to Gunter Grass's speech. Or a letter to Yitzhak Rabin. Or write that article on the heart of Christendom. And for once he'd be able to watch the nine o'clock news without interruption. Or fall asleep in front of the television in the middle of a brainless melodrama. Or, better still, curl up in bed with the book he had borrowed from Ted, study the life of the whalers in Alaska, imagine the simplicity of primitive nomads, enjoy the strange sexual habits of the Eskimos. The custom of handing over a ripe widow to the adolescent boys as part of their initiation rites suddenly caused a delicious pulsing in his loins. And tomorrow morning he would explain everything to his lovers, who would surely forgive him: after all, it was more or less a case of force majeure. Besides the sense of relief and the message in his loins, he also felt hungry. He had eaten nothing all evening. So he went to the kitchen, and without even sitting gulped down five thick slices of bread and jam, devoured two tomatoes whole without bothering to slice them, ate a jar of yogurt, swallowed two glasses of tea with honey, and rounded the whole off with a heartburn tablet. To encourage his hesitant bladder he flushed the toilet in the middle, lost the race, and had to wait for the cistern to refill. But he got bored waiting, and went around the flat turning the lights off, then stood at the window to examine what was new in the empty fields stretching away to Bethlehem: perhaps there was already some sign of a distant radiance. He took pleasure in the rattling of the windowpanes under the onslaught of the sharp black wind.
Here and there on the dark slopes a pale gleam shimmered: Arab stone cottages scattered among orchards and boulders. The shadows of the hills deluded him, as though they were exchanging elusive caresses that were not of this world. Once upon a time kings and prophets, saviors, world reformers, madmen who heard voices, zealots, ascetics, and dreamers walked around Jerusalem. And one day in the future, in a hundred years or more, new men, totally different from us, would be living here. Earnest, self-contained people. No doubt they would find all our troubles weird, unintelligible, perplexing. Meanwhile, and for the time being, between the past and the future, we have been sent to inhabit Jerusalem. The city has been entrusted to our stewardship. And we fill it with oppression, foolishness, and injustice. We inflict humiliation, frustration, torture on each other, not out of arrogance but merely from laziness and fear. We pursue good and cause evil. We seek to comfort and instead we wound. We aim to increase knowledge, and instead we increase pain.
"Don't you judge me," Fima grumbled aloud to Yoezer. "Just be quiet. Anyway, what can a wishy-washy individual like you understand? Who's talking to you anyway?"
Large sharp stars shone before his tired eyes. Fima did not know their names, and he did not care which was Mars or Jupiter or Saturn. But he longed to understand where the vague feeling came from, that this was not the first time. That he had been here before, long ago. That he had already seen these glimmering stars on a cold deserted winter's night. Not from the window of this flat, but maybe from the doorway of one of the low stone cottages among the dark boulders opposite. And he had asked himself then what the stars in the sky wanted from us and what the shadow of the hills in the darkness was saying. And there was a simple answer. Which had been forgotten. Wiped away. Although for a moment he had the feeling that that answer was struggling on the threshold of his memory, so close he could reach out and touch it. He hit his forehead against the glass, and shivered with cold. Bialik, for one, claimed that the stars cheated him. They had not kept their promise. Their appointment, as it were. But surely it is the other way around: they have not cheated us, we have cheated them. We are the ones who have not kept our promise. They called us, and we forgot to go. They spoke, and we refused to hear. Cranes wheeled — and were gone.
Say a word. Give me just a little pointer, a hint, a clue, a wink, and I'll get up and go at once. I won't even stop to change my shirt. I'll go right away. Or prostrate myself at your feet. Falling in a trance with wide-open eyes.
Outside, the wind blew stronger. Sheets of water broke against his forehead through the windowpane. The hole in the clouds over the Bethlehem hills, through which the stars had been glimmering, was also dark now. He suddenly fancied he heard a shrill crying far away, as though a baby had been abandoned in a wet blanket on the slope of the wadi. As though he must run immediately and help his mother find her lost child. But he said to himself that it was probably nothing but a creaking shutter. Or one of the neighbors' children. Or a cat freezing in the yard. However hard he stared, all he could see was darkness. No sign appeared, either in the hills or in the faint gleams of light in the cottages scattered on the opposite slope, or in the dark sky. Isn't it unjust, wicked, to call me to go without giving me so much as a tiny clue where? Where the meeting place is. Whether there is or isn't to be a meeting. Whether I am the one who is being called or if it is actually one of my neighbors. Whether there is or isn't something inside this darkness.