Apart from Dimi and his parents, there was the group: pleasant, respectable people, some of whom had known Fima from student days and had been indirectly involved in the ordeals of the billy-goat year, and some of whom still hoped that one day the fellow would wake up, get his act together, and one way or another take Jerusalem by the ears. True, they said, he sometimes gets on your nerves, he overdoes it, he has no sense of proportion, but on the other hand when he's brilliant he's really brilliant. One day he's really going to get somewhere. He's worth investing in. Last Friday, for example, early in the evening, before he started making a fool of himself with his imitations of politicians, the way he snatched the word "ritual" out of Tsvi's mouth and held us all spellbound like little kids when he suddenly said, "Everything is ritual," and fired his theory at us straight from the hip. We haven't stopped talking about it all week. Or that amazing comparison he threw out, of Kafka and Gogol, and of the two of them with Hasidic folk tales.
Over the years some of them grew fond of Fima's unique combination of wit and absent-mindedness, of melancholy and enthusiasm, of sensitivity and helplessness, of profundity and buffoonery. Moreover, he was always available to be roped in to do some proofreading or to discuss a draft of an article. Behind his back they said, not unkindly, True, he's a — how to put it? — he's an original, and he's goodhearted. The trouble is, he's bone idle. He has no ambition. He simply doesn't think about tomorrow. And he's not getting any younger.
Despite which, there was something in his pudgy form, his shuffling, abstracted way of walking, his fine, high brow, his weary shoulders, his thinning fair hair, and his kindly eyes that always seemed lost and looking cither inward or out beyond the mountains and the desert, something in his appearance that filled them with affection and joy and made them smile broadly even when they caught sight of him from a distance, on the other side of the street, wandering around the city center as though he did not know who had brought him there or how he was going to get out again. And they said: Look, there's Fima over there, waving his arms. He must be having an argument with himself, and presumably he's winning it.
In the course of time a certain uneasy friendliness, filled with anger and contradictions, developed between Fima and his father, the well-known cosmetics manufacturer Baruch Nomberg, who was a veteran member of the right-wing Herut party. Even now, when Fima was fifty-four and his father eighty-two, the father would slip a couple of ten-shekel notes, or a single twenty-shekel note, into his son's pocket at the end of every visit. Meanwhile Fima's little secret was that he deposited eighty shekels each month in a savings account in the name of Ted and Yael's son, who was ten now but still looked like a seven-year-old, dreamy and trustful. Strangers on buses sometimes noticed a vague resemblance between Fima and the child, in the shape of the chin or the forehead, or in the walk. The previous spring Dimi had asked to keep a pair of tortoises and some silkworms in a little storage space that Fima and Ted cleared for him on the balcony of the messy kitchen of the flat in Kiryat Yovel. And even though Fima was considered by others and even by himself as incorrigibly idle and absent-minded, all through the summer there was not a single day when he forgot to attend to what he took to calling "our can of worms." Now, in the winter, the silkworms were dead, and the tortoises had been set free in the wadi, at the point where Jerusalem abruptly ends and a rocky wilderness begins.
4. HOPES OF OPENING A NEW CHAPTER
THE PRIVATE CLINIC IN KIRYAT SHMUEL WAS APPROACHED through the garden behind the building, along a pathway paved with Jerusalem stone. Now that it was winter, the path was covered with slippery rain-soaked pine needles. Fima was totally absorbed in considering whether a frozen bird he had just spotted on a low branch could hear the thunder that was rolling from west to east; the bird's head and beak were buried deep in the plumage of its wing. Struck by a sudden doubt, he turned back to see if it really was a bird or if it was just a wet pine cone. That was how he came to slip and fall to his knees. He stayed crouching, not because he was in pain, but because of self-mocking pleasure at his own predicament. Softly he said, Well done, pal.
For some reason he felt he had deserved this fall as a sort of logical sequel to the minor miracle he had experienced outside the Hilton Hotel on his way here.
When he eventually managed to get to his feet, he stood absent-mindedly in the rain, looking like someone who does not know where he has come from or where he must go. Raising his head toward the upper floors, he saw nothing but closed shutters or blank curtained windows. Here and there on a balcony was a geranium in a pot. The rain had given them a sensual sparkle that brought to his mind the painted lips of a vulgar woman.
Beside the entrance to the clinic there was an elegantly restrained plate of black glass inscribed in silver lettering: DR. WAHRHAFTIG DR. EITAN CONSULTANT GYNECOLOGISTS. For the thousandth time Fima asked himself why there were not specialists for male disorders too. He also objected to the Hebrew, which contained a construction that the language does not tolerate. Then he found himself ridiculous for thinking such an absurd sentence. And felt shame and confusion as he recalled how indignantly he had reacted to the news, indignant not because of the death of an Arab boy in the Jebeliyeh refugee camp but because of the phrase "killed by a plastic bullet."
As if it's the bullets that do the killing.
And was he getting soft in the head himself?
He summoned his cabinet for another meeting in the dilapidated classroom. At the door he posted a burly sentry in khaki shorts, Arab headdress, and knit cap. Some of his ministers sat on the bare floor at his feet, others leaned against the wall, which was covered with educational diagrams. In a few well-chosen words Fima presented them with the need to choose between the territories conquered in 'sixty-seven and our very identity. Then, while they were still buzzing excitedly, he called for a vote, which he won, and immediately gave them his detailed instructions.
Before we won the Six Days' War, he mused, the state of the nation was less dangerous and destructive than it is now. Or perhaps it wasn't really less dangerous, just less demoralizing and less depressing. Was it really easier for us to face up to the danger of annihilation than to sit in the dock facing the accusations of international public opinion? The danger of annihilation gave us pride and a sense of unity, whereas sitting in the dock now is gradually breaking our spirit. But that's not the right way to state the alternatives. In fact, sitting in the dock may be breaking the spirit only of the secular intelligentsia of Russian or Western origin, whereas the ordinary masses are not in the least nostalgic for the pride of David standing up to Goliath. Anyway, the expression "ordinary masses" is a hollow cliché. Meanwhile, because you fell, your trousers are covered with mud and the hands that are wiping them clean are also muddy and the rain is pouring down on your head. It is already five past one. However hard you try, you'll never get to work on time.
The clinic was two ground-floor flats joined together. The windows, guarded by arabesque grilles, looked out on a typical back garden, damp and deserted, shaded by dense pine trees around whose bases a few gray boulders sprouted. A rustle of treetops started at the slightest breeze. Now, with a strong wind blowing, Fima had a fleeting image of a remote village in Poland or one of the Baltic States, with storms shrieking through the surrounding forest, whipping across snowbound fields, assailing thatched cottage roofs, and making the church bells ring. And wolves howling not far away. In his head Fima already had a little story about this village, about Nazis, Jews, and partisans, which he might tell to Dimi this evening, in exchange for a ladybug in a jam jar or a spaceship cut out of orange peel.