"Would you be good enough to spare me a moment of your time, sir?"
Ben Gurion stopped and exclaimed:
"Lupatin! What arc you doing in Jerusalem? Who is guarding Galilee?"
Baruch replied calmly:
"I am not Lupatin, and you, sir, are not the Messiah. Despite what your purblind disciples no doubt whisper in your ear. I advise you not to believe them."
The prime minister said:
"What, you're not Grisha Lupatin? Arc you sure you're not mistaken? You look very like him. So, a case of mistaken identity. In that case, who are you?"
Baruch said:
"I happen to belong to the opposite camp."
"To Lupatin?"
"No, sir, to you. And if I may allow myself the liberty of saying so…"
But Ben Gurion had already begun to stride ahead, and all he said as he went was:
"So, oppose, oppose. But don't be so busy opposing that you fail to raise this charming boy to be a faithful lover of Israel and a defender of his people and his land. All the rest is irrelevant." And so saying, he marched on, followed by the good-looking man whose function was apparently to protect him from being pestered.
Baruch said:
"Genghis Khan!"
And he added:
"Sec for yourself, Efraim, whom Providence has selected to save Israeclass="underline" the bramble from the parable of Jotham."
Fima, who had been sixteen at the time, smiled in the dark as he recalled how astonished he had been to discover that Ben Gurion was shorter than he was and potbellied, with a huge red face and a dwarf's legs, and a voice as loud and raucous as a fishwife's. What had his father been trying to say to the prime minister? What would he himself say to him now, with hindsight? And who was that Lupatin or Lupatkin who neglected the defense of Galilee?
Was it not possible that the child Yael had not wanted might have grown up to be world famous?
And what about Dimi?
Suddenly Fima had a brainstorm: he realized that it was actually Yael, with her research on jet-propelled vehicles, who was likelier than any of us to achieve what Baruch had never given up dreaming of for him. And he asked himself if he was not himself the bramble from the parable of Jotham. Tsvika, Uri, Teddy, Nina, Yael — they are all fruiting trees, and only you, Mr. Eugene Onegin of Kiryat Yovel, go through life generating foolishness and falsehood. Driveling on and pestering everybody. Arguing with cockroaches and lizards.
Why should he not decide to devote the remainder of his days, starting today, or tomorrow, to smoothing their paths for them? He would shoulder the burden of bringing up the child. He would learn how to cook and do the washing. Every morning he would sharpen all the colored pencils on the drawing board. Every so often he would change the ribbon on the computer. If computers have ribbons. And so, humbly, as the unknown soldier, he would make his own modest contribution to the development of jet propulsion and the acquisition of world fame.
In his childhood, on warm summer evenings in Rehavia, solitary sounds of a piano could be heard through closed shutters. Even the stifling air seemed to mock these sounds. Now they were gone and forgotten. Ben Gurion and Lupatin were dead. The refugee scholars with their Homburgs and bow ties were dead. And between them and Yoezer, we lie and fornicate and murder. What is left? Pine trees and silence. And some battered German tomes with the gold lettering on their spines already fading.
Suddenly Fima had to fight back tears of longing. Not longing for the dead, or for what once existed here and no longer did, but for what might have been and was not, and never would be. There came into his head the words "his place does not know him." But however hard he tried, he could not remember whom he had heard pronounce this terrifying phrase within the past two or three days.
It struck him now as precise and penetrating.
The minarets on the hilltops surrounding Jerusalem, the ruins and the stone walls enclosing secretive convents, topped with sharp broken glass, the heavy iron gates, the wrought-iron grilles, the cellars, the gloomy basements, a brooding, resentful Jerusalem, sunk up to its neck in nightmares of prophets stoned and saviors crucified and redeemers hacked to pieces, surrounded by a string of barren rock-strewn hills, the emptiness of slopes pockmarked with caves and gullies, apostate olive trees that had almost ceased to be trees and joined the realm of the inanimate, solitary stone cottages in the folds of incised valleys, and beyond them the great deserts extending southward to Bab el-Mandeb and eastward to Mesopotamia and northward to Hama and Palmyra, the lands of asp and viper, expanses of chalk and salt, haunt of nomads with herds of black goats and with vengeful knives in the folds of their robes, dark desert tents, and in the midst of all this, Rehavia with its melancholy piano music in tiny rooms at dusk, its frail old scholars, its shelves of German tomes, its good manners, its raised Homburgs, silence between the hours of one and five, crystal chandeliers, exiled lacquered furniture, brocade and leather upholstery, china dinner services, sideboards, the Russian excitability of his father, and Ben Gurion and Lupatin, the monkish halo of light around the desks of dour scholars gathering footnotes on their way to acquiring world fame, and we, following in their footsteps with helpless, hopeless perplexity, Tsvika with Columbus and the church, Ted and Yael and their jet-propelled vehicles, Nina orchestrating the liquidation of her ultrapious sex boutique, Wahrhaftig struggling to defend a civilized enclave in his abortion inferno, Uri roaming the world conquering women and mocking his conquests with his wry humor, Annette and Tamar, the unwanted, and you yourself with your Heart of Christendom and your lizards and your late-night letters to Yitzhak Rabin and the price of violence in a time of moral decline. And Dimi with his slaughtered dog. Where was it all leading? Where did that Chili get lost on her way to the Aryan side?
As though this were not a district of a city but a remote camp of whale hunters who had settled at the world's end, on a godforsaken coast in Alaska, throwing up a few shaky structures and a rickety fence in the boundless waste, among bloodthirsty nomadic tribes, and then they all set off together far out on the gray water in search of a nonexistent whale. And God has forgotten them, as the proprietress of the café across the road said yesterday.
Fima had a vivid image of himself standing guard, alone in the dark, over the abandoned whalers' camp. A faint lantern sways in the wind at the top of a pole, flickering, guttering in the black expanse, and there is no other light in all the length and breadth of the Pacific wastes extending northward to the Pole and southward to the tip of Tierra del Fuego. A solitary glowworm. Absurd. Its place does not know it. And yet, this precious radiance. Which it is your duty to keep alive as long as possible. It must not stop glimmering in the depth of the frozen expanse at the foot of the snow-covered glaciers. It is your duty to prevent it from being blown out by the wind. At least as long as you are here and until Yoezer arrives. Never mind who you are and what you arc and what you have to do with whalers who never existed, you with your myopia, your flabby muscles, your floppy breasts, your ridiculous, clumsy body. The responsibility is yours.
But in what sense?
He put his hand in his pocket to look for a heartburn tablet, but instead of the little tin his fingers dredged up the silver earring, which sparkled for an instant as though bewitched in the light that came from the room behind him. As he hurled it into the deep darkness, he seemed to hear Yael's sardonic voice: