Fima (11 page)

He switched the electric kettle on to make himself a cup of coffee, turned the radio to the music program, and managed to catch the beginning of Fauré's Requiem, whose tragic opening notes made him stare out the window for a while in the direction of the Bethlehem hills. Those people of the future his father had mentioned, who a hundred years from now would live in this very flat without knowing anything about him or his life, would they really never feel any curiosity about who had lived here at the beginning of 1989? But why should they? Was there anything in his life that might be of use to people whose parents had not even been born yet? Something that might at least provide them with food for thought as they stood at this window on a winter's morning in the year 2089? No doubt in a hundred years' time jet-propelled vehicles would have become so commonplace that the people living here would have no special reason to remember Yael and Teddy, or Nina and Uri and their crowd, or Tamar and the two gynecologists. Even Tsvi Kropotkin's historical research would probably be out of date by then. At most all that would remain of it would be a footnote in some obsolete tome. His envy of Tsvi seemed pointless, vain, and ridiculous. That envy that he obstinately denied, even to himself, and whose insidious nibbling he silenced with endless arguments, calling Tsvi up on the phone and slipping in a question, out of the blue, about the exiled king of Albania, entangling them in a bad-tempered argument about Albanian Islam or Balkan history. After all, in the B.A. exams Fima had had slightly better marks than his friend. And he was the one who had had certain brilliant insights that Tsvi had made use of, insisting despite Fima's protestations on acknowledging him in footnotes. If only he could overcome his tiredness. He still had it in him to leap ahead, make up the time lost in the billy-goat year, and in a couple of years overtake that spoiled, conventional professor, clad in his sporty blazer and whining out his bland truisms. Not a stone would be left standing of all Kropotkin's edifices. Fima would smash and flatten the lot like a hurricane. He would cause an earthquake and establish new foundations. But what was the point? At the very most some student at the end of the next century would refer in passing, in a parenthesis, to the outmoded approach of the Nisan-Kropotkin school which enjoyed a short-lived vogue in Jerusalem in the late twentieth century, in the declining phase of the socioempiric period, which was marred by hyperemotionalism and the use of clumsy intellectual tools. The student would not even take the trouble to distinguish between them. He would link them together with a hyphen before closing the brackets on the two of them.

The student, who would live in this flat a century from now, suddenly took on in Fima's mind the name Yoezer. He could see him in his mind's eye standing at this same window and staring out at those same hills. And he said to him: Don't you mock. It's thanks to us that you're here. Once there was a tree-planting ceremony in the city of Ramat Gan. The first mayor, the old man, Avraham Krinitzi, stood up in front of a thousand youngsters, from all the nursery schools, each one holding a sapling. The mayor too held a sapling. His task was to make a speech to the children, and he did not know what to say. Suddenly, out of the turmoil of his mind, a one-sentence speech burst forth, delivered with a heavy Russian accent: "Moy dzear cheeldren, you are the trees, and we are the manure." Would there be any point in carving that sentence here, on the wall, like a prisoner on the wall of his cell, for that arrogant Yoezer to read? To force him to think about us? But by then surely the walls will have been repainted, replastered, perhaps even rebuilt. In a hundred years life will be more vital, more vigorous, more reasonable, and more joyful. The wars with the Arabs will be remembered with a shrug, as a sort of absurd cycle of obscure tribal skirmishes. Like the history of the Balkans. I don't suppose Yoezer will waste his mornings hunting cockroaches or his evenings in grubby eating places behind Zion Square. Which will probably have been completely flattened and rebuilt in an energetic, optimistic style. Instead of eating greasy fried eggs, jam, and yogurt, they'll probably just swallow a couple of capsules every few hours. No more filthy kitchens, no more ants and cockroaches. People will be busy all day with useful, exciting things, and their evenings will be devoted to learning and beauty. They will live their lives in the bright light of reason, and if ever there are any stirrings of love, there will probably be some way of exchanging minute electromagnetic pulses from a distance to find out in advance whether it is a good idea to translate this love into physical intimacy. The winter rain will have been swept away from Jerusalem forever. It will be diverted to the agricultural regions. Everyone will be taken across safely to the Aryan side, as it were. Nobody, nothing will smell bad. The word "suffering" may sound to them the way the word "alchemy" does to us.

We've had another power cut. The lights came on again after a couple of minutes. It's probably a hint to me that I ought to pop into the bank to pay my bill, otherwise they'll cut me off and leave me sitting in the dark. I owe the grocer a lot of money too. And did I pay Mrs. Schneider across the road for her schnitzel yesterday, or did I sign for it again? I forgot to get that book for Dimi. What's holding us up? Why are we still here? Why aren't we getting up and clearing out, and leaving Jerusalem to those who will come after us? A very good question, he said under his breath.

This time he convened his cabinet in the old Sha'arei Zedek hospital on Jaffa Road, a splendid abandoned building that had fallen into decay since the hospital was moved to a new site. By lamplight, among remnants of broken benches and pieces of rusting bedsteads, he arranged his ministers in a semicircle. He asked each of them in turn for a briefing on the situation in their various departments. Then he stunned them all by announcing that he intended to fly to Tunis at dawn to address the Palestine National Council. He would place the main burden of historic responsibility for the plight of the Palestinian Arabs fairly and squarely on the shoulders of their extremist leadership since the 'twenties. He would not spare them our anger. However, he would offer to break out of the vicious circle of bloodshed and start building together a reasonable future based on compromise and conciliation. The only condition for starting to negotiate would be the total cessation of violence on both sides. At the close of the session, in the early hours, he appointed Uri Gefen minister of defense. Gad Eitan received the foreign-affairs portfolio. Tsvi would be responsible for education, Nina for finance, Wahrhaftig was put in charge of social welfare, and Ted and Yael would look after science, technology, and energy. For information and internal security he was retaining himself for the time being. And from now on the cabinet would be renamed the Revolutionary Council. The revolutionary process would be completed within six months. By then peace would be established. And immediately thereafter we can all return to our occupations and no longer interfere in the work of the elected government. I myself shall withdraw into total anonymity. I shall change my name and disappear. Now let us disperse separately by side entrances.

What about involving Dimi?

During the winter holidays the child spent a morning in the laboratory at the cosmetics factory in Romema. When Fima arrived to take him to the Biblical Zoo, he found that the old man had shut himself up in the lab with the child and taught him how to use acetone to manufacture explosives. Fima was furious with his father for corrupting the child: Haven't we got enough murderers already? Why poison his soul? But Dimi interrupted the argument by observing gently, like a mediator:

"Granpa's explosives are only good for painting fingernails."

And they all burst out laughing.

On the wall to the left of the window, about four feet away, in a corner of a patch of peeling plaster, Fima saw a gray lizard, immobile, staring like himself, longingly, toward the Bethlehem hills. Or else watching a fly that was invisible to Fima. Once upon a time, on those hills and in their winding valleys, there wandered judges and kings, conquerors, prophets of consolation and wrath, world-reforming saviors, impostors, dreamers, priests and hearers of voices, traitors, messiahs, Roman prefects, Byzantine governors, Muslim generals, and crusader princes, and ascetics, hermits, wonderworkers, and
sufferers
. To this day Jerusalem still resounds with their memory in the ringing of its church bells, sobs out their names from the tops of its minarets, and conjures them back with cabbalistic incantations. And now, at this moment, there was, it seemed, not a living soul left in the city, bar himself and the lizard and the light.

When he was younger he too used to fancy he could hear a voice as he walked among Jerusalem's alleys and boulder-strewn waste plots. He even tried to record in words what he fancied he had heard. In those days he might still have been able to stir some hearts. Even now he could sometimes fascinate a few souls, particularly women, in those Friday-night get-togethers at the Tobiases' or the Gefens'. Sometimes he would throw out a dazzling idea, and for an instant the whole room would hold its breath. His ideas would then make their way around by word of mouth, and occasionally they even reached the columns of the newspapers. Sometimes, when the spirit moved him, he managed to coin a new phrase, to formulate a perception of die situation in words that had not previously been used, to utter some penetrating aperçu which circulated in the city until he came across it a few days later on the radio, severed from him and his name, and often distorted. His friends enjoyed reminding him, as a sort of mild rebuke, how once or twice he had shown real foresight, as for example in 'seventy-three, when he had gone around lamenting to the point of ridicule the blindness that was afflicting Israel, the impending catastrophe. Or on the eve of the invasion of Lebanon. Or before the wave of Islamic fundamentalism. Whenever his friends reminded him of these prophecies, Fima would recoil and reply with a rueful grin that it was nothing, the writing was already on the wall and any child could read it.

Tsvi Kropotkin sometimes copied pieces for him from a literary supplement or a periodical that made reference to the
Death of Augustine
, when some critics bothered to drag those poems out of oblivion to use them as additional ammunition in a campaign for or against current trends in poetry. Fima would shrug and mutter, That's enough, Tsvika, just drop it. His poems, like his prophecies, seemed to him remote and irrelevant. Why does the soul pine when it has no idea what it is pining for? What really exists and what only seems to exist? Where can you look for something lost when you have forgotten what it is you lost? Once, in his billy-goat year, during his brief marriage to the hotel owner in Valletta, he was sitting in a waterfront café in the harbor watching a couple of fishermen play backgammon. In point of fact it was not so much the fishermen he was watching as a German shepherd that sat, panting, on a chair between them. The dog's ears were pricked forward earnestly, as though it were listening for the next move, and it kept following the players' fingers and the rolls of the dice and the moving counters with eyes that seemed to Fima full of fascination and humble wonderment. Fima had never, before or since, seen such a concentrated effort to understand the unintelligible, as if in its longing to decipher the game the dog had achieved a degree of disembodiment. Surely that is precisely the way we ought to look at what is beyond us. To grasp as much as we can, or at least to grasp our inability to grasp. Fima sometimes pictured the creator of the universe, in whom he did not entirely believe, in the form of a Jerusalem tradesman of Middle Eastern origin, aged about sixty, lean and tanned and wrinkled, eaten away by cigarettes and arak, in threadbare brown trousers and a not very clean white shirt buttoned right up to the skinny neck but without a tie, and with worn-out brown shoes and a shabby old-fashioned jacket a little too small for him. This creator sat drowsily on a wicker stool, facing the sun, his eyes half-closed, his head sunk on his chest, in the doorway of his haberdashery shop in Zichron Moshe. A dead cigarette end hung from his lower lip and a string of amber beads hung frozen between his fingers, where a broad ring flashed from time to time. Fima stopped and dared to address him, with exaggerated politeness, in the third person, hesitantly: Might I be permitted to disturb Your Worship with just one question? A twitch of irony flitted across the wrinkled, leathery face. Perhaps just a fly buzzing? Would Your Worship deign to consider the Brothers Karamazov? The argument between Ivan and the Devil? Mitya's dream? Or the episode of the Grand Inquisitor? No? And what would Your Worship deign to reply to that question? Vanity of vanities? Would Your Worship resort yet again to the old arguments: Where wast thou when I laid the foundation of the world? I am that I am. The old man released a kind of belch reeking of tobacco and arak, turned up his two palms, which were as pitted as a plasterer's, and spread them empty on his knees. Only the ring on his finger glimmered for a moment and then faded. Was he chewing something? Smiling? Dozing? Fima abandoned his quest. Apologizing, he went on his way. Not running, not hurrying, yet nevertheless like one who runs away and knows he runs away, and also knows that running away is useless.

From his window Fima watched the sun straining to free itself from the clouds. An elusive change was coming over the streets and the hills. Not so much a brightening as a slight quivering of hues, as though the air itself were smitten with hesitations or doubts. All the things that filled the lives of the group—Uri, Tsvi, Teddy, and the rest of them—the things that stirred them to longing or enthusiasm, seemed to Fima as forlorn as the dead leaves rotting under the bare mulberry tree in the garden. There is a forgotten promised land somewhere here—no, not a land, not promised, not even really forgotten, but something calling to you. He asked himself whether he would care if he died today. The question did not arouse anything in him: neither apprehension nor desire. Death seemed as boring as one of Wahrhaftig's stories. Whereas his daily life was as predictable and weary as his father's moralizing. In his head he suddenly agreed with the old man, not about the identity of the Indians, but when he said that the days go by without joy or purpose. The shlemiel and his friend did indeed deserve pity rather than ridicule. But what were they to him? Surely he, Fima, was full of unbelievable powers, and it was only tiredness that made him put off exercising them. Like someone waiting for the precise timing. Or for a blow to crack the inner crust. He could, for example, drop his job at the clinic, extract a thousand dollars from the old man, and sail away on a cargo boat to start a new life. In Iceland. In Crete. In Safed. He could shut himself up in that guesthouse in Magdiel and write a play. Or a confession. He could devise a political program, pick up some followers, and start a new movement that would shatter the mood of indifference and sweep through the public like wildfire. Or he could join one of the existing parties, apply himself to public activities for five or six years, moving from branch to branch, casting new light on the national situation until even the most stolid hearts were jolted, and eventually he would get his hands on the tiller and bring peace to the land. In 1977 a private citizen named Lange or Longe had managed to get himself elected to the New Zealand parliament, and by 1982 he held the reins of power. Or else Fima could fall in love, or get involved in his father's business and turn the cosmetics factory into the nucleus of an industrial conglomerate. Or he could clamber up the academic ladder, overtake Tsvi and his friends, get a chair, and start a new school. He could take Jerusalem by storm with a new book of poems. What a ridiculous expression, "take Jerusalem by storm." Or win back Yael. And Dimi. Or he could sell this ruin and use the money to restore an abandoned house on the outskirts of a remote village in the hills of Upper Galilee. Or do the opposite: bring in builders, carpenters, decorators, renovate the whole flat, send the bill to his father, and open a new chapter.