Fima (14 page)

Fima said:

"I didn't give them the push. It was the other way around."

Annette said:

"Tell me anyway. Some other time. Not today. Today I can't take it in. I just need you to tell me the whole truth. Am I boring? Selfish? Self-centered? Repulsive? Do you find my body repulsive?"

Fima said:

"On the contrary. I don't think I'm good enough for you. And yet I can't help feeling we're in the same boat. But look, Annette, the weather's cleared. These beautiful winter days in Jerusalem, the sunshine between the showers, as though the sky is singing. Shall we go for a walk? Nowhere in particular, just a stroll? It's half past four now: it'll be dark soon. If I were bold enough, I'd tell you that you're a beautiful, attractive woman. Don't get me wrong. Shall we go? Just for a stroll, to look at the evening light? Will you be cold?"

"No, thanks. I've already taken hours of your time. Actually, yes. Let's have a stroll. If you're not too busy. That's beautiful, what you said, that the sky is singing. Everything you say comes out so beautiful. Just promise me you're not expecting anything from me, so you won't be disappointed. You see, I just can't. Never mind. I shouldn't have said that. Sorry. Let's go on talking while we walk."

Later that evening, full of shame and regret that he had not changed his sweaty sheets, embarrassed that apart from an omelette and a single soft tomato and the liqueur his father had brought him he had nothing to offer her, Fima carefully, deferentially removed her outer garments, like a father getting his daughter ready for bed. He handed her a pair of worn flannel pajamas: he sniffed them as he took them out of the wardrobe, and hesitated, but he had no others. He draped his blanket over her and went down on his knees next to her on the cold floor, apologizing on behalf of the radiator, which did not give out enough heat, and the mattress, with its hills and valleys. She drew his palm toward her face and for an instant her lips touched the back of his hand. He rewarded her generously, kissing her on the forehead, the eyebrows, the chin, not daring to approach her lips, while he kneaded and stroked her long hair. As he stroked her, he whispered, Cry. Never mind, it's all right. When she sobbed so much that the crying made her face ugly and puffy like a beetroot, Fima turned out the light. Very carefully
he touched her shoulders, her neck, lingering for a quarter of an hour before he proceeded down the slope of her breasts, restraining himself from touching the peaks. All the while he continued his fatherly kisses, which he hoped would distract her attention from his fingers slipping between her knees. I feel bad, Efraim, I feel bad and worthless. Fima whispered, You're wonderful, Annette, you thrill me, and as he spoke his finger crept closer to her sex and stopped, ready to be repulsed unceremoniously. When it was clear to him that she was totally absorbed in her predicament, repeatedly describing in broken whispers the injustice she had suffered, as though she did not notice what he was up to, he began to play on her gently, struggling to dismiss from his mind her husband's habit of tapping, until she sighed and laid her hand on the back of his neck, and said, You're so good. From this whisper he drew the courage to touch her breasts and to lodge his desire against the side of her body, still not daring to rub himself against her. He simply went on stroking her here and there, learning the strings, uttering whispers of reassurance and consolation that he himself did not listen to. Until at last he sensed that his patience was beginning to pay off: he felt a responsive ripple, a slight arching, a tremor, even though she still went on talking, grieving, explaining to herself and to him where she went wrong, how she may have made Yeri hate her, how she wronged her husband and her children, and confessing in the dark that besides the Amsterdam episode there had been two other affairs, with a couple of his friends, frivolous, foolish affairs admittedly, but possibly that meant she deserved what had happened to her. Meanwhile his finger found the right rhythm and her sighs were interspersed with groans, and she did not protest when he began rubbing his erection against her thigh. Fima therefore went along with her pretense of being overwhelmed with sorrow, so that she did not even notice her underwear being removed, her body still responding and her thighs gripping his musician's fingers as her own fingers stroked his neck. But at the very moment he decided that his own moment was ripe, and he was on the point of substituting his body for his finger, her body arched like a bow and she released a soft, childlike cry of surprised delight. And the next instant she relaxed. And burst into tears again. Feebly she pummeled his chest, wailing, Why did you do that to me? Why have you humiliated me? I was a wreck even without you. Then she turned her back on him and cried to herself like a baby. Fima knew he was too late. He had missed. For an instant there welled up inside him a mixture of laughter and anger and frustration and self-mockery: at that instant he could have shot the sweet-smiling settler dead with his lawyer and his member of parliament, while he called himself an idiot. Then he collected himself, and reconciled himself to the need to forgive and forget.

He got up, covered Annette, and asked her gently if he should pour her another drop of liqueur. Or should he make some tea?

She sat up violently, clutching the grubby sheet to her chest, groped for a cigarette, lit it furiously, and said:

"What a bastard you are."

Fima, who was struggling to dress while covering himself to hide his shameful rhino horn, muttered like a punished child:

"But what have I done? I didn't do anything to you."

And he knew that these words were both true and false, and he almost burst into grim laughter, almost mumbled,
Azoy
. But he controlled himself, apologized, blamed himself, he couldn't understand what had come over him, it was being with her that put him in a spin and made him forget himself, could she find it in her to forgive him?

She dressed hurriedly, roughly, like an angry old woman, with her back to him; she combed her hair violently, her tears dried. She lit a fresh cigarette and told Fima to call her a taxi and never to phone her again. When he asked if he could see her downstairs, she replied in a flat, icy voice:

"That will not be necessary. Good-bye."

Fima got under the shower. Even though the water was tepid, almost cold, he steeled himself, lathered himself thoroughly, and stayed under for a long time. The real villain of the three, he mused, was the lawyer. Then he put on clean underwear, and furiously gathering the dirty sheets and towels as well as the dishtowel and his shirt, he packed them all into a plastic bag and put it near the front door so that he would not forget to take it to the laundry the next morning. While he made the bed with clean sheets, he tried whistling between his two front teeth, but he couldn't do it. We're all in the same boat was what the pretty settler had said, and Fima discovered, much to his surprise, that in a certain sense he was right.

W
HEN HE HAD FINISHED PREPARING HIS LAUNDRY, HE WENT TO
the kitchen to get rid of Annette's cigarette butts. Opening the door of the compartment under the sink, he found die cockroach, Trotsky, lying dead on its back beside the overfull can. What had killed it? There were no signs of violence. And there was no question of a cockroach dying of hunger in this kitchen. Thinking about it, Fima concluded that the difference between a cockroach and a butterfly was only a matter of variation on a theme, certainly not enough of a difference to justify the fact that butterflies symbolized to us freedom, beauty, purity, whereas the cockroach was perceived as the embodiment of everything disgusting. So what was the cause of death? Fima recalled that in the morning, when he brandished his shoe over Trotsky's head and changed his mind, the creature had made no effort to escape its fate. Perhaps it was already sick then, and he did nothing to help.

Bending down, Fima gently picked up the cockroach in a piece of newspaper folded into a funnel. Instead of disposing of it in the trash, he dug it a grave in the flowerpot that stood on the windowsill with nothing growing in it. After the funeral he attacked the pile of dishes in the sink. He washed the plates and mugs. When he reached the frying pan, which was thick with congealed fat, he got tired of scouring it and decided that the pan would have to wait patiently with the rest of the dirty things until the next day. He could not make tea, because the electric kettle had boiled itself dry while he was peering into the abyss of evolution and searching for a common denominator. He went to piss, but his patience ran out and he pulled the lever in the middle to encourage his stuttering bladder. He lost the race again, but instead of waiting for the cistern to refill, he retreated, turning the light off behind him. Must try to play for time, he said to himself. And he added, If you know what I mean.

Shortly before midnight he put on the flannel pajamas that Annette had thrown down on the rug, got into bed, and enjoyed the clean sheets as he began reading Tsvi Kropotkin's article in
Ha'arets
. He found it academic and bland, like Tsvika himself, but he hoped it would help him get to sleep. When he turned the light out, he remembered the soft cry of pleasure full of childlike excitement that had suddenly burst from Annette's throat as her thighs tightened around his finger. Desire surged again, along with resentment and a sense of grievance. Almost two months had gone by since he had last slept with a woman, and now he had missed two on successive nights, even though he had actually had both of them in his arms. Because of their selfishness he would not be able to get to sleep now. For an instant he thought Yeri, Dr. Tadmor, was right to leave Annette, because he was suffocated by the lies. And almost at once he said to himself: You bastard. Unconsciously his hand began slowly comforting his penis. Then a stranger, a moderate, reasonable man whose parents were not even born yet, the man who would be in this room on a winter's night a hundred years from now, was watching him out of the darkness with eyes that seemed skeptical, only half-curious, almost amused. Fima let go of his penis and complained aloud:

"Don't you go judging me."

Then he added sardonically:

"Anyway, in a hundred years there won't be anything here. Everything will have been destroyed."

And he added:

"Shut up, you. Who was talking to you?"

At this they both fell silent, Yoezer and he, and his desire also subsided. In its stead came a burst of nocturnal energy, a sharp wide-awake lucidity, a rush of inner force and mental clarity. At this moment he was capable of taking on those three conspirators from the Cafe Savyon and defeating them with ease; he could write an epic poem, found a political party, or draw up a peace treaty. Words and snippets of sentences formed themselves in his mind, gleaming with cleanness and precision. He threw off his blanket, rushed to his desk, and, instead of convening the Revolutionary Council for. a midnight sitting, he wrote in half an hour, without crossing out or changing anything, an article for the weekend paper: a reply to Tsvi Kropotkin on the question of the price of morality versus the price of immorality in times of everyday violence. These days all sorts of wolves and would-be wolves are preaching a primitive Darwinism, howling that in time of war morality, like women and children, should stay at home, and that if only we could shrug off the burden of morality we would be able blithely to smash whoever stood in our way. Tsvi gets bogged down in his effort to counter this with pragmatic arguments: The enlightened world, he says, will punish us if we go on behaving like wolves. But surely the fact is that ultimately all oppressive regimes collapse and vanish, while the societies and nations that survive are precisely those that foster the values of humane morality. From a historical viewpoint, Fima wrote, rather than your defending morality, morality defends you, and without it even the fangs of the most ferocious wolves are doomed to rot and decay.

Then he put on a clean shirt and trousers, the chunky sweater he inherited from Yael, and his overcoat, this time being agile enough to avoid the trap of the sleeve. He chewed a heartburn tablet and went down into the street, bubbling with a happy feeling of responsibility, taking the steps two at a time.

Jauntily wide awake, oblivious to the chill of the night air, intoxicated with the silence and emptiness, Fima marched down the road as though to the sound of a military band. There was not a soul in the sodden streets. Jerusalem had been handed over to him, to protect it from itself. The blocks of flats stood heavy and massive in the darkness. The streetlights were shrouded in a pale yellow haze. At the entrance to each staircase the numbers glimmered with a dim electric glow, which was reflected here and there off the windows of a parked car. Automatic living, he thought, a life of comfort and achievement, accumulating possessions, honors, and the routine eating, mating, and financial habits of prosperous people, the soul sinking under folds of flesh, the rituals of social position; that was what the author of the Psalms meant when he wrote, "Their heart is gross like fat." This was the contented mind that had no dealings with death and whose sole concern was to remain contented. Herein lay the tragedy of Annette and Yeri. It was the crushed spirit that knocked in vain, year after year, tapping on inanimate objects, pleading for the locked door to be reopened. Whistling sarcastically through the gap between its front teeth. The snows of yesteryear. The bones of yesteryear. What have we to do with the Aryan side?

And how about you, my dear Prime Minister? What have you ever done? What did you do today? Or yesterday?

Half-unconsciously Fima kicked at a can, which went rolling down the street and startled a cat in a trash can. You made fun of poor Tamar Greenwich simply because, due to a fluke of pigmentation, she was born with one brown eye and one green one. You detested Eitan and Wahrhaftig, but how exactly are you better than they? You were gratuitously rude to Ted Tobias, an honest, hard-working man who has never harmed you. Another man in his place would not have allowed you so much as to set foot in his home. Not to mention the fact that thanks to him and Yael we may soon have jet-propelled vehicles.