Fima (30 page)

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.

And indeed, at that moment Fima sensed the full weight of the darkness lying over Jerusalem. Darkness on steeples and domes, darkness on walls and towers, darkness on stone-walled yards and the groves of ancient pines, on convents and olive trees, on mosques and caves and sepulchers, on tombs of kings and of true and false prophets, darkness on winding alleys, darkness on government buildings and on ruins and gates and on stony fields and thistle-strewn waste plots, darkness on schemes and desires and lunatic visions, darkness on the hills and on the desert.

To the southwest, above the heights surrounding the village of Ein Karem, clouds began to move, as though an unseen hand were drawing a curtain. Just as his mother used to go around the flat drawing all the curtains on winter evenings. One night, when he was three or four, she forgot to draw the curtains in his bedroom. He woke and saw a dim shape outside staring motionlessly at him. A long, thin shape surrounded by a circle of pale light. Then it went out. It materialized again, like moon-touched mist, at the other window. Then it went out again. He remembered how he woke in a panic and sat up in bed crying. His mother came in and leaned over him in a nightdress that had an exquisite scent. She looked long and white and moon-touched too. She held him in her arms and promised him that there was nothing there, that the shape was just a dream. Then she drew both the curtains carefully, rearranged his bedclothes, and kissed him on the forehead. Even though he eventually stopped crying and burrowed under his blanket, even though she stayed on his bed until he fell asleep again, Fima knew, even now, with utter and absolute certainty, that it was not a dream, and that his mother knew it too and had lied to him. Even now, half a century later, he was still convinced that there had been a stranger out there. Not in a dream but outside, on the other side of the windowpanes. And that his mother had seen him too. And he knew that that lie was the worst lie he had ever been told. It was that lie that snatched away his infant brother and doomed his mother to disappear in her prime, and himself to be here and yet not here all these years, seeking in vain what he had not really lost and without the faintest idea what it was or what it looked like, or where to look, or how.

Even if someday he found it, how would he know?

Maybe he had found it already, and dropped it and moved on, still searching like a blind man?

Cranes wheel and whirl and are gone.

The wind subsided. A frozen quiet reigned. At a quarter to eleven Fima changed his mind, put his cap and coat on, went into the empty street, where the cold was sharp and biting. He went to the public call box in the shopping center at the other end of the houses. But when he lifted the receiver, the public telephone too gave only a deathly silence. Maybe there was a problem in the whole district. Had the public telephone been vandalized? Or was the whole of Jerusalem cut off from itself and from the outside world again? He gave up and gently replaced the receiver. Shrugging his shoulders he said, "Well done, pal," as he remembered that in any case he did not have a token.

Tomorrow he would get up early and explain everything to his two lovers.

Or he would get out of here and go away.

The whispering of the drenched pines, the raw cold, the emptiness of the streets, all this suited Fima well. He wandered toward the slope and the fields. His mother had a strange habit of blowing on her food, even if it had already cooled, or if it was cold, such as a salad or fruit compote. When she blew, her lips pursed into a kiss. His heart ached because at that moment, forty-five years after her death, he wanted to kiss her back. He wanted to turn the world upside down to find the blue baby bonnet with the loose pompom and give it back to her.

When he reached the end of the street, which was also the end of the housing development and the end of the city, Fima became aware of something transparent filling the whole universe. As if thousands of soft silken footsteps were whispering on every side. As if his face were being touched by fingers that were no fingers. When his wonderment passed, he managed to identify tiny snowflakes. Very fine snow was beginning to fall on Jerusalem. Though it melted as soon as it touched anything. It did not have the power to whiten the gray city.

Fima returned home and began searching in the wastepaper basket under his desk for the telephone bill he had screwed up and thrown away yesterday or the day before. He did not find the bill, but he did pick out a crumpled page of
Ha'arets
. He smoothed it out and took it to bed with him, and read about present-day false messiahs until his eyes closed and he fell asleep with the newspaper over his face. At two o'clock the light snow stopped. Jerusalem stood frozen and empty in the dark, as though the catastrophe had happened and all the people had been exiled again.

I
N HIS DREAM
G
AD
E
ITAN ARRIVED IN A MILITARY JEEP WITH A
machine gun mounted on the hood, to summon Fima to a meeting with the president. The president's office turned out to be in a small basement synagogue at the edge of the Russian Compound behind the main police station. A foppish British officer sat behind the desk, with a leather belt aslant his black uniform. He urged Fima to sign a voluntary confession to the murder of the dog, who had been transformed in the dream into a woman whose corpse was lying, wrapped in a sheet soiled with black blood, at the foot of the Holy Ark. Fima requested permission to see the dead woman's face. The interrogator replied with a smile, What for? Isn't it a pity to wake her? It's Chili again; she risked her life for you, she brought you over to the Aryan side, she saved your life repeatedly, and you betrayed her. When Fima plucked up the courage to ask what punishment was in store for him, the defense minister said, Look what a dummy you arc. The crime
is
the punishment.

A
T HALF PAST SIX IN THE MORNING HE WOKE WITH A START BECAUSE
a heavy object fell in the flat above, followed by a woman shouting, not for long or particularly loudly, but terribly, desperately, as though she had seen her own death. Fima leaped out of bed and into his trousers, then hurried to the kitchen balcony to hear better. No sound came from the upstairs flat. Only an invisible bird, which kept repeating three gentle syllables, as if it had come to the conclusion that Fima was so slow on the uptake that he would surely not understand. Shouldn't he go upstairs quickly to find out what had happened? To offer help? Rescue? To call the police or an ambulance? But he remembered that his telephone had been cut off, so he was relieved of the obligation to intervene. Besides which, it was possible that the crash and the scream had happened in his sleep, and his inquiry would cause nothing but embarrassment and derision.

Instead of going back to bed, he continued standing on the kitchen balcony in his long-sleeved undershirt, amid the vestiges of cages, jars, and boxes where he and Dimi had once kept their bottle of worms. Now these exuded the rank smell of decay, of wet sawdust mixed with blackened droppings and remains of rotting food: carrots and cucumber peel and cabbage leaves and lettuce. At the beginning of the winter Dimi had decided to free the tortoises, insects, and snails they had collected in the wadi.

And where was the snow of last night?

It was as if it had never been.

It had gone without a trace.

The barren hills to the south of Jerusalem stood purged, flooded in blue radiance, so that it was almost possible to make out silvery flashes on the underside of the leaves of distant olive trees along the ridge of Beit Jalla. It was a cold, sharp light, crystal clear, sent to us perhaps as an advance against the distant days when suffering would end, when Jerusalem would be freed from its torments, and the people who took our place would live their lives calmly, considerately, rationally, and with good taste: then the light of the sky would be like this forever.

It was bitter cold, but Fima, in his yellowing winter undershirt, did not feel it. He stood leaning on the railing, filling his lungs with the winelike air, marveling at the fact of suffering in the midst of such beauty. A minor miracle had occurred below him in the back yard. An eccentric, impatient almond tree had decided suddenly to flower, as though it had got its calendar mixed up. It was covered with tiny glowworms that had forgotten to switch themselves off at the arrival of dawn. Myriad raindrops sparkled on the pink blossoms. The glittering almond tree reminded Fima of a slim, pretty woman who has cried all night and not wiped away her tears. This image caused him childlike joy, and love, and a longing for Yael, for all women indiscriminately, with the bold resolution to open a new chapter in his life, starting this morning: to be from now on a rational, straightforward man, a good man, freed from falsehood and all pretense. So he put on a clean shirt and Yael's sweater. With a boldness that surprised him he climbed the stairs and firmly pressed the upstairs neighbors' bell. After a few moments Mrs. Pizanti opened the door in a dressing gown half unbuttoned over her nightdress. Her wide, childlike face struck Fima as distorted, or even beaten. But perhaps that was more or less what anyone waked from sleep looked like. Behind her, in the pale neon light of the entrance hall, her husband's eyes were glittering. He was a hirsute, athletic-looking individual, much taller than his wife. She asked anxiously if something had happened. Fima said:

"Sorry. Nothing. I thought maybe something fell down in your flat? Or broke? I just thought, I imagined, I heard ... something like that? I must have been mistaken. Perhaps it was just an explosion a long way off. Perhaps the Messianic Faithful dynamited the Temple Mount and turned it into a Vale of Tears."

"Sorry?" said Mrs. Pizanti, staring at Fima with bewilderment and some apprehension.

Her husband, an x-ray technician, replied from behind her back in a tone that struck Fima as not entirely honest:

"Everything's a hundred percent in here, Dr. Nisan. When you ring the bell, I think maybe you have some problem. No? You are short something? Out of coffee again? Blown a fuse? I come and change it for you?"

"Thank you," Fima said, "that's very kind of you. I've got plenty of coffee and the electricity is working fine. It so happens my telephone is out of order, but I'm quite pleased, actually; it means I can have some peace and quiet at last. Sorry to bother you so early in the morning. I just thought ... Never mind. Sorry. Thank you."