Fima (34 page)

Fima had closed his eyes. He tensed, not like someone who is afraid of being hit but like someone who hopes for it to the very tips of his nerves. As though it were not Yael, not even Yael's mother, but his own mother bending over him and demanding that he give back at once the blue bonnet that he had hidden. But what makes her think that he hid it? And why does Yael assume it was a boy? What if it was actually a girl? A little Yael with long soft hair and a face like Giulietta Masina? He laid his arms on the table and without opening his eyes hid his weary head on them. He could almost hear Professor Talmon's scholarly nasal voice declaring that Karl Marx's understanding of human nature was naive and dogmatic, not to say primitive, and in any case one-dimensional. Fima responded mentally with Yael's old father's perpetual question:

In what sense?

The more he thought about this, the less he could find an answer. Yet on the other side of the wall, in the next flat, a young woman was singing a forgotten song which had been on everyone's lips years ago, about a man called Johnny: There was never a man like my Johnny, / Like the man they called Johnny Guitar. The melody was feeble, childish, almost laughable, and the woman on the other side of the kitchen wall was no singer. Fima suddenly recalled making love to Yael, half his lifetime ago, one afternoon in a small boardinghouse on Mount Carmel, when he was accompanying her to a conference at the Technion. She thought up the fantasy that he should pretend to be a stranger and she a young girl who had never been touched before, innocent, shy, nervous. His task was to seduce her, taking his time. And he managed to give her pleasure that was close to pain. He drew forth cries for help, pleas, tender exclamations of surprise. The more he played the stranger, the more the pleasure intensified and deepened, until a mysterious sense of hearing developed in his fingertips, in every cell of his body, enabling him to know precisely what would feel good to her, as if he had planted a spy inside the dark network of nerves of her spinal column. Or as if he had become one flesh with her. Until they ceased to touch and be touched like a man and woman, and became a single being quenching its thirst. That afternoon he felt not like a man having intercourse with a woman but as if he had always lived inside her, that her womb was now not hers but theirs, his penis not his but theirs, and his skin and her skin both theirs.

Later they dressed and went for a walk in one of the verdant valleys on the side of Mount Carmel. They strolled until nightfall among the luxuriant vegetation without talking or touching, until a night bird sang to them a short, poignant phrase which Fima imitated to perfection, and Yael, with a warm low laugh, said, Do you have any plausible explanation, good sir, why I suddenly love you, even though we're not blood relations or anything like that?

He opened his eyes and saw his ex-wife, shrunken, almost shriveled, an aging Giulietta Masina, in gray trousers and a dark red sweater, still standing with her back to him and folding towels. It's not possible, he thought, that she has so many towels that she can go on folding them forever. Unless she's refolding them because she wasn't satisfied with the way she did it the first time. So he stood up like a man who knows exactly what to do, and embraced her from behind, putting one hand over her mouth and the other over her eyes, and kissed the nape of her neck, the roots of her hair, her back. The smell of toilet soap and the hint of tobacco from Ted's pipe reached his nostrils, dizzying him with a vague desire, along with a sadness that snuffed it out. He picked up her thin little girl's body in his arms, and just as he had carried her son two nights before, he carried Yael now and laid her on the same bed in her bedroom, and just as he had stroked Dimi, he now stroked her cheek. But he did not remove the counterpane, nor did he try to take off his clothes or hers, but instead pressed himself against her along the whole length of their bodies and buried her head in the hollow of his shoulder. Instead of saying I've missed you, he was so tired that he whispered I've messed you. They lay side by side, close but not embracing, motionless, speechless, his body's warmth radiating into hers and hers into his. Until she whispered to him: Right. Now be good and go.

Fima silently obeyed. He got up and found his coat, drank the remains of his second coffee, which had gone cold like its predecessor. She told me to go into town and buy an aquarium and some tropical fish for Dimi, he thought, so that's what I'll do. On his way out he managed to close the door behind him so carefully that it did not make the slightest sound. Then, as he walked northward, the same silence continued in the street and in his thoughts. He walked slowly the whole length of Hehalutz Street, to his own surprise trying to whistle the tune of the old song about the man they called Johnny Guitar. There, he said to himself, you could say that everything's lost or you could say that nothing's lost, and the two things are definitely not mutually exclusive. The situation seemed strange yet wonderful: he had not slept with his wife, yet he felt no lack in his body but, rather, the opposite, an exhilaration, an elation, a fulfillment, as though in some mysterious way there really had been deep and accurate intercourse between them. And as if in that intercourse with her he had finally begotten his son, his only son.

But in what sense?

The question seemed meaningless. In a senseless sense. So what.

When he reached Herzl Street, the fine rain reminded him that he had left his cap behind at Yael's, on the edge of the kitchen table. But he was not anxious, because he knew he would return. He still had to explain to her and to Dimi, and why not to Ted too, the secret of the Third State. But not now. Not today. There was no hurry. Even when he thought of Yoezer and the other reasonable, sane people who would live in Jerusalem instead of us a hundred years from now, he felt no anguish, but, on the contrary, a sort of shy inner smile. What's the matter? What's the hurry? Let them wait. Let them wait quietly for their turn. We definitely haven't concluded our business here yet. It's a slow business, a rotten business, there's no denying it, but one way or another we still haven't said our last word.

He boarded the first bus that stopped, without bothering to check its number or its destination. He sat down behind the driver and hummed to himself, shamelessly out of tune, the song about Johnny Guitar. He saw no reason to get off before the terminus, which happened to be Prophet Samuel Street. Despite the cold and the wind, Fima was in very good form.

H
E WAS SO HAPPY THAT HE DID NOT FEEL HUNGRY, DESPITE HAVING
eaten nothing since the early morning, apart from the biscuits he nibbled in Yael's kitchen. When he got off the bus, the rain had stopped. Among the wisps of dirty cloud, islands of blue were shining. For some reason it seemed that the clouds were standing still and the blue islands were floating westward. And he felt that this blueness was aimed at him and was calling him to follow.

Fima began walking up Ezekiel Street. The first two lines of the song about Johnny Guitar were still resounding in his chest. But how did the song go on? Where in the world did Johnny end up? Where is he playing now?

There was a Sabbath eve smell in the Bukharian Quarter, even though it was still only half past twelve. Fima attempted to identify the components of this thick smell which reminded him of his childhood and of that fine excitement that used to course through him and through Jerusalem as the Sabbath approached. The smell sometimes began to fill the world even on Thursday afternoon, with the washing and the scrubbing and the cooking. The maid used to cook stuffed chicken's necks sewn up with a needle and thread. His mother would make a plum compote that was as sweet and sticky as glue. And sweet stewed carrots, and gefilte fish, and pies, or a strudel, or pastries filled with raisins. And all kinds of jams and marmalades, one of which was called
varyennye
in Russian. Vividly there came back to Fima, as he walked, the smell and appearance of the wine-colored borscht, a semisolid soup with blobs of fat floating on the surface like gold rings, which he used to fish for with a spoon when he was little.

And every Friday his mother would wait for him precisely at midday at the gate of his school, with her blond plait framing her head like a wreath and a brown tortoiseshell comb planted at her golden nape. They would go together to do the last-minute shopping in Mahane Yehuda Market, he with his satchel on his back and she clutching her wicker shopping basket, a sapphire ring gleaming on her finger. The smells of the market, sharp, savory Oriental smells, filled them both with childish glee. As though they were conspiring secretly against the heavy Ashkenazic sweetness of the pics at home and the cloying carrot and the strudel and the compote and the sticky jams. And indeed, his father disliked these Friday raids on the market. He grumbled sardonically that the child ought to be doing his homework or improving his body with exercises, and in any case they paid a fortune to have a maid, whose job it was to do the shopping, and surely one could buy everything nearby in Rehavia, so there was no need to drag the child among those filthy stalls with foul liquids swilling on the pavement. The Levant was swarming with germs, and all those pungent spices with their clamorous smells were nothing but a camouflage for filth. He made a joke of his wife's attraction to the enchantments of the Thousand and One Nights, and what he termed her weekly quest for Ali Baba. Fima trembled inwardly at the recollection of the illicit thrill of helping his mother to choose from among various kinds of black olives, with their almost indecent smell and their sharp, dizzying taste. Sometimes he noticed the smoldering look one of the stall holders fixed on his mother, and although he was too young to know its meaning, he could faintly feel, as in a dream, an echo of a tremor that ran through his mother's body and seemed to overflow into his own. He could hear her voice now, in the distance. Look what they've done to you, stupid. But this time he answered cheerfully, Never mind, you'll see that I still haven't said my last word.

On their way home after the market he always insisted on carrying the basket. His other arm he linked in hers. They always had lunch on Fridays in a little vegetarian restaurant on King George Street, a red-curtained establishment that made him think of abroad as he knew it from the cinema. It was run by a refugee couple, Mr. and Mrs. Danzig, a charming pair who looked so alike, they might have been brother and sister. As indeed, Fima thought, perhaps they were. Who could tell? Their gentle manners brought a smile to his mother's face like a beam of light. Fima felt a pang of longing as he recalled it. At the end of their meal, Mrs. Danzig always placed two exact squares of almond chocolate in front of Fima. And she would say with a smile:

"That is for gutt-boy who didn't leave anything on his plate."

She pronounced "gutt-boy" without an article, as though it were his name. As for Mr. Danzig, he was a round man with one cheek that was like raw butcher's meat: Fima did not know if he had a chronic skin disease or a strange birthmark, or if it was a mysterious trace of an extensive burn. Mr. Danzig would intone a verse, like a ritual, at the end of those Friday lunches:

"Efraim iss a lovely child,
He finish all his dinner;
So now he vill be strong and vild,
And in our town the vinner—

Vot town?"

Fima's role in this ceremony was to reply:

"Jerusalem!"

But once, he rebelled and perversely answered: "Danzig!" which he knew from his father's stamp collection and also from the heavy German adas that he used to browse in for hours on end, spread-eagled on the carpet in a corner of the salon, especially on winter evenings. This reply made Mr. Danzig smile wistfully and say something that ended with "
mein Kind
." Meanwhile his mother's eyes for some reason filled with tears, and she suddenly squeezed Fima's head to her bosom and covered his face with a volley of quick kisses.

What became of the Danzigs? They must have died ages ago. A branch of a bank had stood for years on the site of that little restaurant that gleamed with a cleanness which even now, a thousand years later, Fima could feel in his nostrils, and which for some reason smelled to him like fresh snow. On each table, on the spotless white tablecloth, there was always an upright rose in a glass vase. The walls were adorned with calm landscapes of lakes and forests. Sometimes at a table in the far comer near the potted palms a slim British officer would be lunching on his own. He would sit stiffly, with his peaked cap parked at the foot of the rose. Where have those pictures of lakes and forests ended up? Where in the world is that lonely British officer eating now? A city of longings and madness. A refugee camp, not a city. But you could still get away from it. You could take Dimi and Yael away from here and join a kibbutz in the desert. You could propose to Tamar or to Annette Tadmor, settle down with her in Magdiel, and get a job as a clerk in a bank, in the health service, or in the national insurance, and start writing poetry again in the evenings. Start a new chapter. Get a little closer to the Third State.

His feet led him of their own accord into the maze of narrow streets which is the Bukharian Quarter. Slowly he shuffled underneath gaudily bedecked clotheslines stretched across the gray street. On balconies with rusting wrought-iron balustrades he could see dried skeletons of palm booths left over from Sukkoth, heaps of scrap iron and junk, suspended copper washing kettles, moldering packing boxes, jerry cans, all the refuse of the run-down flats. Almost every window here was curtained in garish colors. On the windowsills stood glass jars inside which cucumbers were slowly pickling in a broth of garlic, dill, and parsley. Fima suddenly felt that these guttural places, built around courtyards with ancient stone wells, smelling of grilled meat, onions, baking pastry, spiced dishes, and smoke, offered him a simple, straightforward answer to a question he had totally failed to frame. Something was hammering urgently at his chest both outside and within, gently plucking and gnawing, like the long-forgotten music of Johnny Guitar, like the lakes and forests on the walls of the little restaurant that his mother used to take him to after shopping in the market on Fridays. And he said to himself: