Fima Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Amos Oz

  Title Page

  1 Promise and grace

  2 Fima gets up for work

  3 A can of worms

  4 Hopes of opening a new chapter

  5 Fima gets soaked in the dark in the pouring rain

  6 As if she were his sister

  7 With thin fists

  8 A disagreement on the question of who the Indians really are

  9 ‘There are so many things we could talk about, compare …’

  10 Fima forgives and forgets

  11 As far as the last lamppost

  12 The fixed distance between him and her

  13 The root of all evil

  14 Discovering the identity of a famous Finnish general

  15 Bedtime stories

  16 Fima comes to the conclusion that there is still a chance

  17 Nightlife

  18 ‘You’ve forgotten yourself’

  19 In the monastery

  20 Fima is lost in the forest

  21 But the glow-worm had vanished

  22 ‘I feel good with you just like this’

  23 Fima forgets what he has forgotten

  24 Shame and guilt

  25 Fingers that were no fingers

  26 Chili

  27 Fima refuses to give in

  28 In Ithaca, on the water’s edge

  29 Before the Sabbath

  30 At least as far as possible

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Fima, our eponymous hero, is a receptionist at a gynaecology clinic. A preposterous, yet curiously attractive figure, he spends his hours fantasizing about solving the nation’s problems and pursuing women with equivocal success.

  About the Author

  Born in Jerusalem in 1939, Amos Oz studied philosophy and literature at Hebrew University and is one of Israel’s finest living writers, as well as a respected political commentator and campaigner for peace in the Middle East. He is the author of many previous works of fiction, including My Michael, To Know a Woman, Black Box, Don’t Call It Night and, most recently, The Same Sea, as well as acclaimed works of non-fiction In the Land of Israel, The Slopes of Lebanon, Israel, Palestine & Peace and The Story Begins. His work has been translated into twenty-eight languages and he has won many international literary awards. Amos Oz is married, with two daughters and a son, and lives in Arad, Israel.

  ALSO BY AMOS OZ

  Fiction

  Elsewhere, Perhaps

  Touch the Water, Touch the Wind

  Unto Death

  The Hill of Evil Counsel

  Where the Jackals Howl

  A Perfect Peace

  My Michael

  To Know a Woman

  Black Box

  Don’t Call It Night

  Panther in the Basement

  The Same Sea

  Non Fiction

  In the Land of Israel

  The Slopes of Lebanon

  Israel, Palestine & Peace

  The Story Begins

  For Children

  Soumchi

  Amos Oz

  FIMA

  TRANSLATED FROM THE HEBREW BY

  Nicholas de Lange

  in collaboration with the author

  1

  Promise and grace

  FIVE nights before the sad event, Fima had a dream which he recorded at half past five in the morning in his dream book, a brown notebook that always lay beneath an untidy heap of old newspapers and magazines on the floor at the foot of his bed. In this book Fima had made it his habit to write down, in bed, as the first pale lines of dawn began to appear between the slats of his blinds, whatever he had seen in the night. Even if he had seen nothing, or if he had forgotten what he had seen, he still switched on the light, squinted, sat up in bed, and, propping a thick magazine on his knees to serve as a writing desk, wrote something like this:

  ‘Twentieth of December – blank night.’

  Or:

  ‘Fourth of January – something about a fox and a ladder, but the details have gone.’

  He always wrote the date out in words. Then he would get up to relieve himself and lie down in bed again until the cooing of the doves came into the room, with a dog barking and a bird nearby that sounded surprised, as though it could not believe its eyes. Fima promised himself he would get up at once, in a few minutes, a quarter of an hour at most, but sometimes he dropped off again and did not wake till eight or nine, because his shift at the clinic only started at one o’clock. He found less falsehood in sleeping than in waking. Even though he had long ago come to understand that truth was beyond his reach, he wanted to distance himself as much as possible from the petty lies that filled his everyday life like a fine dust that penetrated even to the most intimate crannies.

  On Monday morning early, as a murky orange glimmer began to filter through the blind, he sat up in bed and entered the following in his book:

  ‘A woman, attractive rather than beautiful, came up to me; she didn’t approach the reception desk but appeared from behind me, despite the notice saying STAFF ONLY. I said, “Sorry, all inquiries must be made from the front of the desk.” She laughed and said, “All right, Efraim, we heard you the first time.” I said, “If you don’t get out of here, ma’am, I’ll have to ring my bell” (although I haven’t got a bell). At these words the woman laughed again, a pleasant, graceful laugh, like a limpid brook. She was slim-shouldered and had a slightly wrinkled neck, but her bosom and stomach were well rounded and her calves covered by silk stockings with curving seams. The combination of curvaceousness and vulnerability was both sexy and touching. Or maybe it was the contrast between the shapely body and the face of an overworked teacher that was touching. I had a little girl by you, she said, and now it’s time for our daughter to meet her father. Although I knew I wasn’t supposed to leave the clinic, that it would be dangerous to follow her, especially barefoot, which I suddenly was, a sort of inner signal formed itself: If she draws her hair over her left shoulder with her left hand, then I’ll have to go. She knew; with a light movement she brought her hair forward until it spread over her dress and covered her left breast, and she said: Come. I followed her through several streets and alleys, several flights of steps and gates, and more stone-paved courtyards in Valladolid in Spain, though it was really more or less the Bukharian Quarter here in Jerusalem. Even though this woman in the girlish cotton dress and sexy stockings was a stranger and I had never set eyes on her before, I still wanted to see the little girl. So we walked through entrances to buildings that led to back yards full of loaded clotheslines, which led us to new alleyways and an ancient square lit by a street lamp in the rain. Because it had started to rain, not hard, not pouring, very few drops in fact, just a thick mist in the darkening air. We didn’t meet a living soul on the way. Not even a cat. Suddenly the woman stopped in a passageway that had vestiges of decaying grandeur, like an entrance to an Oriental palace, but probably it was just a tunnel joining two sodden courtyards, with battered letter boxes and flaking ceramic tiles, and removing my wrist-watch, she pointed to a tattered army blanket in an alcove under the steps, as though removing my watch was the prelude to some kind of nakedness, and now I had to give her a baby daughter and I asked where we were and where the children were, because somehow along the way the daughter had turned into children. The woman said, Chili. I couldn’t tell whether this was the little girl’s name or the name of the woman herself, who was clasping my hand to her breast, or if she was cold because of the nakedness of the skinny daughters, or if it was an invitation to hug her and warm her up. When I hugged her, her whole body shook, not with desire but with despair, and she whispered, Don’t be afraid, Efraim, I know a
way and I’ll get you across safely to the Aryan side. In the dream this whispered phrase was full of promise and grace, and I continued to trust her and follow her ecstatically, and was not at all surprised when in the dream she turned into my mother, nor did I ask where the Aryan side was. Until we reached the water. At the water’s edge, with a blond military moustache and legs spread wide, stood a man in a dark uniform who said: Have to separate.

  ‘So it became clear that she was chilly because of the water, and that I would not see her again. I woke with sadness and even now as I conclude these notes the sadness has not left me.’

  2

  Fima gets up for work

  EFRAIM got out of bed in his sweaty underwear, opened his shutters a crack, and looked out at the beginning of a winter day in Jerusalem. The nearby buildings did not look near: they seemed far from him and from each other, with wisps of low cloud drifting among them. There was no sign of life outside. As though the dream were continuing. Except that there was no stone-paved alley now, but a shabby road at the southwest edge of Kiryat Yovel, a row of squat blocks of flats jerry-built in the late 1950s. The balconies had been mostly closed in with breeze-block, plasterboard, aluminium, and glass. Here and there an empty window box or a neglected flowerpot stood on a rusting balustrade. Away to the south the Bethlehem hills merged with the grey clouds, looking unattractive and grubby this morning, more like slag heaps than hills. A neighbour was having difficulty starting his car because of the cold and the damp. The starter wheezed repeatedly, like a terminally ill lung case who still insisted on chain-smoking. Again Fima was overcome by the feeling that he was here by mistake, that he ought to be somewhere completely different.

  But what the mistake was, or where he ought to be, he did not know this morning. In fact he never did.

  The car’s wheezing brought on his own morning cough, and he moved away from the window. He did not want to start his day in such a pointless and pathetic way. He said to himself, Lazy bastard! and began to do some simple exercises, bends and stretches, in front of the mirror that was dappled with dark islands and continents. The mirror was fixed to the front of the old brown wardrobe his father had bought for him thirty years ago. He should have asked the woman what it was he was supposed to separate. But he had missed his chance.

  As a general rule Fima loathed people standing at windows. He especially loathed the sight of a woman looking out of a window with her back to the room. Before his divorce he had often irritated Yael by grumbling when she stood like that, looking out at the street or the hills.

  ‘What’s wrong? Am I breaking the rules again?’

  ‘You know it annoys me.’

  ‘That’s your problem, Effy.’

  This morning, even his exercises in front of the mirror annoyed and tired him. After a minute or two he stopped. Calling himself lazy bastard again. He panted and added mockingly:

  ‘That’s your problem, pal.’

  He was fifty-four, and during his years of living alone he had fallen into the habit of talking to himself. He reckoned this among his old bachelor’s foibles, along with losing the lid of the jam, trimming the hair in one of his nostrils and forgetting to do the other, unzipping his fly on the way to the bathroom to save time but missing the bowl when he started to piss, or flushing in the middle in the hope that the sound of rushing water would help him overcome his stuttering bladder. He would try to finish while the water was still running; so there was always a race between his own water and that from the cistern. It was a race he always lost, and he would be faced with the infuriating alternative of standing there, tool in hand, until the cistern refilled and he could have another go, or admitting defeat and leaving his urine in the bowl till next time. He did not like to admit defeat or to waste his time waiting, so he would impatiently pull the handle before the cistern was full again. This would provoke a premature eruption which was insufficient to flush the bowl but was enough to confront him yet again with the abhorrent choice between waiting longer or giving up and going away.

  In the course of his life he had had several love affairs, several ideas, a book of poems that aroused some expectations, thought about the purpose of the universe and clear insights into where the country had lost its way, a detailed fantasy about founding a new political movement, longings of one sort or another, and the constant desire to open a new chapter. And here he was now in this shabby flat on a gloomy wet morning, engaged in a humiliating struggle to release the corner of his shirt from the zip of his fly. While outside some soggy bird kept repeating the same three-note phrase over and over again, as though it had come to the conclusion that he was so dimwitted he would never understand.

  In this way, by painstakingly identifying and classifying his middle-aged bachelor habits, Fima hoped to distance himself from himself, to open up a space for mockery and defend his longings and his self-respect. But there were times when this obsessive quest for the ridiculous or compulsive habits appeared to him in a revelation not as a line of defence between himself and the middle-aged bachelor but in fact as a stratagem employed by that bachelor to get rid of him and usurp his place.

  He decided to return to the wardrobe and take a look at himself in the mirror. And to view his body not with disgust, despair, or self-pity, but with resignation. In the mirror he beheld a pale, rather overweight clerk with folds of flesh at the waist, whose underwear was none too fresh, who had sparse black hair on white legs that were too skinny in relation to the belly, and greying hair, weak shoulders, and flabby male breasts growing on the untanned plot of his chest, dotted with pimples, one of which was surrounded by a livid redness. He squeezed the pimples between his forefinger and thumb, watching in the mirror. The bursting of the pimples and the squirting of the yellowish pus afforded a vague, irritable pleasure. For fifty years, like the gestation of an elephant, this faceless clerk had been swelling inside the womb of child and youth and grown man, and now the fifty years were up, the gestation was complete, the womb had burst open, the butterfly had begotten a chrysalis. In this chrysalis Fima recognised himself.

  He also saw that now the roles were reversed, that from here on, in the depth of the cocoonlike womb, the wide-eyed child with the gawky limbs would be forever hiding.

  Resignation accompanied by faint mockery sometimes contains its opposite: an inner craving for the child, the youth, the grown man out of whose womb the chrysalis emerged. And so sometimes he experienced, for an instant, the restoration of that which could never be restored, in a pure refined state, immune to decay, proof against longing and sorrow. As though trapped inside a glass bubble for an instant Yael’s love was restored to him, with the touch of her lips and tongue behind his ear and her whispered, ‘Here, touch me here.’

  In the bathroom Fima was put in a quandary when he discovered that his shaving foam had run out, but he had the bright idea of trying to shave with a thick layer of ordinary toilet soap. Except that the soap turned out to have a rancid smell, like armpits in a heat wave. He scraped his jaws till they were raw but forgot to shave the bristles under his chin. Then he took a hot shower and found the courage to end with thirty seconds of cold water, and for a moment he felt fresh and vigorous and ready to open a new chapter in his life, until the towel, which was damp from the day before and the day before that and more, wrapped him again in his own stale night smell, as though he had been forced to put on a dirty shirt.

  From the shower he made for the kitchen and put on the water for coffee; he washed a dirty cup from the sink, put two saccharin tablets and two spoonfuls of instant coffee in it, and went to make his bed. His struggle with the bedspread lasted several minutes. When he returned to the kitchen, he saw that he had left the refrigerator door open overnight. He took out the margarine and the jam and a yogurt he had started the day before, but it turned out that some feeble-minded insect had for some reason selected the yogurt to commit suicide in. He attempted to fish the cadaver out with a teaspoon, but succeeded only in drowning it. He dropped the yogurt
pot in the bin and made do with black coffee, having decided without checking that the milk must have turned sour because the fridge door had been left open. He intended to turn on the radio and listen to the news. The cabinet had been sitting late into the night. Had the special airborne commando been parachuted into Damascus and captured President Assad? Or did Yasser Arafat want to come to Jerusalem and address the Knesset? Fima preferred to suppose that at most the news would be a devaluation of the shekel or some case of corruption. He visualised himself convening his cabinet for a midnight sitting. An old revolutionary sentiment from his days in the youth movement made him hold this meeting in a classroom in a run-down school in Katamon, with peeling benches and sums chalked on the blackboard. He himself, wearing a workman’s jacket and threadbare trousers, would sit not at the teacher’s desk but on the windowsill. He would paint a pitiless picture of the realities, startling the ministers with his portrayal of the impending disaster. Towards dawn he would secure a majority for a decision to withdraw all our armed forces, as a first step, from the Gaza Strip, even without an agreement. ‘If they fire on our settlements, I’ll bomb them from the air. But if they keep quiet, if they demonstrate that they are serious about peace, then we’ll wait a year or two and open negotiations with them about the future of the West Bank.’

  After his coffee he put on a worn brown sweater, the chunky one Yael had left behind for him, looked at his watch, and saw he had missed the seven o’clock news. So he went downstairs to collect the morning paper from the letter box. But he had forgotten the key and had to tug the paper through the slit, tearing the front page in the process. On his way upstairs, reading the headlines as he climbed, he concluded that the country had fallen into the hands of a bunch of lunatics, who went on and on about Hitler and the Holocaust and always rushed to stamp out any glimmer of peace, seeing it as a Nazi ploy aimed at their destruction. By the time he reached his front door, he realised that he had contradicted himself again, and he warned himself against the hysteria and whingeing that were so typical of the Israeli intelligentsia: We must beware of the foolish temptation to assume that history will eventually punish the guilty. As he made himself a second cup of coffee, he mentally deployed, against his previous thoughts, the argument he tended to use in his political discussions with Uri Gefen and Tsvika and the rest of the gang: We’ve got to learn at long last how to exist and operate in interim situations that can drag on for years, instead of reacting to reality by sulking. Our lack of mental readiness to live in an open-ended situation, our desire to reach the bottom line immediately and decide at once what the ending will be, surely these are the real causes of our political impotence.