Fima Read online

  ‘This,’ he said, ‘is where the dog is buried.’

  Ilia said: ‘I feel dreamier than in a dream and more awake than waking. I can’t explain it.’

  Liat said: ‘It’s the light. That’s all.’

  And Yael: ‘Who’s thirsty? Let’s go down to the water.’

  Less than a month after the conclusion of this trip Fima went to Yavne’el to look for the third girl. He discovered that Yael Levin was a graduate of the aeronautical engineering department of the Haifa Technion and worked in a top-secret air force installation in the hills west of Jerusalem. After a few meetings he found that her presence made him feel restful, while his presence amused her in her placid way. When he asked her, hesitantly, whether she thought they were suited to each other, she replied, ‘I quite like the way you talk.’ He thought this indicated a hint of affection. Which he treasured. Next he sought out Liat Sirkin and sat with her for half an hour in a little seaside café, simply to make certain he had not made her pregnant. But afterwards he allowed himself to sleep with her again in a cheap hotel in Bat Yam, so he wasn’t certain any more. In May he invited all three girls to Jerusalem to meet his father. The old man charmed Ilia with his old-style courtesy, entertained Liat with anecdotes and fables with morals, but he preferred Yael, who showed, he thought, ‘signs of depth’. Fima agreed with him, although he was not entirely sure he understood what the signs were. He continued to go out with her, until one day she said to him: ‘Look at your shirt, half inside your trousers and half outside. Wait. I’ll sort it out for you.’

  And in August 1961 Yael and Efraim Nisan were married in the small flat his father had bought him on the edge of Kiryat Yovel, on the edge of Jerusalem, after Fima had given in and signed, in the presence of a notary, an agreement drawn up by his father, containing a solemn undertaking to refrain henceforth from any act that his father might define as an ‘adventure’. He also undertook to begin, at the end of the wasted year, studying for a master’s degree. The father, for his part, agreed to finance his son’s studies as well as the final stage of Yael’s training, and even granted them a modest monthly allowance for the first five years of their marriage. From then on Fima’s name was no longer mentioned in Jerusalem gossip. The adventures had come to an end. The billy-goat year had finished, and the tortoise years began. But he did not go back to the university, except perhaps with one or two ideas that he gave to his friend Tsvi Kropotkin, who had meanwhile proceeded without a pause from MA to doctorate and was already laying the foundation for a great tower of historical articles and books.

  In 1962, at the urging of his friends and thanks to special efforts on the part of Tsvika, Fima published the cycle of poems he had written during his short-lived marriage in Malta: The Death of Augustine and His Resurrection in the Arms of Dulcinea. For a year or two there were some critics and readers who saw in Efraim Nisan a promise waiting to be fulfilled. But after a time even the promise faded, because Fima’s muse fell silent. He wrote no more poems. Every morning Yael was picked up by a military vehicle and taken to work at a base whose location Fima did not know, where she was engaged in some technological development that he neither understood nor wanted to. He would spend the entire morning prowling around the flat, listening to every news broadcast, raiding the fridge and eating standing up, arguing aloud with himself and with the newsreaders, furiously making the bed that Yael had not managed to make before she went out, in fact couldn’t, because he was still asleep in it. Then he would finish reading the morning paper, go out to buy one or two things at the grocer’s, come back with two afternoon papers, immerse himself in them until the evening and leave their pages scattered all over the flat. Between reading the papers and listening to the news, he made himself sit down at his desk. For a while he was occupied by a Christian book, the Pugio Fidei of Father Raymond Martini, published in Paris in 1651 to refute once and for all the faith of the ‘Moors and the Jews’. Fima was contemplating a fresh study of the Christian origins of antisemitism. But his work was interrupted by a vague interest in the idea of the Hidden God. He plunged himself into the biography of the hermit Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus, who learned Hebrew from a Jewish teacher, settled in Bethlehem in 386, translated both Testaments into Latin, and may have deliberately deepened the rift between Jews and Christians. But this study did not quench Fima’s thirst. Lassitude got the better of him, and he sank into idleness. He would leaf through the encyclopedia, forget what he was looking for, and waste a couple of hours reading through the entries in alphabetical order. Almost every evening he would pull on his battered cap and go out to visit his friends, chatting till the early hours about the Lavon affair, the Eichmann trial, the Cuban missile crisis, the German scientists in Egypt, the significance of the Pope’s visit to the Holy Land. When Yael got home from work in the evening and asked if he had eaten, Fima would reply irritably, Why? Where does it say I’ve got to eat? And then, while she was in the shower, he would explain to her through the closed door who was really behind the assassination of President Kennedy. Later, when she asked if he was going out to have another row with Uri or Tsvika, he would answer, No, I’m going to an orgy. And he would ask himself how he had allowed his father to attach him to this woman. But there were other times when he suddenly fell in love all over again with her strong fingers as they rubbed her little ankles at the end of the day, or with her habit of stroking her eyelashes, lost in thought, and he would court her like a shy, passionate youth until she allowed him to give pleasure to her body, and then he would thrill her eagerly and precisely, with a sort of profound attentiveness. Sometimes he would say to her, as some petty quarrel brewed, Just wait, Yael, it’ll pass. It won’t be long before our proper life starts. Sometimes they would go for a walk together in the deserted lanes of north Jerusalem on a Friday evening, and he would talk to her with barely suppressed excitement about the union of body and light according to the ancient mystics. This made her feel so joyful and tender that she snuggled against him and forgave him for putting on weight, for forgetting to change his shirt again for the weekend, for his habit of correcting her Hebrew. Then they would go home and make love as if they were beyond despair.

  In 1965 Yael went to work, on special contract, at the Boeing research centre in Seattle. Fima declined to join her, arguing that a period of separation might do them both good. He stayed behind in the two-room flat in Kiryat Yovel. He had a modest post as receptionist in a private gynaecological clinic in Kiryat Shmuel. He kept his distance from academic life, unless Tsvi Kropotkin dragged him to a one-day conference on the importance of personality in history, or on the notion of the historian as eyewitness. At weekends he would turn up at Nina and Uri Gefen’s or at other friends’, and was easily caught up in their political discussions; he would occasionally astound all those present with some mordant summing-up or paradoxical prediction, but he never knew how to stop when he was winning, he would persist like a compulsive gambler, arguing volubly on subjects he knew nothing about, even over trivial details, until he wore out even his most loyal friends. Sometimes he would arrive with a few books and keep an eye on his friends’ children while they went out for the evening. Or cheerfully offer to help them with an article, by proofreading, copyediting, or preparing an abstract. Sometimes he would undertake shuttle diplomacy on a mission of mediation for a feuding couple. Every now and again he would publish a short trenchant article in Ha’arets on some aspect of the current political scene. Once in a while he would take a few days’ holiday alone in a private guesthouse in one of the older settlements in the northern Sharon. Every summer he attempted with renewed enthusiasm to learn to drive, and every autumn he failed the driving test. Now and again a woman he had met at the clinic or through friends found her way to his untidy bachelor flat and into his bed, whose sheets needed changing. She would soon discover that Fima was more interested in her pleasure than his own. Some women found this wonderful and moving; others found it unsettling and hastened to disengage themselves. He could sp
end an hour or two inflicting endless varied exquisite sensations full of playful inventiveness and physical humour, before casually snatching his own satisfaction, and then, almost before his partner noticed that he had exacted his modest commission, he would be devoting himself to her again. Any woman who tried to obtain a measure of continuity or permanence in her relationship with Fima, who succeeded in extracting a key from him, caused him to take refuge after a week or two in a run-down guesthouse in Pardés Hanna or Magdiel and not come home until she had given him up. But even these episodes had become rare in the past five or six years.

  When Yael wrote to him from Seattle early in 1966 to say there was another man in her life, Fima laughed at the trite expression. The love affairs of his billy-goat year, his marriage to Yael, Yael herself, now seemed as trite, as overacted, as childish as the underground revolutionary cell he had tried to set up when he was in high school. He decided to write her a line or two simply to send his best wishes to her and the other man in her life. He sat down at his desk that afternoon, and did not stop writing until midday the following day: in a feverish missive of thirty-four pages he confessed the depth of his love for her. After reading it through, he rejected it, tore it up, and flushed it down the lavatory. You cannot describe love in words, and if you can, that’s a sign the love no longer exists. Or is on the way out. Finally he tore a page of graph paper from a notebook and scrawled on it: ‘I can’t stop loving you because it’s not up to me, but of course you’re a free agent. How blind I’ve been. If there’s anything you need from the flat, let me know and I’ll send it. Meanwhile I’m sending you a parcel with three of your nighties and your furry slippers and the photos. But if you don’t mind, I’d like to keep the picture of the two of us at Bethlehem in Galilee.’ Yael took this letter to mean that Fima would not place any obstacles in the way of a divorce. But when she came back to Jerusalem and introduced a colourless, inexpressive man with a jaw that was too broad and thick eyebrows like a pair of bushy moustaches, saying, Efraim Nisan, Ted Tobias, let’s all be friends, Fima changed his mind and adamantly refused to grant a divorce. So Ted and Yael flew back to Seattle. They lost contact, apart from a few aerogrammes and postcards about practical matters.

  Several years later, early in 1982 Ted and Yael turned up at Fima’s flat one winter afternoon with their three-year-old son, a slightly cross-eyed albino child-philosopher with thick glasses, dressed in an American astronaut’s space suit bearing a shiny metal badge inscribed with the word CHALLENGER. The little fellow soon revealed an ability to compose complicated conditional sentences and to duck awkward questions. Fima instantly fell for little Dimi Tobias. Regretting his earlier opposition, he offered Yael and Ted a divorce, his assistance, and his friendship. Yael, however, no longer attached any importance to the religious divorce and saw no point in friendship. In the intervening years she had managed to leave Ted twice and have affairs with other men before making up her mind to go back to him and to have Dimi at what was almost the last moment as far as she was concerned. Fima won the heart of the thoughtful little Challenger with a story about a wild wolf who decided to give up being wild and tried to join a colony of rabbits. When the story was over, Dimi offered his own ending, which Fima found logical, sensitive, and not unfunny.

  Thanks to the intervention of Fima’s father, the divorce was arranged discreetly. Ted and Yael settled in the suburb of Beit Hakerem, found jobs together in a research institute, and divided their year into three: the summer in Seattle, the fall in Pasadena, the winter and spring in Jerusalem. Sometimes they invited Fima round on Friday evening, when the Kropotkins and the Gefens and the rest of the group were there. Sometimes they left Dimi with Fima in Kiryat Yovel and went off to Elat or Upper Galilee for a couple of days. Fima became their unpaid baby sitter, because he was available and because a friendship had grown up between him and Dimi. By some odd logic Dimi called him Granpa. He called Fima’s father Granpa too. Fima taught himself to make houses, palaces, and castles with loopholes out of matchsticks, matchboxes, and glue. This was totally at odds with the image of Fima shared by his friends, by Yael, and by Fima himself, namely, a clumsy oaf who was born with two left hands and could never get the hang of replacing the washer on a tap or sewing on a button.

  Apart from Dimi and his parents, there was the gang: pleasant, respectable people, some of whom had known Fima from student days and had been indirectly involved in the ordeals of the billy-goat year, and some of whom still hoped that one day the lad would wake up, get his act together, and one way or another take Jerusalem by the ears. True, they said, he sometimes gets on your nerves, he overdoes it, he has no sense of proportion, but on the other hand when he’s brilliant he’s really brilliant. One day he’s really going to get somewhere. He’s worth investing in. Last Friday, for example, early in the evening, before he started making a fool of himself with his imitations of politicians, the way he snatched the word ‘ritual’ out of Tsvi’s mouth and held us all spellbound like little kids when he suddenly said, ‘Everything is ritual,’ and fired his theory at us straight from the hip. We haven’t stopped talking about it all week. Or that amazing comparison he threw out, of Kafka and Gogol, and of the two of them with Hasidic folk tales.

  Over the years some of them grew fond of Fima’s unique combination of wit and absent-mindedness, of melancholy and enthusiasm, of sensitivity and helplessness, of profundity and buffoonery. Moreover, he was always available to be roped in to do some proofreading or to discuss a draft of an article. Behind his back they said, not unkindly, True, he’s a – how to put it? – he’s an original, and he’s goodhearted. The trouble is, he’s bone idle. He has no ambition. He simply doesn’t think about tomorrow. And he’s not getting any younger.

  Despite which, there was something in his podgy form, his shuffling, abstracted way of walking, his fine, high brow, his weary shoulders, his thinning fair hair, and in his kindly eyes that always seemed lost and looking either inward or out beyond the mountains and the desert, something in his appearance that filled them with affection and joy and made them smile broadly even when they caught sight of him from a distance, on the other side of the street, wandering around the city centre as though he did not know who had brought him there or how he was going to get out again. And they said: Look, there’s Fima over there, waving his arms. He must be having an argument with himself, and presumably he’s winning it.

  In the course of time a certain uneasy friendliness, filled with anger and contradictions, developed between Fima and his father, the well-known cosmetics manufacturer Baruch Nomberg, who was a veteran member of the right-wing Herut party. Even now, when Fima was fifty-four and his father eighty-two, the father would slip a couple of ten-shekel notes, or a single twenty-shekel note, into his son’s pocket at the end of every visit. Meanwhile Fima’s little secret was that he deposited eighty shekels each month in a savings account in the name of Ted and Yael’s son, who was ten now but still looked like a seven-year-old, dreamy and trustful. Strangers on buses sometimes noticed a vague resemblance between Fima and the child, in the shape of the chin or the forehead, or in the walk. The previous spring Dimi had asked to keep a pair of tortoises and some silkworms in a little storage space that Fima and Ted cleared for him on the balcony of the messy kitchen of the flat in Kiryat Yovel. And even though Fima was considered by others and even by himself as incorrigibly idle and absent-minded, all through the summer there was not a single day when he forgot to attend to what he took to calling ‘our can of worms’. Now, in the winter, the silkworms were dead, and the tortoises had been set free in the wadi, at the point where Jerusalem abruptly ends and a rocky wilderness begins.

  4

  Hopes of opening a new chapter

  THE private clinic in Kiryat Shmuel was approached through the garden behind the building, along a pathway paved with Jerusalem stone. Now that it was winter, the path was covered with slippery rain-soaked pine needles. Fima was totally absorbed in considering whether a frozen bird he had
just spotted on a low branch could hear the thunder that was rolling from west to east; the bird’s head and beak were buried deep in the plumage of its wing. Struck by a sudden doubt, he turned back to see if it really was a bird or if it was just a wet pine cone. That was how he came to slip and fall to his knees. He stayed crouching, not because he was in pain, but because of self-mocking pleasure at his own predicament. Softly he said, Well done, pal.