Fima Read online

  The student, who would live in this flat a century from now, suddenly took on in Fima’s mind the name Yoezer. He could see him in his mind’s eye standing at this same window and staring out at those same hills. And he said to him: Don’t you mock. It’s thanks to us that you’re here. Once there was a tree-planting ceremony in the city of Ramat Gan. The first mayor, the old man, Avraham Krinitzi, stood up in front of a thousand youngsters, from all the nursery schools, each one holding a sapling. The mayor too held a sapling. His task was to make a speech to the children, and he did not know what to say. Suddenly, out of the turmoil of his mind, a one-sentence speech burst forth, delivered with a heavy Russian accent: ‘Moy dzear cheeldren, you are the trees, and we are the manure.’ Would there be any point in carving that sentence here, on the wall, like a prisoner on the wall of his cell, for that arrogant Yoezer to read? To force him to think about us? But by then surely the walls will have been repainted, replastered, perhaps even rebuilt. In a hundred years life will be more vital, more vigorous, more reasonable, and more joyful. The wars with the Arabs will be remembered with a shrug, as a sort of absurd cycle of obscure tribal skirmishes. Like the history of the Balkans. I don’t suppose Yoezer will waste his mornings hunting cockroaches or his evenings in grubby eating places behind Zion Square. Which will probably have been completely flattened and rebuilt in an energetic, optimistic style. Instead of eating greasy fried eggs, jam, and yogurt, they’ll probably just swallow a couple of capsules every few hours. No more filthy kitchens, no more ants and cockroaches. People will be busy all day with useful, exciting things, and their evenings will be devoted to learning and beauty. They will live their lives in the bright light of reason, and if ever there are any stirrings of love, there will probably be some way of exchanging minute electromagnetic pulses from a distance to find out in advance whether there is any point trying to translate this love into physical intimacy. The winter rain will have been swept away from Jerusalem forever. It will be diverted to the agricultural regions. Everyone will be taken across safely to the Aryan side, as it were. Nobody, nothing will smell bad. The word ‘suffering’ may sound to them the way the word ‘alchemy’ does to us.

  We’ve had another power cut. The lights came on again after a couple of minutes. It’s probably a hint to me that I ought to pop into the bank to pay my bill, otherwise they’ll cut me off and leave me sitting in the dark. I owe the grocer a lot of money too. And did I pay Mrs Schneider across the road for her schnitzel yesterday, or did I sign for it again? I forgot to get that book for Dimi. What’s holding us up? Why are we still here? Why aren’t we getting up and clearing out, and leaving Jerusalem to those who will come after us? A very good question, he said under his breath.

  This time he convened his cabinet in the old Sha’arei Zedek hospital on the Jaffa Road, a splendid abandoned building that had fallen into decay since the hospital was moved to a new site. By lamplight, among remnants of broken benches and pieces of rusting bedsteads, he arranged his ministers in a semicircle. He asked each of them in turn for a briefing on the situation in their various departments. Then he stunned them all by announcing that he intended to fly to Tunis at dawn to address the Palestine National Council. He would place the main burden of historic responsibility for the plight of the Palestinian Arabs fairly and squarely on the shoulders of their extremist leadership since the 1920s. He would not spare them our anger. However, he would offer to break out of the vicious circle of bloodshed and start building together a reasonable future based on compromise and conciliation. The only condition for starting to negotiate would be the total cessation of violence on both sides. At the close of the session, in the early hours, he appointed Uri Gefen minister of defence. Gad Eitan received the foreign-affairs portfolio. Tsvi would be responsible for education, Nina for finance, Wahrhaftig was put in charge of social welfare, and Ted and Yael would look after science, technology, and energy. Information and internal security he was retaining himself for the time being. And from now on the cabinet would be renamed the Revolutionary Council. The revolutionary process would be completed within six months. By then peace would be established. And immediately thereafter we can all return to our occupations and no longer interfere in the work of the elected government. I myself shall withdraw into total anonymity. I shall change my name and disappear. Now let us disperse separately by side entrances.

  What about involving Dimi?

  During the winter holidays the child spent a morning in the laboratory at the cosmetics factory in Romema. When Fima arrived to take him to the Biblical Zoo, he found that the old man had shut himself up in the lab with the child and taught him how to use acetone to manufacture explosives. Fima was furious with his father for corrupting the child: Haven’t we got enough murderers already? Why poison his soul? But Dimi interrupted the argument by observing gently, like a mediator:

  ‘Granpa’s explosives are only for painting fingernails.’

  And they all burst out laughing.

  On the wall to the left of the window, about four feet away, in a corner of a patch of peeling plaster, Fima saw a grey lizard, immobile, staring like himself, longingly, towards the Bethlehem hills. Or watching a fly that was invisible to Fima. Once upon a time, on those hills and in their winding valleys, there wandered judges and kings, conquerors, prophets of consolation and wrath, world-reforming saviours, impostors, dreamers, priests and hearers of voices, traitors, messiahs, Roman prefects, Byzantine governors, Muslim generals, and crusader princes, and ascetics, hermits, wonderworkers, and sufferers. To this day Jerusalem still resounds with their memory in the ringing of its church bells, sobs out their names from the tops of its minarets, and conjures them back with cabbalistic incantations. And now, at this moment, there was, it seemed, not a living soul left in the city, bar himself and the lizard and the light.

  When he was younger he too used to fancy he could hear a voice as he walked among Jerusalem’s alleys and boulder-strewn waste plots. He even tried to record in words what he fancied he had heard. In those days he might still have been able to stir some hearts. Even now he could sometimes fascinate a few souls, particularly women, in those Friday-night get-togethers at the Tobiases’ or the Gefens’. Sometimes he would throw out a dazzling idea, and for an instant the whole room would hold its breath. His ideas would then make their way around by word of mouth, and occasionally they even reached the columns of the newspapers. Sometimes, when the spirit moved him, he managed to coin a new phrase, to formulate a perception of the situation in words that had not previously been used, to utter some penetrating aperçu which made the rounds of the city until he came across it a few days later on the radio, severed from him and his name, and often distorted. His friends enjoyed reminding him, as a sort of mild rebuke, how once or twice he had shown real foresight, as for example in ’73, when he had gone around lamenting to the point of ridicule the blindness that was afflicting Israel, the impending catastrophe. Or on the eve of the invasion of Lebanon. Or before the wave of Islamic fundamentalism. Whenever his friends reminded him of these prophecies, Fima would recoil and reply with a rueful grin that it was nothing, the writing was already on the wall and any child could read it.

  Tsvi Kropotkin sometimes copied pieces for him from a literary supplement or a periodical with some allusion to the Death of Augustine, when some critics bothered to drag those poems out of oblivion to use them as auxiliary ammunition in a campaign for or against current trends in poetry. Fima would shrug and mutter, That’s enough, Tsvika, just drop it. His poems, like his prophecies, seemed to him remote and irrelevant. Why does the soul pine when it has no idea what it is pining for? What really exists and what only seems to exist? Where can you look for something lost when you have forgotten what it is you lost? Once, in his billy-goat year, during his brief marriage to the hotel owner in Valletta, he was sitting in a waterfront café on the harbour watching a couple of fisherman play backgammon. In point of fact it was not so much the fishermen he was watching as an alsatian
dog that sat, panting, on a chair between them. The dog’s ears were pricked forward earnestly, as though it were listening for the next move, and it kept following the players’ fingers and the rolls of the dice and the moving counters with eyes that seemed to Fima full of fascination and humble wonderment. Fima had never, before or since, seen such a concentrated effort to understand the unintelligible, as if in its longing to decipher the game the dog had achieved a degree of disembodiment. Surely that is precisely the way we ought to look at what is beyond us. To grasp as much as we can, or at least to grasp our inability to grasp. Fima sometimes pictured the creator of the universe, in whom he did not entirely believe, in the form of a Jerusalem tradesman of Middle Eastern origin, aged about sixty, lean and tanned and wrinkled, eaten away by cigarettes and arak, in threadbare brown trousers and a not very clean white shirt buttoned right up to the skinny neck but without a tie, and with worn-out brown shoes and a shabby old-fashioned jacket a little too small for him. This creator sat drowsily on a wicker stool, facing the sun, his eyes half-closed, his head sunk on his chest, in the doorway of his haberdashery shop in Zichron Moshe. A dead cigarette end hung from his lower lip and a string of amber beads was frozen between his fingers, where a broad ring flashed from time to time. Fima stopped and dared to address him, with exaggerated politeness, in the third person, hesitantly: Might I be permitted to disturb Your Worship with just one question? A twitch of irony flitted across the wrinkled, leathery face. Perhaps just a fly buzzing? Would Your Worship deign to consider the Brothers Karamazov? The argument between Ivan and the Devil? Mitya’s dream? Or the episode of the Grand Inquisitor? No? And what would Your Worship deign to reply to that question? Vanity of vanities? Would Your Worship resort yet again to the old arguments: Where wast thou when I laid the foundation of the world? I am that I am. The old man released a kind of belch reeking of tobacco and arak, turned up his two palms, which were as pitted as a plasterer’s, and spread them empty on his knees. Only the ring on his finger glimmered for a moment and then faded. Was he chewing something? Smiling? Dozing? Fima abandoned his quest. Apologising, he went on his way. Not running, not hurrying, yet nevertheless like one who is running away and knows he is, and also knows that running away is useless.

  From his window Fima watched the sun straining to free itself from the clouds. An elusive change was coming over the streets and the hills. Not so much a brightening as a slight quivering of hues, as though the air itself were smitten with hesitations or doubts. All the things that filled the lives of the gang – Uri, Tsvi, Teddy, and the rest of them – the things that stirred them to longing or enthusiasm, seemed to Fima as forlorn as the dead leaves rotting under the bare mulberry tree in the garden. There is a forgotten promised land somewhere here – no, not a land, not promised, not even really forgotten, but something calling to you. He asked himself whether he would care if he died today. The question did not arouse anything in him: neither apprehension nor desire. Death seemed as boring as one of Wahrhaftig’s stories. Whereas his daily life was as predictable and weary as his father’s moralising. In his head he suddenly agreed with the old man, not about the identity of the Indians, but when he said that the days go by without joy or purpose. The shlemiel and his friend did indeed deserve pity rather than ridicule. But what were they to him? Surely he, Fima, was full of unbelievable powers, and it was only tiredness that made him put off exercising them. Like someone waiting for the precise timing. Or for a blow to smash the inner crust. He could, for example, drop his job at the clinic, extract a thousand dollars from the old man, and sail away on a cargo boat to start a new life. In Iceland. In Crete. In Safed. He could shut himself up in that guesthouse in Magdiel and write a play. Or a confession. He could devise a political programme, pick up some followers, and start a new movement that would shatter the mood of indifference and sweep through the public like wildfire. Or he could join one of the existing parties, apply himself to public activities for five or six years, moving from branch to branch, casting new light on the national situation until even the most stolid hearts were jolted, and eventually he would get his hands on the tiller and bring peace to the land. In 1977 a private citizen named Lange or Longe had managed to get himself elected to the New Zealand parliament, and by 1982 he held the reins of power. Or else Fima could fall in love, or get involved in his father’s business and turn the cosmetics factory into the nucleus of an industrial conglomerate. Or he could scoot up the academic ladder, overtake Tsvi and his gang, get a chair, and start a new school. He could take Jerusalem by storm with a new book of poems. What a ridiculous expression, ‘take Jerusalem by storm’. Or win back Yael. And Dimi. Or he could sell this ruin and use the money to restore an abandoned house on the outskirts of a remote village in the hills of Upper Galilee. Or do the opposite: bring in builders, carpenters, decorators, renovate the whole flat, send the bill to his father, and open a new chapter.

  The sun suddenly came out of the fleeting clouds above Gilo and cast a tender, precious light on one of the hills. This time Fima did not find any exaggeration in the expression ‘precious light’, but he chose to discard it. Not before saying the words aloud and feeling a flush of inner response and pleasure. He went on to say the words ‘sharp and smooth’, and again he experienced enjoyment mixed with mockery.

  A sliver of glass caught fire below him in the garden, as though it had found the way and was signalling to him to follow. In his mind Fima repeated his father’s words. Snows of yesteryear. A handful of dust. Somehow instead of saying ‘snows of yesteryear’, he said ‘bones of yesteryear’.

  What did the lizard, immobile on the wall, and the cockroach under the kitchen sink have in common, and how did they differ? Seemingly, neither of them wasted the treasure of life. Even if they too were subject to Baruch Nomberg’s iron rule about living without sense and dying without desire. But at least without fantasising about seizing power or bringing peace to the land.

  Stealthily, Fima opened his window, taking great care not to startle the meditative reptile. Even though his friends, and he himself, considered him to be a clumsy oaf, he managed to open it without a squeak. He was certain now that the creature was focusing on some point in space that he too ought to be looking at. From what remote province of evolution’s realm, from what dim, primeval landscape replete with volcanoes gushing clouds of smoke and jungles and misty vapours rising from the ground long before the word and knowledge came into being, whole aeons before all those kings and prophets and saviours who once roamed these hills, came this creature that now stared at Fima from a distance of not more than three feet with a kind of anxious affection? Like a distant relation concerned about your health. Yes, a perfect little dinosaur, shrunk to the size of a yard lizard. Fima seemed to intrigue the creature, otherwise why was it moving its head to left and right, slowly, as if to say: I’m really surprised at you. Or as if regretting the fact that Fima was acting unwisely but that there was no way of helping him.

  And truly it is a distant relation: there is no doubting that it belongs to a remote branch of the family. Between you and me, pal, and between both of us and Trotsky, there is much more in common than divides us: head neck spine curiosity appetite limbs sexual desire the ability to tell light from darkness and cold from warmth, ribs lungs old age digestive and secretory systems nerves to perceive pain metabolism memory sense of danger a ramifying maze of blood vessels a reproductive mechanism and a mechanism for limited regeneration programmed ultimately for self-destruction. Also a heart functioning as a complex pump and a sense of smell and an instinct for self-preservation and a talent for escape and concealment and camouflage and also direction-finding systems and a brain, and apparently also loneliness. There are so many things we could talk about, compare, learn from each other, and teach each other. Perhaps we should also take into account an even more remote kinship that links the three of us to the vegetable kingdom. Lay your hand on a fig leaf, for instance, or a vine leaf: only a blind person would deny the similarity of form,
the spread of the fingers, the branching vessels and sinews, whose function it is to distribute nourishment and eliminate waste matter. And who can say whether behind this kinship there does not lurk an even subtler one between all of us and the minerals in particular or the inanimate world in general. Every living cell is made up of a mass of inanimate substances which are not really inanimate at all but are constantly pulsing with infinitesimal electrical charges. Electrons. Neutrons. Perhaps there too there is a pattern of male and female that can neither merge nor separate? Fima smiled. It would be best, he decided, to come to terms with young Yoezer, standing at this window in a hundred years’ time, staring at his own lizard. I shall matter to him less than a grain of salt. Perhaps something of me, a molecule, an atom, a neutron, will actually be present in this room, possibly indeed in a grain of salt. Assuming people still use salt a hundred years from now.

  And why shouldn’t they?

  Dimi is the only person I might be able to talk to about these fantasies.

  At any rate, better to fill his head with prophets and lizards and vine leaves than bombs made out of nail varnish.

  In an instant the lizard had wriggled away and hidden itself inside or behind the gutter. It had disappeared, sharp and smooth. Fauré’s Requiem ended and was followed by Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances, which Fima did not like. And the brightening light was beginning to hurt his eyes. He closed the window and began to look for a sweater, but he was too late to save the electric kettle, which had boiled dry some time before and now smelt of smoke and burnt rubber. Fima would have to choose between taking it to be mended on his way to work and buying a new one.

  ‘Your problem, pal,’ he said to himself.

  He chewed a heartburn tablet and opted for freedom. He called the clinic and told Tamar he would not be coming in today. No, he wasn’t ill. Yes, he was sure. Everything was perfectly OK. Yes, a personal matter. No, there was nothing wrong and he didn’t need any help. Thanks anyway, and please say I’m sorry. He looked in the phone book, and, lo and behold, under The found Tadmor, Annette and Yeroham, in one of the suburbs, Mevaseret.