Amos Oz: Fima

By the time he had finished reading what the television critic had to say about a program he had meant but forgotten to watch the previous evening, it was past eight o'clock and he had missed the news again. Angrily he decided that he ought to sit down to work right away. He repeated to himself the words from die dream, Have to separate. Separate what from what? A warm, tender voice that was neither male nor female but held a deep compassion said to him, And where are you, Efraim? A very good question, Fima replied.

He sat at his desk and saw the unanswered letters and the shopping list he had written Saturday evening, and remembered he was supposed to phone someone this morning about something that could not wait, but he could not for the life of him recall who it was. So he dialed Tsvika Kropotkin's number, woke him up, and stammered a long embarrassed apology, but still kept Tsvi on the line for a good twenty minutes about the tactics of the left and the new changes in the U.S. position and the time bomb of Islamic fundamentalism that was ticking away all around us, until Tsvi interrupted: "Fima, I'm sorry, don't be mad, but I simply have to get dressed. I'm late for a class." Fima concluded the conversation as he had begun it, with an excessively long apology, and he still could not remember if he was supposed to call somebody this morning or instead wait for the call, which he might have missed now because of his chat with Tsvi. Less a chat than a monologue. So he dropped his idea of calling Uri Gefen as well, and checked over his computerized bank statement, but he couldn't tell if six hundred and fifty shekels had been credited to his account and four hundred and fifty debited or the other way around. His head sank on his chest, and inside his closed eyes passed crowds of Muslim fanatics excitedly chanting suras and shouting slogans, smashing and burning everything that stood in their way. Then the square was empty, with only tatters of yellowed paper fluttering in the breeze and blending with the pattering rain that fell all the way from here to the Bethlehem hills swatched in gray mist. Where are you, Efraim? Where is the Aryan side? And if she is chilly, why is she?

Fima woke to the touch of a heavy warm hand. He opened his eyes and saw his father's brown hand resting like a tortoise on his thigh. It was an old, thick hand with yellowing nails, a hand with hills and valleys, crisscrossed with dark blue blood vessels, dotted with patches of pigment and sparse tufts of hair. For a moment he panicked. Then he realized that the hand was his own. He woke and read over, three times, the headings he had written down Saturday for an article he had promised to turn in by today's deadline. But what he had intended to write, what had excited him to polemical impishness, today seemed totally flat. The very urge to write had been dulled.

A little reflection revealed that all was not lost: it was nothing more than a technical difficulty. Because of the overcast sky and the heavy mist there was not enough light in the room. He needed light. That was all. He switched on his desk lamp, hoping by so doing to make a fresh start on his article, his morning, his life. But the lamp was broken. Or perhaps it needed a new light bulb. Angry, he hurried to the cupboard in the hall, where, contrary to his expectation, he actually did find a bulb, and he managed to replace the old one with it. But the new bulb must have been defective, or perhaps it had fallen under its predecessor's influence. He went back to look for a third one, and on the way it occurred to him to try the light in the hall, and then he had to exonerate both bulbs, because it turned out there was a power cut. To save himself from idleness he decided to call Yael. If her husband answered, he would hang up. If she was there, the inspiration of the moment would tell him what to say. Like that time, after a terrible fight, when he had mollified her with the words: If only we weren't married, I'd ask you to be my wife. And she, smiling, had answered through her tears, If you weren't already my husband, I think I might say yes. After ten or twenty hollow rings Fima understood that Yael did not want to speak to him, unless Ted was leaning on the phone to prevent her picking up the receiver.

He felt weary. His long nocturnal prowl through the alleys of Valladolid had ruined his whole morning. At one o'clock he had to be at his post behind the reception desk of the private clinic where he worked in Kiryat Shmuel, and already it was twenty past nine. Fima crumpled up the headings for his article and his electricity bill and his shopping list and his computerized bank statement and tossed them all in the trash can: clearing his desk for action at last. He went to the kitchen to make himself a fresh cup of coffee, and while he was waiting for the water to boil, he stood in the half-darkness remembering the evening light in Jerusalem some thirty years before, in Agrippa Street outside the Eden cinema a few weeks after his trip to Greece. Yael had said then, Yes, Effy, I do quite love you and I like loving you and I like it when you talk, but what makes you think that if you stop talking for a few minutes you'll stop existing? And he had shut up like a child scolded by its mother.

When after a quarter of an hour the kettle was still not boiling, even though he had remembered twice to plug it in, he finally realized that without electricity he would never have his coffee. So he lay down again, fully dressed under the heavy winter blanket, set the alarm for quarter to twelve, hid his dream book under the pile of newspapers and magazines at the foot of his bed, covered himself up to his chin, and concentrated his thoughts on women until he managed to arouse himself. He clasped his organ with all ten fingers, like a burglar climbing a drainpipe or, rather — he chuckled — like a drowning man clutching at a straw. But fatigue was much stronger than desire, and he let go and dropped off. Outside, the rain grew heavier.

ON THE MIDDAY NEWS HE HEARD THAT AN ARAB YOUTH HAD BEEN hit and killed that morning by a plastic bullet fired presumably from a soldier's rifle in the Jebeliyeh refugee camp in the course of a stone-throwing incident, and that the corpse had been snatched from the hospital in Gaza by masked youths. The circumstances were being investigated. Fima considered the wording of the announcement. He particularly disliked the expression "killed by a plastic bullet." And the word "presumably" made him seethe. He was angry, too, in a more general way, about the passive verbs that were beginning to take over official statements and seemed to be infecting the language as a whole.

Although in fact it might be a healthy and wholly laudable sense of shame that prevented us from announcing simply: a Jewish soldier has shot and killed an Arab teenager. On the other hand, this polluted language was constantly teaching us that die fault lay with the rifle, with the circumstances that were being investigated, with the plastic bullet, as if all evil was the fault of Heaven and everything was predestined.

And in fact, he said to himself, who knows?

After all, there is a sort of secret charm in the words "the fault of Heaven."

But then he was angry with himself. There was no charm and it was not secret. Leave Heaven out of it.

Fima aimed a fork at his forehead, at his temple, at the back of his head, and tried to guess or sense what it must feel like the instant the bullet pierces the skull and explodes: no pain, no noise, perhaps, so he imagined, perhaps just a searing flash of incredulity, like a child prepared for a slap in the face from his father and receiving instead a white-hot poker in his eye. Is there a fraction, an atom of time, in which illumination arrives? The light of the seven heavens? When what has been dim and vague all your life is momentarily opened up before darkness falls? As though all those years you have been looking for a complicated solution to a complicated problem, and in the final moment a simple solution flashes out?