Amos Oz - Fima

So he turned the light on, got out of bed, and sat down in his yellowing long underwear on the floor in front of the brown wardrobe. He had to use force to dislodge the jammed bottom drawer. For twenty minutes or so he rummaged through old notebooks, pamphlets, drafts, photographs, jottings, and newspaper clippings, until he came upon a shabby cardboard folder with the words "Ministry of the Interior: Department of Local Government" stamped on it.

Fima extracted from this folder a bundle of old letters in their original envelopes. He systematically scrutinized each envelope in turn, determined for once not to be defeated or sidetracked. Eventually he found Yael's farewell letter. The pages were numbered 2, 3, 4. So apparently the first page was lost. Or perhaps it had merely strayed into another envelope. He noticed that the end of the letter was also missing. Lying on the floor in his underwear, he started to read what Yael had written to him when she went off without him to Seatde in 1965. Her handwriting was tiny, pearl-like, neither feminine nor masculine, but rounded and fluent. Perhaps this was the sort of calligraphy that was taught in respectable schools in the last century. In his mind Fima compared this chaste handwriting to his own scrawl, which resembled a mob of panic-stricken soldiers jostling each other out of the way as they fled during a rout.

"…TERRIBLE IN YOU, BUT I SIMPLY DIDN'T UNDERSTAND IT. I STILL don't. There's no resemblance between the soulful, dreamy young man who inspired and entertained three girls in the mountains of northern Greece and the lazy, gossipy receptionist who moons around at home all morning, arguing with himself, listening to the news every hour, reading three newspapers and scattering them all over the flat, opening cupboard doors and forgetting to shut them, poking around in the fridge and complaining there isn't any this and there isn't any that. And scurrying off to your friends every evening, barging in without waiting to be invited, with a grubby shirt collar, a cap left over from the 'forties, picking quarrels about politics with everybody into the early hours of the morning until they arc literally praying for you to leave. Even your outward appearance has a secondhand look. You've put on weight, Effy. Maybe it wasn't your fault. Those eyes that were alert and dreamy started to fade and now they've gone dull. In Greece you could hold Liat, me, and Ilia spellbound from moonrise to sunrise with stories about the Eleusinian mysteries, the cult of Dionysos, the Erinyes, goddesses of fate, and the Moirai, goddesses of furious vengeance, Persephone in the underworld, and fabled rivers with names like Styx and Lethe. I haven't forgotten a thing, Effy: I'm a good pupil. Though I sometimes wonder if you yourself can remember anything. You've forgotten yourself.

"We lay on the ground near a spring and you played on a pipe. We found you amazing, enchanting, but also a little frightening. I remember one evening Ilia and Liat made a wreath of oak leaves and arranged it on your head. At that moment I wouldn't have minded if you'd slept with one of them in front of my eyes. Or even with both of them at once. In Greece, in that springtime four years ago, you were a poet even though you didn't write a single word. Now you sit and cover pages every night, but the poet isn't there anymore.

"What charmed us all was your helplessness. On the one hand you were so enigmatic, and on the other hand you were a little clown. A sort of child. One could be a hundred percent certain that if there was a single sliver of glass in the valley, you would tread on it with your bare foot; that if there was just one loose stone in the whole of Greece, it would fall on your head; that if there was a single wasp in the Balkans, it would sting you. When you played your pipe outside some peasant's hut or at the mouth of a cave, there was sometimes a feeling that your body was not a body but a thought. And vice versa: every time you talked to us at night about thoughts, we felt we could almost touch them. All three of us loved you, but instead of getting jealous, with each day that passed we loved each other more. It was something miraculous. Liat slept with you at night on behalf of all three of us, as it were: through Liat you were sleeping with me and with Ilia too. I can't explain it and I don't need an explanation. You could have had any or all of us. But the moment you made your choice, even though the winner turned out to be me, the spell was broken. When you invited us to Jerusalem to meet your father, the magic was not there anymore. Then, when the preparations for the wedding began, you became tired, absent-minded. Once, you forgot me at the bank. Once, you called me Ilia. When you signed that lunatic contract with your father, in the presence of the notary, you suddenly said: 'Goethe ought to be here to see the Devil selling his soul for a mess of pottage.' Your father laughed and I fought back my tears. Your father and I took care of all the arrangements, and you grumbled that your life was foundering in candlesticks and frying pans. Once you lost your temper and shouted at me that you couldn't stand a bedroom without curtains: even in a brothel there were curtains. You stamped your foot like a spoiled brat. Not that I cared: I had no objection to curtains. But that moment was the end of Greece. Your pettiness had begun. One time you made a scene on account of my wasting your father's money, another time on account of your father's money not arriving on time, and several times on account of my overusing 'on account of.' You corrected my grammar every other sentence.

"You're not easy to live with. Whenever I pluck my eyebrows or wax my legs, you stare as though you've found a spider in your salad, but if I point out that your socks smell, you start moaning that I've stopped loving you. Every evening you grumble, whose turn is it to take the trash out and who washed the dishes yesterday, and whether there were more dirty dishes yesterday or today. And then you ask why it is that the only thing we ever talk about in this house is the washing up and the trash. I know, Effy, that these are petty things. We could work on them. We could give up, or get used to them. You don't unpick a family on account of smelly socks. I don't even get worked up anymore over your regular wisecracks about aerodynamics and jet engines, which so far as you're concerned have to do only with war and killing. As though your wife works for a syndicate of murderers. I've managed to get used to your poor jokes. And your grumbling all day long. And your dirty handkerchiefs on the dinner table. And your leaving the door of the refrigerator open. And your endless theories about who really killed President Kennedy and why. You've developed verbal diarrhea, Effy. You've even taken to arguing with the radio, correcting the newscasters' grammar.

"If you ask me exactly when my separation from you began, at what moment in time, or what you did wrong to me, I can't give you an answer. The answer is: I don't know. What I do know is that in Greece you were alive and here in Jerusalem you're not. You merely exist, and you do even that as if existence itself is a bother. You're an infantile thirty-year-old man. Almost a replica of your father, but without his Old World charm, his generosity, his gallantry, and for the time being the goatee. Even in bed, you've begun to replace love with submissiveness. You've become a bit of a flatterer. But only with women. With Uri and Micha and Tsvika and the rest of your chums you're in a state of perpetual war in your late-night debates. Every now and again you remember to toss Nina or me or Shula some compliment, the same compliment to any of us indiscriminately, a little flattery by way of payment: the cake was excellent, your new hairstyle is lovely, that's a pretty plant. Even if the cake is a bought one, the hairstyle isn't new, the plant is really a vase of flowers. Just to keep us quiet and stop us from interrupting you and your chums in your endless skirmishes about the Lavon affair, or the fall of Carthage, or the Cuban missile crisis, or the Eichmann trial, or the anti-Semitism of Pound and Eliot, or who foresaw what in a discussion you had at the beginning of the winter.