Amos Oz - Fima

Annette laughed.

THEY PASSED ON THE STAIRS. NO SOONER HAD ANNETTE LEFT HIM than Nina Gefen appeared, with her austerely cropped gray hair, carrying a heavy shopping basket, which she deposited firmly on his desk among the papers and yogurt jars and dirty coffee cups. Roughly she lit a Nelson, not blowing die match out but shaking it. She shot twin lances of smoke from her nostrils. Fima unconsciously grinned. The turnover of his female visitors suddenly made him think of the procession of lady friends who were always trooping in and out of his father's flat. Maybe the time had come for him to sport a cane with a silver band?

Nina asked:

"What's so funny?"

Her nostrils must have picked up a whiff of perfume through her cigarette smoke. Without waiting for his reply she added:

"The red lady I bumped into on the stairs was also grinning like a cat who got the cream. Have you had a visitor by any chance?"

Fima was on the point of denying it. Since when did he have visitors? There were eight flats in the building. But something stopped him from lying to this fragile, embittered woman who looked like a cornered vixen, this woman whom he sometimes called "my lover" and whose husband he loved. He looked down and said defensively:

"A patient from the clinic. Somehow we became quite friendly."

"Are you opening a branch of the clinic at your home?"

"It's like this," Fima said, while his fingers attempted in vain to rejoin the two parts of the smashed radio. "Her husband's sort of left her. She came to me for some advice."

"Broken hearts mended here," Nina said, meaning to sound witty but sounding close to tears instead. "Saint Fima, patron saint of grass widows. If it goes on like this, you'll soon be seeing visitors by appointment only."

She went into the kitchen and took out of her shopping basket a bag full of sprays and cleaning materials, which she placed for the time being on the edge of the counter. Fima had the impression that her lips, closed on a cigarette, were trembling. She unpacked various provisions she had brought him, opened the door of the refrigerator, and recoiled in horror.

"What a filthy mess," she exclaimed.

Fima explained sheepishly that he had actually done a radical cleaning but had not had time to do the fridge.

And when was Uri coming back?

From the bottom of the shopping basket Nina extracted a small plastic bag.

"Late Friday night. I.e., tomorrow. I suppose you can both hardly wait. Well, you can have your honeymoon on Saturday night. Here, I've brought you the book about Leibowitz. You ran away and left it on the rug. What's going to become of you, Fima? Just look at yourself."

And indeed Fima had omitted to tuck his shirttail in after Annette, and the bottom of his yellowing flannel undershirt was showing below the chunky sweater.

Nina emptied the fridge, ruthlessly throwing out ancient vegetables tuna, moldy remains of fossilized cheese, an open sardine can. She attacked the shelves and dividers with a cloth soaked in detergent. Fima meanwhile buttered several thick slices of the fragrant black Georgian bread she had brought with her, spread them generously with jam, and started munching voraciously. All the while he delivered a brief lecture on the lessons to be learned in Israel from the collapse of the left in England, Scandinavia, and in fact all over northern Europe. Suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, he said in a different voice:

"Look, Nina. About the night before last. No, it was the night before that. I burst in looking like a half-drowned dog, I talked nonsense, I jumped on top of you, I upset you, and then I ran away without explaining. Now I'm ashamed. I can't imagine what you must think of me. I just wouldn't like you to think that I don't find you attractive or something. It's not that, Nina. On the contrary. I do, more than ever. I'd simply had a bad day. This just isn't my week. I feel that I'm not really living. Just existing. Creeping from day to day. Without sense and without desire. There's a verse in the Psalms: My soul droops with sorrow. That about sums it up: drooping. Sometimes I have no idea what I'm doing hanging around here like last year's snow. Coming and going. Writing and crossing out. Filling in forms at the office. Putting my clothes on and taking them off again. Making phone calls. Bothering everybody and driving you all crazy. Needling my father on purpose. How come there are still people who can stand me? How come you haven't sent me to Hell yet? Will you teach me how to make amends?"

Nina said:

"Be quiet, Fima. Just stop talking."

Meanwhile she arranged the new provisions on the shelves of the now gleaming refrigerator. Her frail shoulders were trembling. From behind she looked to Fima like a small animal trapped in a cage, and he felt tenderness for her. Still with her back toward him, she continued:

"I don't understand it either. Look. An hour and a half ago, at the office, I suddenly had a feeling that you were in trouble. That something bad had happened to you. Maybe you were ill, lying here alone in a fever. I tried to call, but your phone was always busy. I thought perhaps you'd forgotten to put the receiver back, once again. I dashed out in the middle of quite an import ant meeting about an insurance company that's gone broke, and came running straight to you. Or, rather, I stopped on the way to do some shopping for you, so you wouldn't starve to death. It's almost as though Uri and I have adopted you as our child. Except that Uri seems to get a kick out of the game, whereas all I get is depressed. The whole time. Again and again I get this feeling that something terrible has happened to you, and I drop everything and come running. Such an awful feeling, as though you were calling out to me from far away: Nina, come quick. There's no explanation. Do me a favor, Fima; stop stuffing yourself with bread. Look how fat you're getting. And, anyway, I haven't got the strength or the inclination right now for your earth-shattering theories about Mitterrand and the British Labour party. Save it for Uri, for Saturday night. All I want you to say is what's wrong. What's happening to you? Something strange is going on that you're keeping from me. Even stranger than usual. As if you were slightly drugged."

Fima obeyed immediately. He stopped munching the piece of bread he was holding and put it down absent-mindedly in die sink like an empty cup. He began to stammer that the wonderful thing about her was that with her he felt hardly any embarrassment. He wasn't afraid of appearing ridiculous. He didn't even care if he was miserable or stupid in her presence, as happened the other night. As if she were his sister. Now he was going to say something trite, but so what? Trite wasn't necessarily the opposite of true. What he wanted to say was that for him she was a good person. And that she had the loveliest fingers he had ever seen.

Still with her back to him, bending over the sink, picking out the piece of bread Fima had put there, scrubbing the ceramic and die taps, carefully rinsing her hands, Nina said sadly:

"You left a sock at my place, Fima."

And then:

"It's ages since we slept together."

She stubbed out her cigarette, clutched his arm with her exquisitely shaped hand, like that of a young girl from the Far East, and whispered:

"Come now. I have to be back in the office in less than an hour."

On their way to the bed Fima was glad that Nina was nearsighted, because there was a momentary glimmer in the ashtray she had stubbed her cigarette out in, and Fima deduced it must be Annette's lost earring.

Nina drew the curtains, rolled back the bedspread, straightened the pillows, and removed her glasses. Her movements were plain and sparing, as if she were getting ready to be examined by her doctor. When she began undressing, he turned his back to her and hesitated a while before he realized that there was no way out of this, he would have to remove his own clothes too. It never rains but it pours, he said to himself. And he slipped quickly between the sheets so she wouldn't notice his slackness. Remembering how he had disappointed her last time, on the rug at her house, he was overcome by shame. He pressed himself tightly against her, but his penis was as limp and unfeeling as a crumpled handkerchief. He buried his head between her heavy, warm breasts as if he were trying to hide from her inside her. They lay motionless, clinging to each other tightly like a pair of soldiers in a trench under shellfire.