Amos Oz - Fima

And she pleaded in a whisper:

"Don't talk. Don't say anything. I feel good with you just like this."

He had a clear mental image of the butchered dog writhing and oozing the last of his blood with a whimper under a low stone wall among wet bushes and trash. As though in a profound slumber, he murmured between her breasts words she did not hear: Back to Greece, Yael. We'll find love there. And compassion.

Nina glanced at her watch: half past eleven. She kissed him on the forehead, and shaking his shoulder she said affectionately:

"Wake up, boy. Stir yourself. You fell asleep."

She dressed jerkily, put on her thick glasses, and lit another cigarette, not blowing the match out but shaking it.

Before she left, she joined the two parts of the broken radio with a faint click. She turned the knob until the voice of Defense Minister Rabin suddenly filled the room:

"The side that displays the most stamina will win."

"There, that's fixed," said Nina, "and I've got to go."

Fima said:

"Don't be angry with me. I've had a suffocating feeling for days now. As if something awful is going to happen. I hardly sleep at night. I sit writing articles as if there was somebody listening. Nobody's listening and everything seems lost. What's going to become of us all, Nina? Do you know?"

Nina, who was already in the doorway, turned her bespectacled, vixen's face toward him and said:

"I have a chance of finishing relatively early this evening. Come straight to my office after the clinic, and we'll go to the concert at the YMCA. Or we'll go and see that Jean Gabin film. Then we'll go back to my place. Don't be gloomy."

FIMA RETURNED TO THE KITCHEN. HE WOLFED DOWN ANOTHER four slices of Nina's fresh black Georgian bread thickly spread with apricot jam. The defense minister said:

"I urge all of us not to resort to all sorts of dubious shortcuts."

Slightly mispronouncing the last word. And Fima, with his mouth full of bread and jam, echoed him:

"And all of us urge you not to report to all sorts of tubeless chalk-huts."

He immediately recoiled from this petty wordplay. As he turned off the radio, he apologized to Rabin:

"I must run. I'm late for work." And, chewing a heartburn tablet, for some reason he pocketed Annette's earring, which he had found in the ashtray among Nina's cigarette butts. He put on his coat, taking particular care not to trap his arm in the lining of the sleeve. And because the bread had not assuaged his hunger, and because in any case he counted it as breakfast, he went into the café opposite his flat for a bite of lunch. He could not remember if the name of the proprietress was Mrs. Schneidmann or simply Mrs. Schneider. He decided it was Schneidermann. As usual, she did not take offense. She beamed at him with a cheery sparkle in her childlike eyes, which reminded him of a rustic Russian icon, and said:

"It's Scheinmann, Dr. Nisan. Never mind. It's not important at all. The main thing is, God should give good health and prosperity to all Jewish people. And peace should come at last to this dear country of ours. It's hard to take so many deaths all the time. Today the stewed beef for the doctor, or the chicken today?"

Fima thought about it, and ordered the stew and an omelette, and a mixed salad, and a fruit compote. At another table sat a small, wrinkled man who struck Fima as glum and unwell. He was lazily reading Yediot Aharonot , turning the pages, staring, picking his teeth, and turning the pages again. His hair seemed to be stuck to his forehead with engine grease. Fima weighed for a moment the chances that it was just he himself, glued to that table since yesterday or the day before, and that all the events of the night and the morning had never taken place. Or that they had happened to somebody else, who resembled him in some ways and differed from him in a few details that didn't matter.

The whole distinction between open possibilities and closed accomplished facts was simplistic. Perhaps his father was right after all: There is no such thing as a universal map of reality; it simply cannot exist. Everyone has to find his own way somehow through the forest with the help of unreliable, inaccurate maps that we arc born wrapped in or that we pick up here and there along the way. That is why we are all lost, wandering in circles, bumping into one another unawares, and losing one another in the dark, without so much as a distant glimmer of the supernal radiance.

Fima was almost tempted to ask the proprietress who the other gentleman was, and how long he had been sitting like that, squandering life's rich treasure at the green-and-white-oilcloth-covered table. Eventually he decided to make do with asking her what she thought should be done to bring peace nearer.

Mrs. Scheinmann reacted with suspicion. She glanced all around apprehensively, before replying shyly:

"What do we understand? Let the higher-ups decide. The generals in our government. God should only give them good health. And he should give them also plenty good sense."

"Should we make some concessions to the Arabs?"

Apparently afraid of spies, or of tripping herself, or simply of words themselves, she glanced toward the door and the curtain to the kitchen before whispering:

"We need to have some pity. That is all we need."

Fima persisted:

"Pity for the Arabs or pity for ourselves?"

She gave him another timid, coquettish smile, like a peasant girl disconcerted by a sudden question about the color of her underwear or the distance from here to the moon. She replied with graceful shrewdness:

"Pity is pity."

The man at the next table, who looked emaciated and tortured, with his greasy hair stuck to his skull, and who Fima imagined to be a petty clerk with hemorrhoids, perhaps a retired sanitation officer, intervened in the conversation with a Romanian accent and a flat intonation, picking his teeth all the time:

"Sir. Excuse. Please. What Arabs? What peace? What state? Who needs it? While we live, we must enjoy. Why you give a damn for the rest of the world? What, the rest of the world give a damn for you? Just enjoy. The most you can do. Just have good time. All the rest, you waste your time. Excuse for interrupting."

Fima did not think the speaker looked much like someone who had a good time; more like someone who made a few pounds now and then by informing on his neighbors to the Income Tax Department. The man's hands shook.

Fima inquired politely:

"You're saying we should trust to the government in everything? We should look after our own affairs and not meddle in public matters?"

The doleful informer said:

"Best is from the government also they go have a good time. And from the government of the Arabs also. And same thing from the goyim. All happy all the day. Anyway we all dies."

Mrs. Scheinmann smiled conspiratorially at Fima, ignoring the dismissed clerk. Obsequiously, as though to apologize for what he was obliged to listen to here, she said:

"Pay no attention, Doctor. His little girl is died, his wife is died, his brothers is also died. And also, he has not got a penny. He speaks not from his brains. This is a man which God is forgotten."

Fima scrabbled in his pockets but found only loose change, so he asked the proprietress to put it on his account. Next week, when he was paid… But she interrupted him blithely:

"Never mind. Don't worry. Everything is fine."

And without being asked she brought him a glass of sweet lemon tea and added:

"Anyway, everything come from Heaven."

He did not agree with her on this point, but the music of her words touched him like a caress, and he suddenly placed his fingers on her veined hand and thanked her. He praised the food and expressed enthusiastic agreement with what she had said earlier: "Pity is pity."