Amos Oz - Fima

At the entrance to the clinic Fima saw the elegant plate inscribed with the words DR. WAHRHAFTIG DR. EITAN CONSULTANT GYNECOLOGISTS. As usual, he was irked by the construction that Hebrew did not tolerate.

"So let it not tolerate it. So what?"

And did Nora, Wahrhaftig's only daughter, who had been married to Gad Eitan and had run off ten years ago with a visiting Latin-American poet, ever suffer pangs of nostalgia? Of conscience? Of shame and guilt? Her name was never mentioned here. She was never alluded to, even indirectly. As if she had never existed. Only Tamar occasionally whispered something to Fima about a letter that had been returned to sender, or a telephone hung up without a word. Tamar persisted in trying to persuade him that Gad was not really a bad man but was just frightened and hurt. Except when she occasionally said the exact opposite: Any woman would have left such a viper.

Fima put on his short white coat, sat down behind his reception desk, and looked at the appointments book. As though he was trying to guess which patient was going to materialize in his life as the next Annette Tadmor.

Tamar said:

"There arc two patients inside. The one with Dr. Basso Profundo is a little like Margaret Thatcher; Gad's looks like a schoolgirl, quite pretty."

Fima said:

"I nearly phoned you in the middle of the night. I managed to find your Finnish general, the one who begins and ends with M. It's Mannerheim. He was really called von Mannerheim. A German name. He was the one who amazed the whole world by halting Stalin's invasion in 1938. He led the tiny Finnish army against vastly superior Soviet forces."

Tamar said:

"You know everything. You could have been a university professor. Or a Cabinet minister."

Fima considered this, agreed with her in his heart, and replied warmly:

"You are the ideal woman, Tamar. It's a disgrace to the male sex that nobody has snatched you away from us yet. Though on second thought there isn't a man alive who's worthy of you."

Her stocky, robust body, her soft, fair hair gathered into a small bun at the back, even her one green eye and one brown one suddenly made her look touchingly childlike, and he asked himself why he shouldn't go up to her, clasp her shoulders, and bury her head in his chest as though she were his daughter. But this urge to console was mixed with another: to boast to her that two women had made the pilgrimage to his flat that morning and offered themselves to him, one after the other. He hesitated, pulled himself together, and said nothing. When had a man's hand last touched that stout body? How would she react if he suddenly reached out and cupped her breasts in his hands? With shock? Outrage? Guilty surrender? You fool, he said to his penis: now you remember. And as though he could feel her nipples nestling in the soft center of each palm, he clenched his fists and smiled.

Tamar said:

"Can I ask you something else?"

Fima could not remember what the last question was, but he replied cheerily, expansively, as though aping his father's lordly manner:

"Up to half my kingdom."

"Pacific island, also bathing costume."

"Pardon?"

"That's what it says here. Do you think it's a misprint? 'Pacific island, also bathing costume.' Sue letters. It's almost the last clue left."

"I don't know," said Fima. "Try Tahiti. I've got a child who keeps asking me to take him away to the Pacific. He wants us to build a cabin out of wattles and live on fish and fruit. I don't mean that he's my child exactly. Well, he is and he isn't. Never mind. Try Hawaii. Would you like to come with us, Tamar? To live in a cabin built of wattles and eat nothing but fish and fruit? Far away from cruelty and stupidity? Far away from this rain?"

"Do you spell Tahiti with an I or a Y? Either way it won't help, because the second letter has got to be an I and the third's a K. Do you mean Yael's little boy, Dimi? Your Challenger? Maybe I shouldn't meddle, Fima, but you ought to think carefully whether you're not complicating that child's life too much by trying to be a spare father to him. I sometimes think…"

"Bikini," said Fima. "The swimsuit was named after doomsday. Bikini was a tiny island that was evacuated and blown to bits with atom bombs. It was the testing ground for doomsday. In the South Pacific. We'll have to look for some other island. Some other ocean, in fact. Anyway, how can I make a cabin out of wattles: I can't even put up a bookshelf. Uri Gefen assembled my bookcases for me. Please, Tamar, don't stand at the window like that with your back to me and the room. I've told you a thousand times I can't stand it. My problem, I know."

"What's the matter with you, Fima? You're very funny sometimes. I was only drawing the curtains because Pm fed up with looking at the rain. We don't need to look for any other island: Bikini is just right. What do you think is the name of the ruling party in Nicaragua?"

Fima had the answer to this question on the tip of his tongue, but at that instant the sound of a woman's voice suddenly burst out behind Or. Eitan's closed door. It was a short, piercing scream, full of terror and outrage, the sort of sound that might be wrenched from the throat of a small child who was the victim of searing injustice. Who was being butchered in there? Perhaps someone destined to be Yoezer's father or grandfather. Fima tensed, straining to block his mind, to fortify himself, not to imagine, what those plastic-gloved hands were doing in there, on that couch covered in white oilcloth and a disposable sheet of coarse white paper, with a white trolley nearby carrying a set of sterile scalpels, speculums, different-sized scissors, forceps, syringes, a razor, special needle and thread for sewing human flesh, clamps, oxygen masks, and saline drips. And the femininity exposed to its fullest extent, with no hiding place, flooded with bright light from the powerful lamp behind the doctor's head; pink and raw like a wound, looking like a toothless old man's open mouth, oozing dark blood.

While he was still struggling to banish this image, not to see or hear or feel, Tamar said gently:

"You can relax now. It's all over."

But Fima felt ashamed. Somehow, in a way that was not clear to him, he felt that he himself was not free of guilt. That he too was responsible for the agony going on behind the dosed door. That there was a connection between his humiliation of Annette and then Nina this morning and the pain and shame on that spotless couch which now was no doubt far from spotless, full of blood and other secretions. His penis shrank and retreated like a thief. A vague, repulsive pain suddenly throbbed in his testicles. If Tamar had not been there, he would have reached down to ease the pressure of his trousers. Though actually it was better like this. He must abandon his pathetic attempt to convince Tsvi that we are all entitled to discharge ourselves from responsibility for atrocities committed in our name. We have to admit the guilt. We have to accept that everybody's suffering rests on all our shoulders. The oppression in the Territories, the disgrace of old people poking around in trash cans, the blind man tapping at night in the deserted street, the misery of autistic children in run-down institutions, the killing of the dog with edema, Dimi's ordeal, Annette's and Nina's humiliation, Teddy's loneliness, Uri's endless wanderings, the surgical procedure that had just taken place on the other side of this wall, stainless-steel forceps deep inside the wounded vulva — everything was on all our shoulders. How useless to dream of running away to Moruroa or the Galapagos Islands. Even Bikini, poisoned by a radioactive cloud, was on all our shoulders. For a moment he pondered the curious fact that in Hebrew the word for "pity" appears to be related to "womb," while "forceps" appears to be derived from "learning a lesson." But then he rebuked himself for these verbal games, his poeticizings, which were no less despicable than the minister of defense's saying "cost" when he meant "death."