Amos Oz - Fima

In the dark Fima felt a pang. These images not only aroused longing for Yael, but also gave him a strange feeling of nostalgia for himself. As though one of these lighted windows concealed another Fima, the real Fima, not overweight, not a nuisance, not losing his hair, not in yellowing long underwear, but a hard-working, straightforward Fima, living his life in a rational way without shame or falsehood. A calm, punctilious Fima. Even though he had understood for a long time that the truth was not within his reach, he still felt a longing, deep inside, to get away from the falsehood that seeps through like fine dust into every corner of his life, even the most intimate parts.

The other, the real Fima was sitting at this moment in a cosy study, surrounded by bookcases punctuated by prints of Jerusalem as seen by travelers and pilgrims of earlier centuries. His head floated in a pool of light from a desk lamp. His left hand rested on the knee of his wife, who sat close to him on the edge of his desk, her legs dangling, as they exchanged ideas on some new theory about the immune system or quantum physics. Not that Fima had the slightest understanding of the immune system or quantum physics, but he imagined to himself that the real Fima and his wife, there in the warm, cosy study, were both experts in one or both of these subjects, working together on developing some new idea that would reduce the amount of suffering in the world. Was this study what Chili, or his mother, meant in the dream when she called him to come over to the Aryan side?

On the corner of Smolenskin Street in front of Prime Minister Shamir's official residence, Fima noticed a little girl on top of a bundle of blankets near the trash cans. Was she on a hunger strike? Had she fainted? Had she been killed? Had some grieving mother from Bethlehem deposited here the corpse of her daughter, killed by us? Alarmed, he bent over the tot, but it turned out to be nothing more than a damp heap of garden clippings wrapped in a sack. Fima lingered beside it. The idea of lying down here and mounting his own hunger strike suddenly appealed to him: it seemed both attractive and relevant. Looking up, he saw a single yellow light behind a drawn curtain in the last room on the upper floor. He imagined Yitzhak Shamir pacing up and down between the window and the door, his hands behind his back, worrying over a telegram that lay before him on the windowsill, not knowing what to reply, perhaps feeling the winter pains of old age in his shoulders and back. After all, he was not a young man. He too had had his revolutionary years in the underground. It might be a good thing to set aside animosity for a while, go in there and cheer him up, ease his loneliness, talk to him all night, man to man, not with petty contentiousness or sermonizing or accusations, but as one good friend to another gently trying to open the eyes of one who has been involved by bad people in a rotten business from which apparently there is no way out, but which actually has a rational and indeed straightforward and affordable solution that can be driven home even to the most stubborn mind with a few hours of talking, of calm, soothing conversation. Provided the friend who is in trouble does not shut himself up and take refuge behind a barricade of lies and rhetoric, but opens his mind, listens to you with humility, and contemplates a range of possibilities that he has so far ruled out, not from arrogance but because of prejudices, ossified habits of thought, and deeply rooted fears. And what is so wrong with compromise, Mr. Shamir? Each side receives only a part of what it believes it deserves, but the nightmare is ended. The wounds begin to heal. And didn't you yourself achieve your present position as a sort of compromise candidate? Surely you must have compromised now and again with your colleagues? Or with your wife? Haven't you?

And, indeed, why not knock on the door? He would be received with a glass of hot tea; he would take off his coat and explain once and for all what reason dictates and which way history is pointing. Or, on the contrary, he would persuade the prime minister to put his own coat on and join him in a night stroll and a prolonged heart-to-heart discussion in the empty rain-swept streets lit here and there by a wet streetlight wrapped in mist and gloom. A stern, ascetic city, Jerusalem, on a winter's night. But nothing is lost yet, sir. There is still hope of opening a new chapter. The bloodstained introduction has occupied a hundred years here, and now let's make a compromise and move on to the main story. Let the Jewish people start living as a nation that has found rest in its own land and reveals at long last the innate powers of creativity and renewal that have been buried under murky layers of fear and resentment, pogroms, persecutions, annihilation. Shall we give it a try, sir? Cautiously? By small, well-thought-out steps?

The policeman sitting in the sentry box in front of the residence poked his head out and asked:

"Hey, you: arc you looking for something?"

Fima replied:

"Yes. Fm looking for tomorrow."

The policeman politely suggested:

"Well, go and look for it somewhere else, sir. Move along please. You can't wait here."

Fima decided to take this advice. To move along. Keep going. Not give up. Go on struggling as long as he had the strength to fit one word to another and to discriminate between ideas. The question was, where could he move along to? What should he be doing? Wasn't the truth that he hadn't even begun? But begun what? And where? And how? At that moment he heard a calm, reasonable, prosaic voice somewhere nearby calling his name: "Fima, where are you?"

He stopped and replied at once, with devotion:

"Yes. Here I am. Fm listening."

But the only sound was of cats in heat behind the damp stone walls. Followed, like a sponge that wipes everything clean, by the soughing of the wind in the pines in the dark empty gardens.

Sitra de-itkasia: the concealed side.

He continued walking slowly. The Terra Sanaa Building stood in total darkness. In Paris Square he stood for a few minutes waiting for the traffic lights to change, then shuffled down King George Street toward the center of town. He paid no attention to the cold that pierced him through his overcoat, nor to the waterlogged old cap on his head, nor to the few passersby, all walking fast, some perhaps eyeing askance this strange, muffled figure plodding wearily and apparently absorbed in a violent argument with himself, accompanied by gesticulations and mouthings.

It was very bad that he had forgotten to take precautions that morning. What if he got Annette Tadmor pregnant? He'd have to jump aboard a tramp steamer again and run away. To Greece. To Nineveh. To Alaska. Or to the Galapagos Islands. In the dimness of Annette's womb, in a dark labyrinth of moist tunnels, his blind seed was now forcing its way with ridiculous tail-movements, jerking to and fro in the warm liquid, a sort of round, bald Fima-head, possibly wearing a microscopic wet cloth cap, ageless, brainless, sightless, and yearning out of the depths for the hidden source of warmth, nothing but a head and a tail and the urge to thrust and nestle, to ram the crust of the ovum, in every respect resembling its father, who longed to cocoon himself once and for all deep in the feminine slime and there snuggle up cosily and fall asleep. Fima was filled with worry but also a strange jealousy of his own seed. Under a yellow streetlight in front of the Yeshurun Synagogue he stopped and peered at his watch. He could still catch the second showing at the Orion. Jean Gabin certainly wouldn't let him down. But where exactly was he supposed to pick Annette up? Or was it Nina? Or where were they supposed to pick him up? It looked as if this evening he was doomed to let Jean Gabin down. A boy and girl, young and noisy, passed him as he shuffled slowly past Beit Hama'alot, near the old parliament building. The boy said: