Amos Oz - Fima

"This," he said, "is where the dog is buried."

Ilia said: "I feel dreamier than in a dream and more awake than waking. I can't explain it."

Liat said: "It's the light. That's all."

And Yael: "Who's thirsty? Let's go down to the water."

Less than a month after the conclusion of this trip Fima went to Yavne'el to look for the third girl. He discovered that Yael Levin was a graduate of the aeronautical engineering department of Haifa Technion and worked in a top-secret air force installation in the hills west of Jerusalem. After a few meetings he found that her presence made him feel restful, while his presence amused her in her placid way. When he asked her, hesitantly, whether she thought they were suited to each other, she replied, "I quite like the way you talk." He thought this indicated a hint of affection. Which he treasured. Next he sought out Liat Sirkin and sat with her for half an hour in a little seaside café, simply to make certain he had not made her pregnant. But afterward he allowed himself to sleep with her again in a cheap hotel in Bat Yam, so he wasn't certain anymore. In May he invited all three girls to Jerusalem to meet his father. The old man charmed Ilia with his old-style courtesy, entertained Liat with anecdotes and fables with morals, but he preferred Yael, who showed, he thought, "signs of depth." Fima agreed with him, although he was not entirely sure he understood what the signs were. He continued to go out with her, until one day she said to him: "Look at your shirt, half inside your trousers and half outside. Wait. I'll fix it for you."

And in August 1961 Yael and Efraim Nisan were married in the small flat his father had bought him on the edge of Kiryat Yovel on the edge of Jerusalem, after Fima had given in and signed in the presence of a notary an agreement drawn up by his father, containing a solemn undertaking to refrain henceforth from any act that his father might define as an "adventure." He also undertook to begin, at the end of the wasted year, studying for a master's degree. The father, for his part, agreed to finance his son's studies as well as the final stage of Yael's training, and even granted them a modest monthly allowance for the first five years of their marriage. From then on Fima's name was no longer mentioned in Jerusalem gossip. The adventures had come to an end. The billy-goat year had finished, and the tortoise years began. But he did not go back to the university, except perhaps with one or two ideas that he gave to his friend Tsvi Kropotkin, who had meanwhile proceeded without a pause from M.A. to doctorate and was already laying the foundation for a great tower of historical articles and books.

In 1962, at the urging of his friends and thanks to special efforts on the part of Tsvika, Fima published the cycle of poems he had written during his short-lived marriage in Malta: The Death of Augustine and His Resurrection in the Arms of Dulcinea . For a year or two there were some critics and readers who saw in Efraim Nisan a promise waiting to be fulfilled. But after a time even the promise faded, because Fima's muse fell silent. He wrote no more poems.

Every morning Yael was picked up by a military vehicle and taken to work at a base whose location Fima did not know, where she was engaged in some technological development that he neither understood nor wanted to. He would spend the entire morning prowling around the flat, listening to every news broadcast, raiding the fridge and eating standing up, arguing aloud with himself and with the newscasters, furiously making the bed that Yael had not managed to make before she went out, in fact couldn't, because he was still asleep in it. Then he would finish reading the morning paper, go out to buy one or two things at the grocer's, come back with two afternoon papers, immerse himself in them until the evening and leave their pages scattered all over the flat. Between reading the papers and listening to the news, he made himself sit down at his desk. For a while he was occupied by a Christian book, the Pugio Fidei of Father Raymond Martini, published in Paris in 1651 to refute once and for all the faith of the "Moors and the Jews." Fima was contemplating a fresh study of the Christian origins of anti-Semitism. But his work was interrupted by an interest in the idea of the Hidden God. He plunged himself into the biography of the hermit Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus, who learned Hebrew from a Jewish teacher, settled in Bethlehem in 386, translated both Testaments into Latin, and may have deliberately deepened the rift between Jews and Christians. But this study did not quench Fima's thirst. Lassitude got the better of him, and he sank into idleness. He would leaf through the encyclopedia, forget what he was looking for, and waste a couple of hours reading through the entries in alphabetical order. Almost every evening he would pull on his battered cap and go out to visit his friends, chatting till the early hours about the Lavon affair, the Eichmann trial, the Cuban missile crisis, the German scientists in Egypt, the significance of the Pope's visit to the Holy Land. When Yael got home from work in the evening and asked if he had eaten, Fima would reply irritably, Why? Where does it say I've got to eat? And then, while she was in the shower, he would explain to her through the closed door who was really behind the assassination of President Kennedy. Later, when she asked if he was going out to debate again with Uri or Tsvika, he would answer, No, I'm going to an orgy. And he would ask himself how he had allowed his father to attach him to this woman. But there were other times when he suddenly fell in love all over again with her strong fingers as they rubbed her small ankles at the end of the day, or with her habit of stroking her eyelashes, lost in thought, and he would court her like a shy, passionate youth until she allowed him to give pleasure to her body, and then he would thrill her eagerly and precisely, with a sort of profound attentiveness. Sometimes he would say to her, as some petty quarrel brewed, Just wait, Yael, it'll pass. It won't be long before our proper life starts. Sometimes they would go for a walk together in the deserted lanes of north Jerusalem on a Friday evening, and he would talk to her with barely suppressed excitement about the union of body and light according to the ancient mystics. This made her feel so joyful and tender that she snuggled against him and forgave him for putting on weight, for forgetting to change his shirt again for the weekend, for his habit of correcting her Hebrew. Then they would go home and make love as if they were beyond despair.

In 1965 Yael went to work, on special contract, at the Boeing research center in Seattle. Fima declined to join her, arguing that a period of separation might do them both good. He stayed behind in the two-room flat in Kiryat Yovel. He had a modest post as receptionist in a private gynecological clinic in Kiryat Shmuel. He kept his distance from academic life, unless Tsvi Kropotkin dragged him to a one-day conference on the importance of personality in history, or on the notion of the historian as eyewitness. On weekends he would turn up at Nina and Uri Gefen's or at other friends', and was easily caught up in their political discussions; he would occasionally astound all those present with some mordant summation or paradoxical prediction, but he never knew how to stop when he was winning; he would persist like a compulsive gambler, arguing volubly on subjects he knew nothing about, even over trivial details, until he wore out even his most loyal friends.

Sometimes he would arrive with a few books and keep an eye on his friends' children while they went out for the evening. Or cheerfully offer to help them with an article, by proofreading, copyediting, or preparing an abstract. Sometimes he would undertake shuttle diplomacy on a mission of mediation for a feuding couple. Every now and again he would publish a short trenchant article in Ha'arets on some aspect of the current political scene. Once in a while he would take a few days' holiday alone in a private guesthouse in one of the older settlements in the northern Sharon. Every summer he attempted with renewed enthusiasm to learn to drive, and every autumn he failed the driving test. Now and again a woman he had met at the clinic or through friends found her way to his untidy bachelor flat and into his bed, whose sheets needed changing. She would soon discover that Fima was more interested in her pleasure than his own. Some women found this wonderful and moving; others found it unsettling and hastened to disengage themselves. He could spend an hour or two inflicting endless varied exquisite sensations full of playful inventiveness and physical humor, before casually snatching his own satisfaction, and then, almost before his partner noticed that he had exacted his modest commission, he would be devoting himself to her again. Any woman who tried to obtain a measure of continuity or permanence in her relationship with Fima, who succeeded in extracting a key from him, caused him to take refuge after a week or two in a run-down guesthouse in Pardés Hanna or Magdiel and not come home until she had given him up. But such episodes had become rare in the past five or six years.