Amos Oz - Fima

For some reason he felt he had deserved this fall as a sort of logical sequel to the minor miracle he had experienced outside the Hilton Hotel on his way here.

When he eventually managed to get to his feet, he stood absent-mindedly in the rain, looking like someone who does not know where he has come from or where he must go. Raising his head toward the upper floors, he saw nothing but closed shutters or blank curtained windows. Here and there on a balcony was a geranium in a pot. The rain had given them a sensual sparkle that brought to his mind the painted lips of a vulgar woman.

Beside the entrance to the clinic there was an elegantly restrained plate of black glass inscribed in silver lettering: DR. WAHRHAFTIG DR. EITAN CONSULTANT GYNECOLOGISTS. For the thousandth time Fima asked himself why there were not specialists for male disorders too. He also objected to the Hebrew, which contained a construction that the language does not tolerate. Then he found himself ridiculous for thinking such an absurd sentence. And felt shame and confusion as he recalled how indignantly he had reacted to the news, indignant not because of the death of an Arab boy in the Jebeliyeh refugee camp but because of the phrase "killed by a plastic bullet."

As if it's the bullets that do the killing.

And was he getting soft in the head himself?

He summoned his cabinet for another meeting in the dilapidated classroom. At the door he posted a burly sentry in khaki shorts, Arab headdress, and knit cap. Some of his ministers sat on the bare floor at his feet, others leaned against the wall, which was covered with educational diagrams. In a few well-chosen words Fima presented them with the need to choose between the territories conquered in 'sixty-seven and our very identity. Then, while they were still buzzing excitedly, he called for a vote, which he won, and immediately gave them his detailed instructions.

Before we won the Six Days' War, he mused, the state of the nation was less dangerous and destructive than it is now. Or perhaps it wasn't really less dangerous, just less demoralizing and less depressing. Was it really easier for us to face up to the danger of annihilation than to sit in the dock facing the accusations of international public opinion? The danger of annihilation gave us pride and a sense of unity, whereas sitting in the dock now is gradually breaking our spirit. But that's not the right way to state the alternatives. In fact, sitting in the dock may be breaking the spirit only of the secular intelligentsia of Russian or Western origin, whereas the ordinary masses are not in the least nostalgic for the pride of David standing up to Goliath. Anyway, the expression "ordinary masses" is a hollow cliché. Meanwhile, because you fell, your trousers are covered with mud and the hands that are wiping them clean are also muddy and the rain is pouring down on your head. It is already five past one. However hard you try, you'll never get to work on time.

The clinic was two ground-floor flats joined together. The windows, guarded by arabesque grilles, looked out on a typical back garden, damp and deserted, shaded by dense pine trees around whose bases a few gray boulders sprouted. A rustle of treetops started at the slightest breeze. Now, with a strong wind blowing, Fima had a fleeting image of a remote village in Poland or one of the Baltic States, with storms shrieking through the surrounding forest, whipping across snowbound fields, assailing thatched cottage roofs, and making the church bells ring. And wolves howling not far away. In his head Fima already had a little story about this village, about Nazis, Jews, and partisans, which he might tell to Dimi this evening, in exchange for a ladybug in a jam jar or a spaceship cut out of orange peel.

From the second floor came the sounds of piano, violin, and cello being played by the three elderly women who lived there and gave private music lessons. They also probably gave recitals and played at memorial meetings, at the presentation of a prize for Yiddish literature, at the inauguration of a community center or a daytime center for the elderly. Although Fima had worked at the clinic for several years now, their playing still wrung his heart, as though a cello deep inside him responded with its own mute sounds of longing to the one upstairs. As though a mystic bond was growing stronger with the passing years, between what was being done down here to women's bodies with stainless-steel forceps and the melancholy of the cello upstairs.

The sight of Fima, pudgy and disheveled, smiling sheepishly, with his hands and knees covered with mud, filled Dr. Wahrhaftig as usual with good humor mingled with affection and a strong urge to reprimand him. Wahrhaftig was a gentle, rather shy man, so emotional that he had difficulty holding back his tears at times, especially when anybody apologized to him and asked to be forgiven. Maybe that was why he cultivated a severe manner, and always tried to terrorize those around him by shouting rebukes at them. Rebukes that turned out to be mild and inoffensive.

"Hah! Your Excellency! Herr Major General von Nisan! Straight from the trenches, I see! We should pin a medal on you!"

"I'm a little late," Fima replied bashfully. "I'm sorry. I slipped on the path. It's so wet outside."

"Ach so!" roared Wahrhaftig. "Once more this fatal lateness! Once again force majeure!" And he recounted for the nth time the joke about the dead man who was late for his own funeral.

He was a stocky man with the build of a basso profundo, and his face had the florid, flabby look of an alcoholic, crisscrossed with an unhealthy network of blood vessels that were so near the surface, you could almost take his pulse by their throbbing. He had a joke for every occasion, invariably introduced with the phrase "There is a well-known story about." And he always burst out laughing when he got close to the punch line. Fima, who had already heard ad nauseam why the dead man was late for his own funeral, nevertheless let out a faint laugh, because he was fond of this tenderhearted tyrant. Wahrhaftig was constantly delivering long lectures in his stentorian voice about such subjects as the connection between your eating habits and your worldview, or about the "socialist" economy and how it encouraged idleness and fraud and was therefore unsuited to a civilized country. Wahrhaftig would utter these last words in a tone of mystical pathos, like a true believer praising the works of the Almighty.

"It's quiet here today," Fima remarked.

Wahrhaftig replied that they were expecting a famous artist any minute now with a minor obstruction of the tubes. The word "tubes," in its medical usage, reminded him of a well-known story, which he did not spare Fima.

Meanwhile, stealthily as a cat, Dr. Gad Eitan emerged from his office. He was followed by the nurse, Tamar Greenwich, who looked like an early pioneer, a woman of forty-five or so in a light-blue cotton dress with her hair pinned neatly back into what looked like a small ball of wool at the base of her skull. As a result of a pigment peculiarity one of her eyes was green and the other brown. She crossed the reception hall supporting a pale patient, whom she escorted to the recovery room.

Dr. Eitan, lithe and muscular, leaned on the counter, chewing gum with a leisurely motion of his jaws. He replied with a jut of the chin to Fima's greeting or to a question from Wahrhaftig, or perhaps to both at once. His watery blue eyes were fixed on a spot high above the reproduction Modigliani on the wall. With his self-satisfied expression and his thin blond mustache, he looked to Fima like an arrogant Prussian diplomat who has been posted against his will to Outer Mongolia. He allowed Wahrhaftig to finish another well-known story. Then there was a silence, after which, like a lethargic leopard, almost without moving his lips, he said quietly: