Fima - Amos Oz [100]
Who knew? Maybe her husband had also left her. Or found a younger mistress. Or been killed on reserve duty in the Territories, and she had no one to comfort her.
25. FINGERS THAT WERE NO FINGERS
AT SEVEN O'CLOCK THEY DREW THE BLINDS AND LOCKED THE CLINIC. The rain and the wind had stopped. A clear, glassy cold had descended on Jerusalem. The stars glowed with a sharp wintry radiance. And from the east, Christian bells tolled loudly and forlornly, as though the Crucifixion were happening at Golgotha that very moment.
Dr. Wahrhaftig went home in a taxi, taking Tamar with him, since he had offered as usual to drop her off opposite the Rehavia high school. Eitan sneaked through the darkness to the side street where he had parked his sports car. While Fima, in his heavy overcoat, with the collar turned up, with his battered, greasy cloth cap on his head, stood for ten minutes or so at the deserted bus stop waiting for a miracle. He had an urge to go to Tsvi and Shula Kropotkin's flat just down the Gaza Road, accept the Napoleon brandy Tsvi had promised him, put his feet up near the radiator, and expound his theory about the rift between Jews and Christians being all the deeper because it was, so to speak, in the family. Our quarrel with Islam, by contrast, is merely an ephemeral dispute over land, which will be forgotten within thirty or forty years. But the Christians in a thousand years' time will still see us as deicides and as an accursed elder brother. This last phrase pierced his heart all of a sudden, reminding him of the baby his mother had borne half a century ago, when he was four. The baby died after only three weeks, of some congenital defect which Fima knew nothing about: it was never discussed in his presence. He had no memory of the baby or of the mourning, but he had a vivid mental picture of a tiny light-blue knit bonnet laid out on his mother's little bedside table. When his father threw out all his wife's belongings at her death, the blue knit bonnet vanished too. Had Baruch given it to the leper hospital in Talbiyeh along with all her clothes?
Fima despaired of the bus and started walking toward Rehavia. Vainly he tried to remember whether he had promised Nina to pick her up from her office after work and take her to see the Jean Gabin film, or whether they had arranged to meet at the cinema. Or was it Annette Tadmor that he had arranged to see? Was it possible that in a fit of absent-mindedness he had asked them both out? He could not find a telephone token in any of his pockets, so he went on walking the empty streets, which were lit occasionally by a yellow streetlight swathed in flickering mist. He walked, oblivious to the biting cold, and thought about his mother, who had also been fond of the cold and loathed the summer. And he wondered what his good friend Uri Gefen was doing at this moment in Rome. Uri was probably sitting in a crowded café in some piazza surrounded by witty men and pretty, provocative women, roaring in his peasant voice and fascinating his audience with stories of air battles in which he had taken pan, or amorous adventures in the Far East, letting fall as usual some wry generalization about the capriciousness of desire, describing in well-chosen words the inevitable shadow of ridicule that accompanies every action and inevitably conceals one's true motives, and concluding with some indulgent commonplace that would finally spread a sort of veil of conciliatory irony over his whole story, the loves, lies, and generalizations he had enunciated before.
Fima ached to feel the touch of Uri's broad, gnarled hand on the back of his neck. He longed for his parodies, his smell, his thick breath, and his warm laughter. At the same time and without any contradiction, he was sorry that his friend was returning from abroad in a couple of days. He was ashamed of his affair with Nina, even though he suspected that Uri had known for a long time about this sexual welfare work and might even have suggested