Fima - Amos Oz [111]
"No problem," said Pizanti expansively. "We always get up at sixfifteen anyway. If you need to make phone call, just feel free. On the house. If you like, I come down and check your contacts. Maybe something come loose."
"I was thinking," Fima said, appalled at the words he heard coming out of his own mouth, "of calling a lady friend of mine who may have been waiting for me since last night. Two lady friends, actually. But right now I think it wouldn't be such a bad thing to let them wait. It's not urgent. I'm sorry I disturbed you."
As he was on the point of leaving, Mrs. Pizanti said hesitantly:
"It could be something fell down outside from the wind. Some washtub or something. But with us everything is fine."
These words convinced Fima that he was being lied to. But he forgave his neighbors, because he had no reason to expect them to tell him about the fight they must have been having, and also because he himself had not told the truth about calling his girlfriends. When he was back in his flat, he said:
"What a fool you are."
But he forgave himself too, because he had meant well.
He did his exercises in front of the mirror for ten minutes or so, shaved, dressed, combed his hair vaguely, boiled some water in the new electric kettle, made his bed, and for once managed all these activities without mishap. He hit her, he thought, he may even have banged her head against the wall; he might have killed her; who knows, he might well do it one of these days, perhaps this very morning. What Hitler did to us didn't finish in 1945; it still goes on, it seems it always will. Dark things go on behind every door. Acts of cruelty and desperation. Underneath this whole state, hidden insanity is simmering. Three times a week our long arm catches the murderers in their dens. We can't get to sleep before we have inflicted a little pogrom on the Cossacks. Every morning we kidnap Eichmann and every evening we nip Hitler in the bud. In basketball we defeat Chmielnicki and in Eurovision we avenge Kishinev. But what right do I have to interfere? I'd be happy to gallop up on a white charger and rescue that Pizanti woman, or the pair of them, or the whole state, if only I knew how. If only I had some idea where to start. There's Baruch with his Trotsky goatee and his carved walking stick; he does his bit to put the world straight by handing out donations and grants, whereas all I ever do is sign petitions. Maybe I should have persuaded that policeman last night to let me in to see Shamir? For a heart-to-heart chat. Or introduced Shamir to my taxi driver?
It occurred to him that he ought to sit down and compose a short but heartfelt appeal to the hawkish right. To suggest to them, in Ha'arets, the broad outline of a partial national consensus. A sort of new deal between the moderates and the nonmessianic hawkish element, which might be willing despite everything to swallow a return of some of the Territories were it not for what it sees as the left's tendency to uncontrolled appeasement. The taxi driver was right: Our worst mistake over the past twenty years has been not to take seriously the sensibilities of Pizanti and his wife and hundreds of thousands of other Israelis like them, in whom the Arabs stir genuine feelings of anger, fear, and suspicion. Such feelings surely deserve not contempt but a gradual rational effort to allay them by means of intelligent argument. Instead of reasoning with them, we emptied a chamberpot full of patronizing ridicule on them. It would make sense therefore to try to draw up an agreement that would define the precise limits of our, the moderates', willingness to make concessions to the Arabs. So that they don't imagine, like Baruch, that we arc, so to speak, advertising a going-out-of-business sale. So that they know what we,