Fima - Amos Oz [12]
When Yael wrote to him from Seatde early in 1966 to say there was another man in her life, Fima laughed at the trite expression. The love affairs of his billy-goat year, his marriage to Yael, Yael herself, now seemed as trite, as overacted, as childish as the underground revolutionary cell he had tried to set up when he was in high school. He decided to write her a line or two simply to send his best wishes to her and the other man in her life. He sat down at his desk that afternoon, and did not stop writing until midday the following day: in a feverish missive of thirty-four pages he confessed the depth of his love for her. After reading it through, he rejected it, tore it up, and flushed it down the toilet. You cannot describe love in words, and if you can, that's a sign the love no longer exists. Or is on the way out. Finally he tore a page of graph paper from a notebook and scrawled on it: "I can't stop loving you because it's not up to me, but of course you're a free agent. How blind I've been. If there's anything you need from the flat, let me know and I'll send it. Meanwhile I'm sending you a parcel with three of your nighties and your furry slippers and the photos. But if you don't mind, I'd like to keep the picture of the two of us at Bethlehem in Galilee." Yael took this letter to mean that Fima would not place any obstacles in the way of a divorce. But when she came back to Jerusalem and introduced a colorless, inexpressive man with a jaw that was too broad and thick eyebrows like a pair of bushy mustaches, saying, Efraim Nisan, Ted Tobias, let's all be friends, Fima changed his mind and adamantly refused to grant a divorce. So Ted and Yael flew back to Seattle. They lost contact, apart from a few aerograms and postcards about practical matters.
Early in 1982 Ted and Yacl turned up at Fima's flat one winter afternoon with their three-year-old son, a slightly cross-eyed albino child-philosopher with thick glasses, dressed in an American astronaut's space suit bearing a shiny metal badge inscribed with the word CHALLENGER. The little fellow soon revealed an ability to compose complicated conditional sentences and to duck awkward questions. Fima instantly fell for little Dimi Tobias. Regretting his earlier opposition, he offered Yael and Ted a divorce, his assistance, and his friendship. Yael, however, no longer attached any importance to the religious divorce and saw no point in friendship. In the intervening years she had managed to leave Ted twice and have affairs with other men before making up her mind to go back to him and to have Dimi at what was almost the last moment as far as she was concerned. Fima won the heart of the thoughtful little Challenger with a story about a wild wolf who decided to give up being wild and tried to join a colony of rabbits. When the story was over, Dimi offered his own ending, which Fima found logical, sensitive, and not unfunny.
Thanks to the intervention of Fima's father, the divorce was arranged discreetly. Ted and Yael settled in the suburb of Beit Hakerem, found jobs together in a research institute, and divided their year into three: the summer in Seattle, the fall in Pasadena, the winter and spring in Jerusalem. Sometimes they invited Fima on Friday evening, when the Kropotkins and the Gefens and the rest of the group were there. Sometimes they left Dimi with Fima in Kiryat Yovel and went off to Elat or Upper Galilee for a couple of days. Fima became their unpaid baby sitter, because he was available and because a friendship had grown up between him and Dimi. By some odd logic