Fima - Amos Oz [122]
"Of course you will. You'll take a correspondence course. Or study at the Open University."
"You'll teach me."
With sudden, timid courage he added:
"You know very well that what you said earlier isn't the whole truth. You didn't want the baby cither. You didn't even want Dimi. I'm sorry I said that. I didn't mean it. It just slipped out. But I want Dimi. I love him more than my own life."
She stood over Fima as he slumped on his bench, stood in her worn corduroy trousers and threadbare red sweater, as though she was straining with all her might not to hit his plump face. Her eyes were dry and flashing, and her face was wrinkled and old, as if it were not Yael but her mother who was bending over him, smelling of black bread and olives and plain toilet soap. And she said with wonder, with a strange taut smile, speaking not to him and not to herself but into space:
"It was also in the winter. It was February then too. Two days after my birthday. In 1963. When you and Uri were completely absorbed in the Lavon affair. The almond tree behind our kitchen in Kiryat Yovel had started to flower. And the sky was just like today, perfectly clear and blue. That morning there was a program of Shoshana Damari songs on the radio. And I went in a rattling old taxi to that Russian gynecologist in the Street of the Prophets, who said I reminded him of Giulietta Masina. Two and a half hours later I went home, as fate would have it in the same taxi with the little photograph of Princess Grace of Monaco over the driver's head, and that was that. I remember I closed the shutters and drew the curtains and lay down in bed listening to a Schubert impromptu on the radio, followed by a lecture about Tibet and the Dalai Lama, and I didn't get up till evening, and by then it had started raining again. You had gone off early in the morning with Tsvi to a one-day history conference at Tel Aviv University. It's true you offered to skip it and come with me. And it's true I said, For Heaven's sake, it's no worse than having a wisdom tooth out. And in the evening you came home all glowing with excitement, because you had managed to catch Professor Talmon out in some minor contradiction. We murdered it, and we said nothing. To this day I don't want to know what they do with them. Smaller than a day-old chick. Do they flush them down the toilet? We both murdered it. Only you didn't want to hear when or where or how. All you wanted to hear from me was that it was all over and done with. But what you really wanted to tell me was about how you'd made the great Talmon stand there on the dais in confusion like a first-year student flunking an oral. And that same evening you rushed to Tsvika's, because the two of you hadn't had time on the bus back to Jerusalem to finish your argument about the implications of the Lavon affair. He could have been a boy of twenty-six by now. He could have been a father himself, with a child or two of his own. The eldest about Dimi's age. And you and I would go into town to buy an aquarium and some tropical fish for the grandchildren. Where do you think the drains of Jerusalem empty out? Into the Mediterranean, via Nahal Shorek? And the sea reaches Greece, and there the king of Ithaca's daughter might have picked him out of the waves. Now he's a curly-haired youth sitting and playing the lyre in the moonlight on the water's edge in Ithaca. I believe Talmon died a few years ago. Or was that Prawer? And didn't Giulietta Masina also die? I'll make some more coffee. I've missed the hairdresser now. It wouldn't do you any harm to have a haircut. Not that it would do you much good either. Do you still remember Shoshana Damari, at least? A star shines in the sky, / And in the wadi jackals cry? She's completely forgotten now, too."
Fima had closed his eyes. He tensed, not like someone who is afraid of being hit but like someone who hopes for it to the very tips of his nerves. As though it were not Yael, not even Yael's mother, but his own mother bending over him and demanding that he give back at once the blue bonnet that he had hidden.