Fima - Amos Oz [123]
In what sense?
The more he thought about this, the less he could find an answer. Yet on the other side of the wall, in the next flat, a young woman was singing a forgotten song which had been on everyone's lips years ago, about a man called Johnny: There was never a man like my Johnny, / Like the man they called Johnny Guitar. The melody was feeble, childish, almost laughable, and the woman on the other side of the kitchen wall was no singer. Fima suddenly recalled making love to Yael, half his lifetime ago, one afternoon in a small boardinghouse on Mount Carmel, when he was accompanying her to a conference at the Technion. She thought up the fantasy that he should pretend to be a stranger and she a young girl who had never been touched before, innocent, shy, nervous. His task was to seduce her, taking his time. And he managed to give her pleasure that was close to pain. He drew forth cries for help, pleas, tender exclamations of surprise. The more he played the stranger, the more the pleasure intensified and deepened, until a mysterious sense of hearing developed in his fingertips, in every cell of his body, enabling him to know precisely what would feel good to her, as if he had planted a spy inside the dark network of nerves of her spinal column. Or as if he had become one flesh with her. Until they ceased to touch and be touched like a man and woman, and became a single being quenching its thirst. That afternoon he felt not like a man having intercourse with a woman but as if he had always lived inside her, that her womb was now not hers but theirs, his penis not his but theirs, and his skin and her skin both theirs.
Later they dressed and went for a walk in one of the verdant valleys on the side of Mount Carmel. They strolled until nightfall among the luxuriant vegetation without talking or touching, until a night bird sang to them a short, poignant phrase which Fima imitated to perfection, and Yael, with a warm low laugh, said, Do you have any plausible explanation, good sir, why I suddenly love you, even though we're not blood relations or anything like that?
He opened his eyes and saw his ex-wife, shrunken, almost shriveled, an aging Giulietta Masina, in gray trousers and a dark red sweater, still standing with her back to him and folding towels. It's not possible, he thought, that she has so many towels that she can go on folding them forever. Unless she's refolding them because she wasn't satisfied with the way she did it the first time. So he stood up like a man who knows exactly what to do, and embraced her from behind, putting one hand over her mouth and the other over her eyes, and kissed the nape of her neck, the roots of her hair, her back. The smell of toilet soap and the hint of tobacco from Ted's pipe reached his nostrils, dizzying him with a vague desire, along with a sadness that snuffed it out. He picked up her thin little girl's body in his arms, and just as he had carried her son two nights before, he carried Yael now and laid her on the same bed in her bedroom, and just as he had stroked Dimi, he now stroked her cheek. But he did not remove the counterpane, nor did he try to take off his clothes or hers, but instead pressed himself against her along the whole length of their bodies and buried her head in the hollow of his shoulder. Instead of saying I've missed you, he was so tired that he whispered I've messed you. They lay side by side, close but not embracing, motionless, speechless, his body's warmth radiating into hers and hers into his. Until she whispered to him: