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By Root 538 0

restaurant that gleamed with a cleanness which even now, a thousand years later, Fima could feel in his nostrils, and which for some reason smelled to him like fresh snow. On each table, on the spotless white tablecloth, there was always an upright rose in a glass vase. The walls were adorned with calm landscapes of lakes and forests. Sometimes at a table in the far comer near the potted palms a slim British officer would be lunching on his own. He would sit stiffly, with his peaked cap parked at the foot of the rose. Where have those pictures of lakes and forests ended up? Where in the world is that lonely British officer eating now? A city of longings and madness. A refugee camp, not a city. But you could still get away from it. You could take Dimi and Yael away from here and join a kibbutz in the desert. You could propose to Tamar or to Annette Tadmor, settle down with her in Magdiel, and get a job as a clerk in a bank, in the health service, or in the national insurance, and start writing poetry again in the evenings. Start a new chapter. Get a little closer to the Third State.

His feet led him of their own accord into the maze of narrow streets which is the Bukharian Quarter. Slowly he shuffled underneath gaudily bedecked clotheslines stretched across the gray street. On balconies with rusting wrought-iron balustrades he could see dried skeletons of palm booths left over from Sukkoth, heaps of scrap iron and junk, suspended copper washing kettles, moldering packing boxes, jerry cans, all the refuse of the run-down flats. Almost every window here was curtained in garish colors. On the windowsills stood glass jars inside which cucumbers were slowly pickling in a broth of garlic, dill, and parsley. Fima suddenly felt that these guttural places, built around courtyards with ancient stone wells, smelling of grilled meat, onions, baking pastry, spiced dishes, and smoke, offered him a simple, straightforward answer to a question he had totally failed to frame. Something was hammering urgently at his chest both outside and within, gently plucking and gnawing, like the long-forgotten music of Johnny Guitar, like the lakes and forests on the walls of the little restaurant that his mother used to take him to after shopping in the market on Fridays. And he said to himself:

"That's enough. Drop it."

Like someone scratching at a sore, unable to stop even though he knew he should.

In Rabbenu Gershom Street he passed three short, plump women who looked so alike that Fima supposed they were sisters, or perhaps a mother with her daughters. He eyed them with an intrigued gaze. They were lush, generously fleshed women, as curvaceous as slave girls in a painting of an Oriental seraglio. His imagination pictured their expansive, abundant nakedness, then their submissive, obedient surrender, like waitresses dishing out warm helpings to a queue of starving men without taking the trouble to distinguish the recipients one from another, bestowing the gift of their bodies indifferently, out of habit, and with a touch of boredom. The boredom and indifference seemed far more sexual and provocative to Fima at that moment than all the sensual excitement in the world. A moment later came a wave of shame that extinguished his desire. Why had he forgone Yacl's body that morning? If he had only invested a little more cunning and patience, if he had only persevered, surely she would have given in. Without desire, but so what? Was it a question of desire?

But, then, what was it a question of?

The three women disappeared around the corner, but Fima stayed rooted to the spot, staring blankly, excited and ashamed. Surely the truth was that this morning he had not craved Yael's emaciated body. Rather, he had longed vaguely for a different kind of union, not a carnal union, nor the union of child and mother, perhaps no union at all, something that Fima could not even name, but nevertheless he felt that this thing, elusive as it was and too fine to be defined, if he could only be blessed with it once, just once, might change his life for the better.

On