Fima - Amos Oz [13]
Apart from Dimi and his parents, there was the group: pleasant, respectable people, some of whom had known Fima from student days and had been indirectly involved in the ordeals of the billy-goat year, and some of whom still hoped that one day the fellow would wake up, get his act together, and one way or another take Jerusalem by the ears. True, they said, he sometimes gets on your nerves, he overdoes it, he has no sense of proportion, but on the other hand when he's brilliant he's really brilliant. One day he's really going to get somewhere. He's worth investing in. Last Friday, for example, early in the evening, before he started making a fool of himself with his imitations of politicians, the way he snatched the word "ritual" out of Tsvi's mouth and held us all spellbound like little kids when he suddenly said, "Everything is ritual," and fired his theory at us straight from the hip. We haven't stopped talking about it all week. Or that amazing comparison he threw out, of Kafka and Gogol, and of the two of them with Hasidic folk tales.
Over the years some of them grew fond of Fima's unique combination of wit and absent-mindedness, of melancholy and enthusiasm, of sensitivity and helplessness, of profundity and buffoonery. Moreover, he was always available to be roped in to do some proofreading or to discuss a draft of an article. Behind his back they said, not unkindly, True, he's a—how to put it?—he's an original, and he's goodhearted. The trouble is, he's bone idle. He has no ambition. He simply doesn't think about tomorrow. And he's not getting any younger.
Despite which, there was something in his pudgy form, his shuffling, abstracted way of walking, his fine, high brow, his weary shoulders, his thinning fair hair, and his kindly eyes that always seemed lost and looking cither inward or out beyond the mountains and the desert, something in his appearance that filled them with affection and joy and made them smile broadly even when they caught sight of him from a distance, on the other side of the street, wandering around the city center as though he did not know who had brought him there or how he was going to get out again. And they said: Look, there's Fima over there, waving his arms. He must be having an argument with himself, and presumably he's winning it.
In the course of time a certain uneasy friendliness, filled with anger and contradictions, developed between Fima and his father, the well-known cosmetics manufacturer Baruch Nomberg, who was a veteran member of the right-wing Herut party. Even now, when Fima was fifty-four and his father eighty-two, the father would slip a couple of ten-shekel notes, or a single twenty-shekel note, into his son's pocket at the end of every visit. Meanwhile Fima's little secret was that he deposited eighty shekels each month in a savings account in the name of Ted and Yael's son, who was ten now but still looked like a seven-year-old, dreamy and trustful. Strangers on buses sometimes noticed a vague resemblance between Fima and the child, in the shape of the chin or the forehead, or in the walk. The previous spring Dimi had asked to keep a pair of tortoises and some silkworms in a little storage space that Fima and Ted cleared for him on the balcony of the messy kitchen of the flat in Kiryat Yovel. And even though Fima was considered by others and even by himself as incorrigibly idle and absent-minded, all through the summer there was not a single day when he forgot to attend to what he took to calling "our can of worms." Now, in the winter, the silkworms were dead, and the tortoises had been set free in the wadi, at the point where Jerusalem abruptly ends and a rocky