Fima - Amos Oz [132]
Fima said:
"No, thank you." This time there was something in his voice that made the young man timidly wish him a good Sabbath and move away. He turned twice and looked back toward Fima, as though afraid he might be pursued.
For a moment Fima was sorry he had not given this peddler of pious deeds and used cars a vitriolic answer, a theological knockout blow that he would not forget in a hurry. He could have asked him, for example, whether you got five credit points up there for killing a five-year-old Arab girl. Or whether to bring a child into the world that neither you nor the mother wanted was a virtuous act or a transgression. After a moment, to his surprise, he felt some regret that he had not said yes, if only to afford a small pleasure to this North African youth in the Volhynian or Galician costume, who, despite his transparent guile, seemed to Fima to be innocent and goodhearted. No doubt in his own way he too was trying to put right what cannot be put right.
Meanwhile he shuffled past a carpenter's workshop, a grocer's that smelled strongly of salt fish, a butcher's shop that struck him as murderously bloodstained, and a dingy shop selling snoods and wigs, and he stopped at a nearby newsstand to buy the weekend editions of Yediot, Hadashot, and Ma'ariv. For once he also bought the ultrapious paper Yated Ne'eman, out of vague curiosity. And so, laden with newspapers, he entered a small café on the comer of Zephaniah Street. It was a family restaurant, with three tables covered with peeling pink Formica, and lit by a single feeble bulb that cast a sickly yellow light. Lazy flies wandered everywhere. A bearlike man was dozing behind the counter, his beard between his teeth, and Fima wondered for a moment about the possibility that this was actually himself behind the reception desk at the clinic transported here by magic. He dropped onto a plastic chair that seemed none too clean, and tried to recall what his mother used to order for him on those Fridays a thousand years ago at the Danzigs' restaurant. Eventually he asked for chicken soup, beef stew, a mixed salad, pita and pickles, and a bottle of mineral water. As he ate, he rummaged in his pile of papers until his fingers were black and the pages were grease-stained.
In Ma'ariv, on the second page, there was a report about an Arab youth in Jenin who had been burned to death while trying to set fire to a military jeep that was parked in the main street of the town. An investigation had shown, the newspaper reported, that the Arab mob which gathered around the burning youth prevented the military orderly from offering him first aid and did not allow the soldiers to get close enough to douse the flames, apparently in the belief that the young man burning to death in front of them was an Israeli soldier. He roasted for about ten minutes in the fire that he himself had lit, uttering "fearful screams" before finally expiring. In the town of Or Akiva, on the other hand, a minor miracle had occurred. A five-year-old boy who fell from an upper story, receiving serious head injuries, had been lying unconscious since the Day of Atonement. The doctors had written him off and placed him in a home, where he was expected to live out the rest of his days as a vegetable. But the mother, a simple woman who could neither read nor write, refused to give up hope. When the doctors told her the child did not have a chance and that only a miracle could save him, she prostrated herself at the feet of a famous rabbi in Bnei Brak, who told her to have a certain rabbinical student who was known to be brain-damaged himself repeat a page of the Zohar about Abraham and Isaac day and night into the ear of the child (whose name was Yitzhak or Isaac). And indeed, after four days and nights the boy began to show signs of life,