Fima - Amos Oz [133]
In the religious paper, Yated Ne'eman, he skimmed through various malicious rumblings about desertions from the kibbutzim. According to the paper, the younger generation of kibbutzniks were all wandering around the Far East and the Indian mountains, attaching themselves to all sorts of terrible pagan sects. And in Ma'ariv a veteran columnist again argued that the government should not be in a hurry to rush off to all sorts of dubious peace conferences. We should wait until the Israeli deterrent was renewed. We must not go to the negotiating table from an inferior position, with the sword of the intifada, as it were, at our throats. Discussions about peace might be desirable, but only when the Arabs finally realized that they had no chance politically or militarily, indeed no chance at all, and came pleading for peace with their tails between their legs.
In Hadashot he read a satirical piece suggesting that instead of hanging Eichmann we should have had the foresight to spare him, so we could use his experience and his organizational skills at the present juncture. Eichmann would be well received among the torturers of Arabs and those who wanted to deport the Arabs to the east en masse, an operation in which Eichmann was known to have particular expertise. Then in the weekend magazine of Tediot Aharonot he came across an article, illustrated with color photographs, about the ordeals of a once popular singer who had become addicted to hard drugs, and now, when she was fighting that addiction, a heartless judge deprived her of custody of her baby daughter by a famous soccer star who refused to recognize his paternity. The judge ruled that the baby should be handed over to a foster family, despite the singer's protest that the foster father was actually a Yugoslav who had not been properly converted and might not even be circumcised. When Fima had searched all the pockets of his trousers, his shirt, and his overcoat and almost given up hope, he eventually fished out of the inside pocket of the coat, of all places, a folded twenty-shekel note which Baruch had managed to plant there without his noticing. He paid and took his leave with a muttered apology. He left all his newspapers on the table.
Outside the restaurant he found the cold had intensified. There was a hint of evening in the air, even though it was still only midafternoon. The cracked asphalt, the rusty wrought-iron gates, some of which had the word "Zion" worked into them, the signboards of the shops, workshops, Torah schools, real estate agencies, and charities, the row of trash cans parked along the street, the distant view of the hills glimpsed beyond neglected gardens—everything was becoming clothed in various shades of gray. Occasionally alien sounds penetrated the regular hubbub of the streets: church bells, high and slow, punctuated by silence, or low, or shrill, or heavy and elegiac, and also a distant loudspeaker, and pneumatic drills, and the faint blaring of a siren. All these sounds could not subdue the silence of Jerusalem, that permanent underlying silence, which you can always find if you look for it underneath any noise in Jerusalem. An old man and a boy walked slowly past, grandfather and grandson perhaps. The boy asked:
"But you said that the inside of the world is fire, so why isn't the ground hot?"
And the grandfather:
"First you must study, Yossel. The more you learn, the more you'll understand that the best thing for us is we shouldn't ask questions."
Fima remembered that when he was a child, there was an old huckster who went through the streets of Jerusalem wheeling a squeaky, broken-down handcart, with a sack on his back, buying and selling secondhand furniture