Fima - Amos Oz [139]
And yet he was a warm-hearted, honest, devoted friend.
On the door was fixed a brass plate inscribed, in black letters on gray: NOMBERG FAMILY. Underneath it, on a square piece of card, Baruch had written in his firm handwriting: "Kindly refrain from ringing the bell between the hours of one and five p.m." Unconsciously Fima shot a glance at his watch. But there was no need to ring anyway; the door was ajar.
Tsvi Kropotkin intercepted them in the hall, like a conscientious staff officer who has been detailed to brief newcomers before admitting them to the operations room. Despite the ambulance drivers' strike, he said, and the approach of the Sabbath, the tireless Nina had managed to arrange on the phone from her office for his father to be moved to the mortuary at Hadassah Hospital. Fima felt a renewed affection for Tsvi's shy embarrassment: he looked less like a famous historian and head of a department than a youth leader whose shoulders have begun to stoop, or a village schoolmaster. Fima also liked the way Tsvi's eyes blinked behind his thick lenses, as though the light was suddenly too bright, and his habit of fingering absent-mindedly everything he came in contact with, dishes, furniture, books, people, as though he always had to wrestle with a secret doubt about the solidity of everything. If it had not been for the Jerusalem mania, and Hitler, and his obsession with Jewish responsibility, this modest scholar might have settled down in Cambridge or Oxford and lived quietly to be a hundred, dividing his time between the golf course and the Crusades, or between tennis and Tennyson.
Fima said:
"You were right to move him. What would he have done here all weekend?"
In the salon he was surrounded by his friends, who reached out from every side and touched him gently on his shoulder, his cheek, his hair, as though through his father's death he had inherited the role of invalid. As though it was their duty to check carefully to sec if he was too hot or too cold or shivering, or planning secretly to leave them without warning. Shula thrust a cup of lemon tea with honey into his hand. And Teddy sat him down gently at one end of the brocade-covered sofa on which embroidered cushions were scattered. They all seemed to be waiting expectantly for him to say something. Fima responded:
"You're all wonderful. I'm sorry to spoil your Friday night like this."
His father's armchair was standing exactly facing him: deep, wide, covered with red leather and with a red leather headrest, looking as though it were made of raw flesh. The footstool seemed to have been pushed slightly to one side. Like a royal scepter, the cane with its silver band rested against the right-hand side of the chair.
Shula said:
"At any rate, one thing's certain: he didn't suffer at all. It was over in a moment. It's what they used to call death by a kiss: only the righteous are granted it, so they used to say."
Fima smiled:
"Righteous or not, kisses were always an important part of his repertoire." As he said this, he observed something that he had never noticed before: Shula, whom he dated more than thirty years ago, before the billy-goat year, and who at that time had a fragile girlish beauty, had aged and gone quite gray. Her thighs had grown so fat that she looked like an ultrapious woman worn out by childbearing but who accepts her decrepitude with total resignation.
A dense, close smell of thick-pile carpets and antique furniture that have been breathing their own air for many years hung in the room, and Fima had to remind himself that it had always been here and was not the smell of Frau Professor Kropotkin's advancing age. At the same time his nostrils caught a whiff of smoke. Looking around, he noticed a cigarette on the edge of an ashtray; it had been stubbed out almost as soon as it was lit. He asked who had been smoking here. It turned out that one of the two old ladies, his father's friends, who had been here on a fundraising mission at the time, had put out her cigarette soon after lighting it. Had she done this when she saw that