Fima - Amos Oz [15]
From the second floor came the sounds of piano, violin, and cello being played by the three elderly women who lived there and gave private music lessons. They also probably gave recitals and played at memorial meetings, at the presentation of a prize for Yiddish literature, at the inauguration of a community center or a daytime center for the elderly. Although Fima had worked at the clinic for several years now, their playing still wrung his heart, as though a cello deep inside him responded with its own mute sounds of longing to the one upstairs. As though a mystic bond was growing stronger with the passing years, between what was being done down here to women's bodies with stainless-steel forceps and the melancholy of the cello upstairs.
The sight of Fima, pudgy and disheveled, smiling sheepishly, with his hands and knees covered with mud, filled Dr. Wahrhaftig as usual with good humor mingled with affection and a strong urge to reprimand him. Wahrhaftig was a gentle, rather shy man, so emotional that he had difficulty holding back his tears at times, especially when anybody apologized to him and asked to be forgiven. Maybe that was why he cultivated a severe manner, and always tried to terrorize those around him by shouting rebukes at them. Rebukes that turned out to be mild and inoffensive.
"Hah! Your Excellency! Herr Major General von Nisan! Straight from the trenches, I see! We should pin a medal on you!"
"I'm a little late," Fima replied bashfully. "I'm sorry. I slipped on the path. It's so wet outside."
"Ach so!" roared Wahrhaftig. "Once more this fatal lateness! Once again force majeure!" And he recounted for the nth time the joke about the dead man who was late for his own funeral.
He was a stocky man with the build of a basso profundo, and his face had the florid, flabby look of an alcoholic, crisscrossed with an unhealthy network of blood vessels that were so near the surface, you could almost take his pulse by their throbbing. He had a joke for every occasion, invariably introduced with the phrase "There is a well-known story about." And he always burst out laughing when he got close to the punch line. Fima, who had already heard ad nauseam why the dead man was late for his own funeral, nevertheless let out a faint laugh, because he was fond of this tenderhearted tyrant. Wahrhaftig was constantly delivering long lectures in his stentorian voice about such subjects as the connection between your eating habits and your worldview, or about the "socialist" economy and how it encouraged idleness and fraud and was therefore unsuited to a civilized country. Wahrhaftig would utter these last words in a tone of mystical pathos, like a true believer praising the works of the Almighty.
"It's quiet here today," Fima remarked.
Wahrhaftig replied that they were expecting a famous artist any minute now with a minor obstruction of the tubes. The word "tubes," in its medical usage, reminded him of a well-known story, which he did not spare Fima.
Meanwhile, stealthily as a cat, Dr. Gad Eitan emerged from his office. He was followed by the nurse, Tamar Greenwich, who looked like an early pioneer, a woman of forty-five or so in a light-blue cotton dress with her hair pinned neatly back into what looked like a small ball of wool at the base of her skull. As a result of a pigment peculiarity one of her eyes was green and the other brown. She crossed the reception hall supporting a pale patient, whom she escorted to the recovery room.
Dr. Eitan, lithe and muscular, leaned on the counter, chewing gum with a leisurely