Fima - Amos Oz [22]
"What the hell do you mean, the situation in the Territories," Fima exploded. "That's just another brand of self-delusion. I wasn't talking about the situation in the Territories; I was talking about the situation right here in Israel. Inside the Green Line. Inside Israeli society. The Territories are nothing but the dark side of ourselves. What happens there every day is just a concretization of the process of degeneration we have been undergoing since the Six Days' War. If not before. If not from the beginning. Yes, every morning we read our papers, ail day long we listen to the news, every evening we watch What's New, we sigh, we tell each other it simply can't go on, we sign petitions now and then, but in fact we do nothing. Zero. Zilch."
"Right," said Ted, and after consideration, after tamping and re-lighting again, slowly and intently, he added mildly: "Yael does voluntary work twice a week at the Council for the Advancement of Tolerance. But they say there's going to be a split in the Council." And he added, uncertain of the meaning of the Hebrew word, "What do you mean by 'petition'?"
"Petition?" Fima replied. "A scrap of paper. Masturbation." He was so enraged that he thumped the keyboard of the word processor accidentally with his fist.
"Hey, watch out," Ted said. "If you break my computer, that won't help the Arabs."
"Who the hell's talking about helping the Arabs?" Fima erupted in an injured roar. "I'm talking about helping ourselves.... It's just them, the nuts, the right, who say we're helping the Arabs!"
"I don't get it," said Ted, scratching his tousled hair in a kind of overacted portrayal of someone who is slow on the uptake. "Do you mean that we're not trying to improve the Arabs' living conditions?"
So Fima started from square one, suppressing his anger with difficulty. He explained in simple Hebrew his view of the tactical and psychological factors that made the moderate left appear to the masses to be identifying itself with the enemy. He fumed at himself again for using that wretched expression "the masses." In the course of his lecture he noticed that Ted was stealing sideways glances at the diagrams scattered on the rug, while his hairy finger kept tamping down the tobacco in his pipe. His wedding ring glinted on his finger.
Fima strove in vain to dispel the mental picture of that same finger prodding with the selfsame motion at Yael's labia. He instantly fell prey to a suspicion that he was being lied to and deceived, that Yael was hiding from him in the bedroom, weeping silently, with shaking shoulders, stifling her tears in the pillow, as she sometimes wept in the middle of sex and as Dimi sometimes wept soundlessly when he became aware of injustice perpetrated against him or against one of his parents or Fima.
"In any civilized country," Fima continued, unconsciously borrowing Dr. Wahrhaftig's pet phrase, "there would be a campaign of civil disobedience by now. A common front of workers and students would have forced the government to end the horror at once."
"Let me get you another brandy, Fima. It'll calm you down."
Fima feverishly downed the brandy in one gulp, tipping his head back the way Russians drink vodka in the movies. He could see a detailed image of this log with steel-wool eyebrows bringing Yael a glass of orange juice in bed on Saturday morning, and of her, drowsily, luxuriantly, with her eyes still half-closed, reaching out and stroking the opening of his pajamas, which were doubtless made of real silk. The image aroused in Fima not jealousy or rage or fury but, to his astonishment, profound pity for this diligent, upright man, who made one think of a beast of burden, working day and night at his computer, searching for a way to perfect the jet propulsion of vehicles, and with barely a single friend in the whole of Jerusalem.
"The saddest thing," Fima said, "is the way the left is paralyzed."
Ted said: "True. You're quite right. It was much the same with us at the time of Vietnam. Coffee?"