• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 540 0

famous combat pilot, and later became a pilot with El Al. In 1971 he went into private business, starting a complex network of importers. He had a reputation in Jerusalem as a hunter of married women. The whole city knew that Nina had reconciled herself to his adventures, and that for several years their marriage had been purely platonic. Sometimes Uri's lovers ended up as Nina's friends. Uri and Nina had no children, but their charming home had become the regular Friday-evening rendezvous of a group of lawyers, army officers, civil servants, artists, and university lecturers. Fima was fond of them both, because both of them, in their different ways, had taken him under their wing. He was indiscriminately fond of anyone who could put up with him, and he had an unbounded affection for that circle of dear friends who still continued to have faith in him and endeavored to spur him on, lamenting how he frittered away his talents.

On the sideboard, mantelpiece, and bookshelves stood photographs of Uri in or out of uniform. He was a large, stocky, rumbustious man, who exuded a rough physical affection that gave women and children and even men a cuddly feeling about him. Facially he bore a faint resemblance to Anthony Quinn. His manner was always coarsely hearty. He had a habit of touching people he was talking to, men and women alike, prodding you in the stomach, putting an arm around your shoulder, or resting a large freckled hand on your knee. When the spirit moved him, he could reduce a roomful of people to tears of laughter by mimicking the intonation of a stall holder in the central market, impersonating Abba Eban addressing an audience of immigrants in a transit camp, or casually analyzing the impact of an article of Fima's about Albert Camus. Sometimes he would offer frank revelations, in the company of friends and in his wife's presence, about his own conquests. He spoke cheerfully, tastefully, without making fun of his lovers or revealing their identities, never boasting, recounting the progress of a romance with wistful good humor, like someone who has long since learned how intimately love and ridicule are interwoven; how both seducer and seduced are guided by fixed rituals; how absurdly childlike was his own indefatigable urge to conquer, in which carnal needs played only a small part; how lies, mannerisms, and pretenses are woven into the very fabric even of true love; and how the passing years deprive us all of the power of thrilling and the power of longing alike, as everything wears out and fades. He himself appeared in this Friday-night Decameron in a somewhat ludicrous light, as though Uri Gefen the narrator were examining Uri Gefen the lover under a microscope, dispassionately isolating the comic element. Sometimes he would say, By the time you begin to make sense of something, your term of office is over. Or, There's a Bulgarian proverb: The main thing an old cat remembers is how to meow.

It was in Uri's presence, rather than in Nina's arms, that Fima always felt a dizzying sensual exhilaration. Uri aroused in him an overwhelming urge to impress or even shock this magnificent male. To get the better of him in an argument. To experience that powerful hand grasping his elbow. But Fima did not always manage to get the better of him, because Uri too was endowed with a penetrating intellect, no less penetrating than Fima's own. And they had in common the tendency to switch easily, almost offhand, from ridicule to tragic empathy and back again, and to demolish with a couple of sentences an argument they had taken a quarter of an hour to build up.

During those Friday nights at Uri and Nina's, Fima was at his best. Whenever he got going, he could enthrall and entertain into the early hours of the morning with a series of motley paradoxes, amaze with his political analysis, and produce laughter or excitement.

"There's only one Fima," Uri would say with paternal affection.

And Fima for his part would finish the sentence for him:

"...and that's one too many."

Nina would say:

"Just look at the pair of them. Romeo