Fima - Amos Oz [28]
Nina lit another cigarette and said:
"Paradoxes. Okay. But what's going to become of you?"
And she added:
"When arc you going to take yourself in hand? When arc you going to stop running away?"
Fima said:
"I've noticed at least two signs lately that Shamir is beginning to realize that without the PLO it won't work."
And Nina, through her thick lenses and the cigarette haze:
"Sometimes I think you're a lost cause."
To which Fima riposted:
"Aren't we all, Nina?"
At that moment he felt as affectionate and tender toward the person sitting opposite him, dressed in a well-worn pair of men's jeans with a zipper fly and a wide-cut man's shirt, as he would if she were his own sister. Her lack of prettiness and femininity suddenly struck him as painfully feminine and attractive. Her large soft breasts cried out to him to lay his head between them. Her short gray hair drew his fingertips. And he knew precisely how to wipe that hunted vixen look off her face and replace it with the her pampered little girl expression. At this his organ began to stir. With Fima, kindness, generosity, compassion for a woman always heralded the stirrings of lust. His loins were on fire with a desire that was close to pain: it was two months since he had slept with a woman. The smell of damp wool that he had sniffed on Yael when he kissed her back in the dark entrance to her building was blended now with the smell of his clothes drying in front of the fire. His breathing quickened, and his lips parted and quivered. Like a child's. Nina noticed, and said:
"Just a minute, Fima. Let me finish my cigarette. Give me another moment or two."
But Fima, bashful yet burning with lust and pity, ignored this, knelt in front of her, and tugged at her leg until he succeeded in dragging her down to join him on the rug. A clumsy tussle with his clothes and hers ensued by the table legs. With some difficulty he disposed of her lighted cigarette and spectacles, while he rubbed uninterruptedly against her thigh and smothered her face with kisses as if to distract her attention from the ever more furious friction. Until she managed to push him away and release both of them from their clothes, whispering, "Gently, Fima: you're eating me alive." But, heedless, he lay on top of her with all his weight, still kissing her face, still whispering entreaties and stammering excuses. When she finally relented and said, "All right, come on then," his organ suddenly shriveled. It withdrew into the recesses of its lair like a startled tortoise.
Even so, he did not stop kissing and hugging and apologizing for his tiredness; he had had a bad dream last night, and this evening Ted had thrown him out after making him drink brandy, and now the Scotch. It seemed as though today really wasn't his day.
Two tears appeared in the corners of Nina's nearsighted eyes. Without her glasses, she looked frail and dreamy, as though her face were much more naked than her body. They lay for a long while, holding each other tight without moving, like soldiers in a trench under shelling. Humiliated, and bound together by their humiliation. Until she broke loose, groped for a cigarette, lit it, and tried to say "Never mind, child," and tried to make him understand that at this moment he was reaching deeper inside her than he could by screwing. Again she called him "child," and said, Come and have a wash, and let's put you to bed.
Fima, consoled and elegiac, laid his head in the hollow of her shoulder but pushed her glasses away, because he was ashamed of their naked bodies, ashamed of his shrunken member, wanting only to cuddle up to her, not to see and not to be seen. Close and silent, they lay sprawled on the rug in the dying firelight, listening to the raging wind and the rain beating against the windows and the gurgling of the water in the drainpipe, both of them soft and satisfied, as though they had made love tenderly and given