Fima - Amos Oz [29]
"What do you think, Nina: have Yacl and Uri made love together?"
The spell was broken. Nina pulled sharply away from his embrace, grabbed her spectacles, wrapped the tablecloth around herself, abruptly lit another Nelson, and said:
"Tell me. Why is it you can never keep your mouth shut for five minutes on end?"
Then he asked her what it was exactly she had liked about his article in Friday's paper.
Nina said:
"Wait."
He heard a door slam. A moment later came the sound of rushing water as the bathtub filled. He rummaged in his heap of clothes, searching all the pockets for his heartburn tablets. Self- mockingly he repeated Ted's words:
"You're looking a little run down."
And Yael's:
"What an ass you are."
When Nina emerged twenty minutes later, scrubbed and scented, in a brown bathrobe, eager to make up, she found her husband's clothes scattered on the floor, die fire dying, and the furry slippers Uri bought in Portugal lying like dead kittens by the door. Fima had vanished. But she noticed he had finished his drink and forgotten the book about Leibowitz and also one of his socks, hanging on the back of a chair in front of the fire, which flickered for a moment with its last remaining strength then expired. Nina picked up the clothes and slippers, cleared away the glass, soup bowl, and sock, and straightened a corner of the rug. Her thin, well-shaped fingers, like those of a pretty Chinese child, groped for a cigarette. Through her tears she was smiling.
7. WITH THIN FISTS
AT A QUARTER PAST SIX IN THE MORNING HE WROTE DOWN IN HIS brown dream book what he had seen in the night. A coffee-table book about Jerusalem in Hebrew poetry resting slantwise on his raised knees served as a writing desk. He wrote the date, as always, in words, not in figures.
In the dream, war had broken out. The setting resembled the Golan Heights, only more barren. Like a moonscape. Dressed in military uniform but without belt or gun, he was walking along a deserted dirt track, both sides of which, he knew, were lined with minefields. He particularly remembered that the air was very close and gray, as though a storm were approaching. Far in the distance a bell tolled slowly, with long pauses between strokes, the sound echoing through invisible valleys. There was no other soul. Not so much as a bird. And no sign of human habitation. We had been caught off guard again. An enemy armored column was steadily approaching a narrow mountain pass, a sort of ravine that Fima could make out farther up the road, where the rugged heights began. He realized that the grayness in the air was the dust rising from their tracks. He also began to hear dimly, behind the clanging of the bell, a low rumble of engines. Somehow he knew that his appointed task was to wait for them in the ravine at the point where the road crossed the mountains. To delay them by talking to them until reinforcements could be brought up to block the canyon. He started to run as hard as he could. He was panting heavily. The blood throbbed in his temples. His lungs ached. He had a stitch in his side. Although he was exerting his muscles to the utmost, he was hardly moving at all, he was almost running in place, and all the while he was frantically searching for words he could use to delay the enemy. He simply had to find something, a phrase, an idea, a message, perhaps even something funny, words that would make the armored column that was advancing toward him stop, make heads emerge from turrets to listen to him. If he could not change their hearts, at least he must gain time. Without which there was no hope. But his strength was failing and his feet were stumbling and his head was empty of ideas. Not a word passed through his mind. The rumble of engines was getting closer, louder; he could already hear the thunder of guns and the barking of machine guns behind a bend in the road. And he could see flashes inside the cloud of smoke or dust that filled the ravine and filled his eyes and made his throat burn. He was too late. He