Fima - Amos Oz [30]
Fima also noted in his book:
"My bedclothes smell. I ought to take a bundle of washing to the laundry today. Yet there was something: I was left with a longing for those barren mountains and the weird light, and especially for the tolling of the bell that echoed in the deserted valleys with very long pauses between the strokes, and seemed to be coming to me from an unimaginable distance."
8. A DISAGREEMENT ON THE QUESTION OF WHO THE INDIANS REALLY ARE
AT TEN O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING, AS HE WAS STANDING AT THE window counting the raindrops, he saw Baruch Nomberg taking his leave of the taxi driver. Fima's father was a dapper old man in a suit and bow tic, with a pointed white beard that curved upward like a Saracen scimitar. At the age of eighty-two he still kept a firm hold of the reins of the cosmetics factory he had set up in the 'thirties.
His father was bending over the window of the taxi, apparently lecturing the driver, with his white hair waving in the breeze, his hat in his left hand and his carved stick with the silver band in the other. Fima knew that the old man was not haggling about the fare or waiting for his change; he was finishing an anecdote he had started telling on the way. For fifty years now he had been conducting an extended seminar with Jerusalem taxi drivers on Hasidic tales and pious stories. He was a dedicated storyteller. And he had a fixed habit of commenting on every anecdote and pointing up the moral lesson. Whenever he told a joke, he would follow it by explaining what the point was. Sometimes he would also explain both the apparent point and the real point. His commentaries always made his listeners laugh, which encouraged the old man to tell more stories and explain them too. He was convinced that the point of the stories had escaped everybody, and that it was his duty to open their eyes.
As a young man Baruch Nomberg had fled from the Bolsheviks in Kharkov and studied chemistry in Prague, then he had come to Jerusalem and started producing lipsticks and face powders in a small domestic laboratory. From these small beginnings a successful cosmetics factory had developed. He was a flirtatious, garrulous old man. A widower for several decades now, he was always surrounded by female friends and companions. Jerusalem gossip had it that they were attracted to him only for his money. Fima thought otherwise: he considered his father, for all his bluster, a good and generous man. All these years it had been his habit to lend his financial support to any cause he found deserving or moving. He was a member of endless committees, councils, societies, associations, and groups. He was a regular participant in fundraising campaigns for the homeless, for the absorption of immigrants, for people in need of complex surgical operations abroad, for land purchase in the Occupied Territories, for the production of commemorative volumes, for the restoration of historic ruins, for the creation of homes for abandoned children and shelters for battered wives. He volunteered his support for needy artists, for the ending of experiments on laboratory animals, for the purchase of wheelchairs, and for the prevention of environmental pollution. He saw no inherent contradiction in backing traditional values in education while also funding a campaign for the prevention of religious coercion. He dispensed grants to students from minority groups, to victims of violent crime, and also for the rehabilitation of the violent criminals. In each of these initiatives