Fima - Amos Oz [31]
He spent his spare time in the company of women. Even now that he was over eighty, he still loved sitting in cafés. Summer and winter alike he wore a formal suit and bow tie, with a triangle of gleaming white silk protruding from his breast pocket like a snowflake in a heat wave, with silver cuff links, a jeweled ring flashing on his little finger, his white beard sticking out in front like a wagging finger, his carved stick with the silver band parked between his knees, and his hat on the table in front of him. A pink old man, scrubbed and polished, he was invariably accompanied by an elegant divorcée or a well-preserved widow, always cultured European women with refined manners in their late fifties or early sixties. He would sometimes sit at his usual table in the café with two or three of them. He would order them espresso and strudel, while he normally had a liqueur and a dish of fresh fruit in front of him.
As the taxi drove off, the old man waved it good-bye with his hat, following his invariable habit. Being a sentimental person, he treated every farewell as final. Fima went out to meet him. He could almost hear him humming a Hasidic folk tune to himself as he climbed the stairs. Whenever he was alone, and even sometimes when he was being spoken to, the old man would be constantly intoning the characteristic ya-ba-bam. Fima sometimes wondered whether he did it in his sleep too: like a musical liquid welling up from some invisible hot spring, overflowing his father's shrunken body, or seeping out through the tiny cracks caused by old age. Fima could also almost sniff his father's special smell waiting up the stairs, that smell that he remembered from his infancy and could identify even in a roomful of strangers: the scent of airless rooms, old furniture, steaming fish stew and boiled carrots, feather beds, and sticky liqueur.
As father and son exchanged a perfunctory embrace, this Eastern European aroma aroused in Fima a revulsion mixed with shame at the revulsion, together with the long-standing urge to pick a quarrel with his father, to trample on some sacrosanct principle of his, to disclose the irritating contradictions in his views, to exasperate him a little.
"Nu," the old man began, panting and wheezing from the exertion of his climb, "so what does my esteemed professor have to report to me today? Has the Redeemer come unto Zion? Have the Arabs had a change of heart and made up their minds to love us?"
"Hello, Baruch." Fima contained himself.
"Right. Hello, my dear."
"What's new? Is your back still bothering you?"
"My back?" said the old man. "Fortunately my back is doomed to be forever behind me. I am here, it is there; it will never overtake me. And if, God forbid, it ever does, why, I'll simply turn my back on it. But my breath is getting shorter. Like my temper. And here the roles are reversed: It is not chasing me; I am chasing it. So, what is Herr Efraim busying himself with in these awesome days? Still bent upon setting the world to rights in readiness for the Kingdom of God?"
"There's nothing new," said Fima, and, taking his father's stick and hat, he saw fit to add:
"Except that the country's going to the dogs."
The old man shrugged. "I've been hearing such obituaries for fifty years already—the country this, the country that—and in the meantime the obituarists are all six feet underground and the country is improving every day. For all your protestations: The more