Fima - Amos Oz [38]
What about involving Dimi?
During the winter holidays the child spent a morning in the laboratory at the cosmetics factory in Romema. When Fima arrived to take him to the Biblical Zoo, he found that the old man had shut himself up in the lab with the child and taught him how to use acetone to manufacture explosives. Fima was furious with his father for corrupting the child: Haven't we got enough murderers already? Why poison his soul? But Dimi interrupted the argument by observing gently, like a mediator:
"Granpa's explosives are only good for painting fingernails."
And they all burst out laughing.
On the wall to the left of the window, about four feet away, in a corner of a patch of peeling plaster, Fima saw a gray lizard, immobile, staring like himself, longingly, toward the Bethlehem hills. Or else watching a fly that was invisible to Fima. Once upon a time, on those hills and in their winding valleys, there wandered judges and kings, conquerors, prophets of consolation and wrath, world-reforming saviors, impostors, dreamers, priests and hearers of voices, traitors, messiahs, Roman prefects, Byzantine governors, Muslim generals, and crusader princes, and ascetics, hermits, wonderworkers, and sufferers. To this day Jerusalem still resounds with their memory in the ringing of its church bells, sobs out their names from the tops of its minarets, and conjures them back with cabbalistic incantations. And now, at this moment, there was, it seemed, not a living soul left in the city, bar himself and the lizard and the light.
When he was younger he too used to fancy he could hear a voice as he walked among Jerusalem's alleys and boulder-strewn waste plots. He even tried to record in words what he fancied he had heard. In those days he might still have been able to stir some hearts. Even now he could sometimes fascinate a few souls, particularly women, in those Friday-night get-togethers at the Tobiases' or the Gefens'. Sometimes he would throw out a dazzling idea, and for an instant the whole room would hold its breath. His ideas would then make their way around by word of mouth, and occasionally they even reached the columns of the newspapers. Sometimes, when the spirit moved him, he managed to coin a new phrase, to formulate a perception of die situation in words that had not previously been used, to utter some penetrating aperçu which circulated in the city until he came across it a few days later on the radio, severed from him and his name, and often distorted. His friends enjoyed reminding him, as a sort of mild rebuke, how once or twice he had shown real foresight, as for example in 'seventy-three, when he had gone around lamenting to the point of ridicule the blindness that was afflicting Israel, the impending catastrophe. Or on the eve of the invasion of Lebanon. Or before the wave of Islamic fundamentalism. Whenever his friends reminded him of these prophecies, Fima would recoil and reply with a rueful grin that it was nothing, the writing was already on the wall and any child could read it.
Tsvi Kropotkin sometimes copied pieces for him from a literary supplement or a periodical that made reference to the Death of Augustine, when some critics bothered to drag those poems out of oblivion to use them as additional ammunition in a campaign for or against current trends in poetry. Fima would shrug and mutter, That's enough, Tsvika, just drop it. His poems, like his prophecies, seemed to him remote and irrelevant. Why does the soul pine when it has no idea what it is pining for? What really exists and what only seems to exist?