• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 535 0

there is much more in common than divides us: head neck spine curiosity appetite limbs sexual desire the ability to tell light from darkness and cold from warmth, ribs lungs old age digestive and secretory systems nerves to perceive pain metabolism memory sense of danger a ramifying maze of blood vessels a reproductive mechanism and a mechanism for limited regeneration programmed ultimately for self-destruction. Also a heart functioning as a complex pump and a sense of smell and an instinct for self-preservation and a talent for escape and concealment and camouflage and also direction-finding systems and a brain, and apparently also loneliness. There arc so many things we could talk about, compare, learn from each other, and teach each other. Perhaps we should also take into account an even more remote kinship that links the three of us to the vegetable kingdom. Lay your hand on a fig leaf, for instance, or a vine leaf: Only a blind person would deny the similarity of form, the spread of the fingers, the branching vessels and sinews, whose function it is to distribute nourishment and eliminate waste matter. And who can say whether behind this kinship there does not lurk an even subtler one between all of us and the minerals in particular or the inanimate world in general. Every living cell is made up of a mass of inanimate substances which are not really inanimate at all but are constantly pulsing with infinitesimal electrical charges. Electrons. Neutrons. Perhaps there too is a pattern of male and female that can neither merge nor separate? Fima smiled. It would be best, he decided, to come to terms with young Yoezer, standing at this window in a hundred years' time, staring at his own lizard. I shall matter to him less than a grain of salt. Perhaps something of me, a molecule, an atom, a neutron, will actually be present in this room, possibly indeed in a grain of salt. Assuming people still use salt a hundred years from now.

And why shouldn't they?

Dimi is the only person I might be able to talk to about these fantasies.

At any rate, better to fill his head with prophets and lizards and vine leaves than bombs made out of nail varnish.

In an instant the lizard had wriggled away and hidden itself inside or behind the gutter. It had disappeared, sharp and smooth. Fauré's Requiem ended and was followed by Borodin's Polovetsian Dances, which Fima did not like. And the brightening light was beginning to hurt his eyes. He dosed the window and began to look for a sweater, but he was too late to save the electric kettle, which had boiled dry some time before and now smelled of smoke and burned rubber. Fima would have to choose between taking it to be mended on his way to work and buying a new one.

"Your problem, pal," he said to himself.

He chewed a heartburn tablet and opted for freedom. He called the clinic and told Tamar he would not be coming in today. No, he wasn't ill. Yes, he was sure. Everything was perfectly okay. Yes, a personal matter. No, there was nothing wrong and he didn't need any help. Thanks anyway, and please say I'm sorry. He looked in the phone book, and, lo and behold, under The found Tadmor, Annette and Yeroham, in one of the suburbs, Mevaseret.

It was Annette herself who answered. Fima said:

"I'm sorry to bother you. It's the reception clerk from yesterday. Efraim. Fima. Do you remember? We chatted at the clinic. I thought..."

Annette remembered it well. She said she was delighted. And suggested meeting in town. "Shall we say in an hour? An hour and a half? If that suits you, Efraim? I knew you'd call today. Don't ask me how. I just had a feeling. There was something, well, unfinished between us yesterday. So, shall we say an hour then? At the Savyon? If I'm a little late, don't give up."

10. FIMA FORGIVES AND FORGETS

HE WAITED FOR A QUARTER OF AN HOUR AT A TABLE TO ONE SIDE in the café, then ordered coffee and cake. At a nearby table sat a right-wing member of the Knesset with a slim, good-looking, bearded youth who looked to Fima like an activist for the Jewish settlements in the Territories.