• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 495 0

Yoezer and he, and his desire also subsided. In its stead came a burst of nocturnal energy, a sharp wide-awake lucidity, a rush of inner force and mental clarity. At this moment he was capable of taking on those three conspirators from the Cafe Savyon and defeating them with ease; he could write an epic poem, found a political party, or draw up a peace treaty. Words and snippets of sentences formed themselves in his mind, gleaming with cleanness and precision. He threw off his blanket, rushed to his desk, and, instead of convening the Revolutionary Council for. a midnight sitting, he wrote in half an hour, without crossing out or changing anything, an article for the weekend paper: a reply to Tsvi Kropotkin on the question of the price of morality versus the price of immorality in times of everyday violence. These days all sorts of wolves and would-be wolves are preaching a primitive Darwinism, howling that in time of war morality, like women and children, should stay at home, and that if only we could shrug off the burden of morality we would be able blithely to smash whoever stood in our way. Tsvi gets bogged down in his effort to counter this with pragmatic arguments: The enlightened world, he says, will punish us if we go on behaving like wolves. But surely the fact is that ultimately all oppressive regimes collapse and vanish, while the societies and nations that survive are precisely those that foster the values of humane morality. From a historical viewpoint, Fima wrote, rather than your defending morality, morality defends you, and without it even the fangs of the most ferocious wolves are doomed to rot and decay.

Then he put on a clean shirt and trousers, the chunky sweater he inherited from Yael, and his overcoat, this time being agile enough to avoid the trap of the sleeve. He chewed a heartburn tablet and went down into the street, bubbling with a happy feeling of responsibility, taking the steps two at a time.

Jauntily wide awake, oblivious to the chill of the night air, intoxicated with the silence and emptiness, Fima marched down the road as though to the sound of a military band. There was not a soul in the sodden streets. Jerusalem had been handed over to him, to protect it from itself. The blocks of flats stood heavy and massive in the darkness. The streetlights were shrouded in a pale yellow haze. At the entrance to each staircase the numbers glimmered with a dim electric glow, which was reflected here and there off the windows of a parked car. Automatic living, he thought, a life of comfort and achievement, accumulating possessions, honors, and the routine eating, mating, and financial habits of prosperous people, the soul sinking under folds of flesh, the rituals of social position; that was what the author of the Psalms meant when he wrote, "Their heart is gross like fat." This was the contented mind that had no dealings with death and whose sole concern was to remain contented. Herein lay the tragedy of Annette and Yeri. It was the crushed spirit that knocked in vain, year after year, tapping on inanimate objects, pleading for the locked door to be reopened. Whistling sarcastically through the gap between its front teeth. The snows of yesteryear. The bones of yesteryear. What have we to do with the Aryan side?

And how about you, my dear Prime Minister? What have you ever done? What did you do today? Or yesterday?

Half-unconsciously Fima kicked at a can, which went rolling down the street and startled a cat in a trash can. You made fun of poor Tamar Greenwich simply because, due to a fluke of pigmentation, she was born with one brown eye and one green one. You detested Eitan and Wahrhaftig, but how exactly are you better than they? You were gratuitously rude to Ted Tobias, an honest, hard-working man who has never harmed you. Another man in his place would not have allowed you so much as to set foot in his home. Not to mention the fact that thanks to him and Yael we may soon have jet-propelled vehicles.

What have you done with life's treasure? What good have you done? Apart from signing petitions.