Fima - Amos Oz [7]
While he lunched on a salami omelette, a salad, and a fruit compote in the café across the road, he was startled to see, through the window, that the light was on in his flat. He thought about this awhile, weighed the faint possibility that he was in both places at once, but preferred to assume that the problem had been repaired and the current had been restored. Glancing at his watch, he decided that if he went up to the flat, switched off the light, found the key to the mailbox, and got the letter, he would be late for work, so he paid for his meal, saying, "Thank you, Mrs. Schoenberg." As usual, she corrected him:
"It's Scheinmann, Dr. Nisan."
"Of course," Fima replied. "I'm sorry. How much do I owe you? I've already paid? Well, all I can say is it can't have been an accident. I must have wanted to pay twice, because your schnitzel—it was schnitzel, wasn't it—was especially tasty. Fm sorry. Thank you. Good-bye. I must run now. Just look at this rain. Aren't you looking a little tired? Or unhappy? It's probably just the weather. It'll brighten up soon. See you tomorrow."
Twenty minutes later, when the bus stopped at the National Auditorium, it occurred to Fima how ridiculous it had been to come out on a day like this without an umbrella. Or to promise the proprietress of the café that the weather would brighten up. On what grounds? Suddenly a fine, burnished sliver of reddish light pierced the clouds and dazzled him by setting fire to a window high up in the Hilton tower. Though dazzled, he could see a towel waving on the railing of a balcony on the tenth or twentieth floor, and he sensed in his nostrils the precise scent of the woman who had just dried herself on it. Look, he said to himself, nothing is ever really wasted, nothing gets written off, and there is scarcely a moment without some minor miracle. Maybe everything is for the best after all.
The two-room flat on the edge of Kiryat Yovel had been bought for Fima when he remarried in 1961, less than a year after receiving his B.A. in history with distinction at the university in Jerusalem. In those days his father pinned high hopes on him. Others too believed in Fima's future. He was awarded a scholarship, and almost went on to get a master's degree; there were even thoughts of a doctorate and an academic career. But in the summer of 1960 Fima's life underwent a series of mishaps or complications. To this day his friends chuckled with amused affection whenever, in his absence, the conversation turned to "Fima's billy-goat year." In the middle of July, right after the end of his finals, in the garden of the Ratisbonne Convent he fell in love with the French guide of a party of Catholic tourists. He was sitting on a bench waiting for a girlfriend, a student at the nursing college named Shula, who married his friend Tsvi Kropotkin a couple of years later. A sprig of oleander was flowering between his fingers and the birds were arguing overhead. Nicole addressed him from the next bench: Was there any water here? Did he speak French? Fima replied in the affirmative to both questions, even though he did not have the faintest idea where there was any water, and he knew only a smattering of French. From that moment on he dogged her footsteps wherever she went in Jerusalem; he would not leave her alone despite her polite requests; he did not even give her up when her group leader warned him that he would be obliged to lodge a complaint against him. When she went to Mass at the Dormition Abbey, he waited for her outside like a dog for an hour and a half. Every time she came out of the Kings' Hotel, opposite the Terra Sanaa Building, she encountered Fima standing in front of the revolving door, his eyes blazing. When she went to the museum, he was lurking in every room. When she flew back to France, he followed her to Paris and even to her home in Lyons. Late one moonlit night, so the story goes in Jerusalem, her father came