Fima - Amos Oz [71]
It was he who bought the flat in Kiryat Yovel and married him to Yael after examining and failing the other two candidates, Ilia Abravanel from Haifa, who looked like Mary Magdalene in an old painting, and the beautiful Liat Sirkin, who had sweetened Fima's nights in her sleeping bag in the mountains of northern Greece. And it was he who, when it was all over, arranged the divorce. Even the overcoat with the booby-trap sleeve had previously been his.
Fima vaguely remembered one of the old man's favorite anecdotes, about a famous Hasidic saint and a notorious horse thief who exchanged their cloaks and thus in a sense their identities, with tragicomic consequences. But what was it that his father had seen as the real point of the story, as opposed to the apparent one? As hard as he tried to remember, all he managed was a momentary glimpse of a wayside inn in Ukraine built of rough-hewn wooden beams in the midst of a dark, windswept, snow-covered plain, with wolves howling nearby.
The driver said:
"What in hell! Are we supposed to sit here all night?"
And he put his foot down, crossed on the red, and, as though compensating himself and Fima for the lost time, careered crazily down the empty streets, cutting the corners with a squeal of brakes. Fima said:
"What's this, the Six Minutes' War?"
And the driver:
"So be it, amen."
Tomorrow, Fima decided, first thing in the morning, I'll take him to the hospital for tests. By force if necessary. This whistling is something new. Unless he's extending his repertoire again, producing comic imitations of trains to accompany his railway stories. Or unless it's just a slight chill and I'm losing my sense of proportion. Though how can I lose something I never had? He never did either, for that matter.
I ought to give Tsvi a call first; his brother is a consultant at Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus. Try to fix him up with a private room and all the indispensable little luxuries. That die-hard Revisionist is so stubborn, won't so much as hear the word "hospital." He'll erupt like Vesuvius. In fact, why not ask Yael to soften him up first? He has an old weakness for her. What he calls a soft spot. Maybe it's because he's decided that Dimi is his grandson. Just as he decided that India is an Arab state and that Krochmal met Nietzsche, and that I'm a sort of Toynbee manqué or a Pushkin who's gone off the rails. Typical ridiculous mistakes of a man who refuses to face reality and look it straight in the eye.
As the words "straight in the eye" flashed through his mind, Fima suddenly remembered the dog that was bleeding to death in the pitch-black wadi. He had a vivid picture of the last blood oozing from the gaping wounds, and the final spasms of the dying creature. In an instant illumination he realized that this horror too was the result of what was happening in the Occupied Territories.
"We've got to make peace," Fima said to the driver. "We can't go on like this. Don't you think we ought to make the effort and start talking to them? What's so terrible about talking? You don't get killed by talking. In any case, we're a thousand times better at talking than they are."
The driver said:
"We ought to kill them when they're young. Not permit them to raise their heads. Let them curse the day they were crazy enough to start with us. Is this your building?"
Fima suddenly panicked, because he was not certain he had enough money in his pocket for the fare. He decided he would hand his identity