Fima - Amos Oz [8]
out of the house and fired a double-barreled shotgun at him, grazing his leg. During the three days he spent in a Franciscan hospital he made inquiries about what one had to do to become a Christian. Nicole's father, visiting him in the hospital to ask his forgiveness, offered to help him convert. Meanwhile Nicole had had enough of her father too and ran away from both of them, first to her sister in Madrid and then to her sister-in-law in Málaga. Dirty, desperate, and unkempt, he pursued her on dusty buses and trains until his money ran out in Gibraltar and, with the help of the Red Cross, he was returned almost forcibly to Israel on board a Panamanian cargo vessel. On arrival at Haifa he was arrested, and he spent six weeks in a military prison because he had tampered with the date on the form authorizing a soldier on the reserve list to leave the country. They say that at the beginning of this passion Fima weighed one hundred fifty-nine pounds and that in September, in the prison hospital, he weighed less than one hundred thirty-two. He was released from prison after his father interceded for him with a senior official, whose wife, a well-known woman-about-town with a famous collection of etchings, subsequently fell outrageously in love with him; she was ten years younger than her husband and at least eight years older than Fima. In the autumn she became pregnant by him and moved into his lodgings in Musrara. They were the talk of the whole city. In December Fima boarded another cargo boat, a Yugoslav one this time, and turned up in Malta, where he spent three months working on a tropical-fish farm and writing his cycle of poems, The Death of Augustine and His Resurrection in the Arms of Dulcinea. In January the woman who owned the cheap hotel where he was staying in Valletta fell for him and moved his luggage into her own apartment. Afraid she might get pregnant too, he decided to marry her—a civil wedding. This marriage lasted less than two months, because meanwhile his father, with the help of friends in Rome, had managed to discover his whereabouts; he informed Fima that his Jerusalem woman had lost the baby, succumbed to depression, and returned to her husband and her etchings. Fima decided that there was no forgiveness for him and made up his mind to leave his landlady at once and give women a wide berth forever. He decided that love leads inexorably to disaster, whereas relations without love cause only humiliation and hurt. He left Malta without a penny, on the deck of a Turkish fishing boat. His plan was to hole up for at least a year in a certain monastery on the island of Samos. On the way he was smitten with panic at the thought that his ex-wife might also be pregnant and wondered if he ought to go back to her, but at the same time he felt he had acted wisely in leaving her his money but no address that she could trace him by. He disembarked at Thessaloniki and spent a night in a youth hostel, where with sweetness and pain he dreamed of his first love, Nicole, whom he had lost track of in Gibraltar. In the dream her name had changed to Thérèse, and Fima saw his father with a loaded shotgun holding her and the baby prisoner in the cellar of the YMCA in Jerusalem, except that by the end of the dream he himself had become the captive child. The next morning he set off to look for a synagogue, even though he had never been a practicing Jew and was certain that God was not in the least religious and had no use for religion. But, having no other address, Fima decided to try a synagogue. Outside the synagogue he came across three Israeli girls who were backpacking around Greece and turning north, into the mountains, because by now spring had arrived. Fima joined them, and on the way fell head over heels for one of them, Ilia Abravanel, from Haifa, who to him was the image of Mary Magdalene in a painting he had seen somewhere, he could not remember where or who the artist was. Since Ilia did not yield to his advances, he slept a few times with her friend Liat Sirkin, who invited him to share her sleeping bag as they